Suspended in History

My last two postings have been about Sons of Liberty, a Revolutionary War graphic novel illustrated by Leland Purvis. I was delighted to see that he was also the artist of another comic that tackles a knotty challenge in depicting history.

As I discussed back here, one of the big challenges of writing any sort of historical fiction, or any sort of history for kids, is conveying that there’s so much about the past that we don’t know. The narratives that historians tell are incomplete and often contested.

Saying that “this happened at the Boston Tea Party because George R. T. Hewes said so” is based on a lot of assumptions: that Hewes was truthful, accurate, and privy to everything significant; that his words were transmitted to us fully and correctly; that we can judge the crucial moments from our perspective; and so on. But when a book describes the Tea Party in a particular way, and even more so when a comic or movie shows it, those contingencies and nuances usually fall away.

But comics don’t just show what happened; unlike some other forms of illustrated storytelling, they also show the invisible, in word balloons, sound effects, motion lines, fantasy sequences, and emotional signals.

Which brings me to the following panels, from Suspended in Language: A Book about Niels Bohr, scripted by Jim Ottaviani and drawn by Purvis. I actually saw them first in The Year’s Best Graphic Novels, Comics & Manga, that year being June 2003 to December 2004. (The math will just confuse you.) These images depict a meeting between Neils Bohr and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg during World War 2, based on claims from the two men and speculation by others.
This comic uses repeated or barely changing panels, a technique discussed here, here, and here. Often such repetitive images are useful for showing the passage of time. This set shows the suspension of time at a crucial moment, letting the words lay out different paths and possibilities. Ottaviano and Purvis thus communicate how history isn’t just what happened; it’s often our best guess at what happened.

Imagine that technique applied to other historical events. An image of Lexington Common with a shot coming from the local militia in the woods, then the same image with the shot coming from the British column, then the same image with the shot coming from Buckman’s tavern yard. Which (if any) is accurate? We don’t know. And it therefore might be most accurate to show readers all three possibilities, suspended in time.

Missing the Points in Sons of Liberty

In assessing the history in Sons of Liberty, a graphic novel for young readers by Iowa historian Marshall Poe and comics artist Leland Purvis, I’ll start with the good stuff.

The book quotes directly from George R. T. Hewes’s account of the Boston Tea Party and from Paul Revere’s narrative of his midnight ride when depicting those events. Even in edited form, that gives young readers a sense of early American language, and of how first-hand accounts inform our understandings of the past.

Purvis was obviously careful to use visual references: we can recognize Old South Meeting-house, the Boston peninsula, and other settings. There are small glitches with clothing: women not wearing caps, boys outside without hats and waistcoats. But there aren’t any men with beards, women wearing fashions from half a century later, or similar missteps I’ve seen in other history comics.

The story, however, has some real historical anomalies. The first conflict is a mob attack on British soldiers who have confiscated John Hancock’s ship Liberty. The British government stationed soldiers in Boston after that riot, precisely because Customs officials said it and earlier fights showed they weren’t safe.

Most baffling is this explanation of the tea crisis of 1773, put into the mouth of none other than George III:
What’s the phrase I’m looking for? Oh, yes. Utterly and completely wrong.

The East India Company tea was taxed. That’s why most American colonists objected to it. It was taxed in such a way that as soon as the tea was landed on shore, the duty could be collected in London; the tea agents expected to repay themselves by selling the tea, and since that was a desired and untraceable commodity they probably could have. Meanwhile, the tea revenue went to salaries for the Customs service and other royal officials, thus insulating them from popular opinion in the colonies. That was why the tea was so controversial.

Some colonial merchants were selling tea smuggled in from Holland, and their business would have taken a hit from having to compete with East India Company tea sold at rock-bottom prices. But those merchants didn’t “have to charge higher prices” because “they have to pay taxes on their goods,” as the king says above. No one paid taxes on smuggled tea. That was the point of the smuggling.

The tea conflict is complex; back here I argued that such a tempest over tea makes sense only if we consider all the earlier “taxation without representation” debates that led up to it. It would take some effort to summarize that history for kids. But the depiction in Sons of Liberty is simply bass-ackwards.

As reviewed here, Marc Aronson’s The Real Revolution is a much better grounded, heavily illustrated, and nonfiction history of the tea conflict for young people. Not a graphic novel, but highly recommended.

Fathers and Sons of Liberty

Sons of Liberty is a graphic novel scripted by Iowa history professor Marshall Poe, illustrated by Leland Purvis, and published in Simon & Schuster’s Turning Points series. I heard about it at the beginning of the year, and grabbed a just-published copy when I was in London with my dad this summer.

Unlike most of the graphic novels for classrooms that I discussed during Comics Week last year, Sons of Liberty declares itself as fiction. Using a trim size and black-and-white printing familiar to kids who like manga, this book tracks Revolutionary history through a Boston boy named Nathaniel Smithfield.

We meet Nathaniel as a ten-year-old in 1768 during the riot over the Customs service seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty. In fact, the boy fears he may have set off that riot. (Throwing a rock at soldiers can do that.) In 1770, Nathaniel goes to work for Paul Revere, delivering his engravings of the Boston Massacre. Despite living in Boston, he manages to be on Lexington Common on 19 Apr 1775. A year later, the eighteen-year-old carries messages to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. As the story ends, he appears to be a clerk of that legislature, reading the Declaration of Independence. Nathaniel’s story thus brings us to several turning points in the early American Revolution.

As a fictional comic, Sons of Liberty can do some things that nonfiction can’t. One is to dramatize the political arguments of the time by putting them into the mouths of two related characters, in this case Nathaniel and his father.
This argument between parent and child parallels a common Revolutionary-era metaphor, which has come to dominate how we remember that conflict (as Michael Kammen analyzed in Season of Youth). Americans see the independence movement as our national coming of age, breaking away from the influence of a well-meaning but oppressive mother country. As in most American novels about the period, the hero’s maturing process stands in for the nation’s.

I haven’t found many real examples of father-son conflict like this in Revolutionary Boston. Even more than we do now, children tended to take their political leads from their parents. And the patriarchal ideal probably meant that such arguments, if they occurred, weren’t written down for us to know about.

Eventually Mr. Smithfield comes over to the Patriot side. And if you’ve read Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain or Howard Fast’s April Morning, then you know what’s going to happen to Nathaniel and his father at Lexington.

Poe’s choice to put Nathaniel on the scene of half the major political developments of the period makes them even more dramatic. However, it also strains credibility. After a promising start as a rambunctious boy torn between loyalties, the main character turns into a convenient symbol of American youth.

At least Poe didn’t need to find an excuse to make Nathaniel privy to decision-making at the top of the London government as well. These days we generally expect prose novels to stick closely to their protagonists’ points of view, showing us only what those characters can see. But comics, like movies, can shift scenes in an instant with a simple caption, as these panels show.
(In the top two frames of the second page, note how Purvis sketches objects in the background with thinner lines and no dark areas, pushing our attention to the figures in the foreground.)

