Betsy Ross and the Historiography of Bipolar Disorder

On Tuesday I caught Prof. Marla R. Miller at the American Antiquarian Society speaking about her biography Betsy Ross. I know Marla from the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife [now seeking papers on “New England in the Civil War”], but I hadn’t heard her lecture for a while. She’s a really good speaker, offering lots of content in a personable way.

Marla spoke in detail about the challenges of writing about Betsy Ross: cutting through the legends, and building up a portrait from family experiences to make up for lack of direct sources. Academics have largely dismissed Ross as (a) famous only because of a total myth which (b) reflects a retrograde, sentimental image of women in the 1700s. So picking her as a topic brings the risk of being perceived as a less than serious scholar. On the other hand, members of the public most eager to read about Betsy Ross might also be least interested in dispelling their illusions about her.

Toward the end of her talk, Marla mentioned that she had made a personal choice to note hints of how some of Ross’s relatives experienced mental illnesses. That topic also intrigues me—not that I’m drawn to study insanity or its treatment in history (which sounds dreary). But I keep my eyes open for evidence of psychiatric conditions, considering them part of human life in any era. And I may be a little bolder than academic historians in suggesting that modern diagnoses such as Asperger syndrome might apply.

By the U.S. Civil War, people had started to use the word “depressed” as we understand it today, so it’s not an anachronism for that period. Furthermore, psychiatrists have found that bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder and schizophrenia occur across many populations at about the same rate, suggesting they’re rooted in human biology, not particular human cultures. We don’t discuss smallpox today without drawing on modern virology, so should we rule out well established brain science in discussing episodes of insanity or eccentricity?

Nevertheless, writers coming from outside the academy seem to be most open to applying modern psychiatric labels. A couple of years ago I attended an Organization of American Historians panel that included a discussion of whether Gen. William T. Sherman was manic-depressive. Though Prof. Michael Fellman had considered that possibility while writing his biography of Sherman, he didn’t feel up to raising it explicitly. It took Mount Auburn psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi to read Fellman’s book and propose the possibility in an article.

Similarly, a National Park Service ranger, Jason Emerson, wrote the first book to suggest that Abraham Lincoln’s wife suffered from bipolar disorder: The Madness of Mary Lincoln (reviewed here on H-Net). Matthew Karp’s H-Net review of a collection of essays on John Brown titled Terrible Swift Sword says:

Probably the two most provocative and memorable essays…come from the scholars working farthest afield from history. Kenneth R. Carroll, a practicing clinical psychologist in Pennsylvania, uses a variety of remote psychological tests to “diagnose” Brown with bipolar disorder.

For Carroll, Brown’s family history of mental illness, his checkered personal life and business career, and the primary-source testimony of friends and neighbors exhibit a “remarkable consistency” that forms “a coherent picture” (p. 125). Brown’s grandiosity, mania, and “relentless drive toward self-aggrandizement” fit modern psychology’s standard diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder (p. 128).

Carroll argues that the diagnosis is clinched by his study, in which three John Brown experts completed “an objective psychological test, as if responding on behalf of John Brown.” The composite results yield a computer-generated “Interpretive Report” that suggests that “the possibility of a Bipolar Affective Disorder” should be evaluated (pp. 132-134).

Carroll’s diagnosis is hardly conclusive, of course, but he, along with [editors] Russo and Finkelman, are to be commended for their creative approach to the question of Brown’s mental state. His essay, at the very least, should provide the basis for a larger argument about the possibility of Brown being bipolar—a debate that can and should be joined by historians and psychologists alike.

There’s far less evidence about Betsy Ross’s family than about Sherman, Lincoln, or Brown. But what there is suggests that she had to worry about the mental health of certain relations, and perhaps about the possibility of becoming mentally ill herself—again, a part of life.

Betsy Ross is a big book and so far I’ve read bits, but now I’m even more eager to be able to sit and read it all the way through.

Bipolar Disorder as a Factor in the American Revolution?

Instead of porphyria as the explanation for George III’s madness, in the paper I quoted yesterday Timothy Peters pointed to bipolar disorder: a cycle of mania and depression that debilitated the monarch for long, unpredictable stretches in his later life.

Andrew Roberts adopts this conclusion in his new biography of the king. Other scholars might have proposed the same answer as well.

Some might respond that that’s not so much of a diagnosis as a description of the king’s symptoms. Why did his mood shift so drastically? Indeed, part of the appeal of the preceding porphyria diagnosis is that it seems to offer an “explanation” to point to.

Many psychiatrists would counter that even if we don’t know the causal mechanisms of bipolar disorder, it’s a widely recognized condition. About the same fraction of people have it in many different cultures, strongly suggesting that a similar fraction of people had it in the eighteenth century.

Indeed, a number of other prominent figures in the American Revolution showed signs of the disorder. I’m not talking about people whose politics or opinions other people sometimes called “mad,” such as John Adams, but men who went through periods of not being able to function because of depression and other periods of exuberance that got them into trouble.

In Massachusetts, the most prominent example was the early radical leader James Otis, Jr. He suffered several periods of insanity in the 1770s and early 1780s, bad enough that his family bundled him off to houses in the country.

William Tudor, Jr.’s 1823 biography blamed Otis’s coffee-house brawl with John Robinson for those troubles. But John Adams’s diary and other contemporaneous sources from 1769 suggest that Otis’s troubles were already evident by then, and that he actually went into that confrontation during a manic period.

