People Turned Out of Their Houses

On 16 Nov 1775, winter was approaching, and the British commanders besieged in Boston had to worry about moving their troops out of tents and into buildings, about firewood for warmth and cooking, and about food. Boston selectman Timothy Newell described the situation in his journal, recording every development as another injustice by the Crown:

Many people turned out of their houses for the troops to enter. The keys of our Meeting house cellars demanded of me by Major [William] Sheriff by order of General [William] Howe.

Houses, fences, trees &c. pulled down and carried off for fuel. My wharf and barn pulled down by order of General Robinson [actually Gen. Archibald Robertson of the Corps of Engineers].

Beef, Mutton, Pork at 1/6 pr. pound, Geese 14/ Fowls 6/8 L.M. [lawful money]

This the first time in his diary that Newell described the military forcing Bostonians out of their homes. It isn’t entirely clear whether those people owned those buildings, rented them, and were housed by the town in, say, the almshouse (which the military command had tried to empty). In any event, the army’s move was legal because of the war. Even the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permits Congress to enact laws taking possession of homes for the use of troops in times of war.

I get the sense that the British army actually preferred to house its troops in large buildings, where they would be easier to supervise—hence the demand for the keys to the cellar of Newell’s meeting-house on Brattle Street.

Then comes the matter of firewood, a real crisis for the people left in Boston after coastal vessels had stopped bringing in cordwood. Among the other structures torn down and burned during the siege were Old North Meeting-House, John Hancock’s fence, and George Robert Twelves Hewes’s little shoemaking shop. The army also chopped down Liberty Tree for symbolic reasons, and pulled down the spire of the West Meeting-House so that spies couldn’t use it for signaling. It’s possible that Gen. Robertson had Newell’s wharf and barn removed (as opposed to being converted into a barracks) for similar security reasons. But the wood also certainly went into a fire.

First New England History Festival, 24 Nov 2007

On the evening of Saturday, 24 November 2007, the first New England History Festival will take place at the Hibernian Hall in Watertown, Massachusetts. It looks like organizers are trying to create a forum for non-academic historians and researchers to share their work with each other and the public.

Among the scheduled topics pertinent to Revolutionary New England:

• Bill Rose, speaking in the uniform of a French admiral about “Why We Don’t Speak French – Salt Water in the American Revolution.”
  
• John Horrigan, the event’s producer, on 29 May 1780, “New England’s Dark Day,” and other meteorological anomalies.
• D. Michael Ryan, a Park Ranger at Minute Man National Historical Park, signing his new book Concord and the Dawn of Revolution: The Hidden Truths.

In addition to the talks and displays, the organizers promise “trivia, exhibits, concessions, prizes, souvenirs.” The admission is $5.00 for the public, but free for students, senior citizens, and historical society members. The event starts at 6:00 P.M. and runs until 10:00.

Comics Week at Boston 1775 resumes this weekend.

Comics and Historical Conflicts

History books discuss two basic types of conflict:

• The arguments and disputes of the period, such as whether Parliament had the right to levy taxes on colonists or whether Ebenezer Richardson deserved to be convicted of murder for shooting Christopher Seider.
• The arguments and unanswered questions of historiography. These can be factual: Who shot first at Lexington? Who leaked Thomas Hutchinson’s letters to Benjamin Franklin? Were tea prices rising or falling? Or they can be matters of method and interpretation: Does it make more sense to study the elite or the populace? How important were the immediate political issues compared to deeper economic or cultural divisions? What’s the best way to interpret John Adams’s memoirs?

After looking at Michael Burgan’s two Boston Massacre books for Capstone Press and other recent history comics, I think the comics form can do a good job conveying the first type of dispute—perhaps even better than traditional prose books. But comics creators have a much harder time introducing readers to the knottier questions that historians address.

In writing a prose history for young readers, an author usually feels a lot of pressure to tell “what actually happened.” That can mean coming down on one side or other of the disputes of the period, implying that one side was clearly right.

Take the question of smuggling in Boston. There was a lot of it, to be sure, but how much? Which merchants were involved? How many Customs officials looked the other way, or tilted their prosecutions for political reasons? In his traditional school-library book, Burgan simply assumes that the Customs service’s case against John Hancock for smuggling in 1768 was solid. The text says that Hancock “had ignored the duties he was supposed to pay on cargo that his ship [Liberty] carried.”

I don’t think the situation was that clear. That case was hotly contested, and the Crown eventually dropped its prosecution. This book’s bald description of Hancock’s activity implies that he and his fellow Patriots were self-interested, deceptive hypocrites when they protested Customs enforcement. They were definitely self-interested, and some were definitely smugglers, but the evidence on Hancock himself is vague.

Burgan’s Graphic Library comic, in contrast, sums up the dispute over smuggling and duties by showing a merchant and a Customs official arguing the case. That reflects how comics, like drama, work best when characters act out a conflict in front of us. It also results in a better picture of how the situation in Boston looked at the time.

As I discussed yesterday, both of Burgan’s volumes misstate how violence began on King Street on 5 Mar 1770. But both books also state that a particular soldier fired the first shot of the ensuing Massacre and shouted “Fire!” to his fellow soldiers. The comics volume even names him—he was Pvt. Edward Montgomery. Most short accounts of the Massacre, for either adults or children, omit that important detail.

As for question of historical research and debate, comics have a problem in depicting that. They’re like historical fiction, showing us one version of the past. They can show characters voicing different perspectives, but they still carry the message that the events in the panels are based on what actually happened. But what if we don’t really know?

One example of how this works shows up in Xavier Niz’s Paul Revere’s Ride. He has apparently accepted David H. Fischer’s suggestion (in another book titled Paul Revere’s Ride) that Lexington militiamen emptied their muskets before entering Buckman’s Tavern and thus produced the shots that caused British officers to release Revere after capturing him. Fischer made clear that was an educated guess, a theory. But once the comics artists portray that moment, it looks as definite as the two lights in Old North Church.