TOMORROW: How accurate is the history in Sons of Liberty?

Stoll Speaks on Samuel Adams at B.P.L., 20 Nov

On Thursday, 20 November, Ira Stoll will speak at the Boston Public Library about his new book, Samuel Adams: A Life. This event starts at 6:00 P.M. in the Mezzanine Conference Room, and concludes with a book-signing.

Many critical accounts of Samuel Adams’s career say that his contribution to the American Revolution basically ended with the outbreak of war, or with independence at the latest. That writes off his continued service in the Continental Congress, his agonized and influential decision to back the new U.S. Constitution in 1788, and his terms as Massachusetts governor.

It’s therefore notable that Stoll starts his book with a preface (available courtesy of the publisher) about Adams’s speech to the Continental Congress in September 1777, more than a year after the Declaration of Independence. Washington has just lost the Battle of Brandywine, and the Congress has fled Philadelphia for York, Pennsylvania.

“If we despond, public confidence is destroyed, the people will no longer yield their support to a hopeless contest, and American liberty is no more,” Samuel Adams said in the voice John Adams described as clear and harmonious. “Through the darkness which shrouds our prospects the ark of safety is visible. Despondency becomes not the dignity of our cause, nor the character of those who are its supporters.”

He went on, comparing the American revolutionaries to the Israelites who had left the slavery of Egypt. According to Exodus, chapter 13, God had guided them in the wilderness with a “pillar of cloud by day” and a ”pillar of fire by night.” Samuel Adams addressed the delegates:

Let us awaken then, and evince a different spirit,—a spirit that shall inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in us,—a spirit that will encourage them to persevere in this glorious struggle, until their rights and liberties shall be established on a rock. We have proclaimed to the world our determination “to die freemen, rather than to live slaves.” We have appealed to Heaven for the justice of our cause, and in Heaven we have placed our trust. Numerous have been the manifestations of God’s providence in sustaining us. In the gloomy period of adversity, we have had ”our cloud by day and pillar of fire by night.” We have been reduced to distress, and the arm of Omnipotence has raised us up. Let us still rely in humble confidence on Him who is mighty to save. Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.

Some writers on America’s modern political right still fear Adams as a radical organizer, based in part on misunderstandings and misrepresentations in the early 1900s. Stoll, managing editor of the late New York Sun, represents a new approach to the man from the same side of our politics: he emphasizes the man’s conservative religious ideas. As the passage above shows, Adams had the “humble confidence” of a faithful zealot.

More Wisdom from xkcd

Last November I announced the first Comics Week at Boston 1775, looking at how the medium now given the high-falutin’ term “graphic novels” has treated the American Revolution. Now, a little more than a year later, it’s time for Comics Week again!

We’ll start with xkcd, Randall Munroe’s “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

From the sequence of strips that starts here.

A Digital Library from London

My last new online resource for the week is British History Online, a “digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles...Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust.” It looks especially useful for British history and genealogy, but I came across it while Googling for information on an American family.

Among the printed sources digitized on British History Online and available for free (as opposed to by paid subscription only) are the Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations, the official notes of the board that governed commerce in the British Empire.

Those notes cover a meeting in February 1777 when the board members reviewed a:

Copy of a letter from Mr. Gridley to Mr. Read, relative to the sea cow fishery, and the annoyance given thereto by two New England schooners. Remarks upon the sea cow fishery.

The board met again in April 1777 and:

Read a memorial of Mr. Gridley, praying to be recommended for a grant of the Madelaine Islands in the Gulph of St. Lawrence, upon certain duties and conditions, for the purpose of carrying on the sea cow fishery.

Their lordships, agreable to a minute of the Board of the 6th of February, 1771, were of opinion, that such a grant ought not to be made without a valuable consideration being given to the Crown for the same.

Samuel Gridley had been petitioning that board for an exclusive right for his family to hunt seals and walruses on the Magdalen Islands since early 1763. He based his request on his Boston-born father’s service to the Crown in the wars against the French, as recorded in March 1772:

Read a memorial of Samuel Gridley of the city of Bristol, merchant, stating the services of his father Colonel [Richard] Gridley, and praying, that, in consideration of the great expence that both himself and his father have been at, and the losses they have sustained, in making establishments and carrying on these a cow fishery in the Magdalene Islands, the said islands may be granted to him in preference to any other person, or that the person, to whom they may be granted, shall be obliged to reimburse him for the very usefull and necessary buildings and improvements erected and made there.

The irony of Samuel Gridley’s 1777 complaint about “New England schooners” was that by that time his father had become a colonel in the Continental Army. Richard Gridley was in fact the first commander of the American artillery, starting in April 1775. He had fought in some of the early skirmishes of the war, laid out the redoubt on Breed’s Hill, and was wounded in the ensuing Battle of Bunker Hill. Samuel’s younger brother Scarborough was also an officer in that artillery regiment, though not a good one.

By 1777, the colonel had been kicked upstairs to a position as Chief Engineer for the Northern Department, replaced in the field with Henry Knox. Scarborough was out of the army altogether. But Samuel was still pushing for the Crown to grant him the sole right to hunt those walruses based on family loyalty.

He didn’t get it. Within a couple of years, I understand, Samuel made his way back to Massachusetts. The London government eventually granted those islands to another, more loyal son of Boston: Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin.

I have to thank David B. Ingram, an expert on the Gridley family, for this lead. He actually found all this stuff some years ago when it was available only in printed volumes or in the actual London archives. I was following up his lead about the New England schooners when Google brought me to the British History Online site, giving me another reason to be grateful to Dave.

John Quincy Adams’s Lost Breeches

As I described yesterday, I started to look through the Massachusetts Historical Society’s new Founding Families: Digital Edition of the Adams family papers, and was intrigued by an entry in the index under John Quincy Adams: “loses breeches.” Unfortunately, the link beside that entry was a dead end.

Fortunately, I’d also hit the link for “JQA / loses eight guineas in gold,” and it turned out to refer to the same incident. That second link led to this footnote attached to a John Adams diary entry:

JA and [William] McCreery corresponded on commercial subjects for some years, though at first their letters rather amusingly centered on a pair of homespun breeches, lost by JQA in Bordeaux, that contained eight guineas sewed into the waistband.

So at that point I could go back to the index and look up McCreery’s name. (Which is alphabetized ahead of the “Ma...” entries, in the pre-digital way.) And that in turn led to four documents which tell the sad tale.

John Adams’s 15 Apr 1778 letter to McCreery:

I have another Thing to mention to you, which is, that in unpacking my Baggage, I miss a pair of coarse homespun Breeches, which my little son wore in the Passage. If they are at your House, I should be obliged to you if you would rip open the Waistband in which you will find a few Guineas, 8 at least.