In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings for May 1858 refers to a letter from Otis’s younger brother, Samuel Allyne Otis, to their father with “evidence of the existence of a tendency to insanity in the younger [James] Otis, which manifested itself at an early period of his life.” Of course, being beaten on the skull didn’t help the man’s mental stability.

Contemporaries also recognized that the Northampton lawyer Joseph Hawley (1723-1788) fell into a debilitating depression around the start of the Revolutionary War. Until then, he had been a strong Whig voice from the western part of the province, sometimes voicing radical arguments in the courts and legislature. Indeed, in the late 1760s his criticism of the Superior Court was so strong it got him disbarred for a time.

In May 1775 Hawley wrote to his colleague Theodore Sedgwick that he felt “very low and melancholy,” complaining of “want of health or memory, weakness of body and Shocking impair of mind.” He declined requests to serve in the Continental Congress and retired entirely in late 1776. In the following years friends would find Hawley confined to his house, biographer E. Francis Brown wrote, sitting in front of his fire and smoking for hours with a “wild and piercing look” in his eyes.

I think another Massachusetts lawyer in the opposite political camp, attorney general Jonathan Sewall, also shows a pattern of manic-depressive behavior. He certainly suffered a severe depression after going into exile during the war. But Sewall’s refusal to participate in the Boston Massacre trials and his uneven output of newspaper essays might be best explained as signs of severely changing moods.

The cases of both Hawley and Sewall offer evidence of how there’s a hereditary aspect to bipolar disorder. Hawley’s father committed suicide, and Sewall’s son was also known to have depressive episodes.

In Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of Charles Lee (2014), Phillip Pappas posits that bipolar disorder is the best explanation of that general’s wild and often self-defeating behavior—the risk-taking that led to his capture in 1776, his choice as a prisoner to offer strategic advice to Gen. William Howe, what looks like an attempt to draw Gen. George Washington into a duel after the battle of Monmouth, and so on.

Assuming these men did have bipolar disorder, did that affect the course of the Revolution? I think it’s conceivable that Otis was a bit manic when he broke with the Crown in the early 1760s and formulated his foundational arguments about the illegitimacy of Parliament’s revenue laws. I’m not saying that political position was crazy, but it was radical enough that Otis might never have had the audacity to stake out that ground otherwise.

The Illness of George III

The Georgian Papers Programme is an international effort to study the papers of George III, his family, and his two immediate successors.

In Britain the B.B.C. just ran a television show highlighting some of the early discoveries, and this article highlights a new theory about the nature of the king’s insanity aired on that show.

As the B.B.C. story says, for quite a while the prevailing diagnosis of George III’s illness has been porphyria. I remember learning that around the time of the Bicentennial. The only medical detail that stuck with me was that it caused the king to have blue or purple urine. (Hey, I was ten.)

This article presents a less colorful diagnosis:

Using the evidence of thousands of George III’s own handwritten letters, Dr Peter Garrard and Dr Vassiliki Rentoumi have been analysing his use of language. They have discovered that during his episodes of illness, his sentences were much longer than when he was well.

A sentence containing 400 words and eight verbs was not unusual. George III, when ill, often repeated himself, and at the same time his vocabulary became much more complex, creative and colourful.

These are features that can be seen today in the writing and speech of patients experiencing the manic phase of psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder.

Mania, or harmful euphoria, is at one end of a spectrum of mood disorders, with sadness, or depression, at the other. George’s being in a manic state would also match contemporary descriptions of his illness by witnesses.

They spoke of his “incessant loquacity” and his habit of talking until the foam ran out of his mouth. Sometimes he suffered from convulsions, and his pages had to sit on him to keep him safe on the floor.

I wonder if other stylometric measurements, such as the use of pronouns or other tested variables, might indicate periods of depression.

But what about that memorable blue urine?

George III’s medical records show that the king was given medicine based on gentian. This plant, with its deep blue flowers, is still used today as a mild tonic, but may turn the urine blue.

So maybe it wasn’t the king’s “madness” that caused his most famous symptom. It could have simply been his medicine.

It’s notable that this hypothesis comes from a neurologist and a linguist. Historians have generally shied away from applying modern psychiatric diagnoses to figures of the past, both because of the distance in time and because of the way such diagnoses are culturally and historically defined. As certain conditions are more clearly linked to brain chemistry, that might change. I’ve discussed other possible cases of bipolar disorder in Revolutionary times.

Running the Numbers on the Massachusetts Convention

On Monday, 26 Sept 1768—250 years ago today—the Massachusetts Convention returned to Faneuil Hall after taking the Sabbath off.

Gov. Francis Bernard reported that on that Monday the gathering declared itself to be in committee, which by eighteenth-century standards meant that all the participants could meet together in private. He also noted a late arriving participant, writing:

The 3 days last week they kept open doors; [James] Otis was then absent. The two days this week they have kept the doors shut; Otis is with them.

In The Otis Family, John J. Waters wrote that the Convention was Samuel Adams’s idea and Otis was wary of it. But Otis had chaired the Boston town meeting that proposed it, as well as reportedly helping to plan that meeting.

Waters’s description of the situation appears to be an interpretation of Otis’s absence, not based on public statements from him or his colleagues. I wonder if this might be an example of reading politics into actions that were actually driven by bipolar disorder. We’ll never know.

In any event, Otis wasn’t the only man who showed up at the Convention after its opening days. Boston’s invitation had gone out to other towns only on 14 September. That didn’t leave much time for the news to travel, for towns to meet about the unusual request, and for any chosen delegates to journey to Boston. The counties closest to Boston had the most representation, naturally. No one came from Berkshire County, in the far west; Lincoln County, in the northeast (Maine); or the islands.

