Hamilton v. Addington

In the Boston Globe, Charlie Savage reports on historians' dumbfounded response to the Bush-Cheney administration's misuse of the Federalist Papers to justify unfettered executive-branch power. To whit:

Yet scholars from across the political spectrum question the historical cases Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have made. In an effort to find backing for their view of presidential power, these scholars argue, the administration has quoted selectively, taken passages out of context, and simply ignored what many constitutional scholars say is the Federalist Paper that most squarely addresses the president's wartime powers: Federalist 69.

Richard Epstein, a conservative law professor at the University of Chicago who embraces originalism, said Federalist 69 shows that the administration's legal theory is "just wrong" and called its failure to acknowledge the paper "scandalous."

"How can you not talk about Federalist 69?" he said. "All you have to do is go on Google and put in 'Federalist Papers' and 'commander in chief' and it pops up."

And indeed it does. Particularly striking is the fact that Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist 69, not James Madison, who was more wary of a strong executive branch and a strong federal government (when he wasn't in charge of them). Even a man called a "monarchist" in the 1790s would fear the position pushed for the last five years by Cheney's former counsel, now chief of staff, David S. Addington.

A Travel Guide that will lead kids astray

A Travel Guide to Colonial Boston, published by the Lucent Books imprint of the Thomson-Gale Company, is ridiculously full of errors. It’s shot through worse than a British officer walking slowly up Bunker Hill. A few quotations will show what I mean.

In 1774 representatives of all colonies hurried to Philadelphia to form the Continental Congress with the objective of declaring independence from England.

In fact, only twelve colonies participated in the First Continental Congress in 1774. Georgia didn’t send a delegate. (Neither did Nova Scotia, which had had Stamp Act protests, or other British colonies in North America—but that’s another story, which we Americans don't dwell on.) Declaring independence was not the objective of that Congress, but a measure adopted after more than a year and a half of developments and debate.

John Adams, his cousin Samuel Adams, and Paul Revere represented Boston.

Boston did not send representatives; Massachusetts did. The province’s representatives were the Adams cousins plus Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine. In the later Congress that declared independence, Elbridge Gerry replaced Cushing. Paul Revere never represented his province, state, or town as a legislator. His only link to the First Continental Congress was that in Sept 1774 he carried messages to Philadelphia and back.

On April 18, 1775, to counter this act of rebellion, English general Thomas Gage ordered his troops to cross the Charles River, march the remainder of the twenty miles from Boston to the nearby towns of Concord and Lexington, and to destroy hidden caches of ammunition.

Gage wasn’t trying to stymie the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; he was responding to the Provincial Congress in Massachusetts. He didn’t order his troops to march to Lexington; that town was simply on the way to Concord. Concord’s center was seventeen miles from Boston, not twenty. (And for the copy editor, there must be either a “to” in front of “march” or no “to” in front of “destroy” to keep the items in that series parallel.)

Paul Revere and William Dawes, who got wind of the action, rode throughout the countryside urging the local militia—also known as minutemen because each was ready for war at a minute’s notice—to hurry to Concord and Lexington with loaded muskets.

Dawes didn’t speak to any local militia during his ride; he went straight to John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington. Revere did spread the word to his militia contacts. But neither of them told officers to send their men “to Concord and Lexington” since they couldn’t say for sure where the British column was headed.

At the same time, Robert Newman climbed the steeple at the North Church and suspended two lanterns.

Newman hung the lanterns before Revere set out from Boston, not at the same time.

For all who knew this secret code, it warned that the English were advancing up the Charles River.

Very few people knew what the two lanterns meant; Revere had arranged that signal specifically for his contacts in Charlestown. The British troops (they weren’t just English) didn’t head up river but crossed the Charles and then marched away from it.

The minutemen drew the battleline at Concord Bridge. As General Gage and his troops approached the old bridge and ordered the minutemen to stand aside, the militia took aim at the English line of musketeers.

Gage wasn’t on this expedition himself. The North Bridge in Concord was only fifteen years old. Three companies of British regulars were holding that bridge when the militiamen marched down toward it, trying to cross back into town—not the other way around. And no one at the time referred to British soldiers as “musketeers.”

No one knows who fired first, but by the end of the day, 93 patriots lay dead or badly wounded. The English lost 272 men. The War of Independence was on.

Strong evidence says that at Concord some outnumbered British soldiers fired first on the advancing militia. The Travel Guide author apparently confused that moment with what happened at Lexington, where no one knows who fired first. (In fact, the book never mentions the shooting at Lexington at all, though Americans at the time made more of it.) As for the numbers, the provincials suffered only 50 dead or dying of wounds, with 39 otherwise wounded and 5 missing. The number 272 is the total of British casualties, including 65 killed, 180 wounded, and 24 missing, so those “English” lost only 89 men.

Raging against the audacious actions of the minutemen, Gage began a siege of Boston.

From inside the town? No, sieges begin from the outside. The provincial militia companies besieged Boston, trapping the British army.

Thousands of minutemen hurried to Boston and occupied Breed and Bunker Hills in Charles Town, immediately across the channel at the north end of the city.

Right after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the British army encamped on Bunker Hill (the whole prominence was usually called by that name until the early 1800s, when historians started a spitting contest over the name “Breed’s Hill”—but that’s another story). Provincials didn’t try to occupy Charlestown for another two months, until June 16. Technically, Boston was still not a “city,” but a town.

On June 17, 1775, both armies began an artillery bombardment that killed 230 English and wounded 800. Minuteman losses were half what the English suffered.

This makes it sound like the Battle of Bunker Hill was entirely an exchange of artillery. The Americans’ cannons were close to negligible, and they inflicted most of the damage with muskets. The exact British casualty figures are documented: 226 dead, 828 wounded. The American figures are more approximate: about 150 dead and 300 wounded.

Badly mauled, Gage’s army broke off the battle and pulled back to the Boston Common where they stayed for the duration of the year.

Gage’s army won this battle, chased the provincials off the hill, and kept control of Bunker Hill and all of the Charlestown peninsula until March 1776, when Gage’s successor ordered his forces to evacuate.

All those errors appear in consecutive sentences on a single page. (Page 21, to be specific.) This Travel Guide to Colonial Boston is in no way a reliable source of historical information for young readers. In an upcoming post I’ll return to this book and share more choice bits. Why? Because I'm feeling cranky? Because I like showing off? Because I have nothing else to put on this blog? No, no, it's [sanctimonious intonation] for the kids.

ADDENDUM: What should a kids' history book in the guise of a travel guide to Boston in 1793 look like? See part 2.

Mary Palmer: young "city lady" in the country

This blog seems to have developed a small following among local knitters, so I looked for some handwork stories to share. This installment also has more than its share of unabashed gossip.