The Breeches you may give to the first Child that wants them. The Guineas, you may send to me, or ship the Value of them, deducting your Commissions in any Thing you please, to Mrs. Adams at Braintree near Boston, to the Care of Isaac Smith Esqr., Queen Street Boston. Linnens, or Cambricks, I suppose would be as acceptable as any Thing.

McCreery’s reply on 3 May, quoted in a footnote to that letter:

I have made all possible search and enquiry for the Breeches you mention belonging to your Son, containing the Money, but have not been able to get any tidings of them. I do not remember having seen any such at the time you were here. I know that many things were left carelessly loose by the Servants, and am affraid that some of the Porters have got hold of them. I really do not expect that they will be found in this House, after the search that has been made.

Adams on 14 May (a letter he drafted but never sent because it contained other, sensitive information):

I thank you for the trouble you have taken in searching for the Breeches. I have no suspicion of the Servants at your house. I rather conjecture that once, upon the road, when a few Things were taken out of my Trunk, this Article might slip aside. The Gold could not have been the temptation for it was hid in the Waistband. However, whether it is in the hands of a Thief or an honest finder, I wish he knew of the Gold for it might be of Service to him. So much for that.

And finally Adams’s entry in his accounting for “To 8 English Guineas, lost in a Garment which was stole on the Road bet. Bourdeaux and Paris,—the Guineas were sewn up in the Garment, to conceal them from the Enemy in Case of Capture at Sea.”

So I think it’s a little hard on young John Quincy for the Adams Papers index to suggest that he lost his breeches in the same way we say Robert Treat Paine lost his purse. The boy probably had nothing to do with the breeches’ disappearance. And anyway, he was only ten years old.

A New Adams Archive at the M.H.S.

In addition to the Coming of the American Revolution web project that I’ve been writing about, this season the Massachusetts Historical Society unveiled its Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Adamses section. This is still a work in progress, but it shows big promise.

The Founding Families: Digital Editions project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harvard University Press, aims to put all the content of the published Adams Papers volumes and (eventually) the Winthrop Papers online in a searchable form.

This is separate from the M.H.S.’s long-standing (in web terms) Adams Family Papers: Electronic Archive, though the two overlap. Each has material and features that the other doesn’t.

The Adams Electronic Archive:

• contains John Adams’s diary and autobiography and the letters he exchanged with his wife Abigail.
• can be searched with modern spellings of words; those have been hidden in the H.T.M.L. coding, no doubt at great effort.
• offers views of the actual documents.

The Founding Families Adams archive:

• contains many more documents: the contents of every volume published in the Adams Papers series so far, including letters from other people besides John and Abigail, John’s legal papers, notes from the Continental Congress, and so on.
• has an index that links to all the relevant documents in all the volumes.
• can’t be searched with modern spellings, only with the spellings, misspellings, and abbreviations the correspondents actually used. Plus, there are still a few bugs in the search function programming as of this week. As a result, the index is the better way to go.
• shows where documents fall in the printed volumes, in case you’re looking for a document by page number rather than date.
• replicates the exact text of the printed volumes, and doesn’t show images of the documents themselves.

At this point, I find the first archive familiar and user-friendly while the second is frustrating, but that could change as more of its features are locked into place. That second contains much more information that can’t be found anywhere else online. (Everything in the first archive was published, albeit in an edited form, in the 1800s and is therefore in the public domain.)

As a test, I went looking for one of John Quincy Adams’s earliest preserved letters, asking his father (who was in Philadelphia) to buy him a notebook. First I had to figure out that I should look up my boy in the index under “JQA” rather than, oh, “Adams, John Quincy.” I couldn’t find a working chronological list of his letters, so I browsed the alphabetical topics list. I found a tantalizing index entry for “JQA / loses breeches,” but that led to a document about some diplomatic spat in France. Is that an error in the printed version? In transfering data to the digital? In my mind? By this time I’d given up on finding that early letter.

TOMORROW: I get lucky and trip over the trail of those breeches.

You Never Know Whom You Might Meet

Yesterday evening I stopped by the Watertown Public Library because I needed to return some books, and I needed a light supper, and that institution offers both opportunities. As I was walking across the parking lot, I spotted a gentleman putting on a scarlet coat over his crimson sash and gorget—the emblems of a British army officer of the eighteenth century. We greeted each other politely, but it took us both a while to recognize that we’d been on the same bill at the Paul Revere House last year.

It turned out the Historical Society of Watertown was meeting in the library that evening. The featured speaker was Michael Lepage, in the person of Gen. Thomas Gage. Through History Relived of Foxboro, Michael offers that and other first-person historic impressions, including Loyalist Judge Peter Oliver—the name under which I’d met him before. So I zipped through my chicken soup in time to enjoy the show.

While there, I also heard reminders of the New England History Festival at Hibernian Hall in Watertown this Saturday, and opening hours at Watertown’s Edmund Fowle House on Sunday.

Reading Rowe

One of the major primary sources in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s new Coming of the American Revolution web project is the diary of Boston merchant John Rowe. Through that site, we can read his reactions to almost all the major events between 1764 and 1776. Rowe’s diary was fairly detailed, and he knew practically all the leaders on both sides of the political conflict.

Rowe knew them because he tried to remain friendly with both sides. He was a notorious “trimmer,” often changing his positions and alliances. As a result, neither side trusted him. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson suspected Rowe of being behind the attack on his North End mansion on 26 Aug 1765. Yet in 1773 the Boston crowd called Rowe a “great Tory.” He stayed in town through the siege of 1775-76, then chose not to leave with the British authorities.

As a result, Rowe witnessed a lot of events, but I don’t think we can assume that he was a trustworthy witness. His diary is a slippery document. For example, on the evening of the Tea Party he wrote, “I am sincerely sorry for the Event.” Yet a contemporaneous account of the public tea meetings, not published until 1965, confirmed people’s recollection that during the crisis Rowe had been the first to publicly suggest: “Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?”

Rowe’s diary stretches from September 1764 to July 1779, but there are three missing sections:

• 17 Aug 1765 to 10 Apr 1766, the period of the worst Stamp Act riots.
• 1 June to 24 Dec 1775, when he was in the besieged town.
• 19 Nov 1776 to 12 Aug 1778, early in the new republic.

It’s not unusual for one or two volumes to go missing from a long diary like this, but one thing makes me a little suspicious about those holes: Rowe’s diary entry for 16 Mar 1775. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress had declared that should be a fast-day to protest the troops in Boston. Supporters of the royal government objected. On that day, Rowe wrote in his diary:

This day is kept by many People as a Publick Fast, which gives great umbrage to a great many People which does not pay any Regard to it, and I think they are Right because the Order does not originate under the Direction of Good Government.