The official record of the Convention’s first days, published in the 26 September Boston Evening-Post and other newspapers, said that on the 22nd there were “a number of Gentlemen upwards of Seventy” representing “Sixty-Six Towns, besides Districts.”

The 26 September Boston Gazette stated, “We hear there is already arrived Committee-Men form [sic] 90 Towns in the Province.” And the next day, the Rev. Andrew Eliot wrote: “The Committees from the several Towns are now met in convention, between 80 and 90.”

The final published record of the Convention reported 96 towns and 8 districts participating. And even that might be an undercount. Robert Treat Paine of Taunton drew up a list of attendees with the towns or districts they represented—evidently the only surviving document that named names. This list was first published by Richard D. Brown in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1969. Furthermore, Brown added seven towns whose own local records say they sent delegates but weren’t on Paine’s list.

Now I can’t make the numbers in Brown’s footnote add up exactly with that list. To increase the confusion, some attendees represented multiple towns (“Leicester and Spencer and Paxton,” “Lunenburg and Fitchburg”) while a few towns sent two people. But it’s clear that about a hundred jurisdictions were represented.

How did the Convention compare to a typical lower house of the Massachusetts General Court? The shortened 1768 legislative session had representatives from over 200 towns, so the Convention was significantly smaller. (In contrast, when the Massachusetts Provincial Congress met in 1774, more towns participated than in the previous session of the Crown-recognized legislature.) The big secondary ports of Marblehead and Salem sent no one, and a few towns made a public point of not participating, as I’ll discuss later.

On the other hand, the Convention attracted participants from several towns that hadn’t bothered to send representatives to the General Court. The smaller ports of Newburyport, Gloucester, Plymouth, and Dartmouth were there, along with most of the big farming towns in Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk Counties (which would supply militia companies in a military emergency). Some men from Maine did come. All in all, the Convention should have alerted Crown officials that Boston wasn’t alone in feeling aggrieved.

TOMORROW: How two towns responded.

Web Exhibit about the Raids on Fort William & Mary

At the same time that Rhode Island’s preparations for war included moving cannon from Newport to Providence, where they would be beyond reach of the Royal Navy, the New Hampshire militia was taking similar but more dramatic action.

This website from the University of New Hampshire library preserves an exhibit on the militia raids on Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth’s harbor on 14-15 Dec 1774. The exhibit is largely based on chemistry professor Charles Lathrop Parsons’s The Capture of Fort William and Mary, published in 1903. It provides a good overview of this lesser-known event.

There are still some glitches in the online exhibit. The link labeled “The Gunpowder at Bunker Hill” leads instead to a letter from the governor; I haven’t found a webpage on powder. The webpage titled “Gentleman in Boston writing to a Mr. Rivitigton of New York” actually refers to James Rivington, printer of the Loyalist New York Gazetteer. That letter, as transcribed in American Archives, clearly did not endorse what had gone on in Portsmouth starting the night of 14 December:

With difficulty a number of men were persuaded to convene, who proceeded to the Fort, which is situated at New-Castle, an Island about two miles from the Town, and being there joined by a number of the inhabitants of said New-Castle, amounted to near four hundred men; they invested the Fort, and being refused admittance by the Commander of it [John Cochran], who had only five men with him, and who discharged several guns at them, scaled the walls, and soon overpowered and pinioned the Commander; they then struck the King’s colours, with three cheers, broke open the Powder House, and carried off one hundred and three barrels of Powder, leaving only one behind.

Previous to this expresses had been sent out to alarm the country; accordingly, a large body of men marched the next day from Durham, headed by two Generals; Major [John] Sullivan, one of the worthy Delegates, who represented that Province in the Continental Congress, and the Parson of the Parish [John Adams], who having been long-accustomed to apply himself more to the cure of the bodies than the souls of his parishioners, had forgotten that the weapons of his warfare ought to be spiritual, and not carnal, and therefore marched down to supply himself with the latter, from the King’s Fort, and assisted in robbing him of his warlike stores.

After being drawn up on the parade, they chose a Committee, consisting of those persons who had been most active in the riot of the preceding day, with Major Sullivan and some others, to wait on the Governour [John Wentworth], and know of him whether any of the King’s Ships or Troops were expected. The Governour, after expressing to them his great concern for the consequences of taking the Powder from the Fort, of which they pretended to disapprove and to be ignorant of, assured them that he knew of neither Troops or Ships coming into the Province, and ordered the Major, as a Magistrate, to go and disperse the people.

When the Committee returned to the body, and reported what the Governour had told them, they voted that it was satisfactory, and that they would return home. But, by the eloquent harangue of their Demosthenes [i.e., Sullivan], they were first prevailed upon to vote that they took part with, and approved of, the measures of those who had taken the Powder.

Matters appeared then to subside, and it was thought every man had peaceably returned to his own home, instead of this Major Sullivan, with about seventy of his clients, concealed themselves till the evening, and then went to the Fort, and brought off in Gondolas all the small arms, with fifteen 4-pounders, and one 9-pounder, and a quantity of twelve and four and twenty pound shot, which they conveyed, to Durham, &c.

Two opposing military forces facing off against each other (albeit one comprising only six men). The royal troops firing muskets and cannon, and the colonial militia storming a fortification and capturing the men inside (albeit with no killed or wounded on either side). Territory, gunpowder, and ordnance changing hands. The end of royal government in New Hampshire as Wentworth sought shelter and then departed for Boston. One might even think that a war had begun.