I can imagine a comic using a Rashomon approach to a historical controversy, showing different characters’ perspectives on, say, the first shots on Lexington green. But even Rashomon eventually gave us strong hints about “what actually happened.” Similarly, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may end with the rule, “Print the legend,” but it had shown us the facts behind the legend—i.e., “what actually happened.” We like stories to be definite.

Actual history writing has a lot more ambiguities. One example of the difficulty of conveying such uncertainty in the comics format is the Graphic Library’s Molly Pitcher book. It tells the story of a woman named Mary who helped her husband on the battlefield and eventually helped to work one the Continental artillery’s guns.

Only in the afterword does writer Jason Glaser discuss how people have identified multiple women as the source of the Molly Pitcher legend, producing conflicting stories. And that afterword doesn’t mention, as a regular Boston 1775 reader did in comments on this posting, that most historians think the legend is more significant in showing how we want to remember the Revolutionary War than in showing how it actually happened.

In essence, the comics Molly Pitcher tells readers a dramatic story of a young woman on the battlefield, showing her actions and words. And then it tells them that that story may never have happened that way. It could have gone even further and said that story may never have happened at all. But haven’t the kids just seen those events play out before their own eyes?

Comparing Comics and Standard Treatment

Capstone Publishing, the publisher of the Graphic Library comics-style treatment of the Boston Massacre I’ve mentioned the last two days, is also the publisher of a traditional school-library book on the same topic, through its Compass Point imprint. In fact, the two volumes have the same generic title, the same price, and the same author, Michael Burgan. That makes it possible to directly compare their two approaches to explaining history to elementary-school students.

The traditional book is said to be for grades 4-6; the comics treatment has a “Reading Level” of grades 3-4, but an “Interest Level” of 3-9. Both volumes include a glossary, resource list, and index.

Both books list historical advisors from the Boston area. The content advisor for the Compass Point title was Prof. Alan Rogers of Boston College. The consultant for Graphic Library was Susan Goganian, until recently director of the Old State House Museum, which looks down on the site of the Massacre. Interestingly, each contains material not in the other, meaning that Burgan didn’t simply adapt his prose book to create the script for the comic—he went back to his research.

The Compass Point volume is a standard school-library title, telling history in prose with supplemental art. Its illustrations include period documents, old prints, stock photographs, and a few images touched up by the production staff. This art tends to reinforce the text, sometimes adding a little new information but just as often raising unanswered questions. For example, the book shows the signatures of attorneys from the Boston Massacre trials but doesn’t give their names, and the text (like many popular accounts) mentions only John Adams. No child on Earth could decipher Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s signature.

The Compass Point book includes a new map of colonial Boston and Britain’s Atlantic territories from XNR Productions, and an overhead view of the Massacre site adapted from a picture in E. H. Goss’s biography of Paul Revere. In contrast, the Graphic Library volume has no maps. This graphic ingredient isn’t necessary in The Boston Massacre, but it’s sorely missed in the same series’s Paul Revere’s Ride.

Choosing illustrations from existing documents and images, as is standard in school-library books, brings some pitfalls because the available material might not be entirely appropriate. For example, page 16 of the Compass Point book says, “In 1765, [Boston] patriot leaders had formed the Sons of Liberty.” Opposite that is a printed broadside from the Sons of Liberty—but from New York in 1769. I don’t think the “Sons of Liberty” in Boston were ever as formally organized as groups in New York.

Old prints are often handsome and dramatic but decades younger than the events they depict. Such illustrations, such as the late-1800s painting on the cover above, are artistic recreations based on the same documentary sources that we have (or fewer). However, since those pictures look historic, they can seem to carry more authority than they really deserve when they appear in a school book.

In contrast, all the illustrations in the Graphic Library series are in modern comics style. (The Massacre title’s inking style reminds me of Jack Kirby’s comics, meaning that almost all the men come out looking like Jack Lord.) Readers will easily understand that these panels represent illustrators’ interpretations of events.

Similarly, as a comics scripter Burgan had to make up most of the book’s dialogue. The Graphic Library series follows a rule that all speeches taken directly from historical sources appear in pale yellow balloons instead of white. I like that way of alerting readers about what is documented, letting them consider what isn’t.

Of course, some language has to be compromised. Page 16 of the Massacre volume shows Pvt. Patrick Walker asking for work and being told, “The only work I’d have for a lobster is cleaning my boots.” The actual response that soldier received was too rude for a classroom. In his prose history, Burgan could finesse that problem: “Walker traded insults with the owner” (actually with a ropewalk worker, not the owner). But a comics panel needs to put words into the man’s mouth, and the result is a watered-down exchange with no yellow balloons.

In scripting the comic, Burgan apparently sought out visually dramatic detail, and that led him into some errors. Page 10 says, “Samuel Adams trained his dog to snap and snarl at the British troops.” I quoted all that we know about Adams’s dog Queue back here. His descendants said that dog became conditioned to snap at soldiers after they attacked him, not after Adams trained him to do so.

In both books, Burgan simplifies the start of the argument on King Street that led up to the Massacre. The Compass Point volume says, “a few young men approached [Pvt. Hugh] White and began to taunt him.” The Graphic Library title says, “a barber named Edward Garrick taunted British private Hugh White.” Actually, White called Garrick over and hit him upside the head because he disliked what the young fellow had said about a passing officer.
The comics art compounds that inaccuracy by portraying Garrick as an aggressive adult. Similarly, the artists show the protesters outside Theophilus Lillie’s store eleven days earlier as rock-throwing men, not (as they really were) rude boys. Showing teenagers in the middle of those historic events would not only have been accurate, but would offer more interest for the book’s young readers.

Such errors aren’t inherent in a comics treatment, of course. Better advice or research could have pointed the artists in the right direction early on. (Such pointers would have had to come before the drawings were completed; a manuscript is much easier to correct than finished art.) But this situation is a good reminder of how in comics the art is far more than supplemental and carries much more weight, good or bad.