But, as can easily be seen on the original page, the merchant at some moment returned and added a few words (emphasized here):

This day is kept by many People as a Publick Fast, which gives great umbrage to a great many People which does not pay any Regard to it, and I think they are not Right because they say the Order does not originate under the Direction of Good Government—yet it can do no harm.

That change isn’t noted in either of the published versions of Rowe’s diary, both prepared in cooperation with his descendants. (I’d love to see it added to the “Rowe’s Revolution” section of the M.H.S. website. Hint, hint.)

We know, therefore, that John Rowe changed his diary in hindsight, either because he had made a 180° turn in his politics or because he didn’t want anyone else to see his original statement. Might the missing volumes have been so full of embarrassing entries that he decided to do away with them altogether? We’ll never know.

After the British evacuation, Rowe endured some embarrassing moments, such as his attempt to attend the funeral of Dr. Joseph Warren, when he “to my great mortification was very much Insulted.” But eventually he rode out suspicions about his loyalty, finally achieving his goal of representing Boston in the Massachusetts General Court in 1780-84. The only legislative initiative Rowe is remembered for was donating the large carved wooden cod which still hangs in the State House. But his name lives on at Rowes Wharf.

Ben Carp on the Tea Party in Lexington, 21 Nov

Richard Kollen at the Lexington Historical Society tells me the group is sponsoring a free lecture by Tufts professor Benjamin Carp on 21 Nov 2008 at the Lexington Depot.

Ben’s talk, which begins at 8:00 P.M., is entitled “Lexington, the Locals, and the Boston Tea Party,” and will feature material from his upcoming book Teapot in a Tempest: The Boston Tea Party of 1773. That book is a new attempt to identify who exactly destroyed the East India Company’s tea in Boston harbor on 16 Dec 1773, and one of the questions Ben’s had to wrestle with is how many men from outside Boston were involved. I’ve written skeptically about the claims from descendants of Benjamin Rice of North Brookfield and Samuel Smith of Topsfield. But Lexington was closer to Boston than either of those towns.

Ben is also the author of Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, which I wrote about back here.

“His Majesty OKNOOKORTUNKOGOG...”

Today I’m continuing my exploration of The Coming of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Historical Society’s new online historical resource. Here’s the text of an item from the 14 Mar 1774 Boston Gazette. That was three months after the famous Boston Tea Party, on 16 Dec 1773.

At the end of that winter, a fourth ship carrying tea had arrived in Boston harbor. The Gazette article describes what had happened to that cargo on board the Fortune on the night of 7 March—but it describes the event in coded form:

His Majesty OKNOOKORTUNKOGOG King of the Narraganset Tribe of Indians, on receiving Information of the arrival of another Cargo of that Cursed Weed TEA, immediately Summoned his Council at the Great Swamp by the River Jordan, who did Advise and Consent to the immediate Destruction thereof, after Resolving that the IMPORTATION of this Herb, by ANY Persons whatever, was attended with pernicious Consequences to the Lives and Properties of all his Subjects throughout America.

Orders were then issued to their Seizor & Destroyer General, and their Deputies to assemble the executive Body under their Command, to proceed directly to the Place where the noxious Herb was. They arrived last Monday Evening in Town, and finding the Vessel, they emptied every Chest, into the Great Pacific Ocean, and effectually Destroyed the whole, (Twenty-eight Chests and an half.)

They are now returned to Narragansett to make Report of their doings to his Majesty, who we hear is determined to honour them with Commissions for the Peace [i.e., to make them magistrates].

In other words, Boston men had kept the new tea from landing the same way they’d handled the cargo on the earlier three ships—by tossing it into the harbor.

This newspaper item shows how the cover story about “Indians” destroying tea was taking hold. Originally the tea-destroyers appear to have simply put paint or soot on their faces to hide their identities. Ebenezer Stevens insisted that few of them wore any disguises at all. The printers of the Gazette, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, were well aware of what exactly happened. After all, according to Edes’s son, a lot of the crowd had gotten ready at the Edes and Gill shop.

But writing about “the Narragansett Tribe” or “Mohawks” gave the newspaper a way to report on the tea destruction without giving anything away. Within a generation, artists were showing the men on the tea ships in full Native American garb, including feathers and bare chests (on a mid-December night). The Indian disguises became a central part of the Tea Party legend.

As for the second destruction of tea at Boston, on 7 Mar 1774, that tended to get left out of the legend entirely. But at the time, it was significant. News of that act reached London as Parliament was debating how strongly to respond to the first Tea Party. That legislature had already passed the Boston Port Bill, and Lord North was pushing for the Massachusetts Government Act and the Administration of Justice Act. As one might imagine, the news from Boston squelched most calls for leniency. The new laws passed by overwhelming margins.

New from the Massachusetts Historical Society

This week I’m going to highlight several new online historical resources. (And if they’re not really new, they’re new to me.)

To start with, the Massachusetts Historical Society has launched an ambitious educational project called The Coming of the American Revolution. It provides digital images and transcriptions of hundreds of primary-source documents from the Revolutionary period, organized around fifteen chronological topics from “The Sugar Act” in 1764 to “Declarations of Independence” in 1776.

Some of those documents are well known, but others are rare, and provide unusual insights into the events. Take, for example, the Boston Massacre on 5 Mar 1770.

Where was Whig crowd organizer William Molineux on that evening? The diary of merchant John Rowe shows that Molineux was “at Mrs Cordis [i.e., the British Coffee-House] with the Fire Club.” That implies he wasn’t the man in the white wig who urged men down at the dock to stand up for their rights.

Back here I wrote about Dr. Benjamin Church’s autopsy of Crispus Attucks. You can read the original printing of Church’s deposition here, in the Boston town report calmly titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre.

Supporters of the Crown were active, too. They gathered depositions in Boston, shipped them to London, and printed their own report there: A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston in New England. That pamphlet’s never been reprinted (unlike the Boston report), and it isn’t part of the Readex’s Archive of Americana because it was printed in London. Now it’s available with a transcript here.

The trials of British military men for the Massacre ended with acquittals for most of the accused and convictions on manslaughter for Pvt. Edward Montgomery and Pvt. Mathew Kilroy. Here’s the one-sentence report in the 17 Dec 1770 Boston Gazette about those two men being branded on the thumb.

Some other highlights from The Coming of the American Revolution.

