Washington’s Hanukkah: An Oral Tradition

In his recent picture book Hanukkah at Valley Forge, Stephen Krensky gives a main source for his story of Gen. George Washington learning about that Jewish festival, and that book in turn cites as its main source a rabbi’s sermon from 1955. Then, as I discussed yesterday, the trail goes cold.

But Rabbi David Hollander isn’t the only person who’s talked or written about Washington meeting a Jewish soldier at Valley Forge. The web has captured several other examples—so many, in fact, that it’s possible to triangulate among those versions to find the details they share, which hint at a common source. I think that internal evidence points to an oral tradition that started sometime in the mid-2oth century and then spread among rabbis and Jewish writers, details changing along the way.

I suspect I. Harold Sharfman, author of Jews on the Frontier (1977) picked up this tradition and researched hard to squeeze the tale into documented facts about Washington. In Joshua Trachtenberg’s history of Jews in Easton, Pennsylvania, he found a family that claimed a visit from the general. By writing his account around the Hart family, Sharfman melded documented facts about their home, their unconfirmable family tradition, and the too-good-to-pass-by tale of a soldier at Valley Forge. In his notes he even suggested a candidate for that Jewish soldier, presumably a name off Continental Army rolls: “That soldier may have been Private Asher Pollock of the Second Rhode Island Battalion.”

Some versions on the web are Sharfman’s account in simplified form, such as this story by Rabbi Dan Grossman from 1998. Ronald Gerson’s newspaper column even states that the soldier was definitely Pvt. Pollock. They almost certainly derive in some fashion from Jews on the Frontier.

However, other versions describe a similar conversation between Gen. Washington and a Jewish private from Poland, even including similar phrases, but differ with Sharfman’s in significant ways. It seems implausible that these other writers would have read Jews on the Frontier and then neglected the specific details that make its account seem credible. Therefore, I think Sharfman’s tale and those others derive from a common ancestor.

All the tales start with Gen. Washington startling a Jewish soldier from Poland by asking why he is crying. The soldier predicts success for the Continental Army. That impresses the general because, he says, the Jewish man descends from the Biblical prophets. Washington asks about the private’s odd candlestick and learns about Hanukkah. Some versions (but not Sharfman’s) end with a motif common in Washington legends: the general makes a surprise return visit after the war.

Versions differ markedly on the name of the private and the date of his meetings with Washington. And none matches Sharfman’s in making sure the story is in accord with easily confirmed historical facts.

For example, at some point Rabbi Yehuda Mandelcorn left an account written in the voice of the private, whom he named as Jeremiah Greenman. That account (which ends, “This is a true story”) says Washington met Greenman at Valley Forge in 1775 and then revisited him as President in 1776. Washington and his army first camped in Valley Forge in 1777-78. Washington became President in 1789.

In 2000 Rabbi Shmuel Choueka told the story without naming the private. He said Washington’s visited the man again “on Broome Street in New York” during Hanukkah in 1778. New York was occupied by the British military from late 1776 to 1783.

Another version also mentions Broome Street, leaving out dates and names, and adds a medal for the soldier because of his actions at “the Battle of Valley Forge” in 1776. There was never fighting at Valley Forge; it was a winter encampment.

Linda Spitzer’s retelling of a version from Time for My Soul, by Annette and Eugene Labovitz (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1987), offers another first-person account, this time in the voice of a soldier named “Jacob Lipinsky.” He receives a “Medal of Honor” from Gen. Washington, and celebrates by dancing the hora. The Medal of Honor was created during the U.S. Civil War, and the hora is a Romanian folk dance popularized in Israeli kibbutzim in the mid-1900s.

In 2005, “chava” told USHistory.org:

I am looking for information regarding catain isaac israel.he was at valley forge and legend has it that his lighting of a chanukah menorah there led to a conversation that encouraged washington not to surrender. i have found that he did exsist and was there but i can fond no official recor of his menorah or the medalion washington suposedly gave him after the war.

So clearly there’s another version circulating linked to the name “Capt. Isaac Israel.”

Someone at the Harbor Unitarian Universalist Church reported finding the story in a book titled Jewish Holidays and Festivals. (It doesn’t appear in the book of that name by Ben M. Edidin, but might be in the one by Isidor Margolis, Sidney L. Markowitz, and John Teppich, or yet another by Deborah Ross.) The Jewish Legends website reports that similar stories appear in Rabbi Dov Brezak’s Chinuch in Turbulent Times (2002) and Zev Roth’s Monsey-Kiryat Sefer Express (2000).

Not all these writers claim that the story, or every detail they describe, is historically accurate. Regardless, the story clearly has meaning for all the people who have heard it and passed it on. That meaning resides in the details that change little from one telling to the next:

• a Polish Jew fleeing oppression and finding it in the U.S. of A.
• the inspirational power of the Hanukkah story
  
• Washington’s respect for and debt to Jewish support
• perhaps an emphasis on the Jewish prophetic tradition
  

Forging a link to Washington has been a common way for Americans—whether individuals, families, or ethnic groups; whether excluded or politically ambitious—to set themselves squarely within our national heritage. Louisa B. Hart was far from the only nineteenth-century figure to report that Washington had honored her ancestors with a visit (see the descendants of Betsy Ross, Sybil Ludington, John Honyman, &c.). The Christian parson Mason Weems made unsubstantiated claims about Washington praying at Valley Forge (as shown in the popular print above) well over a hundred years before this Hanukkah tradition appeared. Telling myths about George Washington is as American as Washington himself.

I think the Valley Forge Hanukkah tales started to circulate in the 1900s because they reflect the experiences of recent American Jews, not those of the eighteenth century or even Louisa Hart’s time. Polish Jews didn’t seek refuge in America in large numbers until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hanukkah wasn’t that big a deal in Judaism until twentieth-century American Jews developed a gift-giving holiday to match Christmas. The tale of Hanukkah at Valley Forge takes familiar aspects of recent American Judaism—Polish refugee, menorah—and plants them at the nation’s founding. No wonder the story has spread so widely.