At the start of the Revolution in 1775, newborn Mary Palmer’s family was near the top of Patriot society. Her paternal grandfather was one of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s leaders: Braintree manufacturer and militia general Joseph Palmer. For a time her father, Joseph Pearse Palmer, was commissary for the provincial troops. After the war, however, the family fell on hard times. They blamed John Hancock for collecting debts when they had sunk all their cash into Continental scrip and a salt-making enterprise, but it’s clear that psychological depression was also involved. Mary later wrote, “my beloved father’s spirits sank, he seemed totally discouraged.”

Her maternal grandparents let Joseph P. Palmer farm some of their land in Framingham for half the crops. Mary recalled how she and her sisters adjusted from town life to farm life in the 1780s:

We learned to spin, borrowing wheels of our good-natured neighbors, who seemed pleased to teach the city ladies their craft. We learned, while we lived there, to spin flax, on a little foot wheel, and wool, tow and cotton, on a large wheel. . . . a plump rosy faced girl whose name was Zerniah Price…taught us how to card wool, cotton and tow, and how to hatchel flax, some of which we raised upon the farm; and my mother would change work with Zerniah’s mother and other women, knitting and sewing for them while they would weave cotton and flax into cloth which we would get dressed into fustian at the mill.

Eventually Joseph P. Palmer left his family to work in northern New England. After various indignities, Mary ended up marrying author Royall Tyler. What indignities? It seems clear that Royall got Mary pregnant and put off marrying her until months after she gave birth. And researchers now believe that he had earlier impregnated her mother, and perhaps tried to seduce one of her sisters. The Tyler family settled on a farm in Brattleboro in 1796; Royall would eventually become chief justice of Vermont while Mary published one of America’s first parenting books.

Earlier I quoted Royall’s deliberately quaint description of a spinning bee. Here’s Mary on the work of organizing textile production on the Vermont farm:

All this time my dairy and spinning wheels were busily attended...by myself, with the assistance of one and at times two girls. Our sheep furnished wool, and we raised flax. I spun all the thread I used for years, whitening some, and coloring some, and some keeping flax color. I hired a girl to spin that I wanted wove, and the tow also, with which we made cloth for sheets and common table linen.

Later Mary convinced Royall to buy her a loom for her women to weave on. She also sent some blankets “to have them fulled at the mill and dressed,” but “the clothier…fulled it so much” that she was “sadly disappointed.” The system back in Framingham seemed to work better.

These quotations are from Grandmother Tyler’s Book, a compilation of Mary Tyler’s and her mother’s memoirs edited by descendants Frederick Tupper and Helen Tyler Brown. The evidence of Royall Tyler's sexual behavior is discussed in Bruce A. Ronda's Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters.

Colonial Williamsburg looks at Lexington & Concord

Years ago, Colonial Williamsburg called dibs on the phone number 800-HISTORY and the URL history.org—with the clear implication that it's the wellspring of America's history. That attitude resurfaces in its current marketing and interpretation campaign as “Revolutionary City,” which is all very well except that Williamsburg was never a major city and not, after mid-1765, at the forefront of the Revolution.

Of course, for centuries Boston writers have tried to overlook the fact that Williamsburg was ahead of everyplace else in North America as the site of the first serious public objections to the Stamp Act. And Williamsburg was where Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other notable burgesses convened for the Virginia legislature.

Such friendly (or not so friendly) rivalry between Virginia and Massachusetts is at least two centuries old. I—growing up, living in, and studying Boston—think of it as having the best claim to be “Revolutionary City,” even if it was still legally a town until the 1800s. Yet my mother, who was born in greater Philadelphia, thinks there’s a better claimant than either Williamsburg or Boston. Very odd.

In any event, the Colonial Williamsburg magazine and website now features Dennis Montgomery’s article about the Battle of Lexington and Concord. (Quibbles: The British did not succeed in “digging up a brass cannon at the [Concord] gaol"; that was one place they found iron cannon. The Lt. Mackenzie quoted near the end of the article was named Frederick, not Robert. Otherwise a very good account.) The web page also comes with a description and images of the famous 1775 engravings of the Battle of Lexington and Concord by Ralph Earle and Amos Doolittle.

Israel Putnam mural up in the air at Greenwich

This week the Stamford Advocate ran a story, since picked up by the AP and other newspapers, about discussions in Greenwich, Connecticut, on whether to return a large mural titled "The Life and Times of General Israel Putnam of Connecticut," by James Daugherty, to a public school now that both painting and building have been refurbished. It will be interesting to see if this story gets any traction, or any spin.

Already some folks at FreeRepublic.com are fulminating about "political correctness," that conveniently selective and short-sighted complaint. Not noted by those champions of telling children all about our nation's history in the same way we supposedly always have are these points:

• The Putnam painting wasn't created to educate schoolchildren; it was designed for wall space in the First Selectman's office. For many years after it was moved to the school building, says the current PTA president, it was "too dirty and hung too high for the students to really see what was going on."
• The painting is hardly being suppressed. It's on display at the Greenwich Library, which would be happy to keep it.
  
• The mural is a product of Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, derided by a previous generation of conservatives as a source of wasteful, big-government spending. The FreeRepublic crowd thus insists that patriotism demands that kids continue to benefit from FDR's legacy. Well, of course.
  

Here's Rebecca E. Lawton's thorough study of Daugherty and his work. The Stamford Advocate offers an image of the mural itself [well, it did, but now that link is unavailable]. It shows (left to right) Putnam killing a wolf on his farm—an apparently true story already well known by the Revolution; Putnam leading men in battle from horseback; and a younger Putnam tied to a stake and about to be killed by Native Americans (he survived). The swirling draftsmanship looks typical for the 1930s, but the colors seem brighter. In fact, I think the mural's style, flamboyant and lurid to today's eyes, might make its subjects seem more frightening to small children. School cafeteria food can be unappetizing enough already.

The panel at center might depict a moment in Putnam's Revolutionary career, early 1778, when he steered his horse down a long flight of stone steps. Greenwich reenacted that event in 1935. The legendary version says the general rode all the way down. In his application for a pension, Joseph Rundel, born in 1762 and working as Putnam's "waiter" at that time, described what he saw:

General Putnam ordered his men to retreat and save themselves as best they could. He also retreated on his horse at full speed, pursued closely by the British horse. He made down a flight of stone steps, the top of which were about sixty rods (I should think) from the meetinghouse. He did not ride down more than fifteen or twenty of them (there being, I think, about one hundred of them in the whole). He then dismounted and led down the horse as fast as possible. I was at the bottom of the steps as soon as he was. He then mounted his horse, told me to make my escape to a swamp not far off, and he rode off.

That's from John Dann's collection of notable pension applications called The Revolution Remembered, a fine book.

Joshua Simonds: potential suicide bomber

Joshua Simonds was a Lexington farmer who, though he didn’t actually blow himself up to kill British soldiers on 19 April 1775, told people in later years that he'd been prepared to.

At dawn on that day, the British column marched into Lexington from the east. There were about seventy militiamen drawn up in lines on the Green. Between the British column and the provincial lines stood Lexington’s meeting-house, the town’s only public building of substantial size. The locals therefore also used it as the town schoolhouse and, in April 1775, the town gunpowder repository.