• Henry Bass’s confidential letter to his in-law, Samuel P. Savage, describing how the Loyall Nine had just organized a protest against the Stamp Act in 1765.
• William Cooper and someone else taking notes on the tea meetings. (It doesn’t look like that document comes with transcriptions—you’re on your own, kids!) The cross-outs and hurried scrawl shows the turmoil of the big meeting. When noting down the names of men who volunteered to patrol the docks, for instance, Cooper wrote down Adam Colson’s name twice.
• Gen. Thomas Gage’s instructions to undercover scouts to check the roads to Worcester and Concord in February 1775, and their report back to him. These documents were apparently discovered in Boston after the siege and printed by John Gill in 1779.
• How did a man become an officer in the Massachusetts army after the war began? Here’s the officer’s commission issued on 19 May 1775 to Lt. Gamaliel Whiting, over the signature of Dr. Joseph Warren as president pro tem of the Provincial Congress. It looks like Whiting was originally supposed to receive a different rank. Was he at first an ensign (one level lower) or a captain?
• Here is a pro-Crown account of the Battle of Bunker Hill, printed by John Howe inside Boston.
• Finally, we can read Henry Knox’s diary of his journey to Fort Ticonderoga to bring back large cannons to the American forces besieging Boston in 1776.

The site includes lots of educational modules, guidance for students on interpreting historic documents, and links to other useful sites (including Boston 1775). This ongoing project was funded by the Education Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lectures on Warren and Williams

The New England Historic Genealogical Society is hosting a couple of events this month about Massachusetts women who lived through the Revolution—but apparently had opposing feelings about it.

The Muse of the Revolution: Mercy Otis Warren
Monday, November 17, 2008, 6:00 PM

Join NEHGS and award-winning author Nancy Rubin Stuart for the “story of how Mercy Otis Warren’s dedication to original patriotic ideals of the Revolution contributed to its eventual success and then critically informed the creation of American state.” Drawn from the correspondence of Mercy Otis Warren and the letters of colonial patriots, including John and Abigail Adams, George and Martha Washington and Henry Knox, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation is a tale not to be missed.

Advanced registration is required. $10 admission. To RSVP please call 617-226-1226 or email.

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Living in the Past: Esther Williams and Her Relics
Wednesday, November 19, 2008, 6:00 PM

Donald Friary, president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and director emeritus of Historic Deerfield will present the interesting case of a woman who seemed to have added nothing to her household after the American Revolution. Based on the 1800 probate inventory of Esther Williams, widow of a Deerfield Tory, who was surrounded by old forms of furniture and French and Indian War heroes. There are no card tables or sideboards or maps of the new nation or images of Washington. She was living in the past.

No reservation or admission fee required for this educational program.

Esther (Williams) Williams moved to Deerfield from Weston in 1748 as the second wife of Dr. Thomas Williams. She’s not the more famous Esther Williams, captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, or the most famous Esther Williams, co-star of Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

Traveling on “Waterways and Byways” in 2009

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will have its next annual conference on 13-14 June 2009, and the topic will be “Waterways and Byways, 1600-1890.”

The call for papers says:

The Seminar is accepting proposals for papers and presentations on the subject of early transportation networks operating within New England and contiguous portions of New York and Canada before 1890.

Based on the premise that New England’s everyday economy, much like its culture, depended on regional interconnectivity, this conference attempts to examine the physical, professional, and cultural networks that facilitated and encouraged this movement.

Specifically, the conference seeks proposals on river and canal life, on tavern circuits, and on the rise of overland stagecoach routes. The conference also seeks papers on packet boats and coaster trades; the evolution of an inland shipbuilding legacy; the introduction of locks to major rivers; and the growth of commercial turnpikes, steamboats, and early railways.

Planners also look for papers on traditional native ferrying points and fords, on bridge and road builders, as well as on entrepreneurs—such as peddlers, entertainers, civil engineers, coach and carriage makers, and travel diarists—who provided or made use of this connectivity.

The Seminar welcomes proposals from authors, academic and museum scholars working in the public humanities, graduate students, teachers, and the general public. Preference will be given to papers based on primary sources such as account books, diaries, reminiscences, personal and business papers, newspapers and artifacts as well as topographic and toponymic data.

Each paper should be about twenty to twenty-five minutes long (that’s 10-12 double-spaced pages), to be read aloud to the assembly. To propose a paper, email the Seminar a one-page prospectus that cites sources and a one-page vita as attachments by 1 February 2009. Selected papers will appear in a proceedings volume issued about a year after the conference.

Why the cut-off date of 1890? This conference is focused on inland travel before the automobile.

The picture above shows the stagecoach that Old Sturbridge Village hosted last summer. I got to see it in action. I also got to see it standing still after one of the horses stumbled and fell. A couple who were visiting the museum knew enough about horses to get that animal and its teammate calm enough for it to scramble back to its feet, and then they and the coach went home for the day. A little too much authenticity, I thought.

The Challenge of Emancipation in the New Republic

Last month Douglas R. Egerton posted a review for the H-SHEAR list of Eva Sheppard Wolf’s Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). I thought this was an interesting start:

As the American Revolution dawned, Virginia was home not merely to the largest number of African Americans of any new state, but it also boasted a large number of reformers, white and black alike, who desired an end to unfree labor. Wealthy planter Robert Carter created a schedule by which he freed his slaves, and attorney St. George Tucker published a lengthy plan for gradual emancipation, as did Fernando Fairfax, who combined his scheme with the forced removal of freedpersons. Such slaves as Harry Washington abandoned Mount Vernon with John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, only to return as black Loyalist Corporal Washington.

Yet despite black flight and white manumission, by the war’s end in 1783, there were 105,000 more slaves in the state than in 1776, and by the time Nat Turner swung from a tree in 1831, state leaders were well down the intransigent road of positive good theory. Why this promising story did not turn out better has been examined by numerous historians and biographers, but few have waded into the sources as deeply as has Eva Sheppard Wolf.

The “positive good theory” refers to a shift in how American slaveholders discussed slavery. In the late 1700s, most Americans—even those whose wealth depended on keeping people in bondage—agreed publicly that slavery was a bad thing, but argued it was too difficult to do away with immediately. That thinking was particularly strong in the Revolutionary generation, who had spent so much time talking about natural rights and liberty.

Under greater pressure from Abolitionists after the early 1800s, slaveholders developed a new way of thinking, that slavery was a “positive good” for the enslaved people and for society. That of course made emancipation more difficult.

Even just after the Revolution, state populations had difficulty renouncing slavery. Vermont did so as an independent republic, but there were hardly any slaves there to free. Pennsylvania opted for gradual emancipation, as did other northern states over time. In Massachusetts the change came through a 1783 judicial decision affirming that all people deserved equal rights; there was never a popular referendum or vote by the towns’ representatives on the issue.

Here are other reviews of Wolf’s book by David H. Gellman for H-Law, and (in PDF download) by James Sidbury for the William & Mary Quarterly.

Retirement Looms

Toy Soldiers Club in Québec tells me this cavalry officer and some other figures from its Revolutionary War offerings are being “retired.” I don’t think that means being put on half-pay pension, but I really don’t know this world.

Dissecting John Adams on D.V.D.