TOMORROW: Does a factual gloss make fiction more appealing?

The Legend of Hanukkah at Easton

Yesterday I started to examine the historical basis for Stephen Krensky’s recent picture book, Hanukkah at Valley Forge. Of the two sources he cites, one merely states that at an uncertain time George Washington visited the family of Michael Hart in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Krensky’s main source for his Valley Forge tale is therefore I. Harold Sharfman’s Jews on the Frontier (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1977). That book tells the story in detail on pages 65-7. In this posting I’ll quote all its factual statements about the episode along with my commentary.

On December 21, 1778,...General Washington was en route from Valley Forge to an army base in Middlebrook, New Jersey, pausing that day at Easton by the forks of the Delaware, 30 miles north of the capital. His itinerary allowed for luncheon.

Sharfman cites the Fitzgerald edition of Washington’s writings for his itinerary. However, the George Washington Papers online at the Library of Congress report, “Washington reached Middlebrook on December 11.” He issued general orders from that camp on 21 December. “Washington left Middlebrook on December 22, and arrived at Philadelphia that same day.” Looking at a map shows that Easton is many miles off the route from Valley Forge to Middlebrook, or from Middlebrook to Philadelphia. Therefore, it’s impossible for this account’s date to be correct, and unlikely for Washington to have traveled through Easton at all that busy month.

The word “luncheon” would be an anachronism for the eighteenth century. (Neither it nor “lunch” appears in the online edition of Washington’s writings.) In the 1700s, Americans ate “dinner” in the middle of the day and “supper” in the evening. Like other authors before him, Sharfman picked up that word from Louisa B. Hart’s nineteenth-century recollection, and it reflects how she didn’t write from firsthand knowledge.

He [Washington] was welcomed at the home of Corporal Michael Hart, the peacetime Indian trader, now agent of David Franks, who was supplying British prisoners held nearby.

Hart’s house was a two-story stone building on the southeast corner of the public square, directly opposite the courthouse. His general store was on the first floor, his residence on the second. Michael Hart’s wife, Leah, prepared a kosher meal, probably complete with latkes (pancakes) in honor of the Hanukah festival, it being the sixth day of the holiday. Stepdaughter Louisa Hart would proudly record in her diary...

Sharfman then quotes the same two sentences from Louisa B. Hart that appear in Isaac Markens’s The Hebrews in America and other sources I cited yesterday. As I discussed then, it’s not clear to me that Louisa wrote about this event in a diary, she certainly couldn’t have recorded it at the time, and the passage doesn’t seem to mention Hanukkah.

Jews on the Frontier refers to Louisa Hart as Leah Hart’s “stepdaughter” because Leah died, Michael remarried, and Louisa was born to his next wife. Krensky picked up that word in Hanukkah at Valley Forge but erroneously refers to Louisa as Michael Hart’s stepdaughter. As shown by their shared surname, she was his daughter.

One of Sharfman’s sources is Consider the Years: The Story of the Jewish Community at Easton, 1752-1942, by Joshua Trachtenberg, which says that Michael Hart’s father came from Holland. John Adams went through Easton in January 1777 and told his wife Abigail, “Here are some Dutch Jews.” Like most Jews in America at that time, the Harts were culturally Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi, from Eastern Europe. This is significant because latkes are an Ashkenazi dish; even the word is of Slavic origin. A 2001 article in the Jewish Journal stated, “among Sephardic Jews, potato latkes are about as common as Easter eggs.”

Nonetheless, Sharfman slides from saying the meal was “probably complete with latkes” above to stating that the Michael Hart spoke of the dish:

Michael wished the general well in his future campaigns, expressing the hope that he, like the Maccabeans of old, would hammer and level the enemy as symbolized in the flattened pancakes enjoyed on the holiday. He also told of the custom of distributing coins to children to play games of chance. . . .

The commander-in-chief presented the three young Hart sons, the eldest but four years old, with silver coins. These became treasured mementos to the Harts, even as the chair occupied by George Washington became an honored piece of furniture.

The detail of Washington giving coins to the Hart boys appears in Consider the Years, but as far as I can tell the book doesn’t link them to Hanukkah or the tradition of gelt. (I’m working from Google Books’s “snippet views” there.) The chair is mentioned in Morais’s The Jews of Philadelphia, quoted yesterday. I haven’t found any source that says those artifacts still exist; it would be interesting to know if they can be dated to the 1770s.

General Washington told the Harts how the Hanukah festival had inspired him during the previous year, when encamped at Valley forge morale had sunk to its lowest ebb. . . . It was at that period of gloom and despair that a young Jewish private tendered the General a ray of hope.

The soldier had emigrated from Poland, where he and his people suffered misery and degradation, to the new strange America. . . .

Again, very few, if any, Jews from Eastern Europe are documented in America during the Revolution.

It was the night of December 25, 1777. Christmas Day had been observed glumly and after eating their rations the men were bedded down for the night—all except the Jew. In a corner of the drafty wooden shack that served as their barracks, as quietly as possible, he lit his menorah...

It was the night of the 25th day of Kislev on his Hebrew calendar, the first night of Hanukah.

Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah did indeed fall on the same date in 1777.

Suddenly a hand touched his shoulder and a voice asked, “Why do you cry, son?”

Looking up, the soldier saw General Washington himself making the rounds that evening—for it was also Christmas—an aide in the background.

“Actually, I am not crying,” the soldier replied. “I’m praying with tears for your victory.”

“And what is this strange lamp?” asked his commander.

