“Neoclassicism” Seminar in Deerfield, 14-16 Nov.

This weekend Historic Deerfield will host a three-day seminar titled “Borrowing from Antiquity, Designing a New Republic: Neoclassicism in America.”

The three-day forum will explore the new design style developed in France and England in the mid-18th century and made popular in the newly-formed United States as the Federal style. Harkening back to the shapes and ornaments of classical Greece and Rome, antiquity became a source of inspiration for architecture, furniture, and household decoration, and can be seen in decorative arts ranging from porcelain vases to mahogany sideboards.

The frequent use of swags, urns, and elliptical motifs, along with the application of bright and varied color palettes and symmetry, are expressions of Neoclassical style. These design traits appeared in coastal urban centers by the early 1790s, and soon became fashionable in more rural areas, supported by those who wished to demonstrate their awareness of the latest fashion. Like their European counterparts, American builders, architects, and cabinetmakers were influenced by pattern books that emphasized the clean, geometric lines and more delicate Neoclassical detailing.

Speakers and sessions include:

• Gordon S. Wood, the author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, on why Americans became so excited about Neoclassicism.
• Susan Schoelwer, Robert H. Smith Senior Curator of Mount Vernon, on recent research into George Washington’s “New Room.”
• David C. Bosse, Librarian and Curator of Maps at Historic Deerfield, on maps of the Federal period, their decorative elements, and use as wall hangings.
• Robert Mussey, retired conservator, on Neoclassical furniture produced in Boston.
• Cabinetmaker Alan Breed will demonstrate his skills carving a replica of a Federal-style bed.
• William Hosley, Principal of Terra Firma Northeast, on Asher Benjamin (1773-1845), author of  The Country Builder’s Assistant (1797).
• Philip Zea, President of Historic Deerfield, on the consumer revolution in rural New England.
• Stephen Fletcher, Director of American Furniture & Decorative Arts at Skinner, Inc., on restoring an 1830 Greek Revival granite captain’s house.
• William A. Flynt, Architectural Conservator, Historic Deerfield, “Neoclassical Architecture Along Deerfield’s Old Main Street.”
• Allan Breed, Master Cabinetmaker, The Breed School, on “Gouge-Cut Inlays.”
• David E. Lazaro, Associate Curator of Textiles and Collections Manager, Historic Deerfield, “‘The Difference and Quick Transition of Fashion’: Exploring Neoclassical Style in Historic Deerfield’s Fashion and Textile Collection.”
• Amanda Lange, Curatorial Department Director and Curator of Historic Interiors, Historic Deerfield, “Inspired by Pompeii: Neoclassical Ceramics for the American Home.”

For a full schedule and registration fees, including some extra workshops listed above, see the Historic Deerfield website.

The Neoclassical image above comes from the Skinner Inc., a sponsor of this seminar.

New Henry Burbeck Collection at the Clements Library

Earlier this year, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan acquired more than 1,600 documents in the Papers of Henry Burbeck (1754-1848), a general in the early U.S. Army.

Burbeck was born in Boston, son of William Burbeck, who became storekeeper at Castle William as well as the town’s fireworks expert. Henry did his militia service in Boston’s artillery company; I’ve used letters he dictated late in life that are now at the Massachusetts Historical Society to trace the last days of that unit in September 1774.

When the war began, Henry and his brothers joined the provincial artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley; their father was the unit’s nominal second-in-command, but Gridley preferred to administer through his son Scarborough.

In late 1775, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Congress replaced Gridley with Henry Knox, bypassing Lt. Col. Burbeck. At the end of the siege of Boston, the lieutenant colonel refused to march to New York and thus left the Continental Army.

But Henry, then a lieutenant, remained in the army. In fact, he stuck out the whole war and then rejoined in 1786. He commanded at West Point and Springfield, served in the Northwest Indian War, and established a number of forts on the western frontier. In 1808 he presided over the court-martial of Gen. James Wilkinson, and finally he commanded troops through the War of 1812. Most of the new Clements collection appears to come from that long army career.