Simonds was in the meeting-house as the troops arrived. We know that because in the wake of the battle a pro-Crown newspaper suggested that someone had fired from that building at the regular troops, and the Rev. William Gordon sought to refute that idea in his “ACCOUNT of the Commencement of Hostilities between Great Britain and America, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay” published in the 7 June 1775 Pennsylvania Gazette. Gordon insisted there were very few men in the meeting-house:

And who do you imagine they were? One Joshua Simonds, who happened to be getting powder there as the troops arrived; besides whom I believe there were not two, if so much as one, for by reason of the position of the meeting house, none would have remained in it thro’ choice, but fools and madmen.

Indeed, being in the meeting-house was dangerous—but it was even more dangerous to try to leave. In 1824, John Munroe of Lexington, age 77, gave the town minister, Elias Phinney, a deposition that said:

Caleb Harrington was shot down on attempting to leave the meeting-house, where he and some others had gone, before the British soldiers came up, for the purpose of removing a quantity of powder that was stored there.

Joseph Comee was wounded while trying to leave with Harrington. A fourth man, unnamed, hid up in the meeting-house gallery.

Back to Joshua Simonds. In 1775 he was 35 years old and one of the ensigns (the lowest level of officer) in the Lexington militia company. Some of his tales came down in his son William’s family to Eli Simonds (born 1817), who was an informant for Abram E. Brown’s Beneath Old Roof-Trees (1896). Writing in Joshua’s voice, Brown said:

I was in charge of the town's stock of ammunition on the eventful morning. The magazine was the upper gallery of the meeting-house, and in the discharge of my duties I was there filling the powder-horns of my comrades when the regulars came into the town.

My associate glancing out saw the situation, and said, "We are all surrounded!" He then hid in the opposite gallery.

I then determined to blow up the house and go with it rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. I cocked my gun already loaded, placed the muzzle upon the open cask of powder, and waited for their course to determine their fate and mine as well.

That account echoes the deposition of 72-year-old Ebenezer Munroe on 2 April 1825:

When the British came up in front of the meeting-house, Joshua Simonds was in the upper gallery, an open cask of powder standing near him, and he afterward told me, that he cocked his gun and placed the muzzle of it close to the cask of powder, and determined to “touch it off,” in case the troops had come into the gallery.

At that moment, according to the Simonds family account, Lt.-Col. Francis Smith arrived on the Green below and called the British troops back into line. The soldiers who had entered the meeting-house left, and the column marched on to Concord.

Imagine if events had proceeded differently—if regulars had climbed the stairs to the gallery, and Simonds had fired his gun into the casks of powder. The explosion would have been fatal, and would have severely damaged Lexington's religious and civic center. Locals would have blamed the British soldiers. The soldiers would have blamed the locals. Both sides would have felt that their worst thoughts of the other had been confirmed. A one-sided skirmish might well have turned into a free-for-all in the middle of the small town. The Revolutionary War would have started on a very different note from what we Americans have come to know.

Joshua Simonds's suicidal commitment also makes me think of Prof. Robert Pape's study of suicide bombers worldwide from 1980 to 2003, Dying to Win. That book concluded that, in its publisher's words:

Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

There was no "terrorist campaign" at Lexington, obviously. Simonds didn't plan his attack, and it's not certain that he would have gone through with it. But he did see military forces arriving in territory that he viewed as his own.

Samuel Adams: beyond the caricature

It's well worth reading Jeremy A. Stern's reply to a publicity editorial (i.e., he's got a book out, and now finds something to say in an op-ed piece) by Fox news reader Eric Burns on History News Network. Burns or a research assistant had written:

Samuel Adams of the Boston Gazette,...takes a back seat to everyone, including Jayson Blair, in terms of ethics. So desperate was Adams for the colonies to become independent from the Crown---either legislatively or militarily, whatever it took---that he wrote stories about British soldiers in Boston molesting women in the streets. It never happened. He wrote stories about British soldiers in Boston assaulting men on the streets. It never happened. He wrote stories that urged violence against British officials charged with collecting taxes, then summoned his henchmen to the Gazette's offices after closing hours and plotted the violence for them. Hang taxman Andrew Oliver in effigy, he told them. Trash his office. Destroy his home. Threaten him with physical harm if he did not resign. His minions did precisely as told.

Then, a few days later, Sam Adams wrote an article describing such reprehensible actions without either regret or acknowledgment that he had been their primary cause.

As Stern points out, Adams was not the proprietor of the Boston Gazette, did not summon minions to an office there, and did not by any documented account issue orders for violence. He did express regret and disapproval about violent demonstrations while arguing that they were a foreseeable consequence of Crown policies. Adams almost certainly did not write the news stories about British soldiers in Boston that Burns refers to. And as for how Burns feels sure those events "never happened," it's unclear. Especially to me, since I spent Friday afternoon reading reports from Boston town watchmen about their confrontations with British military officers, much like those described in the newspapers of the time.

Burns comes from a long line of conservative writers caricaturing Samuel Adams as a troublemaker, apparently because they fear the idea of revolutionary change. Likewise, Harlow G. Unger's biography of John Hancock uses Adams as a foil to present Hancock as a sober, business-minded moderate. (As a businessman Hancock converted a large fortune into a small one, and he played to crowds more than Adams did.) William H. Hallahan's The Day the American Revolution Began, among many shameful errors of facts, goes so far as to say that Adams broke into the governor's house to obtain embarrassing letters. (Those letters were leaked to the American Whigs by sympathetic London officials.)

I wonder whom today's conservatives would prefer to imagine as principal organizer of the early Revolutionary movement. Perhaps an upper-class man who earned a master's degree, tried business, and then sought public office. Who lived relatively simply on his salary and refused bribes. Who was devout, espoused traditional religious values, recruited young activists through church organizations, and yet learned to work with people of some different faiths. Who didn't seek audience adulation or lead street protests, but worked hard in committees, wrote newspaper essays, moderated public meetings, and drafted legislation. Who spoke against disorder and what he saw as public immorality. Who worried about the national government becoming too strong but came around to support the U.S. Constitution because small manufacturers urged its ratification. Who retired from long service in public office without a fortune to sustain him in his last years.

In other words, today's conservatives might prefer Samuel Adams. The real Samuel Adams.

ADDENDUM: More on the distorted portrait of Samuel Adams we've inherited here and here.

Walking tours of historic Boston

Charles Swift of the City Record and Boston News-Letter blog is offering his first walking tour of Beacon Hill this week: Wednesday, 7 June, 6:00-7:30. As you can see from that blog, Swift has a deep knowledge of the city's architectural history over the centuries.

Gary Gregory at Lessons on Liberty offers costumed tours along the Freedom Trail on weekends. He's been doing that for a few years now, and has impressed me with his commitment to sharing unvarnished Revolutionary history.