“This is my Hanukah lamp,” and the young man related briefly the ancient story—how long ago a small bedraggled but patriotic army routed a huge and powerful foe.

“You are a Jew, a son of the Prophets and you say we will be victorious?” the general declared, his eyes fixed on the flickering flames of the menorah.

“Yes,” the soldier unhesitatingly replied. “The God of Israel who helped the Maccabeans will help to build here a land of freedom for the oppressed.”

To the Harts, General Washington recalled on his luncheon visit when Hanukah was again celebrated, that the warmth of the glowing candlelight and the words of optimism and courage on that darkest night at Valley Forge uplifted him and gave him the fortitude to fight against all odds for victory.

Sharfman’s account states the exact words of the soldier and Washington. What’s his source for such detail? The notes in Jews on the Frontier say:

This story appeared in a sermon by Rabbi David Hollander of Mount Eden Synagogue, Bronx, New York, in the Tercentenary Year 1955. [A 2003 photo of Rabbi Hollander appears above.] He gave as its source the Hebrew/Israel publication, Dvir, Tel Aviv, 1954, but I have not been able to locate either that episode or its source. It is ascribed to “tradition.”

In other words, Krensky’s main source acknowledged that there’s no contemporary source for its tale of Washington and Hanukkah, or anything close to it. We have a “tradition,” a publication that can’t be found, and a sermon preached over 150 years after the events it described. Sharfman’s historical statements don’t match the record of Washington’s activities, nor the likely details of the Harts’ culture.

TOMORROW: Competing Versions of the Same Legend
ADDENDUM: Considering Consider the Years

The Legend of Hanukkah at Valley Forge

Last year Dutton published a picture book titled Hanukkah at Valley Forge, by Lexington author Stephen Krensky and illustrator Greg Harlin. It tells the story of the Maccabees’ rebellion against the Roman Empire alongside a story of George Washington hearing that tale in the winter of 1777-78, as his own rebellion was at a difficult point. The book has won the 2007 Sydney Taylor Book Award in the Younger Readers category from the Association of Jewish Libraries.

I heard Krensky speak about this book at the Foundation for Children's Books before its publication. He acknowledged that the historical documentation for the tale is iffy, but thought it was too good to ignore.

In the back of the book itself, Krensky summarized the historical basis for his Valley Forge tale with this note:

This story of George Washington and Hanukkah is based on facts, but the tale itself must be taken on faith. It is known that in December 1778, Washington had lunch at the home of Michael Hart, a Jewish merchant in Easton, Pennsylvania (cited in Jacob Rader Marcus’s United States Jewry 1776-1985). It was in the middle of Hanukkah, and when Hart began to explain the holiday to the general, Washington replied that he knew it already. He then told the merchant and his family of meeting the Polish soldier at Valley Forge the year before. It was Hart's stepdaughter Louisa who reportedly committed the story to her diary (which was later recounted in Rabbi I. Harold Sharfman’s Jews on the Frontier).

I’ve looked up both of those sources, and think the evidence for this story is even weaker than Krensky’s note acknowledges.

J. R. Marcus’s United States Jewry is a four-volume history published by Wayne State University Press in 1989. The first volume mentions the Hart family on page 562:

Van Buren had a number of Jewish admirers, among them Samuel Hart, of Philadelphia, brother of the well-known communal worker Louisa B. Hart; their father, Michael Hart, the Easton pioneer, had once entertained Washington as he passed through town.

Marcus doesn’t state that “in December 1778, Washington had lunch at the home of Michael Hart,” as Krensky implies. United States Jewry attaches no date to the general’s encounter with the Hart family. In that regard Marcus follows his source for the remark about Washington: “A Memoir of Louisa B. Hart with Extracts from the Diary and Letters,” published in the weekly newspaper The Jewish Record, 11 Oct 1878–3 Jan 1879.

And is that source reliable? A little research reveals that Louisa Hart never saw George Washington at her father’s house. She was born in 1803 to Michael Hart’s second wife, and Washington died in 1799. Louisa Hart therefore relied on secondhand information for whatever she wrote about Washington.

I haven’t seen the original publication of Hart’s writings, which came four years after her death, but I’ve gotten as close as Isaac Markens’s The Hebrews in America, published in 1888. It says:

It was at his [Michael Hart’s] house that Washington accepted an invitation to lunch while tarrying for a few hours in the town. The late Miss Louisa B. Hart, his daughter, thus proudly records the event in her diary: “Let it be remembered that Michael Hart was a Jew, practically, pious, a Jew reverencing and strictly observant of the Sabbath and Festivals; dietary laws were also adhered to, although he was compelled to be his own Shochet. Mark well that he, Washington, the then honored as first in peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, even during a short sojourn became for the hour the guest of the worthy Jew.”

Six years later, Henry S. Morais wrote in The Jews of Philadelphia:

Of Michael Hart, the father, it is said that on a certain occasion Washington lunched with him. The fact is thus recorded in Miss Louisa B. Hart’s “Diary”: [Morais quotes the same passage with slight differences in punctuation and a definition of Shochet as “(he who slaughters animals for Jews’ food).”] . . . Miss Hart afterwards preserved, with care, the chair then occupied by Washington at her father’s house, and the Rev. Dr. Morais [presumably Sabato Morais (1823-1897), and most likely a relative of the author] remembers distinctly having seen this at the lady’s residence.

The same two sentences by Louisa B. Hart were also quoted in Simon Wolf’s American Jew as a Patriot, Soldier, and Citizen, published in 1895. (All these texts are available through Google Book.)

None of these four historians—Marcus, Markens, Morais, and Wolf—quoted Hart on any other detail about the Washington visit, such as the year of the event and whether it coincided with Hanukkah. That strongly implies that Hart didn’t record any information of that sort. Washington traveled through Pennsylvania many times in his life, not just in 1778, so we mustn’t assume.