The longest report I’ve found about the acquisition is from the Mackinac Island News, focusing on documents of local importance:

In 1796 he peacefully received Fort Mackinac from its British garrison and then commanded the post until 1799. He was a steady officer and strict disciplinarian. A young British lieutenant who visited Mackinac in 1799 described Burbeck as “a little man, as stiff as his boots, awkwardly consequential and [who] passed for a martinet.” Perhaps Major Burbeck still harbored some animosity toward his old foes and greeted his British visitor with reserve.

The collection includes two previously unknown plans of the fort, one by Burbeck and Winthrop Sargent and one by Wilkinson, showing how it developed in those years.

That article also says the Clements’s new collection “represents only about 60% of Henry Burbeck’s entire archive. The remainder is divided among three institutions in the Northeast.” One of those is the New London County Historical Society, but I don’t know the others. A large lot of Burbeck’s papers was sold in 2011.

Young Representative Claiborne

This month a New York district made Elsie Stefanik, at age thirty, the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. (The previous holder of that record was Elizabeth Holtzmann, also from New York.)

That news prompted a Boston 1775 reader to ask me who was the youngest man ever elected to Congress. We guessed that representative came closer to the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that members of that house be at least twenty-five years old.

It turns out the youngest Congressman in U.S. history was William Charles Cole Claiborne of Tennessee, who served two terms in the 1790s. (He was also elected to the Senate from Louisiana in 1817, but died before attending a session.) What’s most notable about Claiborne is that he took his seat in 1797, before he turned twenty-five.

There’s some disagreement about Claiborne’s birth date. Congress’s official biography says he was born in 1775. His gravestone in Louisiana boasts that he was “Representative in Congress at 23”; that suggests he was born in late 1773 or 1774. That gravestone also says that he died on 23 Nov 1817 at age forty-two, pointing back to 1775.

In 1905 the William and Mary Quarterly published records from Sussex County, Virginia, that listed “William Cole, son of William Claiborne,” as born in August 1773. That might have been the future Congressman, or might have been an older brother who died young. Even if Claiborne was born in 1773, he still would have been only twenty-four years old when he took office in 1797.

The young representative benefited from being a nephew of Rep. Thomas Claiborne of Virginia and from having assisted the Clerk of the House in New York and Philadelphia when he was studying law. And of course Tennessee, as a new state on the frontier, didn’t have a lot of gentlemen to choose from in 1797.

Claiborne’s service in the House in the 1790s—less than ten years after the Constitution had been adopted, and alongside many men who had played a role in writing it—shows us how the Founders were willing to bend the rules they had written.

“Washington Elm” Exhibit in Cambridge

On Thursday, 13 November, the Cambridge Historical Society hosts an opening reception for its special exhibit on “The Washington Elm,” featuring the photography of Bruce Myren (one example shown here).

That elm, as I’ve discussed, was associated in the late 1800s with a moment on 3 July 1775 when Gen. George Washington was said to have taken command of the Continental Army, often pictured as drawn up in ranks for his review.

In reality, Washignton probably took command indoors on 2 July 1775 when he met Gen. Artemas Ward, and he and Gen. Charles Lee inspected the troops in their various positions around Boston over the next several days.

But the tree became a national symbol. This exhibit explores the artifacts it gave rise to:

historic representations of the Elm, pieces of the tree, collectibles made from the Elm’s wood, and Myren’s large-format pictures of scions, cuttings grown to create clones of the original tree. . . . Images of the Elm appeared on teacups, on stationery, and in paintings, while scions were planted by the hundreds across the country.

When the tree fell in 1923, it was cut into pieces, with cross sections going to the capitals of the forty-eight states, the White House, and the Capitol, and blocks going to prominent citizens across the country.

Myren quotes the English philosopher Bernard Williams when describing the show: “A myth is a fanciful picture of the past designed to justify certain activities in the present.”

The reception is from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. on 13 November at the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House on Brattle Street. The exhibit will also be open for viewing on Saturday, 22 November, from 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. The society will announce additional hours on its website.

Battlefield Archeology Lecture in Lexington, 11 Nov.

Minute Man National Historical Park and the Friends of Minute Man are proceeding with a big project to clear and interpret the portion of the park that became known as “Parker’s Revenge.”

Based on testimony from veterans of the Battle of Lexington and Concord and local traditions, that area is thought to be where the Lexington militia under Capt. John Parker rejoined the fighting in the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775.