Last spring, I wrote a series of postings about H.B.O.’s John Adams miniseries that led to interviews with the Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam and N.P.R.’s Bryant Park Project. Since then, the radio show was canceled, and the Globe’s circulation, advertising, and physical size have shrunk. Mere coincidence! (I think this link rounds up all those postings for anyone who dares risk looking at them.)

Now that John Adams is available on D.V.D., Princeton scholar Jeremy Stern has written a more comprehensive quibbling with its historical details. “What’s Wrong with HBO’s Dramatization of John Adams’s Story” at History News Network builds on his earlier “What’s Inaccurate About the New HBO Series on John Adams.” I found this detail particularly telling:

Fictionalized history can gain traction with alarming ease, spreading both factual errors and fundamental misconceptions: people tend to believe what they see on the screen. Wikipedia has already provided a depressing piece of proof.

The last episode of the series depicts the death of “Nabby” Adams, the daughter of John and Abigail, from breast cancer. An on-screen caption marks the start of Nabby’s ordeal as “1803.” In fact, the cancer was diagnosed in 1810; her mastectomy followed in 1811. What purpose does this flat-out distortion serve? Did the scriptwriters feel entitled to rewrite history simply to avoid an unwanted ten-year gap in events? Yet, as I write, Wikipedia’s entry on Nabby dates her diagnosis to 1803.

Wikipedia records all past revisions, revealing ironically that Nabby’s entry used to include the correct date of 1810—but it was altered to 1803 in late August of this year (the “John Adams” series had been released on DVD in June). Whoever made this erroneous “correction” clearly assumed that television had provided truer facts: the reviser noted a “change of date for diagnosis” to replace previously “false information.”

On 28 October, I changed that date back and added a section about Nabby in the miniseries to state that it had taken liberties with historical events. In doing so, I was trying to adhere to my new rule: Even though it’s a lot of fun to complain about misinformation on Wikipedia, I really should try to improve it when I can. (I also finally got around to fixing that entry on Dr. Joseph Warren. We’ll see how long either change lasts. Or how long me adherence to that rule lasts.)

I’m also posting this link to Jeremy’s article “Jane Franklin Mecom: A Boston Woman in Revolutionary Times,” since I think some Boston 1775 readers might like to know more about Benjamin Franklin’s favorite sister. But that webpage violates the first rule in publicity, that everything’s all right as long as they spell your name right. If only every site were as easy to improve as Wikipedia.

Isaiah Thomas’s “Large Bump”

In mid-1700s North America, British subjects celebrated the 5th of November, or Pope Night, up and down the coast. But young Bostonians observed the holiday with particular fervor. Only in that town, it appears, were there enough boys and enough anti-Catholic fervor for the celebrants to split into two large rival gangs, the North-enders and the South-enders.

Instead of all the youth parading with one big wagon carrying the effigies of Pope and Devil, as the teen-aged boys of other New England towns did, Boston boys had two big processions (and probably a few small ones, too). The North-enders tried to interfere with the South-enders’ parade, and vice versa.

In the evening, the two processions met in the middle of town. The two gangs fought, each trying to grab the other’s paraphernalia to add to its own bonfire. In 1764 a young boy was killed in the melée, his head crushed by a wagon wheel.

Good times.

A few years earlier, another boy was nearly killed before he had the chance to grow up into an important Patriot publisher and antiquarian. Here’s how that incident was described in the biographical (and phrenological) introduction to Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in North America. Isaiah was about nine or ten, already apprenticed to printer Zechariah Fowle:

our little printer, with a large bump of curiosity and a small one of caution, pressed through the crowd to read the labels on the lanterns [on the Pope Night wagons]. A brick aimed at the lantern, lighted on his head and struck him to the ground.

The chances were for the little fellow to be trampled to death by the rushing crowd, but as his good fortune or a kind Providence would have it, the first man whose foot struck him, hearing his groans lifted him up, and persons coming around with lights, one of them recognized him, took him in his arms, and carried him to his master’s house.

A surgeon being sent for, it was found that no bone was broken, and in a few days he was able to return to his types. Such is in substance the account given by Mr. Thomas in later years.

Read more about how colonial Bostonians celebrated the 5th of November here.

The View from London

Seven years ago, I was visiting London to do research in Great Britain’s National Archives. It was less than six weeks after the al-Qaeda hijacker attacks on New York and Washington. I remember eating dinner one evening at a Thai restaurant in the Richmond neighborhood. After the staff heard my accent and asked where I was from, they spontaneously told me how sorry they were for the losses that the U.S. of A. had suffered that September. That evening I represented all of America, and they wished to stand with me.

In February 2003, I was in London again, visiting the British Museum. This time, when an elderly lady heard my accent, she spontaneously expressed regret at the Bush-Cheney administration’s insistence on invading Iraq. And she wasn’t the only local who brought up that topic. Once again, I was a representative for all of America, but this time the emotion was worry. Some of the largest anti-war political demonstrations in history were taking place in Europe that season, as well as some of the largest anti-war protests in the U.S. since the Vietnam War. They had no effect on the administration, and we’ve seen the outcome of its decisions.

I’ve been writing about how the American Revolution broke the U.S. of A. away from the European aristocratic tradition. From the start, the new republic in North America was a model to reformers elsewhere in the world. Many of the U.S. of A.’s early innovations—a written constitution with divided and overlapping powers, a bill of rights to constrain federal power, judges empowered to overturn laws, religious freedom—have been adopted by almost every other industrialized democracy.

Yet people outside America have also long seen our country as talking a better game than we actually play. B.B.C. World Service’s new radio documentary “America’s First Principles,” built around the life and ideas of Thomas Jefferson, displays that split view: the U.S. of A.’s inspiring ideals, and the less inspiring practice. In those two visits to London in October 2001 and February 2003, I saw public sentiment about America had changed from widespread sympathy to deep concern. (And then I got back to the States and discovered from the newspapers that we had somehow gone to war with the French.)

Which brings me to the recent essay on our election by Boris Johnson, the Conservative Mayor of London, in the Telegraph:

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president. . . . it is not clear how America under McCain would recover her standing in the eyes of the world. . . .

Obama deserves to win because he seems talented, compassionate, and because he offers the hope of rejuvenating the greatest country on earth in the eyes of the rest of us. All those are sufficient reasons for desiring his victory.

And then there is the final, additional reason, the glaring reason, and that is race. . . . If Obama wins, he will have established that being black is as relevant to your ability to do a hard job as being left-handed or ginger-haired, and he will have re-established America’s claim to be the last, best hope of Earth.

American Politics and the British Aristocracy

When the U.S. of A. left the British Empire, it lost the top of that society’s elite: the inherited positions of monarch, lords, and wealthiest gentlemen. Some of the North American elite had supported the Crown, and they left for Britain and Canada. Other well-born Americans had led the Whig resistance, and became even bigger frogs in the small U.S. pond. But there was still a lot of open water.