Top 3 Errors in History Channel's The Revolution

Last night the History Channel unveiled its new series The Revolution with an episode titled "Boston, Bloody Boston," as I noted earlier. I'm hard to please when it comes to TV history. But it's simply impossible to summarize the decade or more of political strife in less than an hour (with time out for John Hancock Insurance commercials), so I watched with a charitable eye.

I can excuse how the show's writers fell for some common myths, such as the Sons of Liberty or Continental Congress as secret organizations, or John Adams's "courageous" choice to represent the soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre. I can overlook the mash-up of visual material, so most of the "period" engravings shown actually date from the 1800s and a broadside on Lexington and Concord was used to depict the reaction to the Boston Massacre. And of course we have to expect low-budget reenactments that make a dozen men in slow motion represent hundreds, and a wooded lot in summer stand in for both the streets of Boston in winter and the farmland of Concord in spring. But three misstatements stood out for me.

3. Bostonians had to house British soldiers in their homes in 1774-75, and soldiers ransacked homes on their way to Concord looking for arms. The only British soldiers housed in private homes before the war were officers renting rooms from willing hosts. Boston's dispute over quartering was whether the town had to provide barracks space in publicly-owned buildings in the middle of town, or could insist on housing the soldiers in an island fort. As for the British column on its way to Concord, they were too scrupulous and too much in a hurry to enter people's homes. Soldiers did enter homes on their way back to Boston, both to protect their column from ambush and to loot. But the notion of colonists forced to host soldiers who search for privately-owned weapons is an NRA myth.

2. Two of the British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre were punished with "life imprisonment." Multi-year sentences weren't yet part of the British-American penal code. The two soldiers convicted of manslaughter were sentenced to hang, then in a legal ritual plead "benefit of clergy," allowing them to escape the death penalty and instead be branded F (for felon) on the base of one thumb.

1. Samuel Adams—who's Samuel Adams? This episode covered the ten years between the Stamp Act and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. It covered the resistance to taxes, Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, growth of a Patriot correspondence network, and Continental Congress. It focused on Boston. And yet the single most important political organizer in that town, a man involved in each and every one of those events, was never highlighted. That's like doing a documentary on the rise of the Hollywood studio system without mentioning Louis B. Mayer.

Boston's political footballs

In the charged atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Boston, even football got caught in political disputes.

In 1768-69, Boston’s Whigs sent a series of anonymous dispatches to newspapers in other colonies, describing (with some exaggeration but mostly a lot of complaint) the town’s sufferings after four army regiments had arrived at the request of the royal governor. In the 13 January 1769 letter, the Whigs turned their attention to football:

At a C——l [Council meeting] last Thursday G.B. [Gov. Francis Bernard] exhibited another specimen of the inexpressible littleness of his mind, and the fullness of its enmity against the people: It seems that some boys were the other evening playing at foot ball near the province house [the governor’s official residence] when either by accident or design; they threw down one of the centry boxes at the gate; this rude and mischievous behaviour of children, the G——r has represented to the C——l as a serious and important matter, upon which he required their advice or concurrence, in giving orders to the King’s Attorney to prosecute them for the same, which we are told has been done; and we doubt not an account of this little rude boyish trick, will be transmitted to Administration [in London] with such glosses and comments, as may have a tendency to impress them with the heinousness of the offence; and as another proof of the necessity of regular troops, to keep the inhabitants in order.

At most other times, Boston was not so indulgent toward football-playing youth. According to social historian Alice Morse Earle, the town had passed a law against playing football in the streets as early as 1657. In 1787 the selectmen asked “the several Masters of the public Schools, that they make their respective Scholars acquainted with the By Laws forbidding to throw Snow Balls and play Foot Balls in the Street.”

In a deposition dated 24 July 1770 and held at the British National Archives, Pvt James McKaan of the 29th regiment described another confrontation with Boston youths over football on the previous 25 December. (This may be the first documented example of that American tradition, the Christmas Day football game.) McKaan was on sentry duty at Boston Neck, the narrow land entrance into two. In late afternoon a number of young locals started kicking a football around nearby. The soldier went into his sentry box for a while, then came out and told the people to keep their game away from him. The crowd, probably resenting the military presence in town in the first place, became more rowdy and "at lenth Struck the Ball against this Deponent and hit him on the Head."

The football bounced over a wall. McKaan insisted that no one was allowed to go after it. But "A Young Lad" jumped over the wall to get the ball, and someone else threw a stick at the private's chest. McKaan "made an offer to strike him that Jumped after the Ball but did not reach him," then retreated back into the sentry box. At that point the crowd reverted to strict interpretation of the law, and left to find a magistrate to arrest McKaan for trying to assault the lad. McKaan said he had to lay low for a little while to avoid arrest. (I use this example of a confrontation between the military and Boston youths in my chapter of Children in Colonial America, due this fall from NYU Press.)

The rules for football in colonial Boston were probably informal, adapted to the players and location as in pick-up soccer games today. As for the footballs themselves, in A Restless People Oscar and Lillian Handlin described New Haven boys in this period playing “with a blown-up bladder.” The British antiquarian Joseph Strutt described boys in rural England centuries before playing with “a blown bladder without the covering of leather...putting peas and horse beans withinside, which occasioned a rattling as it was kicked about.” But Strutt also noted that in the same period shoemakers made leather footballs.

However the ball was made, it had to bounce. John Greenwood, a teenaged soldier in the winter of 1775-76, recalled in his 1809 memoir seeing large shells from the British artillery “strike the ground when it was frozen and bound up like a foot-ball.” African-American veteran Boyrereau Brinch, writing in 1810, also used a football metaphor to describe his vicissitudes: “I was fortunes football, and must depend upon her gentle kicks.”

Boston Massacre: really a "massacre"?

Did the confrontation on King Street on the night of 5 March 1770 really add up to a "massacre"? The Boston town meeting commissioned a report on the incident titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, and that name stuck. But many people today, learning that the British soldiers killed only five people, find "massacre" too extreme a term.

I think it's useful to consider the scale of the town at that time. As I laid out in a previous post, Boston contained only about 15,500 inhabitants in 1765. The five people shot by grenadiers therefore represented one out of every 3,100 local residents.

As a comparison, on 19 April 1995, a small group of far-right American terrorists blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. According to my 1995 Rand McNally road atlas, Oklahoma City then had a population of 444,700. That means the equivalent of one out of every 2,647 city residents was killed in that bombing. The shooting on King Street wasn't quite as bad, but was at about the same scale.

Thinking back to the local and national response to the Oklahoma City bombing can thus give us some sense of how Bostonians reacted to the shootings in 1770. The term "massacre" was undoubtedly inflammatory, but in March 1770 most Bostonians were feeling inflamed.

Another likely reason Boston's political leaders chose "massacre" is that Whigs in Britain had used that term to refer to the shootings at St. George's Fields in London on 10 May 1768. Soldiers had then killed six to eleven people (according to different sources) during a riot supporting John Wilkes's attempt to take his seat in Parliament. In 1770 Boston's Whigs saw themselves in common cause with British reformers, and felt that they had suffered their own "massacre" to parallel the killings in London.