As part of that project, battlefield archeologist Douglas D. Scott is coming to town to advise. On Tuesday, 11 November, he’ll speak on “Shot and Shell Tell the Tale: What Archaeology Can Contribute to the Study of Conflict.”

I found a description of this talk that says:

The archaeology of conflict has captured the imagination of the public and media. Site specific studies of forts and battlefields and detailed artifact analyses are the epitome of military archaeology, but we are now beginning to see broader patterns in data. I will discuss how archeological evidence can be used with historical documentation to identify command and control organization on a battlefield as well as see the loss of tactical cohesion. Examples will be presented to support how the physical evidence of battles can refine battlefield interpretation, build a more complete understanding of past events, and demonstrate the evolution of military tactics and strategy.

This event is scheduled to start at 7:30 P.M. in the Lexington Depot.

Mayflower Society Auction in Plymouth, 8 Nov.

On Saturday, 8 November, the Plymouth auctioneer J. James is offering a boatload of antiques and other material that the Mayflower Society is deaccessioning in order to improve the preservation and interpretation of its Edward Winslow House.

The online catalogue lists all the items up for sale and illustrates many.

For example, this chest with a serpentine front is thought to have been made in Massachusetts in 1770.

And this orderly book was written at Castle William in Boston harbor in the 1780s, when Continental Artillery veteran Maj. William Perkins became commander there.

A few of the items come with specific provenances, like this waistcoat, said to have been worn by Alden Bass (1734-1803) of Boston at his wedding in 1766.

The auction will take place in Plymouth Memorial Hall at 83 Court Street. The preview is today from noon to 5:00 P.M. and tomorrow from 10:00 A.M. to noon. The bidding starts at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday.

Have I mentioned I have a birthday coming up?

“True Yankees” Talk in Salem, 6 Nov.

Tonight, 6 November, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site is hosting a talk by Prof. Dane A. Morrison on his new book, True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity.

The publisher’s description of the book says:

With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. During the years between the Treaty of Paris [1783] and the Treaty of Wangxi [1844], Americans first voyaged past the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the ports of Algiers and the bazaars of Arabia, the markets of India and the beaches of Sumatra, the villages of Cochin, China, and the factories of Canton. Their South Seas voyages of commerce and discovery introduced the infant nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese, Turks, and others dubbed the “new people.”

Drawing on private journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, True Yankees traces America’s earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano [1763-1823] toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning [1769-1841] circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. . . .

How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women—not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans—regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character—the “true Yankee.”

Morrison’s talk starts at 7:30 P.M. at the Salem Visitor Center at 2 New Liberty Street. A book signing will follow. It’s free and open to the public, though seating is limited.

The End of Pope Night in Boston

As I’ve discussed under the label of Pope Night, the 5th of November was a big holiday in colonial Boston. That was when Boston’s young men and teen-aged boys showed their loyalty to Britain by parading through the streets with effigies of the Pope and the Devil, hanging the enemies of the year in effigy, and brawling after sundown.

That anti-Catholic pageant wasn’t any trouble until American Patriots started to seek to support of Catholics. One of the first people to recognize the potential problem was Gen. George Washington, who on 5 Nov 1775 chided his officers and troops for considering “that ridiculous and childish Custom of burning the Effigy of the pope.” At the time, Gen. Richard Montgomery and Col. Benedict Arnold were hoping to win over the French Catholics of Canada.

But that invasion fell apart, and by November 1776 Boston’s youth went back to their traditional Pope Night celebrations. Then in early 1778 the new U.S. of A.’s diplomats spoiled the fun by convincing the French government to enter the war. The French navy arrived off New England’s coast in the middle of the year. So suddenly Bostonians were supposed to be nice to Catholics again.

The joint American and French attempt to dislodge the British from Newport ended in failure, and then the fleet moved up to Boston. There was a lot of friction between those sailors and marines and the locals. As Christian McBurney describes in his recent Journal of the American Revolution article, “Why Did a Boston Mob Kill a French Officer?”, that conflict came to a head when, well, a Boston mob killed a French officer.