Citing Hart’s “diary” carries the implication that she recorded her family’s encounter with Washington shortly after it happened, and for a private audience rather than the public. But Hart wrote decades later. And it seems odd to see “Let it be remembered” and “Mark well” in a private diary; those are phrases addressed to an audience. Hart’s writings were titled “Extracts from the Diary and Letters,” and Morais put quotes around the word “Diary” to signal it was an abbreviation for that long title. I suspect that the quoted passage comes from one of Hart’s letters or prepared talks, and would have to be evaluated in that context. In any event, it has nothing to say about Valley Forge or Hanukkah, so for the main source we must look elsewhere.

TOMORROW: Examining Krensky’s other cited source, Jews on the Frontier.

Tasteless Dirty Joke from 231 Years Ago

On Friday I quoted Al Young’s message on how the British forces on Long Island became notorious for raping young women—at least notorious among Americans. That reputation may have started soon after they landed in the region in the fall of 1776, judging by their behavior and attitude toward the local citizens. Here’s part of a letter from Francis Rawdon, Lord Hastings, then a captain among the British army’s Engineers, to his uncle back in Britain:

The fair nymphs of this isle are in wonderful tribulation, as the fresh meat our men have got here have made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished, and they are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation, and of consequence we have the most entertaining courts-martial every day. . . . A girl of this island made a complaint the other day to Lord Percy of her being deflowered, as she said, by some grenadiers. Lord Percy asked her how she knew them to be grenadiers, as it happened in the dark. “Oh, good God,” cried she, “they could be nothing else, and if your Lordship will examine I am sure you will find it so.”

To get the joke, we must recall that grenadiers were on average larger than regular soldiers. And then of course we must look very serious because jokes of this sort are not funny. The quotation comes from The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776, by John J. Gallagher. The picture comes from NNDB.com’s entry for Lord Hastings.

NEHGS Hosts African American Genealogy Seminar

The New England Historic Geneaological Society is hosting an African American Genealogical Research Seminar next Saturday, 10 Feb 2007, at its headquarters in Boston. The event announcement says:

This day-long seminar will be useful for those just getting started with their African American family research as well as for those who have been pursuing their research for quite some time. In addition to four substantive lectures the seminar includes two hours for personal research assisted by NEHGS staff genealogists in the renowned library.

Speakers will cover:

• Getting Started with 20th-Century Resources
• Discovering Slave Ancestors, with blogger Kenyatta D. Berry
  
• Researching African Americans in Pre-Civil War New England
• African American Manuscript Resources at the NEHGS

The event runs from 8:45 AM to 5:00 PM, with a break for people to find lunch. The cost is $75. A PDF registration form can be downloaded here.

Sarah Bishop and Hair

I was going to stay away from the topic of hair for a long while. Really, I was. But as I noodled about the story of hermitess Sarah Bishop yesterday, I couldn’t help noticing how the cover artists for Scott O’Dell’s young adult novel about her had depicted her tresses.


The hardcover edition from Houghton Mifflin to the left is from 1980.

I think the cover at right is the first mass-market paperback edition, from the early 1980s.

And below is a detail of the paperback edition on the market since 1988.In each case, young Sarah wears her hair in a way fashionable at the time that cover was published, but with no resemblance to Revolutionary styles. The hardcover artist at least popped a cap on her head—all respectable British-American women and girls wore caps in public in the 1700s. And when that hairstyle was the norm, perhaps only people attuned to changing fashion would have noticed something amiss. But from our perspective twenty-seven years later, the cap and those Breck Girl bangs make Sarah Bishop look like a surly young Holiday Inn waitress from 1980.

If you’ll be reenacting at Battle Road this April, the folks at the Hive can help ensure this doesn’t happen to you.

Sarah Bishop: finding the context

Yesterday’s posting about Sarah Bishop, the “Hermitess of West Mountain,” prompted some good questions from Boston 1775 readers. I’d noted that the earliest account of her life was published while Bishop was still living in a cave (pictured at right) near the Connecticut-New York border, and it says nothing about her suffering from British attacks during the Revolutionary War. Instead, it says, “she always discovered an unusual antipathy to men.” Thirty years after her death, however, being “cruelly treated by a British officer” or privateers became the standard explanation for Bishop’s reclusive lifestyle.

slskenyon wrote:

I think there are other possible reasons why this "contemporary" account should be "read" within its own time. I think you will be hard-pressed to find any account anywhere--even in private diary entries--of someone having experienced a rape of any kind.

And Alfred F . Young wrote in an email:

Long Island was overrun with British soldiers who had an established high level of rapes. She was (by tradition) a beautiful woman (with high expectations of landing a good catch). If she was raped and especially if she bore a child, she would have been disgraced. . . . She could have been traumatized and fled far away from the British and men (North Salem would do) and spent her life in a cave.

Al’s book Masquerade, about Deborah Sampson Gannett, discusses cases of young women using men’s clothes to flee such disgrace.

I assayed the context of the 1804 description of Bishop by looking up the word “rape” in American newspapers that year. And the first thing that search revealed was that “rape” is also a crop, part of the word “grape,” and close enough to a lot of other words and phrases (like “rope” and “escape”) to confuse the OCR program that created the digital database.

So I sampled the 900+ results—checking about 20-25% of the entries. Most were false positives, but several did refer to the violent crime.