The Rev. John Adams, minister at Durham from 1748 to 1778, suffered from what we’d now call bipolar disorder, according to the description of the Rev. John Eliot:

For he was in his best days, and when he was not exposed to peculiar trials of his ministry, very much the sport of his feelings. Sometimes he was so depressed as to seem like a being mingling with the dust, and suddenly would mount up to heaven with a bolder wing than any of his contemporaries.

Local tradition says that he allowed some of the gunpowder from Fort William and Mary to be hidden under his pulpit. It probably seemed like a good idea at that moment.

Dr. Nassir Ghaemi at Boston Public Library Tonight

I’m going outside the eighteenth century to mention that Dr. Nassir Ghaemi will speak at the Boston Public Library this evening at 6:00 P.M. about his new book, A First-Rate Madness.

Two years back, when I was at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Seattle, I attended a session where Dr. Ghaemi spoke. His topic was the intersection of modern psychiatry and history—specifically, the case of Gen. William T. Sherman of the Union Army, and his history of depression.

As I noted a year later, Dr. Ghaemi had a broader argument: that bipolar/manic-depressive disorder and schizophrenia are found at a fairly steady rate across all societies, so they most likely have a biological rather than cultural basis, and we should assume those conditions appeared with the same frequency in the nineteenth century—or the eighteenth.

In addition to Sherman, A First-Rate Madness looks at Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, King, Kennedy, and others from the last hundred and fifty years. It posits that at times those men’s psychological challenges made them better leaders by enhancing their “realism, empathy, resilience, and creativity.” Here’s the Boston Globe’s review (and an interview with Dr. Ghaemi about his own reading).

Are there similar examples from the eighteenth century? Unfortunately, most of our sources on people of that period describe their moods only when they’re debilitated one way or another, like Lt. Neil Wanchope or Samuel Dana. We know less about mood changes they got through without so much difficulty.

Thus, it’s easy to say that former Massachusetts Attorney General Jonathan Sewall was severely depressed when he didn’t come out of his bedroom for several months straight after the war. But was depression also why he went unusually silent during the Boston Massacre trials of 1770, and the Massachusettensis-Novanglus debate of 1774-75?

Did manic energy, empathy, and a clearer sense of risks help Robert Clive build the British Empire in India? Did depression contribute to his suicide in 1774? And did earlier personal problems—or the loss of his leadership—produce the British East India Company’s fiscal disaster in the early 1770s, which in turn led to a new tea tax and then the Boston Tea Party?

Seeking Meaning in a Murder

The latest issue of the Journal of American History includes Christopher Grasso’s article “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution”. It begins:

In Wethersfield, Connecticut, on December 11, 1782, William Beadle, a respected merchant known as a doting father and husband, cut the throats of his wife and four young children and then fired two pistols into his head.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I’m going to repeat one of my favorite observations: we humans, whether in the past or looking back at the past, often look for external motivations to explain behavior that might have arisen mostly from internal, irrational psychiatric conditions.

As Grasso’s title reflects, many of Beadle’s contemporaries linked his crime to his interest in deism. On 17 Dec 1782, the Hartford Courant said Beadle had “renounced all the popular religions of the world, [and] he intended to die a proper Deist.” Ministers used him as a cautionary example in their sermons. Of course, orthodox New Englander applied the label of “deism” to Unitarianism, Universalism, and any other religion that didn’t accept the notion of divinely inspired scripture (and the labels of “heresy” or “error” to religions that didn’t interpret scripture as they did).

Beadle’s letters on religion survive not in the original manuscripts, but in the papers of the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles of Newport and New Haven. He was one of three eminent men entrusted with the material, but the authorities determined that the letters were too dangerous to release publicly. The letters show that Beadle still believed in God when he died; indeed, he was certain that God was guiding his last acts.

Not every contemporary explained Beadle’s insanity through religion, however. As Grasso discusses, former Continental Congress delegate Stephen Mix Mitchell anonymously published A Narrative of the Life of William Beadle in 1783. This pamphlet emphasized the man’s business difficulties as the large quantities of Continental and Connecticut money he had accumulated lost their value and he feared his family would fall into poverty.

Of course, everyone in New England was dealing with the same economy, and most men didn’t kill their families. Similarly, most deists and Unitarians, including some of the most eminent men in the new republic, died without killing their families. Grasso’s topic is the different interpretations of Beadle at the time, so the adequacy of either of those explanations is less important than how adequate the people of the time considered them.

As we learn more about psychiatric conditions and the biological factors that contribute to them, it might be possible to study Beadle’s writings and actions in a different way. Was he struggling with the manic-depressive swings of bipolar disorder, or some other serious mental ailment? Such a disorder could have fueled his enthusiasm for deist ideas, his business drive, and his final fixed idea that murder and suicide was a good idea. But would the historical record offer enough information to support such a diagnosis, even a tentative one?

The “unutterable things” of Gen. Charles Lee

In the movie Bull Durham, the veteran catcher counsels the hot pitching prospect, “Win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back on your shower shoes and the press’ll think you’re colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you’re a slob.”

The reverse process happened to Gen. Charles Lee. In 1775-76, Americans saw him as a military genius and were willing to chuckle about his many eccentricities. Once he challenged Gen. George Washington in 1778, however, Lee became less popular. After Washington became President and was apotheosized after his death, Lee became one of the villains of American history, and authors were happy to highlight his character flaws.

In 1788 the Rev. William Gordon published this anecdote about Lee, dating it to late 1776. (It’s not clear whether Gordon actually wrote this in 1776, but his history of the Revolution took the form of a series of contemporaneous letters to a friend in Britain.)