TOMORROW: How these two books address controversies.

Historical Comics' Anachronistic Art

Yesterday I wrote about some of the potential of comics to make historical experiences come alive for young readers. Today’s topic is how to screw up that process through lazy research.

Just as artwork can convey meaning more quickly and powerfully than prose, pictures of historical events can produce wrong impressions. Furthermore, while prose can say, “This is what happened, as best as we can tell from our sources,” realistically rendered art carries the implication that events did happen this way. In comics the visual elements usually provide at least half the meaning, particularly at the emotional level, so it’s especially important to make the artwork as historically accurate as possible. That means the same level of research should go into the art as into the words.

It doesn’t look like the teams behind Capstone’s Graphic Library of historical books has worked that way. During the pre-Revolutionary turmoil covered by the series’s Boston Massacre volume, British settlers had been living and building in Boston for more than a century and a third. We have pictures of what the center of town looked like, where men met to discuss business and politics. It did not look like a frontier village with small, unpainted houses.
(I also wonder if the guy with his Kirbyish mouth wide open is supposed to be shouting, “Down with the Stamp Act!” and the calm gentleman on the right is supposed to be saying, “I can’t believe Parliament taxes our newspapers...” This book has a number of panels that look slapped together.)

The artist for Graphic Library’s Paul Revere’s Ride seems to have looked up the Paul Revere House in the North End before drawing it in this panel. But that house was never this close to the waterfront. Even after global warming it won’t be this close to the waterfront.

Using good historical art references can also avoid anachronistic styles of clothing and hair. Contrary to what Rachel on Friends believed, not everything from the past falls into “the colonial period.” (To be fair, Rachel also acknowledged “yore.”) This set of protesters from the Graphic Library Boston Tea Party look like they walked out of Little House on the Prairie.

From the same book, here’s the man accused of trying to make off with tea during the protest. His name was Charles Conner. Contrary to what we might assume from this portrayal, he lived in the 1770s, not the 1970s.

And lest we think the books’ visual errors are no more consequential than facial hair in a time when British men were almost universally clean-shaven, loading a cannon alone as shown below (from the Molly Pitcher volume) is a good way to get your arms blown off.

What Comics Can Convey about History

There are several American Revolution titles covered in the Graphic Library from Capstone Press, a large series of nonfiction comics created for the late elementary-school grades. These books are often marketed to schools and libraries with the argument that reluctant readers will stick with them longer than traditional prose books. And that may well be so.

I would go beyond that and say that comics, executed well, can convey some information more quickly or forcefully than prose. They can immerse readers in a historical moment, helping us think about the past as an experience rather than as a set of facts.

For example, in this panel from Paul Revere’s Ride (script by Xavier Niz and art by Brian Bascle) the art quickly portrays the rush of Revere’s gallop away from British scouts in Cambridge.
The blurred background as a way to convey speed is, I understand, a technique developed in Japanese comics.

This pair of panels from The Boston Tea Party (script by Matt Doeden, art by Charles Barnett III and Dave Hoover) conveys the need for quiet as men boarded the tea ships by offering a panel with no words at all:
A traditional book would have to say something like, “The men boarded the ships quietly,” but as soon as you’re using words to describe not saying anything you’re already behind.

Finally, here are a couple of panels from The Boston Massacre (script by Michael Burgan, art by Charles Barnett III and Bob Wiacek).
That most cliché aspect of American comics, the rock-’em-sock-’em fight scene complete with sound effects, does quite nicely at depicting the brawls that led up to the Massacre. That said, when I was writing my article on Ebenezer Richardson, I never imagined him looking like Steve Ditko’s Peter Parker.

Unfortunately, in the Graphic Library titles that I’ve looked at, the examples of poor execution outnumber the moments of potential. Some of the problems are faults with the comics themselves, such as a mismatch between art and text. Is this Richardson really calm enough to say, “They shouldn’t have joined such a lawless mob”?

But there’s a bigger problem that extends across this whole series.

TOMORROW: What else? The bigger problem.

Comics Week at Boston 1775

Comics Week at Oz and Ends looked like so much fun that I’m going to post a series of remarks on comics depicting the American Revolution. School-library publishers are commissioning many new history books in comics form, and comics publishers are finding wider audiences for serious non-fiction. I’ll review several recent examples of both types of books.

But first, five years ago, Scott Shaw! used his Oddball Comics column at Comic Book Resources to share a few strange comic books from the Tomahawk series. This adventure comic, launched in 1950, was set in Revolutionary times, but apparently in the same version of the war as the Liberty Boys of ’76 series of dime novels: an endless backwoods struggle between a small band of Patriots and an always defeated, never exhausted company of redcoats and Natives, with many moments of freaky strangeness.

In the 1950s this comic book capitalized on the popularity of Westerns and the Davy Crockett mania: note the heroes’ coonskin caps. By the early 1960s, science fiction was taking over, making what was never historically accurate into a boiling stew of weirdness.

Shaw!’s postings start with a tale of Tomahawk, his band of fighters, and a dinosaur pining for its long-lost Viking master. Somehow that story also involves a missing blacksmith and the latest attack from redcoat soldiers and their Iroquois allies. Follow the “Next” link for four more Tomahawk tales, or as many as you can stand.

Here’s a bit of art for the flavor.

For artwork and snarky humor, Oddball Comics can’t match up to the similarly themed Stupid Comics from Mister Kitty. Alas, I found only one Revolutionary War panel there, from the mid-1960s Super Green Beret.

British Raid on Lechmere’s Point

The British army raided east Cambridge 237 years ago today, seeking cattle to increase their meat supply as winter approached. Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded the basics:

Several Companies of Regulars from Charlestown went over to Phips’s farm to take a number of Cattle feeding there. The Provincials came upon them and soon drove them on board boats after an engagement—it is said several are [blank—wounded?] and none killed, but they supposed many of the Provincials killed.