• On 3 Jan, The Farmer’s Cabinet of Middlebury, Vermont, reported the arrest of Samuel Baker Bump for having “committed a rape on the body of a female child, of the age of four or five years, and daughter of Amos Coggswell of...Coventry.”
• The next day, the Portsmouth Weekly Wanderer described a father in Machias, Maine, setting fire to the jail to kill a young man who had “attempted rape on a young lady of 15 years of age.”
• The New York Daily Advertiser for 14 April described the conviction of a Kentuckian named Richard Tomlinson “for a rape, committed on his own niece.” That account was later picked up in the New Hampshire Gazette.
• In July, several Massachusetts newspapers reported on the capture of “the villain who committed the rape and murder on the body of Miss Sally Tolbot, of Canton.”
• The 23 Aug Otsego Herald ran what looks like a bad joke from Dublin about a “ravished fair one” and “a rape.” On 15 Nov, the same paper ran a story from North Carolina about the conviction of a man “for attempting to commit a rape on the wife of Nathaniel Morgan.”
• Finally, by looking up “ravish” I found that on 1 May The Hive of Northampton reported about the arraignment of soldier Micah Welch for “an attempt to ravish a female child under the age of nine years.”

Newspaper printers of 1804 don’t appear to have shied away from the word “rape” or mentions of that crime. There are some possible signs of printers shielding rape victims from the public eye: in the only account that names the victim, that woman is dead. However, four other articles offer enough detail for people to identify the victim (e.g., the four- or five-year-old daughter of Amos Coggswell of Coventry).

Legal authorities sometimes trod delicately by casting some rapes as attempted rapes. I’ve read that prosecutors or juries could decide on this charge because of the difficulty of proving the harsher crime and/or a wish to avoid punishing the rapist with death. Perhaps printers used the same sidestep to shield a victim from stigma. But clearly some of these newspapers said that rapes had occurred. And at least in these published accounts (we don’t know what didn’t make the newspapers), the newspapers reflect sympathy rather than disgrace for the victim.

In fact, printers seem to have been more squeamish about the word “rape” in 1839, the date of the account of Sarah Bishop that said she was “cruelly used.” Even though the U.S. had more and longer newspapers by then, the same digital database kicks out only 110 appearances of the word “rape” that year (only a few having anything to do with the crime).

So it looks like the 1804 writer could have reported that Sarah Bishop had been raped during the Revolutionary War, or hinted at some crime or mistreatment as the 1839 writer delicately did. Indeed, with many Americans in 1804 still remembering the years of warfare around New York, such an account would have cast Bishop as the victim of a shared national enemy. But the contemporary writer didn’t do so. Instead, he or she connected Bishop’s odd behavior to antipathies she had exhibited from an early age.

Perhaps the later writer had more information about Bishop, and felt comfortable hinting at it long after her death. But I think it’s also possible that writer was offering an explanation that made more sense in the context of 1839.

Sarah Bishop: cave-dwelling recluse

By way of the 11th Carnival of Bad History, of all things, I learned about Walking the Berkshires’s posting on Sarah Bishop, the Hermit of West Mountain straddling Ridgefield, Connecticut, and North Salem, New York.

Bishop was turned into a romantic figure by writers in her own time and since (including Newbery-winning novelist Scott O’Dell, in the book at right). In 1839, the New England Gazetteer reported:

She lived on Long Island at the time of the Revolutionary war. Her father’s house was burned by the British, and she was cruelly treated by a British officer. She then left society and wandered among the mountains near this part of the state: she found a kind of cave near Ridgefield, where she resided till about the time of her death, which took place in 1810.

Later accounts say Bishop was forced to serve the crew aboard a British privateer. Some websites list her among female pirates. Linda Grant DePauw’s Seafaring Women interpreted this account more realistically to present Bishop as a victim of rape and, possibly, post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But when did that explanation of her behavior arise? The Democrat of Boston published an essay about Bishop, “The Hermitess of North Salem,” on 22 Sept 1804, crediting a Poughkeepsie newspaper as the source. That article suggested a different history for her reclusiveness:

Sarah Bishop, (for this was the name of this Hermitess) is a person of about fifty years of age. About thirty years ago [i.e., 1774] she was a young lady of considerable beauty, a competent share of mental endowments, and education; She was possessed of a handsome fortune, but she was of a tender of delicate constitution, and enjoyed but a low degree of health; and could hardly be comfortable without constant recourse to medicine, and careful attendance; and added to this, she always discovered an unusual antipathy to men; and was often heard to say that she had no dread of any animal on earth but man. Disgusted with them, and consequently with the world, about twenty-three years ago [i.e., about 1781], she withdrew herself from all human society...

This early account makes no mention of wartime trauma or years on a British ship. Instead, it implies that Bishop’s “delicate constitution,” “low degree of health,” and “constant recourse to medicine” appeared before or early in the Revolutionary War—and she always showed an “unusual antipathy to men.”

Of course it’s possible that Bishop developed her “unusual antipathy” because of trauma during the war, and the Poughkeepsie writer either didn’t know about that event or chose to keep it secret. But we humans have a tendency to seek a reason for people’s mental or emotional difficulties—such as finding an event to explain why Bishop came to dread men so much. (The case of James Otis, Jr., offers another example.) But we also know that such behavior can arise from brain chemistry, not from an outside cause. So there may be more—or less—to the story of Sarah Bishop to discover.

Did She or Didn't She? Only Her Hairdresser Knew

What I originally announced as Bad Hair Week has turned into Bad Hair Month at Boston 1775, with intermittent postings about genteel people wearing wigs, not wearing wigs, and otherwise getting the most out of their hair. Today I bring this series to a close with remarks about the secret side of hairdressers.

No, not whether women dyed their hair, as in the old Miss Clairol ads. This posting involves extramarital affairs, so it might be inappropriate for the kids.

(Hello, kids! I thought that would get your attention.)

The elaborate hairstyles that the rich wore in the 1700s often required careful preparation, “30 to 40 minutes every day” for gentlemen, potentially longer for ladies before a big occasion. That meant many wealthy husbands were paying hairdressers to spend hours in close, private contact with their wives—and did that lead to anything else?