Gen. Lee, while at White Plains, lodged in a small house close in with the road, by which gen. Washington had to pass when out on reconnoitring. Returning with his officers they called in and took a dinner. They were no sooner gone, than Lee told his aids, “You must look me out another place, for I shall have Washington and all his puppies continually calling upon me, and they will eat me up.”

The next day Lee seeing Washington out upon the like business, and supposing that he should have another visit, ordered his servant to write with chalk upon the door—No victuals dressed here to-day. When the company approached and saw the writing, they pushed off with much good humor for their own table, without resenting the habitual oddity of the man.

Here’s another story about the same trait of Lee’s, published in the Essex Institute Historical Collections by Thomas Amory Lee in 1917. See if you can spot the difference in tone:

Gen. Lee was not only slovenly in his dress and rude in manner, but remarkable for his sordid parsimony. Col. [William Raymond] Lee often remarked on these inhospitable and repulsive peculiarities of an officer of his superior education, large service in European armies, and constant intercourse with the first gentlemen in every country in which he had resided.

Col. Lee stated that as acting brigade major of the brigade which Col. [John] Glover temporarily commanded, he was obliged daily as senior officer in General Lee’s division, and at all hours to visit the headquarters of Gen. Lee. On one occasion, happening to call just as the General was sitting down to dinner, he observed, “Major Lee, why the devil do you never dine, breakfast, or sup with me; you are frequently at my quarters, either in the morning, at the dinner hour, or in the evening.”

The major replied, “General, you have never invited me to take a seat at your table.”

“That is just like all you damned Yankees; never stand on ceremony, but in future, whenever you come into my quarters at the time I am taking my meals, sit down and call on the servant for a plate.”

“Very well, sir,” said the major, “I am very much obliged to you and will avail myself of your politeness now,” and placing a chair at the table, requested that a plate might be brought to him.

The General was astonished, looked unutterable things, and never again hinted that Major Lee’s company would be agreeable.

In his recent biography Renegade Revolutionary, Phillip Papas speculated that Lee might have had bipolar or manic-depressive disorder. This is a far more understanding approach than deciding he was just a Bad Person. Of course, Lee could also have been a Bad Person.

The Disappearance of Jonathan Sewall

In the mid-1760s, Jonathan Sewall allied with Gov. Francis Bernard, writing pseudonymous newspaper essays lampooning James Otis and favoring the Crown. The governor appointed Sewall to be attorney general of Massachusetts in 1767.

Sometime in March 1770, Attorney General Sewall wrote out the indictment of Capt. Thomas Preston and eight soldiers for multiple counts of murder—the Boston Massacre. This document used old British legal formulas: “not having the Fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the devil and their own wicked Hearts…”

After 27 March, Sewall expanded that indictment to include three Customs service employees and notary John Munro, caught up in young Charles Bourgate’s accusations. It’s highly unlikely he believed in those charges, but he didn’t fight them.

Ordinarily Sewall would have prosecuted all those defendants, as well as the murder charges against Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot. He had personally argued all previous criminal cases since his appointment. Because people knew Sewall was a friend of the royal government, on 13 March the town of Boston voted to hire an attorney to assist him—an unusual move to ensure there was an aggressive prosecution.

Instead, the indictment turned out to be Sewall’s last official act in the Massacre trials. He never appeared in the Boston courthouse again that term. In 1816 defense counsel John Adams recalled: “Mr. Sewall, the Attorney General, who ought, at the hazard of his existence, to have conducted those prosecutions, disappeared.” Solicitor general Samuel Quincy wrote that Sewall couldn’t appear “by reason of Ill health.”

According to Thomas Hutchinson, the problem was the Boston Whigs’ visit to the court on 22 March to demand that the judges proceed to those murder trials. The acting governor wrote, “Sewall tells me he never will appear at any other court in that town, after the present, as Attorney General, and the whole court say they do not sit there with freedom.”

Yet the judges continued to sit. To prosecute the big murder cases, they appointed Robert Treat Paine, a private lawyer in Taunton, and Samuel Quincy. Adams wondered if Sewall was involved in those choices, but there’s no surviving evidence that he was.

Samuel Phillips Savage of Weston complained that Sewall didn’t stop all legal work. In his almanac diary Savage wrote that the attorney general continued to appear “with the jurys of the Inferior Courts at Charlston and Ipswich in the petty Concerns cognizable before the General Sessions of the Peace.” But he never went into Boston.

I suspect there was another factor in Sewall’s action, or lack of it: he was prone to depression. During the war he had a breakdown and spent more than a year in his bedroom. He had other spells of depression later in life, and his son suffered from the same spells while serving as chief justice of Upper Canada.

Even before the war, I think Sewall’s public writing shows a pattern of bursts of energy and silence. He published series of lively and often verbose essays from February to June 1763 (as “J,” “Jehosaphat Smoothingplain,” and “J. Philanthrop”), December 1766 to August 1767 (“Philanthrop”), December 1770 to February 1771 (Philanthrop” reviewing the Massacre trials he’d stayed away from), and June to August 1773 (“Philalethes”).

But in late 1774, after the Powder Alarm drove him into Boston, Sewall went silent. To argue for the Crown, “several of the principal gentlemen” turned to Daniel Leonard and Sewall’s law clerk Ward Chipman to deliver the “Massachusettensis” essays. Sewall may have supported the project, but he couldn’t do the work.

Historians are reluctant to apply psychiatric diagnoses like bipolar disorder to figures of the past. They’re beyond the reach of psychologists. And more than anyone historians know how concepts of mental illness change over time.