Capt. John Barker of the 4th Regiment put a lot more detail into his diary:

To day a party of about 250 Light Infantry embarked at 11 o’clock in the flat bottom’d Boats: they landed on a Peninsula call’d Lechmere’s farm, which in spring tides is an Island; it is between Cambridge and Charlestown and within cannon shot of the Rebels Works on Prospect Hill.

The Rebel Guard made their escape all but one; we brought off 12 or 14 head of Cattle; after the Party was reimbarked then a very large body of the Rebels waded to the Peninsula and fired on our Men, but without doing any execution, at the same time we firing Cannon at them from this side and from the ships and some Gondolas.

While our People were on the Ground they did not dare to pass; there was some firing between them and our advanced Guard; this was all done without the loss of a Man on our side, and I think must mortify them a good deal, braving them in a manner right under their noses and under their Cannon, which indeed they seem’d to manage but badly, taking an amazing time to load.

On the 13th, Barker added, “By a Deserter from the Rebels we hear they had 9 Man killed and several wounded on the 9th.” However, the Continental Army still viewed this skirmish as a victory because they perceived themselves as having driven the British back.

Gimme That Old-Time New England

While looking up stuff about the Brattle Street Meeting-House that Deacon Timothy Newell was struggling to preserve from the British military, I stumbled across Historic New England’s online, searchable library of Old-Time New England articles. O.T.N.E. was the organization’s main periodical back when it was called the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. The issues available online now extend back to 1950, though there were thirty-nine volumes preceding that.

All the articles come in PDF form for downloading, rather than for reading online. Here are direct links to some about eighteenth-century matters that caught my eye:

• “Thomas Dawes’s Church in Brattle Square”, Frederic C. Detwiller
• “The Early History and Federalization of the Codman House”, R. Curtis Chapman
• “Drawn and Published: The Craft of Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century New England”, Anne M. Fuhrman
• “‘To Promote My Countrys Good’: Joseph Whipple and the Oliver Evans Flour Mill in New Hampshire, 1788-1802”, Richard M. Candee
• “The Province House and the Preservation Movement”, Fay Campbell Kaynor
• “The Old South: The Meetinghouse and the American Preservation Movement”, Michael Holleran
• “An Eighteenth-Century Century Collection of Contra Dances”
• “The Foster-Hutchinson House”, Abbott Lowell Cummings
  

The Province House (shown above in the 1830s) was the mansion in central Boston provided for Massachusetts’s governor if he didn’t have a Boston home of his own. The Foster-Hutchinson House was the mansion in the North End owned by one particular governor, Thomas Hutchinson. The Codman House in Lincoln doesn’t have the same political significance, but is the only one of these three that still exists and can be visited, thanks to S.P.N.E.A.—whoops, to Historic New England.

Free Public Reading from My Dearest Friend

On 19 November 2007, the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard University Press will launch a new edition of the letters of John and Abigail Adams with an unusual public event at Faneuil Hall. Apparently taking a cue from performances of A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters, the event will feature three modern political couples reading from the book:

• Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Victoria Kennedy
• Governor Deval Patrick and Diane Patrick
• Governor Michael Dukakis and Kitty Dukakis

The event starts at 7:00 P.M., and is free and open to the public.

There have been previous editions of the Adams letters, but My Dearest Friend is said to be “the first collection of their letters that is selected from the entire forty years span of their correspondence,” and to contain “several letters never before published.”

These letters provide an especially revealing look at the two Adamses, making their relationship more vivid and approachable, for a variety of reasons:

• John Adams seems to have been unusually frank in expressing his emotions, judging by how his diary compares to those of other men. His private letters can be equally open—which occasionally got him in trouble.
• Abigail Adams was unusually smart, knowledgeable, and politically minded for a woman of the time—though even she felt inadequate when she compared herself to Mercy Warren.
• The Adamses happened to live apart in some momentous periods: during the Continental Congresses, when John was first a diplomat in Europe, and at times during his Presidency. That means issues and news they would have normally discussed over the dinner table got put down on paper for us to read.
• Unlike other families, the Adamses rarely threw anything away. Martha and George Washington’s private papers seem to have gone into the fire. In contrast, John and Abigail’s descendants actually started the process of publishing their letters.

Folks can also enjoy this correspondence through the M.H.S.’s Adams Electronic Archive, which includes all the letters in searchable form and images of the surviving manuscripts.

Steal Not This Book for Fear of Shame

Yesterday folks at the Seth Kaller firm in New York sent me a link to their catalog of the early American documents related to Boston now for sale. (Click on “Boston Catalog” at the webpage linked above.) They’ll be at the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair on 16-18 November.

One item that caught my eye was a copy of Brady and Tate’s New Version of the Psalms of David, printed in Boston in 1765 and signed as shown here: “John Hancock’s / Thou shalt not Steal Saith the Lord.”

Hancock’s inscription reminded me of similar warnings I’d seen in textbooks from the South Latin School, which the merchant had attended starting in 1745. For example, in 1774 Joshua Green signed his copy of the Accidence, the beginners’ textbook, and two years later he added:

Hic liber pertinet [This book belongs to] Josua Green
Steal not this book for fear of shame
For in it is the owner’s name 1776

Other surviving eighteenth-century schoolbooks are also inked with multiple signatures and dire warnings against theft. Charles Chauncy (who had entered the same South Latin School in 1712) was straightforward in a history of Rome: “Steal this book if you dare.” He grew up to be Boston’s senior Congregationalist minister.

Inside a Greek-Latin text that school required of older students, Peter Oliver (entered school 1719) warned in Latin, “Here I place my name, since I don’t want to lose this book; If anyone steals it, he will be hanged by the neck.” Appropriately, he grew up to be the last royal Chief Justice of Massachusetts.