At least in gossip from London, women did have affairs with men who dressed their hair. On 13 Aug 1771, for example, the Essex Gazette reprinted gossip from London about one “Admiral R——y” having papers served on his wife for divorce. According to the scandal sheets:

One of the Gentlemen, with whom a certain Admiral’s Lady was too intimate, we hear, is Capt. A——y. A favourite footman is also talked of: the Lady, it seems, had put him out of livery, & been at the expence of his being taught to dress hair, on purpose to attend her on her voyage.

The notion that gentlemen should worry about their wives’ hairdressers also showed up in popular prints of the era. And here I rely on the online collection of satirical mezzotints from London prepared by John Hart at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon—well worth a browse.

“A Hint to Married Men” (1794), also issued as “Lady Friz at Her Toilet,” shows a lady enjoying the close attention of a French hairdresser—obviously something for married men to worry about. “A Hint to the Husbands, or the Dresser, properly Dressed” (1777, above) shows an enraged husband taking action against his wife’s beautician. And for genteel fathers, “The Boarding-School Hair-Dresser” (1786) serves up the eighteenth century’s visual symbolism for sex: the helpful hairdresser straddles the leg of the young lady.

William Lang: hairdresser of Salem

While looking up something else in the early American newspaper database, I kept running across the advertisement of an Essex County hairdresser named William Lang. I thought his words offered a useful snapshot of how he and his customers thought about their wigs and hair. This notice ran in the Essex Gazette throughout 1773:

William Lang
Wig-Maker and Hair-Dresser,

Hereby informs the Public that he has hired a Person from EUROPE, by whose Assistance he is now enabled, in the several Branches of his Business, to serve his good Customers, and all others, in the most genteel and polite Tastes that are at present in fashion in England and America.

-----In Particular, WIGS made in any Mode whatever, such as may grace and become the most important Heads, whether those of Judges, Divines [i.e., clergymen], Lawyers or Physicians; together with all those of an inferior Kind, so as exactly to suit their respective Occupations and Inclinations.

-----HAIR DRESSING, for Ladies and Gentlemen, performed in the most elegant and newest Taste.-----Ladies, in a particular Manner, shall be attended to, in the nice, easy, genteel and polite Construction of ROLLS, such as may tend to raise their Heads to any Pitch they desire,----also French Curls, made in the neatest Manner.

He gives Cash for Hair.

Here’s more about the different styles of wigs for different professions (as opposed to those of us of the “inferior kind”). And here’s a posting about ladies’ head-raising rolls.

The Constitution and the Commander-in-Chief

People are paying a lot more attention these days to how the U.S. Constitution defines (and doesn’t define) the military authority of the President and Congress. Members of the Bush-Cheney administration have cited the President’s role as “commander-in-chief” as if that conveyed the power to unilaterally decide anything vaguely military, including (at latest count) overseas deployments, surveillance of anti-war activists in the U.S. of A., trials of people who are specifically not classified as prisoners of war, &c.

In today’s New York Times Assistant Editor and lawyer Adam Cohen uses the “Editorial Observer” column to look at what the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions really say. Here’s an extract about the document’s original context and early interpretation:

The Constitution’s provision that the president is the commander in chief clearly puts him at the top of the military chain of command. Congress would be overstepping if, for example, it passed a law requiring generals in the field to report directly to the speaker of the House.

But the Constitution also gives Congress an array of war powers, including the power to “declare war,” “raise and support armies” and “make rules concerning captures on land and water.” By “declare war,” the Constitution’s framers did not mean merely firing off a starting gun. In the 18th century, war declarations were often limited in scope — European powers might fight a naval battle in the Americas, for example, but not battle on their own continent. In giving Congress the power to declare war, the Constitution gives it authority to make decisions about a war’s scope and duration.

The Founders, including James Madison, who is often called “the father of the Constitution,” fully expected Congress to use these powers to rein in the commander in chief. “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it,” Madison cautioned. “It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.”

In the early days of the republic, the Supreme Court made clear that Congress could limit the president’s war powers — notably in the Flying Fish case. In 1799, during the “Quasi War,” the undeclared sea war between the United States and France, Congress authorized President John Adams to clamp down on trade between the two nations by stopping ships headed to French ports. But Adams went further, ordering commanders to stop ships that were sailing to or from a French port.

When the Flying Fish was seized while sailing from a French port — something Congress had not authorized — the ship’s owner sued. The Supreme Court decided in his favor, ruling that the president had no right to issue the order he did. John Marshall, the nation’s greatest chief justice [shown above], declared that even in a time of hostilities, a president’s decision to act militarily beyond what Congress had authorized was “unlawful.”

I think anyone reading Gen. George Washington’s wartime correspondence would notice how much he deferred to Congress on major decisions. He advised that legislature strongly, clearly advocating for certain decisions and almost begging for others, but he didn’t view his appointment as commander-in-chief to mean that he was the ultimate decision-maker and was careful to avoid implying he was. He worked for Congress, which in turn worked for the people of the thirteen states.

Later Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention and served as the first President under its new federal structure. For his remarks on the limits of Presidential powers, see this posting.

Why Israel Putnam?

Someone using the handle “richmond va” has sent in this question:

I’d like to ask if you could tell me why a Petersburg, Va. foundry in the early 1800’s would create a number of andirons in the likeness of Israel Putnam, rather than someone else more famous like G Washington. Thanks

Questioning the fame of Israel Putnam (1718-1790) shows that you’re not from Connecticut. I’m not, either, so I can answer the question.

In the early republic, Gen. Putnam was to Connecticut what Stonewall Jackson was to the Old Dominion after Reconstruction, except that the state didn’t also have a Robert E. Lee to share the attention. Connecticut’s modern household-name Revolutionary heroes hadn’t yet been discovered: Nathan Hale was still nothing more than an agent caught and hanged on his first mission, and the legend of Sybil Ludington was unknown outside her immediate family (if it was known there).