History Channel series starts with "Bloody Boston"

On Sunday, 4 June, the History Channel starts its new series The Revolution [that would be the American Revolution, naturally] with an episode titled "Boston, Bloody Boston." The network's description:

The opening episode dramatizes the controversies and conflicts leading to war, including the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and Lexington and Concord. The key players of the Revolution emerge, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Hutchinson, as well as England's King George III and British General Thomas Gage.

That's Sunday at 10:00, right after The Sopranos. Talk about bloody. Which reminds me...

The word "bloody" was one of the dividing lines between the British military and Boston populace in 1775. To London gentlemen, it was terribly rude. To locals, it was simple description. In delivering an oration about the Boston Massacre on 6 March 1775, to an audience that included regular army officers, Dr. Joseph Warren avoided the word, though he described other forms of gore.

Hither let me call the gay companion; here let him drop a farewell tear upon that body which so late he saw vigorous and warm with social mirth; hither let me lead the tender mother to weep over her beloved son: come widowed mourner, here satiate thy grief; behold thy murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father's fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father's brains.

Yadda yadda yadda.

Samuel Adams wasn't one to compromise local standards, however. He rose at the end of Warren's speech, offered thanks on behalf of the town, and proposed that Boston commission a similar oration the next year to commemorate the...bloody Massacre.

"Fie, fie!" shouted the officers. (In army life, it appears, they were unused to hearing profanity.)

Many Bostonians heard those calls as "Fire, fire!" The crowd scrambled out of the Old South Meeting-House, running smack into a passing regiment. Only by luck did that day not turn out, well, bloody.

Sybil Ludington: woman of legend

In February, I gave a paper on "grandmothers' tales" about Revolutionary heroes at the University of Connecticut. (See this earlier posting for download instructions if you're inclined.) Since state resources seemed to be paying for my hotel room (and a nice room it turned out to be), I decided I should include a Connecticut example. I was also hoping to find a few more examples of good stories from the Revolution that also had good historical documentation.

So I dug into the story of Sybil Ludington. I'd first heard about her from a publishing colleague who's a Ludington by birth, but Sybil's story has now been told in many a website, children's book, and episode of Liberty's Kids. She was the sixteen-year-old eldest child of Henry Ludington, a militia colonel in Dutchess County, New York. On 26 April 1777, British troops raided the Connecticut town of Danbury, destroying supplies for the Continental Army and some houses. An exhausted rider carried word of the British landing to Col. Ludington. Sybil volunteered to ride on through the stormy night to summon his militiamen from their farms. She thus allowed them and her father to participate in a counterattack the next day.

As I noted in my paper, this story has a pleasing structure: an individual protagonist, clear goal and obstacles, and success. For the purposes of inspiring children, it featured a young person—and a young woman at that. But was that how events actually unfolded in 1777, or the shape into which storytellers had (wittingly or unwittingly) massaged those events in subsequent years?

So I looked for the earliest version of Sybil Ludington's tale. All paths seemed to lead back to a single book: Colonel Henry Ludington: A Memoir, written by Willis Fletcher Johnson and published in 1907. There aren't a lot of copies of that book around, and as I searched for one I kept seeing red flags. The biography was published by two of Col. Ludington's grandchildren, not an independent press. Although Johnson wrote other histories, he did so as a writer for hire, not an independent researcher. (He also wrote several political biographies.) And of course it's not a good sign when the earliest published source for a story dates from 125 years after the event.

Last week I tracked down a copy of that book at the New-York Historical Society (a copy donated by one of the Ludingtons who published it). Johnson's introduction states:

The most copious and important data have been secured from the manuscript collections of two of Henry Ludington’s descendants, Mr. Lewis S. Patrick, of Marinette, Wisconsin, who has devoted much time and painstaking labor to the work of searching for and securing authentic information of his distinguished ancestor, and Mr. Charles Henry Ludington, of New York, who has received many valuable papers and original documents and records from a descendant of Sibyl Ludington Ogden, Henry Ludington’s first-born child.

So for a moment things were looking up: Sybil or her children left "valuable papers and original documents and records." Did they include a first- or second-hand account of her ride in 1777? Yet Johnson's information on Sybil also had big holes: he didn't have solid evidence about the first name of her husband, referring to him as Edward, Edmund, or Henry Osgood. Johnson also consistently spelled her name as "Sibyl," apparently relying on a page from the family Bible, while most authors today use "Sybil." Her gravestone says "Sibbell," and gives her husband's name as "Edmond."

Alas, when I read Johnson's description of Sybil's ride, I found no quotations from those "original documents" or citations of them. The same applied to all the book's other anecdotes about her activities during the Revolution. Apparently Johnson based those accounts on what his introduction calls "some oral traditions of whose authenticity there is substantial evidence"—though he described none of that evidence nor how those traditions came to him.

Furthermore, when Johnson did present documentation, his analysis went well beyond what those records support. He reprinted celebrated spy Enoch Crosby's 1832 pension application, which mentions Col. Ludington twice among other contacts and American officers. But then he added unsupported statements that Ludington "furnished numerous other members of the Secret Service," and sent their reports "to the Committee of Safety and some to the headquarters of General Washington." (The Library of Congress's online collection of George Washington's papers turns up three likely references to Col. "Luddington" from 1779 on, none involving espionage.) Johnson wrote that Sybil and her sister "were also privy to Crosby’s doings, and had a code of signals, by means of which they frequently admitted him in secrecy and safety to the house." Yet Crosby's pension application, which was required by law to state details about his Revolutionary service and commanding officers, said nothing about taking frequent refuge in Col. Ludington's house.

In short, I have to classify the story of Sybil Ludington as legend, not a documented Revolutionary event. Maybe she rode to alert the county militia in April 1777, and did the other things that Johnson's book ascribes to her. But maybe, like other grandmothers I discussed in my paper, she told inspiring but not necessarily accurate stories to her children (or to customers at her tavern), never intending that they'd end up in the collections of the New-York Historical Society and similar organizations.

The thin evidence in Johnson's book and elsewhere hasn't stopped twentieth-century Sybil Ludington fans from spinning off new statements about her. Though Johnson and his sources never stated the length or route of her ride, there are now maps of it. The Danbury library has a 1961 statue of her. Some accounts give her horse the name Star, and include direct quotes of what she yelled as she rode. But does any version cite sources for that information that go back more than one century?

ADDENDUM: How did the Ludingtons affect the Danbury raid?

Paying attention to black Loyalists

Sunday's Boston Globe featured an interview with historian Simon Schama on the occasion of his book Rough Crossings, about the experience of Loyalists of African ancestry before, during, and after the Revolution. It's interesting to compare the press this book is getting in the U.S. to what British reviewers had to say about it last fall. The North American media has focused on how it will rile American readers by supposedly breaking the news that most wealthy founders owned slaves and were upset at the prospect of losing them. In Britain, reviewers paid more attention to the book's latter half, which covers the Crown's broken promises to the black Loyalists in Canada and Sierra Leone. For instance, the Guardian's reviewer wrote

When the defeated British withdrew, thousands of former slaves found themselves herded on to British ships and relocated to Nova Scotia and London. Their miserable fate and protracted sufferings form the core of Schama's gripping new book.