But in Sewall’s case, I think attributing his refusal after March 1770 to try the Massacre cases solely to his politics or to Whig pressure might miss a crucial internal force. The attorney general couldn’t bring himself to prosecute the big cases, nor to refuse to prosecute. He just stayed away.

The Younger Samuel Dana

I’ve been tracing the Revolutionary experiences of the Rev. Samuel Dana of Groton, from comfortably ensconced minister to reviled Loyalist who nonetheless declined to leave town, to Presbyterian preacher, and finally to respected jurist in New Hampshire.

The former minister’s younger son, also named Samuel, was only eight years old when his father lost his pulpit. He continued growing up in Groton, went to Harvard, and in 1789 returned to his home town. This Samuel Dana became a prominent attorney, a representative in the state legislature and in Congress, and a judge. As a result, nineteenth-century Groton historians couldn’t say too many bad things about his father.

One thing chronicler Caleb Butler did write about the son was:

In the latter part of his life there seemed to be a want of fixedness of purpose in Judge Dana’s pursuits. . . . He was occasionally subject to undue elevations and depressions of spirit, which caused instability in his undertakings and pursuits.

That sounds an awful lot like what we’d call manic-depressive or bipolar disorder. Perhaps both Samuel Danas had the condition, and it was a factor in how the father defied his community’s political and religious unity.

(The picture above comes from the Find-a-Grave page for the younger Samuel Dana. I don’t know the source, and the hairstyle, clothing, and pose seem more appropriate for a man of his father’s generation.)

“Otis indulged himself in all his Airs”

So far I’ve been discussing the affray between Customs official John Robinson and Boston politician James Otis, Jr., in the context of larger politics—the non-importation campaign in Boston, and the leaks of royal government documents from London.

But personal factors might have been even more important in how events unfolded. For those I turn to the diary of John Adams.

The day after Robinson and Otis had their private conversation over coffee was Sunday, 3 Sept 1769, and Adams wrote:

Heard Dr. [Samuel] Cooper in the forenoon, Mr. [Judah?] Champion of Connecticutt in the Afternoon and Mr. [Ebenezer] Pemberton in the Evening at the Charity Lecture.

Spent the Remainder of the Evening and supped with Mr. Otis, in Company with Mr. [Samuel] Adams, Mr. Wm. Davis, and Mr. Jno. Gill. The Evening spent in preparing for the Next Days Newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.—working the political Engine!

Otis talks all. He grows the most talkative Man alive. No other Gentleman in Company can find a Space to put in a Word—as Dr. Swift expressed it, he leaves no Elbow Room. There is much Sense, Knowledge, Spirit and Humour in his Conversation. But he grows narrative, like an old Man. Abounds with Stories.

The next day, Monday, Adams and his social club met at the home of Dr. James Pecker (1724-1794). This club often talked about politics, though Pecker was a mild Loyalist. Adams wrote:

Spent the Evening at Dr. Peckers, with the Clubb. Mr. Otis introduced a Stranger, a Gentleman from Georgia, recommended to him by the late Speaker of the House in that Province.

Otis indulged himself in all his Airs. Attacked the Aldermen, [Henderson] Inches and [Samuel] Pemberton, for not calling a Town meeting to consider the Letters of the Governor, General, Commodore, Commissioners, Collector, Comptroller &c.— charged them with Timidity, Haughtiness, Arbitrary Dispositions, and Insolence of Office.

But not the least Attention did he shew to his Friend the Georgian.—No Questions concerning his Province, their Measures against the Revenue Acts, their Growth, Manufactures, Husbandry, Commerce—No general Conversation, concerning the Continental Opposition—Nothing, but one continued Scene of bullying, bantering, reproaching and ridiculing the Select Men.—Airs and Vapours about his Moderatorship [of town meetings], and Membership, and [Thomas] Cushings Speakership.—There is no Politeness nor Delicacy, no Learning nor Ingenuity, no Taste or Sense in this Kind of Conversation.

We can see Otis’s concern about the documents from London here, but Adams said he didn’t show a concern for the larger struggle. What’s more, Adams, who generally admired Otis, was really put off by how he was dominating all conversations with his stories and criticism of other Whigs.

Otis’s modern biographers, such as John J. Waters, have noted earlier moments when he acted irrationally, when his political pronouncements shifted suddenly and surprised his allies. Otis may have been dealing with bipolar disorder, and in this early September going through a period of manic behavior. Which casts a different light on what he did the next day.

TOMORROW: The paragraphs they cooked up.

“A thoroughgoing refutation of the Whig historians’ estimation of George III”

The H-Early-America email list just ran Matthew Reardon’s review (P.D.F. download) of The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts.

Like other reviewers, Reardon notes Roberts’s main thesis (especially for U.S. readers): that George III wasn’t a tyrant as American Patriots and many of their descendants portrayed him. He was committed to the eighteenth-century British form of constitutional monarchy. Indeed, his respect for some political traditions limited what measures he endorsed to put down the colonial rebellion.

In addition, this George was personally nicer to his family and circle than his predecessor and successor. 

Roberts argues the king’s periods of insanity resulted from bipolar disorder. As to other times, “Far from the dullard regularly portrayed in print and film, George III in fact possessed an inquisitive mind, with interests spanning from astronomy to agriculture.”

Reardon takes issue with how the book treats the American Revolution:

Although it is a thoroughgoing refutation of the Whig historians’ estimation of George III, it thoroughly embraces their interpretation of the American Revolution as an inevitable coming-of-age event. Ignored is the recent historiography positing either institutional, ideological, or economic causes for independence, in favor of older arguments associated with salutary neglect.