Putnam had been famous before the Revolution began because of his personal bravery, both in fighting against French and Indians and in bagging a wolf on his farm. Private soldiers also seem to have remained fond of “Old Put,” who could never act as aloofly as Washington. (He was also popular with a small coterie of British officers he had befriended during the earlier wars.) As a result, Connecticut and areas settled by folks from that state provided a strong market for Putnam memorabilia. The Petersburg foundry might also have made souvenirs of Washington and other Revolutionary heroes, of course.

Putnam’s actual record during the Revolutionary War never matched those early expectations. In the early 1800s there was an ongoing and sometimes vituperative argument over whether he or Col. William Prescott was in command at Bunker Hill. Now historians agree that Putnam spent most of his time riding around behind the lines unsuccessfully urging more provincial troops to join the fray.

Putnam didn’t have the strategic sense to match his personal bravery. He was forced into retreat at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, and abandoned Fort Clinton and Fort Montgomery to the British in 1777. Washington then assigned him to recruiting duty and later to regional commands. In 1779, Putnam suffered a bad stroke and had to retire to his farm.

Despite that record, early U.S. historians treated Putnam very well, listing him among the Continental Army’s most important commanders. Col. David Humphreys, a former aide (who was also from Connecticut), wrote a laudatory biography of the general in 1818. The general’s hasty retreat from British troops in Greenwich was turned (with a little massaging of the facts) into a legend. Even now, admirers and descendants of “Old Put” can be fervently loyal.

New England Style at Old South in February 2007

In the spirit of former congregant Anna Green Winslow, Old South Meeting-House has invited “fashionistas everywhere” to a series of midday presentations each Thursday in February 2007. “Fashion Conscious: A History of New England Style” will explore evolution in styles from the 1600s through the 1900s: how fabrics were acquired, how styles changed, international influences, and personal histories. Here’s the line-up.

1 Feb: Comfort and Style: 17th & 18th Century Fabrics
From a simple shift to an elegant open gown, textiles were a valued commodity in the colonial era. In an illustrated lecture, Diane Fagan Affleck, Senior Research Associate at the American Textile History Museum, discusses the complex means by which fabrics were acquired and the myriad styles and designs available to American colonists.

8 Feb: A Social History of Victorian Costume, by textile and costume historian Lynne Bassett

15 Feb: When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear, by Prof. Patricia Campbell Warner (book-signing to follow)

22 Feb: Needles and Pens: The Sewing Diaries of Four American Women, 1883-1920, by Karen Herbaugh, Curator at the American Textile History Museum

I’ve given short shrift to the presentations past the eighteenth century, but you can find longer descriptions of each event at the Freedom Trail Events page.

All lectures run 12:15 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Thursdays. The cost for each is $5 adults, $4 students/seniors, free for members. Old South Meeting House is located at 310 Washington Street in downtown Boston, near the Downtown Crossing and other T stops. For more information, call 617-482-6439.

Big Hair for Revolutionary Ladies

Last spring I quoted some letters of young Anna Green Winslow on Boston fashions in the early 1770s. In particular, she described her “heddus roll”: a combination of “a red Cow Tail,” coarse horsehair, and a little blond human hair, “all carded together and twisted up” to create padding for her own hair to be combed up and over.

Fashionable women didn’t replace their natural hair with wigs, as many men still did, but augmented their hair with such padding or even wire frames of the sort Lucy Knox wore. The goal was to have one’s hair built up into an impressive tower. In Anna’s case, her aunt found that the distance from her hairline to the top of her cap was one inch more than from her hairline to her chin. In the published edition of Anna’s letters (called a “diary,” so don’t be confused), editor Alice Morse Earle reported that a fashionable roll might weigh 14 ounces.

Earle also added this remark:

That same year the Boston Gazette had a laughable account of an accident to a young woman on Boston streets. She was knocked down by a runaway, and her headdress received the most serious damage. . . .

That anecdote was in turn picked up by other authors, as in Early American Costume, by Edward Warwick and Henry C. Pitz (1929).

However, I think Earle was misled by the newspaper. The story she described appeared in the Boston Gazette for 19 Aug 1771, but it looks like printers Edes and Gill had picked it up from the Pennsylvania Gazette of 8 August. Or perhaps from a British newspaper, because the Philadelphia printers had reported that the incident happened “in High Holborn,” a major street in London. It was common for newspaper printers to reprint each other’s material word for word, but usually they were more careful about saying where each story originated. Other New England printers who picked up the tale from the Boston Gazette assumed, like Earle, that it had happened in Boston.

Here’s the verbatim report from the Pennsylvania paper:

Some young man having tied an old broken chair to the tail of a large dog, turned him out into the street; away he run with great swiftness, and in his way the chair catched hold of the gown of a very genteel dressed woman, and threw her down with great force; the dog being very strong, and the chair holding in her gown, he drawed her a little way along the pavement, and bruised her in several places.

But this was not the worst of the scene; the Lady having her hair dressed in the modern perpendicular taste, the violence of the fall shook down this temporary monument to the very foundation, and great was the fall!

The materials with which it was erected were as follows: A piece of black stocking stuffed with black wool, and made proportionable to the manner in which the hair was dressed; and on the outside was hair very ingeniously worked into the stocking; upon this surprising piece of workmanship was frizzed the Lady’s own hair, in order to raise the edifice.

She being disentangled, got up, and complained of being hurt a little, but took no notice of her piece of ornament for the head, which some boys had got hold of, kicking about the street as a foot-ball.