The book's Amazon.co.uk page shows how the original publisher played up the post-Revolutionary story for British readers. But of course Americans have short attention spans for Canadian history and Sierra Leone, so the U.S. publisher's copy emphasizes the Revolution.

Rough Crossings is one fruit of a huge (by historians' standards) book-TV deal Schama made a few years ago. The Wikipedia article about him states:

In 2003, Schama signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around $5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. The only confirmed project lined up as part of the deal is a book and TV show provisionally entitled Rough Crossings, dealing with stories of migration across the Atlantic Ocean and including chapters/episodes on Pocahontas, freed slaves, and the Irish famine

Apparently Schama found enough material on black Loyalists to build a series and book about them alone.

Such a large deal puts pressure on the publisher and author to produce large sales, and one route to that is to declare that the book tells a story that's never been told before. To his credit, in the Globe interview Schama demurs, saying his work adds "almost nothing" to the record, only public attention. And in fact it's easy to find other authors writing about black Loyalists today:

• This month in the New Yorker, Harvard professor Jill Lepore reviewed Schama's book alongside Cassandra Pybus’s Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty, and praised the latter for its new research findings from multiple continents.
• UCLA historian Gary B. Nash will speak at Old South Meeting-House on 15 June about his short new book, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution.
  
• Last fall Vincent Carretta has published his enlightening biography of the single most prominent black Loyalist, Equiano, the African. That publisher's page links to an interview with Carretta on his conclusions that Olaudah Equiano was not African-born, as he claimed.
  
• Last week Caleb McDaniel blogged about how the book that's said to have established the American tradition of ignoring black Loyalists in favor of African-American patriots, Boston author William C. Nell's Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, actually acknowledges black emigrés. McDaniel also provides a link to an online lecture by Cassandra Pybus, made available by WGBH.

Nathanael Greene: published at last

This weekend the Rhode Island Historical Society will celebrate the publication of the thirteenth and final volume of the Papers of General Nathanael Greene with a festive (and fundraising) dinner featuring David McCullough, author of 1776.

Publishing the complete papers of any significant historical figure is a long undertaking—thirty-four years in Greene's case. It usually requires government funding, exacting standards, and management skills. At some point, I understand, participants start to suspect that the project will never end. So the RIHS deserves to feel proud about bringing this ship into port.

Unfortunately, Greene's papers shed limited light on the biggest mystery of his career: how he vaulted from being just one of several founders of the Kentish Guards militia company to being named general of the Rhode Island troops early in the siege of Boston. In that position he gained the respect of George Washington, and the rest was history.

The first volume of the Greene Papers does contain a marvelous example of eighteenth-century American spelling standards in the form of his orders for 14 Aug 1775, as transcribed by an unknown company captain into an orderly book:

The Camp Coloman of Each Ridgment to Clean the Spears three times a week against there Several alarm posts. The Corl are Requested to see it Don. There appears to be a Grate negtlect of the people Reparing to the Neserys agreeable to General orders but to Void there Exerments about the field pernishously and Dont fill the Vaults that are Dug as Directed by his Excelentsy. As the healths of the Camps is greatly Dangred by these Neglects it is Recomended to the ofisers of the Several Ridgments to pay due attention to futer transgresion and Let the Transgresor be ponished with the Utmost Severity. Generals Lee Gard to be furnished with Camp Cittels and to Draw provisions by them selves. The Cort marshal for Coln mansfield is agorned tomorow at 9 Clock as appointed in General orders. The Cort and the partis are to attend at the time and place appinted. Coln Gridly to Draw out a fetege party and to widen and Depen the Ditches Round these Linds at Lest 2 feet and from glaised 16 or 18 inches higt.

Got that?

Edward Barber: teenaged casualty of war

The 1775 broadside titled "Bloody Butchery by the British Troops," available in a keyword search through the Library of Congress's magnificent "American Memory" site, lists all the American casualties along the Battle Road from Boston to Concord and back. From the town of Charlestown, two names appear:

Mr. James Miller.
Capt. William Barber's son, aged 14.

Obviously, the printers who created that broadside had limited information about the Barber boy. Charlestown genealogies published by Thomas Bellows Wyman in 1879 offer a bit more. Capt. William Barber was a mariner who owned waterfront property and a wharf. He married his second wife, Anne Hay, in 1745, and she bore his children until 1770. Edward Barber, baptized on 1 November 1761, was the ninth of the captain's thirteen children. The boy was probably thirteen years old when he died on 19 April 1775.

Abram English Brown's Beneath Old Roof-Trees (1896) quoted the memoirs of Mercy Tufts Boylston on the circumstances of Edward Barber's death:

General Gage sent a message to Hon. James Russell [of Charlestown], to the effect that he was aware that armed citizens had gone out to oppose his Majesty's troops, and that if more went he would lay the town in ashes. . . . The dread reality was apparent at about sunset. The troops came in haste and confusion into the town. The first of her sons to be sacrificed was a boy, Edward Barber, who was standing in a house, and was there shot. He was my cousin,...and would have escaped if our people had obeyed orders. We were told that no harm would befall us if the army was not fired upon. A careless, excited negro discharged his musket, and the return fire killed the inoffensive boy.

This would not have been the first time that nineteenth-century New Englanders used the excuse of a "careless, excited negro" to explain away impulsive actions by local whites. In 1821-22, the Columbian Centinel newspaper published "Recollections of a Bostonian" that blamed the fights before the Boston Massacre on a black man who insulted a soldier; in 1770 ropemaker William Green had acknowledged delivering the insult in question. Some people blamed the Emerson family's enslaved worker Frank for killing a wounded British soldier in Concord; Frank wasn't nearby at the time, and the attacker was most likely a local carpenter named Ammi White. So it probably was with the death of Edward Barber. There was general confusion in Charlestown, some locals might have shot at the British column, but no one could be sure who.

Twentieth-century historians suggest Edward was reckless in looking out a window as the British soldiers arrived. Those soldiers had marched all the way back from Concord (or, in the case of Percy's relief column, Lexington) under occasional attack from houses and farm-buildings along the road. Commanders had sent flankers out to break into houses and clear out yards, with most of the Crown "atrocities" that Massachusetts politicians and printers complained about coming during those actions. Edward Barber's face in a twilit window might have looked threatening to a British soldier. And I don't think we can rule out anger as a possible factor in making the regulars quicker to shoot.

I choose to write about Edward Barber on Memorial Day because he's the first example of a child killed in the Revolutionary War—and on the first day, too. He's a reminder that wars always end up killing children, whether as "collateral damage" or deliberate targets, whether in Haditha or Grozny or thousands of other places across history.