Many historians of early America will certainly take note of bold but unsourced statements such as “by the time of the Peace of Paris of 1763 … some [Americans] were ready for full statehood” or that “many Patriots had indeed long wanted the thirteen colonies to become an independent nation” (pp. 107, 286). Who were these shadowy American revolutionaries quietly waiting (for decades it seems) for an opportunity to break from Britain? None are ever identified.

When evaluating the colonists’ motives for independence, the interpretative slant becomes downright American Tory in its cynicism. Objections to “taxation without representation” were merely disingenuous “proxy protests against British political control by a people who sensed they could now thrive as an independent country,” we are told, while the Declaration’s content is summarily dismissed as “simultaneously grotesquely hypocritical, illogical, mendacious and sublime” (pp. 113, 306).

That might be an effect of getting deeply into George III’s head: not seeing how Americans felt just as committed to the British constitution as they understood it, and broke with Britain only after deciding there was no way to heal the rifts between them and their national government and sovereign.

Mysteries of Marie Antoinette and Her Family

Yesterday I listened to this episode of the History Extra podcast, an interview with Nancy Goldstone about her new book, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters.

Although the episode title focuses on Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, a large part of the conversation was about the empress’s youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette of France. In that section, Goldstone posited that:

• Louis XVI was on the autism spectrum.
• Marie Antoinette might have been dyslexic.

The latter theory didn’t appear in her book, she said. The former is a major argument, and her publisher is marketing that as part of what’s new.

Another element of Goldstone’s portrait of Marie Antoinette, not so new, is that she had a long emotional and sexual relationship with the Swedish count Axel von Fersen. I discussed the recent reading of their letters earlier this month.

Goldstone has written or co-written quite a range of books, including previous biographies of royal women, memoirs of the book trade, and murder mysteries. She hasn’t written about the eighteenth century before, however. I’ve seen some reviews complain that she’s overlooked sources that have come to light in the last few decades, which specialists would certainly use.

That said, Goldstone’s status as a non-academic historian writing for a popular readership has probably freed her to acknowledge the usual caveats about the impossibility of making any sort of sophisticated diagnosis when a subject has been dead for centuries and share her ideas anyway.

Autism and dyslexia may be like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, homosexuality, and other human conditions with genetic components that appear in individuals in all sorts of societies in all eras. Those societies understand and respond to the conditions differently—accepting, denying, punishing—leaving different evidence in the historical record. Our present understandings of those conditions may be more advanced than in previous centuries but are undoubtedly still limited. Nonetheless, I think these possible diagnoses are worth at least considering.

In the podcast Goldstone also raised the possibility of genetic testing to see if, as she suspects, Marie Antoinette’s two younger children were fathered by Count von Fersen rather than King Louis. I don’t know if there’s enough genetic material available to make that possible; both children died young, though one became the doomed Dauphin, whose heart is reportedly preserved.

Streaming King George

This evening, Andrew Roberts is scheduled to speak at Mount Vernon on his new book The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. The public can view that talk starting at 7:00 P.M. through the estate’s website.

I recently listened to the History Extra podcast’s conversation with Roberts, which focused mainly on the charge that George III was tyrannical. American Patriots used that claim to justify their total break with the British system in July 1776, piling onto the king all the policies of the government he represented and describing them in the worst possible way.

Later British Whig writers also criticized George III for trying to exercise political power simply on the basis of inheritance. Roberts argues that really they disliked his preference for “Tories” even when Whigs held the majority in the House of Commons. In reality, he says, George III was barely involved in governing even before his illness.

That position makes a provocative contrast with the conversations about the prime ministers who served under George III on Iain Dale’s “The Prime Ministers” podcast. A recurring theme of those interviews is that getting along with the king was close to a prerequisite for prime ministers in the late eighteenth century. Men like William Pitt in the late 1750s and Charles James Fox in the early 1780s held power in the House of Commons but needed a more congenial, noble First Lord of the Treasury as a buffer between themselves and the king. George III may not have gotten deep into the details of policy, but he did get into personalities.

Another of Roberts’s contentions involves the illness that debilitated George III. Back in the early 1960s Drs. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter argued that disease was porphyria in two British Medical Journal papers; a book, George III and the Mad Business; and a pamphlet, Porphyria: A Royal Malady. Not everyone was convinced, but their hypothesis got a lot of traction.

Indeed, I remember learning the word “porphyria” as a boy back in the Bicentennial era, solely because of King George. All I knew about the disease is that it could render people insane and turn their urine purple.

In 2011 Timothy Peters published a paper in the journal Clinical Medicine titled “King George III, bipolar disorder, porphyria and lessons for historians.” He lambasted Macalpine and Hunter’s diagnosis, writing, “it is clear that their interpretation of [the king’s symptoms] as diagnostic of acute porphyria was misleading and some interpretations were bordering on the fraudulent.”

As for the urine:

The discoloured urine claimed by Hunter to be ‘the final proof of the diagnosis’ is worthy of some mention. Macalpine was able to identify four occasions during the 30 years of the King’s recurrent illness when the physicians reported discolouration. They subsequently claimed a further two unidentified occasions when coloured urine was noted. The bluish particulate material in a single urine sample during his final attack in January 1811…is particularly noteworthy.

However, Macalpine and Hunter and other researchers have failed to point to the six occasions in the six weeks leading up to this event when the physicians referred to pale, clear, yellow and normal urine samples. A single visit to the British Library to confirm the blue urine referred to in the Willis papers would surely have signalled even to non-medics the possibility of selectivity. The observation that three days before the blue urine episode the King commenced a new medication, extract of gentian, was a ‘red flag’ to the present author.