The local authorities quickly moved in to quell that fighting and repair relations with the French commanders. But the next 5th of November approached less than two months later. Those officials worried that Pope Night would rouse passions again. Therefore, they clamped down, at every level.

The Massachusetts Council, which was exercising executive power in the state in the absence of a governor, passed a resolve against Pope Night. Then the seven elected Boston selectmen, including John Scollay, Samuel Austin, and Harbottle Dorr, met on the 5th, and they invited the town’s magistrates in as well:

The Justices attended according to the invitation of the Selectmen to consult the best methods to prevent any Exhibitions this Evening agreable to a Resolve of the Council transmitted to the Selectmen, Yesterday.

All those branches of government working together managed to suppress Pope Night at last. And it doesn’t seem to have come back in Boston again. Some of the rituals resurfaced around Christmas, others on Halloween. But the next time Boston newspapers reported on “Pope’s Day,” it was as a quaint pre-Revolutionary custom.

“An attempt was made against Mr. S. Adams”

I already described one story behind Boston’s vote for representatives to the Massachusetts General Court in 1772: the replacement of James Otis, Jr., after too many episodes of insanity.

The other story appeared in a posthumous volume of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Hutchinson had convinced himself that a rift was opening between Samuel Adams and John Hancock that year. He even fancied that he could peel Hancock away from the local Whigs with favors like appointing him colonel of the province’s most prestigious militia company, the Cadets, and approving his election to the Council.

Hutchinson also felt that Adams was losing popularity with voters. His take on the election of May 1772 was:

It was apparent that, even in Boston, a considerable proportion of the people were still in favour of government [i.e., the Crown]. No opposition had been made for several years past to the election of members in that town; but in May, 1772, an attempt was made against Mr. S. Adams, and it appeared, upon trial, that near one-third of the votes were against him.

Although this attempt shewed that a strong party was still left which disapproved the measures of opposition, it proved a disservice to government. It caused an alarm, and a more vigorous exertion; and no endeavours were spared to heal all breaches in the opposition, and to guard against a renewal of them. The friends both of Mr. Hancock and Mr. Adams never ceased, until they had brought about a reconciliation.

By “near one-third of the votes,” a footnote showed, Hutchinson meant “218 in 723.” (His total differed from the official count in William Cooper’s minutes, which was 728.)

Over 150 people cast votes for Adams’s colleagues without voting for him. In previous years, Adams’s percentage had come much closer to all votes cast. Without troops in town, new taxes, or other irritants, he was having trouble convincing Bostonians they needed to push hard against the royal government.

Still, Adams won 70% of the vote at that town meeting, obviously enough to remain in office. It’s not clear who was next runner-up, or even if there was a candidate that the friends of the royal government put their weight behind. But obviously, if every voter could list four names, he didn’t come close to matching Adams’s 505 votes.

I can’t help but think that Hutchinson was fooling himself about his strength in the colony’s popular politics. Royal appointees were always too convinced that “a considerable proportion of the people” was really on their side.

The Election Results from 1772

On 6 May 1772, Boston held its annual town meeting to elect representatives to the Massachusetts General Court.

Boston had four seats in that legislature while no other town in the province had more than two. Nonetheless, because Boston was so much larger than other towns, its population was underrepresented.

That town meeting was a special sort on the annual schedule because of the property requirement for General Court elections. White men didn’t have to own so much to vote for town officials in March and on town issues throughout the year.

The selectmen called for attendees to vote by noon, and then the town clerk, William Cooper, recorded the results this way:

The Votes being brought in the number of the same were found to be Seven hundred & twenty three, and upon sorting them it appeared that the four following Gentlemen were chosen, Vizt.

The Honble. Thomas Cushing Esq. - - - - 699
The Honble. John Hancock Esq. - - - - 690
Mr. Samuel Adams. - - - - - - - - - - - 505
William Phillips Esq. - - - - - - - - - - 668

Cushing, Hancock, and Adams had been Boston’s legislative representatives for a few years. Phillips, as I discussed last month, was a replacement for James Otis, Jr.

But those four men weren’t necessarily the only candidates. In his diary, the merchant John Rowe recorded how many votes he won in General Court elections from 1765 to 1768, always coming up short. Yet Cooper never listed Rowe as a candidate in those years, thus avoiding an official record of his failure. So it’s possible other men were in the running in 1772 but didn’t match Adams’s 505 votes.