With all those warnings in all those books, you might think that pre-Revolutionary Boston suffered from a wave of textbook and hymnal theft. But no newspaper, court records, or memoir of schoolboy life mentions that problem. And I doubt there were many thieves who could read a warning in Latin anyway.

Rather, I think the schoolboys’ signatures and inscriptions simply showed their pride of ownership. Even upper-class children had few possessions of their own, but the scholars’ Latin textbooks not only belonged to them but signified their place in society.

As for why one of Boston’s richest merchants was still signing a book that way years after he graduated, I couldn’t say. But for $85,000 you can own that book yourself.

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November

Here’s a quick reminder about tonight’s 5th of November retrospective at the Bostonian Society (Old State House), starting at 6:30 P.M. Learn about that highlight of the colonial year from Profs. Brendan McConville and Cynthia Van Zandt. We’ll also announce the debut of the 5th of November website. Hear what all this excitement was about!

British Soldiers Weren't Called Lobsterbacks

A while back, Christopher Lenney, the researcher who alerted me to the possibility of a “Mount Whoredom” in London to match the one in Boston, sent me a note that said:

I may be crazy but I can find no authentic 18th C. use of the term “lobsterback” or “lobster-back” for British soldier. Can you?

So I searched for words containing the ingredient “lobster” in the primary sources on my computer. You can see the results in yesterday’s posting. Lots of mentions of “lobsters,” but not one use of “lobsterback.” Or “lobster-back,” or “lobster back.”

So Chris, author of Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England, is today’s guest blogger. (My interruptions in italics.)

“Lobsterback” has been repeated so often by historians that the term has taken on a life of its own. I learned it in school, and if you Google it you’ll find it still is a standard Revolutionary War vocabulary word. But is it really a Revolutionary-era taunt?

If you go to the standard references, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, you find that “lobster” has been used since 1643 as a slang term for English soldiers, originally said of Roundhead cuirassiers on account of their armor, not the color of their uniforms. Later it was transferred to other British soldiers with red uniforms.

“Lobsterback” is not in the OED, Webster’s Second, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, The Dictionary of American English, or The Dictionary of Americanisms. It is in Webster’s Third (1961).

Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English lists the first example of “lobster-back” in 1822, and says it is a variant on “lobster (soldier).” The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang lists the first example as “lobster-backed” in 1809 in a non-North American source, and gives the first American usage as Crockett’s Almanac in 1840. (But see below.)

In America’s Historical Newspapers online, the first documented uses of “lobsterback” that I can find are in 1812-13 in The Tickler of Philadelphia:

• 8 Sept 1812: a satirical poem refers to “General Lobsterback.”
• 22 Sept 1812: “If the democrats would fight as hard as chatter and drink grog, there would not be a lobsterback in all Quebec, in less than forty-five days.” And about a man going privateering, “Perhaps he may in that station, scald the lobster-back rascals.”
• 26 Jan 1813: a letter quoted the city’s mayor saying, “Who cares for a parcel of d——d lobster back rascals and tories?”

[Additionally, I found “lobster backed” used as an insult for a British officer in Benjamin Waterhouse’s A Journal, of a Young Man of Massachusetts, Late a Surgeon on Board an American Privateer (Boston: Rowe and Hooper, 1816), which is said to have been a “best-selling account of a ship’s surgeon in the War of 1812.” Popular literature like that could have spread the term throughout the U.S. of A.

Over in Britain, Google Books finds the term in witness testimony in The Trial of Robert Surrage..., printed in Edinburgh in 1820, and in the novel The Irish Necromancer; or, Deer Park, written by Thomas Henry Marshal and published in London in 1821—all from the same general period.]

After the War of 1812, the term starts to appear in American fiction about the Revolutionary War. A short story by J. N. Barker called “The Green Mountain Boy: A Tale of Ticonderoga” in The Atlantic Souvenir: A Christmas and New Year’s Offering (Philadelphia, 1827) has Ethan Allen use this phrase as he challenges the British in the fort:

“...come out lobster back, from your shell…”

[Barker’s story was reprinted in this 1832 anthology for folks who want to read it.]

Fishing in Google, I found this passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair from 1840. The section of chapter five headed “The Boston Massacre” appears to rephrase for young ears the taunts that had been published in newspapers in 1770.

“Turn out, you lobsterbacks!” one would say. “Crowd them off the sidewalks!” another would cry. “A redcoat has no right in Boston streets!”

“O, you rebel rascals!” perhaps the soldiers would reply, glaring fiercely at the young men. “Some day or other we’ll make our way through Boston streets at the point of the bayonet!”

Thanks, Chris! It looks like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of “lobster-back” might have put it into the American literary canon. The next generation of New England writers adopted it. Edward Everett Hale used it in 1896 and 1899. Julian Hawthorne used it in a textbook in 1898, and soon it appeared in other textbooks, such as this from 1905.

Around that turn of the century, the term surfaced in several American novels, particularly historical novels for young readers: Chauncey Crafts Hotchkiss’s In Defiance of the King (NY: 1895), Robert W. Chambers’s Cardigan (NY: 1901) and The Reckoning (NY: 1907), and James Otis’s The Minute Boys of Boston (Boston: 1910). And details we learn as children have a way of sticking.

Can anyone point to eighteenth-century sources using the term “lobsterback” for a British soldier? Or should we revise our understanding of Revolutionary vocabulary? Would any late reminiscence of those times that uses “lobsterback” probably have been written long after the fact?

Scoundrel, Lobster, Bloody Back’d Dog!

A few weeks back, an email from a colleague made me consider what nasty phrases colonial Bostonians used for the British soldiers stationed in their midst in 1768-70 and 1774-76. And who better to record those insults than the men who were their targets? All the following phrases come from depositions that those soldiers dictated to sympathetic ministers or magistrates in mid-1770, as friends of the royal government built a case that the locals had brought the shootings known as the Boston Massacre upon themselves.