John Adams: the many faces

Only a very small fraction of people alive in 1775 ever had their portraits professionally painted or drawn. John Adams was one of those few. In fact, because he became so prominent in the Revolutionary War and early American republic, we have many portraits of him over several decades. Those images let us watch him mature—and watch changes in how gentlemen presented themselves.

Lawyer John Adams bought pastel portraits of himself and his wife Abigail from Benjamin Blyth about 1766, when he was thirty-one years old. These pictures are small, and the medium was less expensive and prestigious than oil paintings. But buying portraits at all showed how the Adamses sought to fit into a genteel and sophisticated level of society. John's plump, unwrinkled face looks out from under the bushy white powdered wig of an attorney, perhaps trying not to smile too proudly. This portrait and its mate are displayed by the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

When he was involved in politics before and during the Revolutionary War, Adams had less time to sit for artists. But he grew prominent as an American statesman and diplomat, becoming the sort of man whose portrait other people asked for. In Europe, painters were better trained and more numerous than in colonial America, but the artists who took Adams's likeness were all American expatriates, many of them Loyalist. (Benjamin Franklin, in contrast, was highly popular with French artists.)

In 1783, when Adams was in London helping to negotiate the end of the Revolutionary War, Boston-born artist John Singleton Copley painted a full-length portrait of him—the most elaborate he ever posed for. In this painting Adams gestures to maps and a globe, symbols of the treaty he had just negotiated. Copley's original is now owned by Harvard University. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns Copley's sketch of Adams in this pose.

Another interesting image from this period is Benjamin West's unfinished painting of the commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1783. All five of the American diplomats posed for West, but the British ministers chose not to, and the painting was never finished. It now hangs at the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, which has more beautiful things than it can possibly display. The U.S. State Department offers online visitors a closer look at a copy of West's painting; Adams is seated to the left.

The Boston Athenaeum has a fine portrait of Adams by Mather Brown, a British court painter born in Boston, from around the same time.

Connecticut artist John Trumbull painted Adams in 1793, when he was Vice President. In this image Adams looks remarkably placid, which to me means it's not a very good likeness. This may have been the statesmanlike calm that Adams wanted to exude, but he rarely achieved that demeanor in his writings or his discussions with other people; that's what makes him so interesting. This portrait was donated to Harvard by merchant Andrew Craigie, then the owner of Longfellow House in Cambridge. A similar portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

Trumbull also included Adams, as he imagined him looking about twenty years before, in his monumental "Declaration of Independence" for the U.S. Capitol. (In fact, despite writing about his care for accuracy, Trumbull seems to have imagined quite a bit about that painting.)

In the same period, Adams sat for Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale. This portrait is at Independence National Historic Park, but for a full-color web preview we have to go elsewhere. The vice president had started to wear his hair (what he had left) in a different style. Adams still had his hair curled and dressed, but he had stopped wearing a wig. Republican values had made the powdered wigs of his earliest portraits unfashionable.

Silhouettes and profiles were fashionable during Adams's administration. Around 1800, the French emigré artist Charles Balthazar J. F. Saint-Mémin drew a "grayscale" profile of the president in crayon, charcoal, and chalk. Saint-Mémin used a physiognotrace, a device that made it easy to trace a person’s silhouette onto paper and thus to create a close, if somewhat stiff, likeness now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (The Smithsonian offers more information about Saint-Mémin. Wendy Bellion at MIT discusses his physiognotrace and similar inventions.)

Around the same time, Raphaelle Peale, one of the many sons of Charles Willson Peale, reportedly produced the silhouettes of John and Abigail Adams in the Peale Family Papers.

Gilbert Stuart painted Adams starting around 1800, in the final years of his presidency. This was one of the most bitter periods of Adams's life, analyzed by Joseph Ellis in Passionate Sage. I see a little of that shock and suspicion in Adams's face. As he did with his famous portrait of George Washington, Stuart kept working on his original while he produced several copies for sale to other customers. This painting can be viewed at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

Stuart used his original to paint Adams in an uncharacteristically bright red suit for one of a series of presidential portraits, also at the National Gallery. In this image, I think the ex-president's face looks a bit more relaxed. Though Stuart was still working from his original sketches, in an odd way this later portrait manages to depict Adams after he had made peace with his electoral defeat.

Stuart returned to Adams in 1823 and painted another portrait of the former president as he neared ninety. He was obviously a man in retirement, no longer dressing his hair or dressing up. His face had developed more wrinkles. He was now a widower, Abigail having died in 1818. But his expression exudes intellectual vigor. This image is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

French sculptor J. B. Binon created a bust of Adams for Boston's Fanueil Hall around 1818. It was thought to be a good likeness, which makes me think how portly the ex-president must have been at this time. Plaster copies were sold to admirers, and Thomas Jefferson's is on display at Monticello. This is the irascible face that greeted some visitors to Adams's house in Braintree.

One of my favorite images of John Adams—indeed, one of my favorite manmade objects in the world—is the bust of the ex-President created by sculptor J. H. I. Browere in 1825. It's on display at the New York State Historical Association's Fenimore House Museum in Cooperstown, New York, alongside similar busts of Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and other American notables of that decade. (See the photo above.)

Because Browere developed his bust from a life mask—a plaster cast of Adams's actual face—it's remarkably vivid. You can see how the president had lost some teeth on the right side of his mouth, for instance. (That may be why Stuart put that side of his face in shadow in his 1823 painting.) Overall, the face is so lively that looking at the bust feels almost like visiting the old man himself. Seeing these busts is worth the trip to Cooperstown, which is a beautiful place, anyway. C-SPAN offers an expensive video on this collection. All the books about it have gone out of print.

Finally, there have been many posthumous depictions of Adams, all necessarily based on the paintings and sculptures above. Some of the notable ones:

• Horatio Greenough's classicist bust at the Museum of Fine Arts, created around 1830.
• Randolph Rogers's full-length statue, delivered to the Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1859 and now displayed in Memorial Hall at Harvard. (Alternate view.)
• Daniel Chester French's bust, commissioned by the U.S. Senate in 1886.

ADDENDUM: Another John Adams portrait, this one by Samuel F. B. Morse.

George Washington: turnaround manager

A couple of months back, NPS ranger Paul Blandford of Longfellow House gave me a copy of Fred Anderson's article "The Hinge of the Revolution: George Washington Confronts a People's Army, July 3, 1775." It's available at HistoryCooperative.org, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which published it in the first volume of the Massachusetts Historical Review. I actually have a copy of that magazine in my home, but I hadn't gotten around to reading it and would need about a week to find it from a sitting start. So I'm grateful to Paul for saving me such trouble.

Anderson is the author of A People's Army, Crucible of War, and The War That Made America. In other words, he's one of our top experts on the Seven Years' War in North America (or French & Indian War as we who are not French or Indian like to call it). Which gives Anderson a fine vantage-point for discussing how New Englanders, the British military, and George Washington saw themselves as the Revolutionary War began.