TOMORROW: The story behind the results.

“Visualizing Slavery” Conference in New Haven , 7-8 Nov.

On Friday and Saturday, 7-8 November, the Gilder Lehrman Center’s 16th Annual International Conference will take place at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

It will be on the theme “Visualizing Slavery and British Culture” and coincides with the museum’s exhibition “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.”

The event description says:

Using a cross disciplinary approach, the conference will help place the works in the exhibition in a historical context—Britain and its empire from roughly the 1720s to the early 1800s—and explore the impact of slavery on British art and culture.

The conference intends to build on the growing field of work exploring the relationships between slavery, art, taste, and power, as well as to raise questions about how art, artists, and cultural institutions reckon with slavery’s legacies.

The scheduled presentations include “London’s Black Community, the Somerset Case, and the Politics of Slavery”; “Remembering to Forget: Ignorance and the Curating of Slavery”; “A Colloquial Archive of Color-Conscious Insult and Slang in Eighteenth-Century Britain”; and more.

Registration is free but required for all attendees.

“Letters from Washington” in Cambridge in November

This month Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge will host a new series of discussions on George Washington, open to anyone.

Each Thursday at 6:00 P.M. the site’s Revolutionary War specialist, ranger Garrett Cloer, will lead chats about letters that Washington wrote on different topics:

• November 6: Native Americans
• November 13: Nationhood
• November 20: Slavery

The selections will come from Washington’s military and political careers and periods of retirement. Copies will be provided at the start of each evening. The goal will be to explore how Washington viewed these issues and how his thinking might have changed over time.

These gatherings will take place in the Longfellow carriage house behind the mansion that Washington used in 1775-76 (and where the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family later lived). Parking in Cambridge is notoriously difficult, but some areas along Brattle Street become free at 6:00. For more information about the discussion series, call the site at 617-876-4491.

The Evidence for Paine as a Staymaker

As I discussed yesterday, a claim appeared on Wikipedia last month that Thomas Paine started out making stays for sailing ships, not stays for women to wear, and that Paine’s political enemies misrepresented him as a maker of underwear.

This fraud apparently fooled every historian and biographer who has written about Paine. At least, the citations that Wikipedia editor “Jkfkauia” inserted after that statement did not actually name any scholar who had seen through the ruse. In fact, those citations offer no outside support for the new statement.

Normally I’d point out that “Jkfkauia” has the responsibility to provide evidence for a claim, especially if he or she is going to dress it up with footnotes. Skeptics don’t have the burden of proving a historical statement is untenable. But I can’t resist poking some holes in the theory.

First, it wasn’t just Paine’s enemies who wrote that he had trained as a staymaker. Paine’s friends did, too. The jokes about Paine making stays for women appeared during and shortly after his lifetime when he or his friends could have refuted them. After all, Paine didn’t build a career as a political writer on two continents by staying quiet about his opponents’ errors.

Second, I have yet to find any eighteenth-century use of the word “staymaker” to mean someone who made stays for ships. Those were a type of rope, and the common term for someone who made ropes was “ropemaker.” If “staymaker” was also used for someone who spun stays for ships, there would surely be period sources remarking on its double meaning.

Instead, sources like this guide to professions from 1747, defined “The Stay-Maker” as “employed in making Stays, Jumps, and Bodice for Ladies.” (That book went on to nasty remarks about women before getting to the working conditions and wages young staymakers might expect.) And here’s a court case from 1771 when “James Paterson, staymaker,” sued to be paid for “furnishings to Taylor’s wife and daughter.”

Furthermore, Paine’s early biographers identified particular staymakers he worked for: his father in Thetford, a “Mr. Morris” on Hanover Street in London, and a “Mr. Grace” in Dover. Records from the late 1700s have helped recent biographers identify the latter two as John Morris and Benjamin Grace. Morris was in fashionable Covent Garden, not a shipbuilding center.

Thetford is an inland town in the east of England. According to “Jkfkauia,” Thomas’s father John Pain was supplying a port downriver with ropes, but it wouldn’t have made economic sense for a ropemaker serving ships to be so far away from the sea. On the other hand, half the people in Thetford needed stays. Making them was a steady, skilled profession.