• Capt. Thomas Preston: “you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels.”
• Sgt. Thomas Smilie: “the most scurrilous & abusive Language..., Such as Blood back Rascal, Red Herring &ca. . . . ‘Damn You Bloody Back Rascals our Town is free, We will have no Soldiers in it but our Selves, which we think better Soldiers than You’.”
• Sgt. Thomas Light: “Bloody Back Thieving Dogs.”
• Sgt. Thomas Thornley: “Lobster scoundrels, what business had they there”
• Sgt. John Ridings: “Lobster and other abusive Names.”
• Sgt. John Norfolk: “one [John] Ruddock, who said he was a justice of the peace, and expressed the words, Go fetch my broad sword and Fusee and Damn the Scoundrels, let us drive the Bloody backs to their Quarters, Send for my Company of men, for I think we are men enough for them.”
  
• Sgt. William Henderson et al.: “there should be no Bloody backs permitted to walk on the Common.”
  
• Cpl. Henry Cullen: “Bloody back, Lobster, and Many other provoking Speeches.”
• Cpl. John Arnold: “go through the dirt like other Lobsters and Scoundrels.”
• Cpl. John Shelton et al.: “those bloody back’d rascals.”
• Cpl. Samuel Heale: “offered to shake hands, which Winship insultingly refused to do, saying he would not shake hands with any dirty Rascals like us for fear of Catching the Itch.”
  
• Pvt. Richard Ratcliff: “a Lobster Scoundrel Bloodyback dog.”
• Pvt. John Care: “Lobster and bloody back,...bloody back’d Dogs.”
• Pvt. Jacob Moor: “Damn’d Lobstering scoundrels,” “lobster and bloody back’d Scoundrel.”
• Pvt. Joseph Whitehouse: “Scoundrel, Lobster, bloody back’d dog.”
• Pvt. Cornelius Murphy: “the Common Appelations of Bloodybacks Red Herrings &c.”

To be sure, British soldiers had developed their own talents for invective. Their insults show up in testimony, depositions, and newspaper articles collected and published by the Whigs. But even American sources, given enough distance, acknowledged that locals often insulted the British soldiers. For example, Traits of the Tea-Party (published in Boston in 1835) says:

Mr. [William] Pierce...remembers [Crispus] Attucks...had a large stick in his hand, and that he saw him early in this tumult harassing and abusing the sentry, poking him rather severely with the stick, and calling him a “lobster”—a popular reproach—and swearing that he would have off one of his claws.

But the big mystery here is the son-of-a-bitch that didn’t bark. What insulting word for British soldiers would we expect to find on this list, given how closely it’s identified with this conflict in our history books, but is nowhere to be seen? (And I don’t mean “redcoats,” which isn’t really an insult.)

TOMORROW: A guest blogger explores that mystery.

Thumbnail image above from Jacqamoe’s nice Flickr set of historical reenactors in Britain.

The Investments of Abigail Adams

Earlier this week the Boston Globe ran a review by Michael Kenney of Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. That book has also been nominated for the National Book Award, which led to this online interview with Holton. He says:

It occurred to me that I could make the topic a lot more appealing to readers if I could find a compelling story about a single bond speculator; then that one guy could stand in for all the rest. For years I searched in vain for a speculator who left sufficient documentation. Near the end of the writing—almost too late—I found my speculator. It is Abigail Adams. Twenty years before becoming First Lady, in June 1777, Adams discovered this incredibly lucrative investment. And she was still buying bonds in the 1790s, when her husband was vice president.

The same day I saw that review, I also received the October issue of the William & Mary Quarterly, which includes Holton’s short article, “Abigail Adams, Bond Speculator.” I’d heard about this research at the Massachusetts Historical Society a couple of years ago, so I’m interested to see what he’s made of it.

Adams’s financial speculation seems to have started simply as part of supplying her household needs when her husband John was out of town at the Continental Congress. On the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, 16 June 1775, Abigail wrote to John asking him to look for bargains in pins in Philadelphia:

I have a request to make you. Something like the Barrel of Sand suppose you will think it, but really of much more importance to me. It is that you would send out Mr. Bass and purchase me a bundle of pins and put in your trunk for me. The cry for pins is so great that what we used to Buy for 7.6 are now 20 Shillings and not to be had for that. A bundle contains 6 thousand for which I used to give a Dollor, but if you can procure them for 50 [shillings] or 3 pound, pray let me have them.

That sounds like nothing more than a housewife seeking necessities at the best prices in a time of local shortages. But within a few years John was at a diplomatic post in Europe and Abigail was using him to import goods not only to use herself but also, it’s clear, to sell at a profit. In a letter to John dated 15 April 1780:

All the articles you were so kind as to send me were very acceptable. . . . The Linnens tho rather coars were an article I stood in great need of, and they are in great demand here. The Tea proves of the best kind, the Hankerchiefs will turn to good account sold for hard Money, the only currency that can be delt in without immense loss.

And 13 Nov 1780:

The Articles you were so kind as to send me were not all to my mind. . . . A large Quantity of ordinary black ribbon, which may possibly sell for double what it cost, if it had been coulourd there would have been no difficulty with it. The tape is of the coarsest kind, I shall not lose by it, but as I wanted it for family use, it was not the thing.

And by 9 Dec 1781 Abigail was directing John to particular mercantile houses:

I shall inclose an invoice to the House of Ingraham Bromfild, and one to de Neufvilla. There is nothing from Bilboa that can be imported with advantage, hankerchiefs are sold here at 7 dollers & half per dozen.

There are some articles which would be advantageous from Holland, but Goods there run high, and the retailing vendues which are tolerated here ruin the Shopkeepers. The articles put up, by the American House were better in Quality, for the price than those by the House of de Neufvilla. Small articles have the best profit, Gauze, ribbons, feathers and flowers to make the Ladies Gay, have the best advance. There are some articles which come from India I should suppose would be lower priced than many others—bengalls, Nankeens, persian Silk and Bandano hankerchiefs, but the House of Bromfeild & C. know best what articles will suit here.