Amid the upheaval and war, new men rose to prominence: bookseller’s apprentice Henry Knox, illegitimate islander Alexander Hamilton, carpenter Ebenezer Stevens, underwear maker Thomas Paine, Irish redcoat Andrew Brown. In British society, their opportunities were limited. In the U.S. of A., they all became gentlemen of influence. (To be sure, the old aristocratic system offered its own openings for ambitious men willing to serve powerful patrons, such as Benjamin Thompson of Woburn, later Count Rumford.)

As John Adams’s remarks about a “natural and actual aristocracy” showed, a lot of people still expected power to bunch in families. And in the Adams family it did, for three or four generations. But gradually American society has become more egalitarian and open—as has British society, and every other society in the industrialized world. Though all elites wish to pass down privileges to their children, democracies need to enable talent from every quarter.

Industrialized democracies have therefore tried to replace aristocracy with meritocracy: various systems for identifying and educating talented youth. Those systems all seem to require public education (pioneered in Massachusetts), libraries, inexpensive universities or generous financial aid for higher education, and other ways of spreading opportunities as widely as possible. In addition, as long as unfair discrimination lingers, equal-opportunity societies take affirmative steps to counteract it, or else talent can’t rise from every corner.

Of the four candidates in the current national election, two—Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Joe Biden—came up through that meritocratic system. Obama, as we all know now, didn’t grow up with wealth or connections. He’s an immigrant’s son, raised away from the U.S. mainland, and visibly African-American in a society that still has racist strains. Biden was the son of a car salesman who attended his state university.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain was the son and grandson of admirals who followed them into the U.S. Navy. He entered the naval academy without good grades, graduated near the bottom of his class, and kept his wings even after crashing airplanes. This Rolling Stone article reported how McCain enjoyed the privileges of flying out of an airfield named after his family. By his own telling, he matured only when he became a prisoner of war, and his family background turned into a liability instead of an asset. Even so, he’s struggled to realize what good fortune has come his way in life.

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska represents a third strain in American politics: an anti-elitist populism with roots in the Puritan, Revolutionary, and Jacksonian periods. Though Palin’s parents were public-school educators (a teacher and a school secretary), she appears to have taken a casual approach to education. Her political campaigns have all had the theme of overturning forces in power, whether locally or statewide (even when her own party has been in power). That message resonates because most Americans are suspicious of aristocracy—so strongly, in fact, that many of us resent the products of meritocracy as well.

Which brings me to the curious moment this July when Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild told C.N.N. about Obama: “...frankly I don’t like him. I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.” In September, as Rothschild prepared to endorse McCain, she published a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that again used the word “elitist.”

Looking at an anti-elitist essay over the byline “Lynn Forester de Rothschild,“ Mickey Kaus at Slate commented, “You lost me at ‘de’.” And Rothschild hadn’t even used the aristocratic title she’d received on marrying Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild of the fabulously rich British-French banking family.

Lady de Rothschild and her third husband live at Ascott House, shown above. (This is one of several handsome pictures on Wikipedia.) They also own homes in the Chelsea section of London and in New York. (The couple has no home in Washington, D.C.; when visiting that city, Rothschild told Condé Nast Portfolio in 2007, “I assume I’ll still be at the Four Seasons.”) Portfolio called Rothschild the “flashiest hostess in London.”

Given that perspective, what could Rothschild have meant by “elitist”? Her opinion piece didn’t define that trait or offer evidence of how Obama might fit the definition. Its argument seemed to be that other, unnamed other people thought Obama was elitist, so therefore he must be. Rothschild named Thomas Dewey as an American politician from a “modest background.” In fact, Dewey was the son of a newspaper publisher, less patrician than Franklin D. Roosevelt but closer to the governing elite than farmer’s son Harry S. Truman.

Rothschild’s profiles describe her as having had a middle-class upbringing in Oradell, New Jersey. Her father, John Kenneth (Ken) Forester, founded the General Aviation Company in 1954 to provide private and charter planes for executives. As Meridian Aircraft, it remains a family firm, catering particularly to the private planes of New York executives. I don’t know what sort of lifestyle that company’s income provided the Foresters in the 1960s, but clearly its success depended on pleasing America’s corporate elite.

Lynn Forester went to college and law school, like Obama and Biden. After that, she doesn’t seem to have been concerned enough about elitism to enter, say, civil rights law, criminal law, politics, or education, all of which can have direct effects on the lives of the poor. Rather, she went into international business law. On the advice of John Kluge, she made an early bet in telecommunications, and ended up selling her government-granted wireless broadband rights for millions of dollars. Rothschild was therefore a self-made entrepreneur before her latest marriage.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but notice how much thought she devotes to family backgrounds instead of individual achievement. She told the Times, “I think Evelyn fell in love with me when I told him, ‘I’m so impressed how you have risen above the stature of your birth’.” (That was at an invitation-only Bilderberg conference.) Rothschild reassured Portfolio that her husband’s resignation as corporate chairman “was not a particularly difficult decision, because the bank has stayed within family control.” She praised the Estée Lauder company because “the Lauder family is essential to the success of that company.”

Rothschild’s latest business venture involves selling luxury items in India:

You know India has luxury in its DNA. All you’ve got to do is look at the maharajas and look at the Taj Mahal. There’s no Hermès or Louis Vuitton that’s going to tell India anything about luxury. Luxury is a very interesting, undeveloped piece of India.

Another “undeveloped piece of India” is the millions of children who live in grinding poverty; they’re definitely not part of the world’s elite, but they’re also not part of Rothschild’s stated concerns.

In our soon-to-end presidential race, there have been a lot of outlandish and demonstrably false statements, but for me Lady de Rothschild’s remarks stand out as the most ridiculous. Given our nation’s history, they’re also the most ironic: a rich, titled Londoner telling Americans that a former neighborhood activist is “elitist.” At least in the Revolutionary period, Lady de Rothschild could have voiced the aristocratic disdain and resentment of Tories instead of trying to camouflage her personal preferences in anti-aristocratic rhetoric.

John Adams on “Natural and Actual Aristocracy”

As I discussed yesterday, the U.S. of A. never created a formal hereditary aristocracy on the British model. But before American politics turned against the whole idea of aristocracy, some leaders argued that some sort of noble class was a useful check on both autocracy and democracy.

Notably, on 18 Oct 1790, John Adams wrote to Samuel Adams about the value of “nobles” in preserving balanced government:

By nobles, I mean not peculiarly an hereditary nobility, or any particular modification, but the natural and actual aristocracy among mankind. The existence of this you will not deny. You and I have seen four noble families rise up in Boston,—the Craftses, Gores, Daweses, and Austins. These are as really a nobility in our town as the Howards, Somersets, Berties, &c., in England.