In fact, Thomas Paine wasn’t the only British political writer of the period who had been trained to make stays. Hugh Kelly, who wrote propaganda for Lord North and plays and poems for himself, was also apprenticed to a staymaker as a teenager. And, like Paine, people who disliked Kelly didn’t let him forget that he’d trained to sew women’s underwear. Because he had.

This Season’s New Paine Claim

Last month, on 24 September, someone signed in to Wikipedia as “Jkfkauia” in order to revise the Thomas Paine entry. He or she explained the editing this way:

(I am correcting a widely repeated piece of insulting misinformation about Thomas Paine. He was involved in youth with making rope stays used on sailing ships, NOT the stays used in corsets. This lie about his life story was invented by his foes.)

Wikipedia records four other edits by “Jkfkauia” in 2012 and 2013, none having to do with eighteenth-century history.

The section on Paine’s early life now reads in part:

At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to his stay-maker father. Paine researchers contend his father's occupation has been widely misinterpreted to mean that he made the stays in ladies’ corsets, which likely was an insult later invented by his political foes.[citation needed] Actually, the father and apprentice son made the thick rope stays (also called stay ropes) used on sailing ships.[10][better source needed] Thetford historically had maintained a brisk trade with the downriver port city of Yarmouth.[11][not in citation given]

Those “citation needed” variants were added later on that same day by “Tedickey,” an active Wikipedia editor who’s worked on entries about the Articles of Confederation and Connecticut Compromise.

“Jkfkauia” did not cite or name the “Paine researchers [who] contend his father’s occupation has been widely misinterpreted.” As far as I can tell, no biographers from the 1790s, when Paine became prominent as a political writer in Britain, to the last decade identified him or his father as making stays for ships. And, despite the complaints of his fans, Paine has not been neglected by biographers.

It’s true that Paine’s political enemies in the 1790s made fun of his early work as a staymaker. In 2011 the Two Nerdy History Girls analyzed two political cartoons (one above) that showed “Thomas Pain / Stay Maker” squeezing Britannia into stays that were too strait for her.

But “Jkfkauia” wrote that Paine had never made stays, only ropes for ships.

TOMORROW: Does that make any sense?

A New Memorial Proposed for D.C.

In 1980, Lena Santos Ferguson applied for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

She traced her ancestry to Jonah Gay, who in 1775 was on the committee of correspondence for Meduncook, Maine, later called Friendship.

It took four years for the organization to accept that documentation and make Ferguson “the second black member of the Daughters of the American Revolution in modern times.”

The organization soon came around to supporting a project to document over 6,000 black Continental soldiers and in 2008 published the reference book Forgotten Patriots.

At the same time Ferguson’s nephew, Maurice Barboza, was inspired to imagine a monument to those soldiers in Washington, D.C. Recently the Washington Post reported a milestone in that effort:

Last month, Congress unanimously authorized a site for the memorial: the northeast corner of 14th Street and Independence Avenue, a main gateway to the city, in what is currently a surface parking lot next to the Department of Agriculture. And on Sept. 26, President Obama signed the authorization into law. The National Liberty Memorial was formally approved for placement on the Mall. . . .

But Barboza’s mission is far from done. Supporters of the National Liberty Memorial must raise at least $6 million to fund the memorial’s design and construction. And then they have to earn the approval of the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

Here’s the website for the effort to complete this monument. Above is sculptor Michael Curtis’s proposed design.

Letters from Gen. Phillips to Gen. Heath Up for Bid

After my mention of the Convention Army yesterday, Boston 1775 reader Christopher Hurley alerted me to the auction on 1 November in Marlborough of six letters related to those prisoners of war.

The Skinner auction house describes the lot as:

Six Letters…dated April through October 1778, from Major General William Phillips to Major General William Heath written from Cambridge, Massachusetts, relating to conditions, clothing, and monetary needs for the Convention Army surrendered after the battle of Saratoga.

Unfortunately, the auction house’s online description doesn’t give the dates for those letters or offer other details on their contents.