Abigail was also buying land in Braintree and, as Holton discusses, government bonds.

John Trumbull Seeks a Job

John Trumbull (1756-1843) grew up in Connecticut wanting to be an artist. He even made drawings on the “the nicely sanded floors” of his house. (Housekeepers scattered clean sand on bare floors to soak up water brought in from outside, and to make walking on the boards softer and smoother.)

Unfortunately, young John was the son of the governor of Connecticut, who felt that his family was the sort that employed portrait painters, and did not produce them. John endured a Harvard education, relieved by one exciting visit to the Boston home of painter John Singleton Copley, and then looked ahead drearily to a career in business.

Luckily, a war broke out less than two years after he graduated in 1773. Trumbull’s autobiography describes how he obtained a a position working for the new American commander:

I was told by my eldest brother, the commissary general, that the commander in chief was very desirous of obtaining a correct plan of the enemy’s works, in front of our position on Boston neck; he advised me (as I could draw) to attempt to execute a view and plan, as a mean of introducing myself (probably) to the favorable notice of the general.

I took his advice and began the attempt, by creeping (under the concealment of high grass) so nigh that I could ascertain that the work consisted of a curtain crossing the entrance of the town, flanked by two bastions. . . .

My drawing was...shown to the general. . . . This (probably) led to my future promotion, for, soon after, I was presented to the general, and appointed his second aid-du-camp.

Of course, Trumbull’s family connections probably didn’t hurt.

As it was, John Trumbull lasted only about three weeks as Gen. George Washington’s aide, working in the Vassall mansion in Cambridge. Then the general decided that, with the arrival of some colleagues from Virginia, he had more than enough young gentlemen working for him. Trumbull switched to the staff of Gen. Horatio Gates, and finally resigned as a colonel in 1777.

In 1780, still eager to become a professional artist, Trumbull sailed to London to study painting with Benjamin West. He didn’t seem to care that the war was still going on, but the British authorities did, and they locked him up on suspicion of being a spy. Trumbull eventually did get training, and became one of the U.S. of A.’s busiest history painters, his personal acquaintance with such men as Washington being a valuable asset. He was probably the finest one-eyed painter of his generation. One of Trumbull’s portraits of the generalissimo appears above, courtesy of the George Washington Papers site at the University of Virginia.

Changing Wages for Ropewalk Workers

This evening the Boston Area Early American History Seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society tackled the question of the cost of living in Boston during the 1700s. How much money did it take for a poor person to survive? This is tough to calculate because of a wide range of variables: incomplete records, lack of complete details in the records that exist, changing prices, fluctuating currencies, different family situations, uncertain expenditures, and the bias of different sources.

During that conversation someone asked about workers’ wages, which prompted me to talk about the data in two accounting books from the Box & Austin ropewalk, documents now owned by the Winterthur museum in Delaware. John Box and Benjamin Austin owned and operated their rope factory in Boston’s West End during the mid-1700s.

Ropewalks and shipyards were the biggest proto-industrial businesses of the colonial period. They required a large infrastructure and fairly large workforce, including some highly skilled workers—the spinners. (In the picture above, from the Alexandria Archeology Museum, the spinner is the man at the rear walking backwards spinning a strand of hemp yarn from each hand. Now that’s skill.)

Often the owner of shipyards and ropewalks did not work alongside his men, and in some cases may never have learned their crafts. But he had the money, business knowledge, and customer contacts to run the firm, producing a clear management/labor distinction. According to his daughter, Box never learned how to spin rope, but he kept the accounts. According to later political rivals of his sons, Austin did make rope himself, so he was probably in charge of supervising the output.

Box’s account book for 1757-66 lists every ropewalk worker, what he was due in wages, what he accumulated in debts, and finally what he received. Early in the period covered by the book, most workers were paid “By Worke,” meaning by output: in 1758 each unit of work [which is unclear] was worth 5 shillings. After Sept 1760 all men were paid for the number of days out of six that they worked each week, occasionally with extra for “Jobbing.” The prevailing wage was 25 or 30 shillings per day.

Thus, James West earned £34.15.10 in September 1760 under the old system, and only £32.5.0 the following month, when he was paid by the day for the first time. Was this a better deal for him? That’s impossible to know because the record doesn’t state how many days West worked in September, or how many units he produced in October. Workers could work as many as six days of the week, but sometimes worked only one or two. I assume that overall Box & Austin thought the new payment method was better for their firm.

Before paying the workers, Box deducted for their debts. Charges to the workers’ accounts included “Sundrys” from the warehouse, firewood, gloves, pumps, bread, handkerchiefs, tea, sugar, “Shoes for ys Wife,” “1 years Rent of dwelling House,” “Victualing at my House,” “Pork,” and “Spinning Bands.” Thus, a man named Neal McNeal boarded with Box at £4.10 per week while earning 25 shillings each day.

Some men accumulated debt faster than they could earn wages. By October 1766 Samuel Tralaven owed £60 to his employer, including a whopping £11 “To a Beaver Hatt of Thos. H. Peck” the previous September. At the end of that period Tralaven was working less than full weeks and could barely sign his name; I wonder if he was debilitated by illness or drink.

One interesting name that popped up in this document is William Green, the ropemaker who started a fight with Pvt. Patrick Walker at Gray’s ropewalks on 2 Mar 1770, beginning a cycle of violence that led to the Boston Massacre three days later. Green’s employer, John Gray, fired him after that fight. The following January, Green started to work across town for Box & Austin at 25 shillings a day.

Real and Virtual Commemorations of Pope Night

I celebrated Halloween by dressing up a new website about Pope Night in New England. Take a sneak peek if you want; it’s still a work in progress. My favorite detail newly added to the Pope Night saga I’ve already explored is how, after that pro-British, anti-Catholic holiday became politically incorrect in Revolutionary America, the rituals had so much appeal that people reinvented it as a way to attack Benedict Arnold.