Blind, undistinguishing reproaches against the aristocratical part of mankind, a division which nature has made, and we cannot abolish, are neither pious nor benevolent. They are as pernicious as they are false. They serve only to foment prejudice, jealousy, envy, animosity, and malevolence. They serve no ends but those of sophistry, fraud, and the spirit of party.

(This transcription isn’t exact. When this letter was published at the time, printers cleaned up Adams’s spellings.)

All the families that Adams named had risen from the ranks of craftsmen to that of gentlemen (particularly lawyers, his own profession) in his lifetime:

• Thomas Crafts was a decorative painter who helped organize the earliest Stamp Act protests in Boston, commanded the Massachusetts militia artillery during the war, and became a selectman and magistrate.
• John Gore also started as a decorative painter and became a militia officer. His oldest daughter, Frances, married Crafts; his middle son, Samuel, became a factory owner; and his youngest son, Christopher, went into the law and eventually became governor of Massachusetts.
• The elder Thomas Dawes was a house carpenter who went into politics; his son of the same name became a judge. (William Dawes was a cousin.) The family’s descendants included Senator Henry L. Dawes and Vice President Chester G. Dawes.
• Benjamin Austin, a merchant and state legislator, and Jonathan L. Austin, eventually state treasurer, were the sons of the manager and part-owner of a rope factory.

An unstated subtext of this letter was that the Adams family was also part of America’s “natural aristocracy.” After all, John’s father was a farmer and rural selectman, but in 1790 John had become Vice President. Samuel Adams, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, wasn’t doing too bad, either. The people who most like the idea of a natural aristocracy usually see themselves as natural members of it.

Adams’s insistence on the value of such a “natural aristocracy” reflected his view of proper constitutional balance was always a shifting contest among the one (monarch, President), the few (lords, Senate, political class in general), and the many (Commons, House of Representatives, voters or people in general). Not to mention his penchant for dividing groups into thirds.

Other thinkers of the time also advocated a tripartite division of power, but that wasn’t the only constitutional model Americans were working with. For example, during the Revolution some states opted for a one-chamber legislature and/or a council of men instead of a single person as executive. But Adams’s model won out, in Massachusetts in 1780 and in the U.S. of A. as a whole in 1788.

Judge Oliver Looks Down on Dr. Warren

I’m going back to the seasonal theme of political invective. After the siege of Boston began, Margaret Draper’s Boston News-Letter was the only newspaper still printed in town (and only on an irregular basis). Naturally, the views in its pages leaned toward the Crown. The 11 Jan 1776 issue of contained a long essay that referred to, among others:

the unhappy leader in the late action at Charlestown [i.e., the Battle of Bunker Hill], (who from ambition only, had raised himself from a bare-legged milk boy to a major general of an army)

That referred to Dr. Joseph Warren, who had indeed grown up on a Roxbury farm.

The author of this essay was probably Judge Peter Oliver (shown here), who used similar language in his Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, completed around 1783:

Major Genl. Warren…was born near to Boston, & when young, was a bare legged milk Boy to furnish the Boston Market. He was a proper Successor to the bare legged Fisher Boy Massianello, & his Fate was almost as rapid. Being possessed of a Genius which promised him Distinction, either in Virtue or Vice, his Friends educated him at the College in Cambridge, to take his Chance of being a Curse or a Blessing to his Country.

(All other sources I’ve seen indicate that Warren’s mother paid for his tuition.)

Oliver sneered at Warren’s middling family background and ambition, just as he voiced snobbish ideas in other passages of his memoir:

As for the People in general, they were like the Mobility of all Countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch.

Here Oliver used “mobility” in the sense of “mob.” And on the mobility we think about today—people rising or falling from one social class to another—he didn’t seem to care for it:

Never did the World exhibit a greater Raree Show, of Beggars riding on Horse back & in Coaches, and Princes walking on Foot. One Instance is Striking, of a Sand Man who carried Sand to the Doors of the Inhabitants of Boston, & is now riding in a Coach. This material World is turned topsey turvey every day.

A “Sand Man” carted around dry sand for homemakers to spread on floors as a cleanliness measure; it was a vocation for the very poor.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, whose children intermarried with the Oliver family, displayed similar attitudes in writing about the political conflict. For example, after young Christopher Seider was fatally shot during a riot, Hutchinson wrote that the boy “was the son of a poor German. A grand funeral was, however, judged very proper for him.”

Those remarks seem almost stereotypically “Tory” because one way our culture remembers the Revolution is a fight between nose-in-the-air aristocrats and good Americans who believed that “all men are created equal.” I think the rhetoric of many Loyalist leaders really was more snobbish than that of Patriot leaders; even if those Loyalists didn’t look down on the common people to begin with, facing angry crowds tends to push you toward that thinking.

But the British-Americans who became Patriots had grown up in the same society as those who became Loyalists, and they also accepted that there was value in aristocracy, Greek for “rule by the best.” In Britain, “the best” had come to mean men raised in wealthy and powerful families, particularly those who had hereditary titles. Those men supposedly had the education, manners, resources, and bloodlines to govern best. In America, the aristocracy was simply a different set of wealthy families.

The new American republic still deferred to gentlemen, even if it eschewed noble titles. (When men with titles condescended to join the Continental Army—Lord Stirling, Baron de Steuben, the Marquis de Lafayette—most officers were flattered.) As Americans set up their republic, they also set up some aristocratic institutions, such as the Order of the Cincinnati, with membership passed down through sons. In the 1790s and early 1800s, New England Federalists had little trouble arguing that the American common man wasn’t ready to be in charge of government.

That changed, I think, with the triumph of the Jacksonian Democrats. It became politically unpalatable in America to imply that a man didn’t deserve to be in government or rise high in society simply because of his family’s wealth. Because of his racial or ethnic group—those restrictions remained in force for many more decades.

We can see that change within the career of Martin Van Buren. When he was a young lawyer, well-born opponents sneered at his background as son of a Kinderhook tavern-keeper. During one election, they publicly challenged Van Buren on whether he owned enough property to vote. But nothing derailed his political career until the Whig Party applied anti-aristocratic political rhetoric. Van Buren drank fine wine, those Whigs sneered, while Gen. William Henry Harrison preferred hard cider. Never mind that Harrison was the son of a rich planter who had signed the Declaration of Independence and served as Virginia governor. (Of course, the financial Panic of 1837 helped defeat Van Buren, too.)

Today, American voters tend to suspect rather than defer to politicians been born into wealth or power—even though children can’t help that any more than they can help being born into poverty. Of recent presidential candidates, George Bush and Al Gore were sons of Senators, George W. Bush the son of a President, John McCain the son and grandson of admirals. All in different ways have worked to reassure voters that they’re not aristocrats. But an eighteenth-century gentlemen like Peter Oliver would have seen all of them as natural members of the governing class.

On the other hand, a man whose father delivered milk for a living, like Dick Gephardt—we know what Judge Oliver would have thought of that.