Gen. Phillips (1731-1781) became the highest-ranking officer in the Convention Army after Gen. John Burgoyne was paroled and sailed for home. (To confuse matters a little, there was a prominent Boston merchant and politician with the name William Phillips, whom I also mentioned last week.)

Meanwhile, Gen. William Heath (shown above) had been named American military commander of the region. He thus had responsibility for finding housing and supplies for all those prisoners, treating them humanely but also making sure they didn’t disrupt local life too badly. The low point came when a young American sentry shot and killed a British officer for venturing too far from camp.

As a result, Phillips and Heath exchanged a lot of letters in 1778. Each man probably kept a copy of his own letters, at least the most important ones, so there were two parallel collections. And neither appears to have survived intact.

The Massachusetts Historical Society became the guardian of the William Heath Papers in 1859. However, when the society published a third volume of transcriptions in 1905, its editor stated:

In spite of the enormous mass of papers preserved by General Heath it is certain that many documents, some of them of considerable importance, had disappeared before the collection came into the possession of Mr. [Amos A.] Lawrence [around 1838], as stated in the preface to the second part of the Heath Papers.

A striking illustration of this occurs in connection with the controversy, in 1778, between General Heath and General Phillips of the Convention troops. In General Heath’s Memoirs and in our previous volume are numerous letters bearing on the subject, and it was supposed by the Committee that in one or the other place would be found everything of interest or importance relating to it; but in the “Report on American Manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain,” issued in London at about the same time as our volume [in 1904], are a number of letters printed or calendared from copies sent over to England, of which neither originals nor copies now exist in the Heath Papers. They contain no new facts, but they should not be overlooked in any thorough study of the episode of the Convention troops; and it is not easy to see how they could have been lost, except through carelessness after the death of General Heath.

The Boston Public Library has one letter from Heath to Phillips dated 7 April, apparently Heath’s draft. The Gilder-Lehrman Collection has two more, dated 9 June and 1 August.

Three letters from Phillips to Heath, dated 23 April, 14 May, and 16 July, are part of the Lloyd W. Smith Collection at Morristown National Historical Park, according to Robert P. Davis’s 1999 biography of Phillips.

Which means multiple institutions might like to add this batch of correspondence to their collections.

“Red Horse Tavern” Reenactment in Sudbury, 1 Nov.

On Saturday, 1 November, Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury will host the annual “Battle of the Red Horse Tavern” reenactment. This event isn’t designed to recreate any specific fight in the Revolutionary War. Rather, it offers a chance to explore a typical skirmish scenario.

The host organization, the Sudbury Company of Militia and Minute, offers a program for this year’s event:

Start the day by listening to colonial music, talking with re-enactors, visiting sutlers, observing cannon firing demonstrations and more. Then watch as the Colonial and British armies battle for control of the Red Horse Tavern.

Eighteenth-century taverns were important in the Colonies as a place to hear the news and other current events, engage in commerce, conduct militia drills and provide respite for weary travelers. The Red Horse Tavern sitting along the Boston Post Road, the major east-west route to and from Boston and New York, was crucial in that anyone or anything travelling into or out of Boston to/from the west would have to pass by its door. Whichever side controlled the Tavern could control the flow of supplies, troops and information.

The Redcoats are determined to wrest control, no matter the cost, while the Colonists will do all they can to stop them and send them back to Boston.

Who will control the tavern? Come and find out.

11:45 A.M.-12:45 P.M.: Cannon demonstration, fyfe & drum music, 18th century fashion show, sutlers, mix-n-mingle with the re-enactors

1:00 P.M.: Formation & inspection of troops

1:15 P.M.: Battle of the Red Horse Tavern – near grist mill

2:30 P.M.: Battle of the Red Horse Tavern II – south field

Of course, in real life, rural Massachusetts wasn’t contested territory after 19 Apr 1775. The only British army to traverse that countryside was the Convention Army of P.O.W.’s after Gen. John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. But there were plenty of skirmishes over taverns, crossroads, and other key points elsewhere in the young U.S. of A.

“The 18th-Century Woman” in Arlington, 28 Oct.

The Arlington Historical Society will host a lecture on Tuesday, 28 October, on “The 18th-Century Woman” by Gail White Usher. This is part of a yearlong series with the theme of “Women’s Work.”