It's part of the human condition to prepare for the last war (if one prepares well for any war at all). And Anderson's article made me realize how different experiences of the Seven Years' War colored men's expectations for the first campaign of the Revolution.

• New Englanders by and large had been shut out of the fighting during the Seven Years' War. Instead, they proudly remembered the last last war: King George's War (1744-48). Colonials had managed the North American theater of that conflict without the regular British army. And the New England troops triumphed: they conquered the French fortress at Louisburg, only to see it returned to Louis XV as part of the peace settlement. So they thought their militia and command system could work well if it was given a chance. And in some ways it did. After the fall of Fort William Henry in 1757, that system put well over 10,000 armed men on the march in just a few days. Could the Crown in London do that?
  
• The British military officers who had served in North America during the Seven Years' War had come away with a different, and much worse, impression of the New England troops. British regulars were expected to serve as long as they remained alive and healthy. In contrast, New Englanders saw military service as a contract, not a career. The British officers used to commanding the first group had a hard time managing the second, and came to see them as malingerers or cowards—even though New England culture was among the most strait-laced and fervent in the British Empire. As a result, the regular army commanders kept New England militiamen in minor service roles during the Seven Years' War (i.e., "by and large shut out of the fighting"—see above).
  
• Finally, there was Washington. He had had terrible experiences in the French & Indian War: Fort Necessity, Braddock's retreat, and never getting a regular commission, perhaps not in that order. He didn't share New Englanders' high regard for themselves, in part because of aristocratic prejudices (as in his famous complaint about seeing an officer shave an enlisted man) and in part because he knew how dangerous the British military could be and what a long campaign required. Washington also represented the best hope of turning the middle and southern colonies' short-term response to the outbreak of war into sustained commitment to drive the royal army off the continent.
  

That's why Anderson sees Washington taking command of the Continental—formerly New England—Army in July 1775 and then taking control of it through reorganization in later 1775 as a crucial turning-point in the entire conflict.

Newton Prince: civil rights lobbyist

I plan to pay my first visit to the New-York Historical Society today, so it seems appropriate to post about a document there which reveals a bit about lobbying for civil rights in Boston just before the Revolution.

The NYHS owns a leaflet reprinting a letter datelined "Boston, April 20th, 1773," and signed by four men who identify themselves as slaves: Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie. They ask for their liberty, in the same spirit that the province was then demanding political liberties from the Crown. According to their letter, after becoming free those four men planned

to leave the province, which we determine to do as soon as we can, from our joynt labours procure money to transport ourselves to some part of the Coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement.

The printed leaflet was part of a legislative lobbying effort, as shown by the address line printed on it: "For the Representative of the town of". The town name "Thompson" was written in by hand on the NYHS copy. Presumably there was one leaflet prepared for every sympathetic lawmaker.

Who delivered these leaflets on behalf of the four slaves, who had neither the liberty nor the standing to speak for themselves? More than twenty years later, a former member of the Massachusetts legislature's upper house recalled being approached by a free black businessman with a pamphlet. Samuel Dexter, former Council member from Weston, wrote to the Rev Jeremy Belknap on 26 Feb 1795:

I took up a pamphlet which I had not looked into for several years, and found I had noted upon the outside leaf that it was given to me by Mr. Newton Prince, lemon merchant, in the name and at the desire of a number of negroes, then petitioners to the General Court. At the head of these was Foelix Holbrook.

While the petition remained undecided upon, I was called out of the Council Chamber, and very politely presented with the pamphlet by Newton, who, after making his best bow, said that the negroes had been informed that I was against the slave-trade, and was their friend. He had several more to give to particular members of the House of Representatives. Upon my returning into the chamber, I boasted, as I have since, that I was distinguished from all the other members of council by this mark of respect.

What was the outcome of Newton Prince's effort? This Massachusetts legislature voted to prohibit the slave trade from Africa, but did nothing to end slavery within the province. And then the royal governor vetoed the law against importing new slaves, anyway. Slavery did not end in Massachusetts until the high court decided in 1783 that such inequality went against the state constitution (the same basis for the court's 2003 marriage-equality decision).

And what happened to Newton Prince? I'll discuss his past and future in future posts.

Boston's population in 1765

In reading about Revolutionary Boston, I've found it incredibly important to know the scale of the town. And it was still a town, both legally (not a city) and in size. Here are the population figures for Boston in 1765, from the last surviving census before the Revolutionary War:

• houses: 1,676
• families: 2,069
• white males under age sixteen: 4,109
• white females under age sixteen: 4,010
• white males above age sixteen: 2,941
• white females above age sixteen: 3,612
• negroes and mulattoes, male: 510
• negroes and mulattoes, female: 301
• male Indians: 21
• female Indians: 16
• French neutrals under age 16: none
• French neutrals over age 16: none
• TOTAL: 15,520 people

These figures come J. H. Benton, Jr., Early Census Making in Massachusetts, 1643-1765, published in 1905. They probably didn't change much in the decade that followed. The categories for counting might prompt some questions:

• Why the dividing line at age sixteen? The legal age of majority for men was twenty-one; that's when they could vote and make contracts, and when apprenticeships usually ended. But sixteen was when white males had militia duties, and one reason for the census was to tell the government how many potential soldiers lived in each part of the province.
• Why not divide non-whites by age? The militia was again a big factor. Free men of color were supposed to fulfill their public duties in other ways, such as by cleaning and repairing streets. By the 1760s that traditional system had broken down in Boston. As George Quintal, Jr., has documented for Boston National Historic Park, there would also be many men of African and Native American descent in the militia army outside Boston in 1775. But the 1765 census-takers were still using the traditional categorizations.
• What's a "French neutral"? Those were Acadians driven out of eastern Canada. A significant number were living in Maine. The government didn't expect them to serve in the militia, particularly since that militia would be expected to fight Frenchmen (this was only two years after the end of the Seven Years' War, which in turn came less than a decade after King George's War...).

Analyzing the numbers brings up some fairly mind-twisting ways that this colonial society differed from our own.

• Boston had far more children than adults. So did the whole British Empire, and most other societies of the time. Our mental picture of Revolutionary America probably involves groups of men: the Continental Congress, the Boston Tea Party, companies arrayed for battle, ships at sea. But demographically the colonies were more like Disneyland. (I play this up for all it's worth in my contribution to Children in Colonial America, coming this December from NYU Press.)
  
• The town had far more white women than white men because of losses in the wars and at sea. On the other hand, there was an even bigger imbalance of black men to black women, a consequence of the slave trade's preference for young males.
  
• There were more families than houses, and far more adult males or females than families. Households were bigger than what most of us are used to, and extended well beyond the nuclear family.
  
• Though Boston contained only as many people as a small town today, it was still the third largest metropolitan area on the coast of North America. Only Philadelphia and New York were larger.
  
• When the British government stationed 4,000 soldiers in Boston in early 1775, that was more than one soldier for every local male of military age. No wonder it felt like a "garrison town."