Roberts clearly trusts Peters’s analysis of the case.

TOMORROW: So what was the madness of George III?

“His looks were as mad as could be”

Yesterday I pointed to Don Hagist’s report on British Army private William Whitwell, who went insane on a military transport ship. Here’s a parallel case of a British Marines officer which Lee Bienkowski, author of Admirals in the Age of Nelson, unearthed in the National Archives of Britain and shared with the Revlist back in 2002.

On 21 Sept 1776, the navy tried Lt. Neil Wanchope to determine if he was lunatic. A lieutenant on the Thetis named (like the American general) William Heath testified:

His conduct has been insulting and improper. . . . This was after a very severe fit of madness when we were obliged to have four people hold him in his bed. I was frequently obliged to go to quiet him. He was knocking against the 1st Lieutenant’s cabin desiring him to leave off electrifying and murdering him. He regarded me more than anybody. He never insulted me till lately.

He grew better in about three weeks and returned to our mess. We used to send him his victuals when he was mad, and made the servant taste it first, for fear we should poison him. He did not eat at first for some time for that suspicion. At St. Helena he got better and conversed; he talked sensibly.

About the 21st of June at St. Helena at breakfast we sent to let him know breakfast was ready. He came with a bottle of porter in one hand and a tumbler in the other. Somebody just put his cup over to him. He said, “Gentlemen, I’ll have none of your tea.” His looks were as mad as could be. He said we had electrified him under cover and hurt his constitution, and he would take a turn with us all round one by one. He loaded his pistol that night.

Wanchope eventually challenged another lieutenant to a duel and then stabbed him superficially in the belly. He was found insane and discharged.

Wanchope’s rank suggests that he was a young man, and his paranoia indicates he might have been suffering from schizophrenia, which often becomes apparent in youth. I was particularly struck by how his anxieties focused on being “electrified,” the latest technology of the day, the way some people today worry about computer chips implanted inside them.

At last spring’s Organization of American Historians meeting, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi observed that schizophrenia (along with bipolar/manic-depressive disorder) is found at a fairly steady rate across all societies. In other words, Wanchope and Whitwell might or might not have suffered from schizophrenia, but we should assume that about one in a hundred men of their time did.

Charles Lee and a “distemper’d brain”

In a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia dated 19 Sept 1775, Gen. Charles Lee complained about the Continental Army’s New England troops. And then he complained about Rush’s colleagues at the Continental Congress. And then he complained about how he was supposed to be addressed. Gen. Lee saw a lot to complain about that day.

Lee’s letter started with a mention of action at “Bunker’s Hill,” but he didn’t mean the big battle in June. In late August the wing of the army under his command had pressed forward to fortify Ploughed Hill, closer to the British fort on Bunker’s. That produced some firing back and forth. The fact that the Continentals had taken and held that position was the first significant movement in the siege for weeks, and enough for supporters to celebrate.

Gen. Lee, of course, complained:

I am extremely sorry that your Philadelphians have been buoy’d up with the news of so complete a victory, and more so that I am the Hero who have gain’d it—When men fall from great expectations, They are apt to esteem themselves deceiv’d by those who have been the reputed actors of the things They wish’d, altho’ They had no hand in raising these expectations—Not a syllable of the Bunker’s Hill seduction and victory has the least foundation in truth, indeed from all appearances not all the astutia [cleverness] of Hanibal or Sertorius wou’d draw ’em from their nest—

let me communicate to you my sentiments, but at the same time I must desire you to be secret. I think then We might have attack’d em long before this and with success, were our Troops differently constituted—but the fatal perswasion has taken deep root in the minds of the Americans from the highest to the lowest order that they are no match for the Regulars, but when cover’d by a wall or breast work. This notion is still further strengthen’d by the endless works We are throwing up—in short unless we can remove the idea (and it must be done by degrees) no spirited action can be ventur’d on without the greatest risk—

to inculcate a different way of thinking, to inspire ’em with some confidence pugnando manibus [in hand combat], I first propos’d a body of spearmen for each Regiment at Philadelphia, and I cou’d perceive that the proposal appear’d to many to be the production of a distemper’d brain; but I am afraid They may find to their cost some time or other that the principle was sound, and that They will suffer by not adopting it.

You alarm me extremely in expressing apprehensions of divisions starting up amongst the members of the Congress. Good Gods, I was in hopes that we shou’d reap the full harvest Which We have sown with such infinite pains and labor. (I agree with you entirely in the opinion that they ought (at least half of them) to be changed annually.)

I condemn with you the barbarous, dangerous custom of loading the Servants of the People with the trappings of Court Titles. I cannot conceive who the Devil first devis’d the bauble of Excellency for their Commander in Chief, or the more ridiculous of His Honour for me—Upon my Soul They make me spew—even the tacking honorable to the Continental Congress creates a wambling in my stomack—What cou’d add dignity to the simple title of the Continental Congress of America, as long as they do their duty? And the instant They grow corrupt or slavish from timidity all the rumbling sounds of honorable, serene, mighty, sublime, or magnanimous, will only make their infamy more infamous.

Lee then went on for even longer about John Adams’s recently intercepted comments about him and his dogs, about why dogs were superior, and about an imagined moment of John Dickinson being “pelted with oranges.”

In his recent biography of Lee, Renegade Revolutionary, Phillip Pappas writes that the general “evidenced classic signs of what modern psychiatry would classify as manic-depressive (or bipolar disorder).” This letter appears to be from one of his up moods.