The event description is basic:

Gain greater understanding of what it meant to be a middling or working-class woman in New England prior to the Revolutionary War, through diaries, letters, paintings, and objects.

Usher comes to Arlington from Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut. She has also worked at the Bowen House in that town and at the Daniel Benton Homestead in Tolland, and she’s an avid reenactor.

This event starts at 7:30 P.M. in the Masonic Temple at 19 Academy Street.

As another look at eighteenth-century American women, here’s a poem that appeared in the 25 Dec 1769 issue of the Pennsylvania Chronicle, headlined “The Female Patriots: Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty in America.”

Since the Men, from a Party or Fear of a Frown,
Are kept by a Sugar-plumb quietly down.
Supinely asleep—and depriv’d of their Sight,
Are stripp’d of their Freedom, and robb’d of their Right;
If the Sons, so degenerate! the Blessings despise,
Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise;
And tho’ we’ve no Voice but a Negative here,
The Use of the Taxables†, let us forbear:—
(Then Merchants import till your Stores are all full,
May the Buyers be few, and your Traffick be dull!)
Stand firmly resolv’d, and bid Grenville to see,
That rather than Freedom we part with our Tea,
And week as we love the dear Draught when a-dry
As American Patriots our Taste we deny—

This exhortation to women to boycott goods from Britain continued for twenty more lines. A footnote identified the “Taxables” as “Tea, Paper, Glass, and Paints.” George Grenville had not actually been in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer or First Minister for years.

Those lines were credited only to “A FEMALE.” For a while Milcah Martha Moore got credit because the poem appeared in her commonplace book. But now scholars attribute the lines to Hannah Griffitts (1727-1817).

“Fear in the Revolutionary Americas” at Tufts, 31 Oct.

On Friday, 31 October, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University will host a one-day conference on the topic “Fear in the Revolutionary Americas, 1776-1865.” [A conference about fear on Halloween? Well played, Tufts University—well played.]

This conference reflects the current academic interest in examining the entire “Age of Revolutions” that started with American independence and ran through the upheavals in France, Haiti, Mexico, and South America, rather than stop at national boundaries. Co-sponsors include the university’s Departments of History, Latin American Studies, and Romance Languages, and the Center for the Study of Race & Democracy.

Presentations that will definitely touch on developments in North America include:

• Edward Rugemer, Yale University, “Fear of Slave Violence in Jamaica and South Carolina during the American Revolution”
• Nicole Eustace, New York University, “Republics of Saints?: Fear and Virtue in the Age of Revolutions”
• Alan Taylor, University of Virginia, “Fear and Loathing in the American Revolution”
• David Nichols, Indiana State University, “Capitalizing on Fear: Violence, Insecurity, and Negotiation in Native North America, 1750-1830”
• Roundtable Discussion: Chris Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University and Ben Carp, Brooklyn College

Download the full program and speaker biographies here.

The sessions will take place in the Coolidge Room of Ballou Hall. Here are directions. To reserve a slot, contact Ms. Khalilah Tyre, administrator of Tufts’ Humanities center.

Revolutionary Book Talk at Old South, 30 Oct.

On Thursday, 30 October, the Old South Meeting House will host a book talk by Alex Myers, author of the novel Revolutionary.

As the event announcement explains, that book is the fictionalized story of

Deborah Samson, a woman who disguised herself as a man, joined the Continental Army (as Robert Shurtliff), and participated in the final battles of the Revolutionary War.

This meticulously researched debut novel brings to life the true story of Deborah’s struggle against a rigid colonial society and her harrowing experience on the front line. The author, who was raised as Alice and came out as transgender while a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, is a descendant of Deborah Samson.

Join us to hear Mr. Myers’s insights into both the social world of colonial New England, and his own creative process of merging history and fiction.

(The Phillips who founded Phillips Exeter, John Phillips (1719-1795), was a brother to the merchant and politician William Phillips I mentioned yesterday. Their nephew Samuel started Phillips Andover.)

For Myers’s talk, the doors will open at 6:00 P.M. for Old South members and fifteen minutes later for non-members. Since the place can seat hundreds, everyone will get a seat, but members will have a chance to be up front. Myers will sign copies of Revolutionary after his talk.