This website will be launched like a skyrocket in conjunction with the Bostonian Society’s upcoming public lecture:

Bonfires, Effigies, and Brawls: Colonial Boston Celebrates Guy Fawkes’ Day
Monday, November 5, 2007, 6:30 p.m.
Old State House
This event is free and open to the public

Remember, Remember the fifth of November... Every 5th of November the people of Britain celebrate the failure of Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators to blow up the English Houses of Parliment on November 5, 1605.

In colonial Boston, the celebration was called Pope’s Day; on this day working people staged parades, bonfires, and other events to demonstrate their angry sentiments toward both Catholics and the British monarchy.

Prof. Brendan McConville of Boston University and Prof. Cynthia Van Zandt of the University of New Hampshire will explore how this once politically and religiously charged holiday rose and fell out of colonial practice.

Feel free to send feedback through the email address on the site. Just don’t get me upset enough to build an effigy, parade it around the house, and burn it.

Gen. Howe Endorses the Loyal American Association

Boston selectman Timothy Newell reported two disparate events in his journal entry for 30 Oct 1775:

A soldier, one of the Light-horse men was hanged at the head of their camp for attempting to desert.

Proclamation issued by General [William] Howe for the Inhabitants to sign an Association to take arms &c.

The general’s proclamation was dated 28 October, and the Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies offers its full text. The picture of Howe comes from NNDB.com.

“Association” meant a sort of Loyalist militia, responsible for patrolling the streets of Boston. Some members of Association companies went on to serve in other Loyalist units or the regular British army.

On the 29th, a group calling itself “Royal North British Volunteers,” a socially acceptable way of referring to their origins in Scotland, formed a similar group. They included printer John Fleeming, a link in the Dr. Benjamin Church spy case. On 7 December, the Loyal Irish Volunteers officially formed; their officers included James Forrest and Ralph Cunningham, apparently son of provost-martial William Cunningham.

By 17 November, the main Loyal American Association had formed its official command structure under Timothy Ruggles, who had been a brigadier in the pre-war militia. Ruggles’s orders to company captain Francis Green, dated two days before, give a sense of the group’s duties:

I have it in command to acquaint you, that the General expects (for the present) you take charge of the District about Liberty Tree & the Lanes, Alleys & Wharves adjacent, & that by a constant patroling party from sunset, to sunrise you prevent all disorders within the district by either Signals, Fires, Thieves, Robers, house breakers or Rioters;

Again, that text comes courtesy of the Loyalist Institute.

However, other documents indicate that the Loyalists in Boston had formed themselves into companies as early as the preceding July, so Howe was merely giving his official blessing to those groups. Those early muster rolls from that month show some familiar names and intriguing patterns. Capt. Adino Paddock was head of Boston’s militia artillery company before the war. Without any cannon to command, he became an infantry captain in July 1775. Among his troops were shopkeeper Theophilus Lillie; the younger John Lovell, balanced on the edge of madness; Joshua Loring, Jr., whose wife became Howe’s mistress; Martin Gay, who had supported the Whigs in 1770 and would return to Boston after the war; &c.

An especially intriguing name is Sgt. Hopestill Capen, who was briefly the employer of Benjamin Thompson and the landlord of Isaiah Thomas. Capen was jailed by Massachusetts authorities after the British evacuation. He told them that his religion (Sandemanian Christianity) forbade him from taking up arms against a government, and some historians have treated that to mean it was a pacifist sect. But Capen’s church preached against taking up arms in rebellion; defending a government was apparently just fine.

Around the Globe

Yesterday’s Boston Globe offered H. W. Brands’s review of Joseph Ellis’s latest book on the founding era, American Creation. Brands says of Ellis:

he eschews a continuous rendering of a period—in this case the years 1775 to 1803—in favor of focusing on a handful of discrete events and brief stretches of time. As he has before, he ties the events closely to famous individuals. A chapter on the decision for independence features John Adams. Next comes a chapter on Valley Forge that trails George Washington through the snow (but debunks the vision of the Continental Army commander falling to his knees amid the drifts to seek divine guidance). Ellis then jumps a decade to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and makes James Madison the hero of the hour. The Federalist decade of the 1790s gets two chapters; the book closes with Thomas Jefferson purchasing Louisiana from France in 1803.

Ellis’s style is discursively delightful. “Narrative is the highest form of historical analysis,” he remarks. As his narrative unfolds, so do his conclusions, with such gentle art as almost to compel assent.

That sounds much like Ellis’s entertaining Founding Brothers, except that instead of seeking out lesser-known episodes in the U.S. of A.’s founding, in this book the Mount Holyoke professor hits the best-known moments that many authors have already written about. Random House offers an online excerpt. Ellis will address the Cambridge Forum at First Parish in Harvard Square on Thursday, 1 November, at 7:30; this event is free, and he’s a charming speaker.

The same Sunday paper ran columnist Sam Allis’s musings on tourism in Boston, and how closely it’s tied to history, and thus to (gasp!) mental effort:

What do the ranking of Charleston (3), Santa Fe (4), and Savannah (8) mean? They tell me that Americans—exhausted two-career couples and their kids, in particular—want to relax on their pitifully short vacations. They want easy. They want fun. They want small.

What they don’t want is dutiful. Boston is dutiful. These people don't want an “eat your spinach” history marathon through the 16-station Freedom Trail with the threat of a spot quiz back in the hotel room on Crispus Attucks.

Where can I sign up for that quiz?

Today’s Globe adds David Mehegan’s review of two books touching on witchcraft trials in the late 1600s and his profile of Eve LaPlante, author of one of those books, about Judge Samuel Sewall. The judge lived just a few years into the eighteenth century and was never involved with the province’s break from England. But he was a key figure in the colony’s transition from a Puritan theocracy, and he kept a most human diary.

Finally, the most important story from our local paper: “Sox are kings of diamond.”