When the Boston Gazette passed on the tale to its readers, the printers changed the black stocking to “black knit breeches,” which hardly shows a concern for journalistic accuracy. I’m not 100% sure this happened anyway, even in London. It has all the hallmarks of an urban legend of the sort Snopes.com tracks, a story too good to verify. Ladies’ towering hair styles made easy targets for caricatures and moral lessons.

Lucy Knox: elaborately coiffed hostess

On 7 July 1787, the Rev. Dr. Manasseh Cutler (shown at right in later life) wrote in his journal about a dinner party in New York:

Dined with General [Henry] Knox, introduced to his lady and a French nobleman, Marquis Lotbinière. Several other gentlemen dined with us. Our dinner was served in high style, much in the French taste.

Mrs. Knox is very gross [i.e., fat], but her manners are easy and agreeable. She is sociable, and would be agreeable, were it not for her affected singularity in dressing her hair. She seems to mimic the military style, which to me is very disgusting in a female.

Her hair in front is craped at least a foot high, much in the form of a churn bottom upward, and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form, covered with black gauze, which hangs in streamers down to her back. Her hair behind is a large braid, and confined with a monstrous crooked comb.

Apparently when Dr. Cutler said Lucy Knox’s hair appeared “to mimic the military style,” he meant it ended up looking like a grenadier’s cap. To “crape” hair was the curl it tightly, and it was standard treatment for men as well as women in the late eighteenth century. It added more body—apparently a lot more body.

There was no question her hair was not the only thing big about Lucy Knox at this time. We think of Henry Knox as fat, but in 1788 Abigail Smith, daughter of Abigail and John Adams, told her mother about the general’s wife:

her size is enormous; I am frightened when I look at her; I verily believe that her waist is as large as three of yours at least. The general is not half so fat as he was.

But being heavy doesn’t seem to have affected Lucy’s longevity. She lived until 1824, outliving her husband and most of their money, and died at the age of 68.

The Myth of the Quilt Code

Yesterday the New York Times front page reported on historians’ dismay at the myth that patchwork quilts were used to guide escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad. In particular, quilt designs have been incorporated into a monument to Frederick Douglass in Central Park (Algernon Miller’s floor design shown at left). Experts in the history of slavery are pushing back, and the city is rethinking the plaques originally intended to explain those patchwork designs as part of the “quilt code.”

The article quotes artist Miller as saying, “No matter what anyone has to say, they weren’t there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret.” Of course, he wasn’t there, either. The crucial fact is that no person who was there escaping from slavery or helping others to escape is documented as ever saying a word about a quilt code.

Nor is there any example of an antebellum quilt that fits the system. The different “quilt codes” that a handful of people have described based on family oral traditions are inconsistent with each other, with the historical realities of how Americans escaped from slavery, and with the history of quilting.

This topic has little to do with Revolutionary New England, but I was involved in the online discussions which prompted the Times article. The first began in October 2005, when Prof. Donovan Conley of the UNLV Department of Communication Studies contacted H-Amstdy (an email list on American Studies), and thence H-Slavery (on the history of slavery), with this request:

I have a student working on a masters project about the communicational and political uses of quilts throughout the underground railroad. He’s discovering an inherent problem with the project: the lack of primary research materials.

Several members of the H-Slavery list were familiar with the “quilt code” hypothesis from the 1999 book Hidden in Plain View, by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobar, and a private Underground Railroad Quilt Code Museum in Atlanta. Discussion followed for three days, with over a dozen people writing in. Several members of the H-Slavery list pointed Conley to Leigh Fellner’s website thoroughly debunking the myth of quilts and the Underground Railroad.

Prof. David Blight, Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, summed up the overwhelming consensus of the group this way:

The reason your student is not finding primary material on quilting in the Underground Railroad is because in all likelihood there isn’t any. This is “myth” of the softest kind that serves the needs of the present for people who prefer their history as lore and little else. . . .

The quilt story...will survive and thrive as long as it serves real needs in the desires many people have from history—to convert tragedy into something triumphal, suffering into progress, complexity into curiosity, nitty gritty social and political history into material culture we can touch and see.

Conley’s student proceeded with his project, inserting (with some inaccuracies) quotations and summaries of the H-Slavery discussion into his thesis—which still rested on the assumption that the “quilt code” is fact. UNLV awarded a master’s degree. News of that prompted a new round of discussions on H-Slavery last month, which in turn caught the attention of History News Network and the Times.

My original contribution to the discussion was a close reading of Tobin’s introduction to Hidden in Plain View. As she described her research, it struck me she was so eager to connect to African-American history that she overlooked how little evidence she actually had, of either the “quilt code” or genuine friendship with her elderly African-American informant—who was making her living by selling quilts. I saw Tobin’s wishfulness as mirroring a desire for racial reconciliation in today’s America:

During that talk, Tobin writes, she comes to think of herself as “one of only a few trusted people” to hear about the quilts’ secret. Both Williams and her eventual coauthor Raymond Dobard have told her she would learn the secrets only when she was “ready.” At last, this second conversation seems to confirm, Tobin is “ready” for such a secret. And, by implication, so are the book's readers and America as a whole.

In the more recent discussion, Roberta Gold offered this perceptive observation on the “quilt code”:

It seems to me that the spread of the quilt myth is part of a larger popular “domestication” of African American past, in which the complex, bleak and tragic dimensions of black history are softened and smoothed into something that isn’t too disturbing to teach to kindergartners. . . . The injustice is not erased, exactly, but it’s air-brushed with a disproportionate amount of heartwarming, feel-good interpretation. In the case of “code quilts,” it’s literally made into something warm and fuzzy.

Indeed, there are many elementary school lesson plans about the “quilt code,” despite all the serious historical questions. (This lesson from Queens University in Ontario is so inaccurate as to say that Tobin’s main informant is still alive. As Hidden in Plain View reported, she died in 1998.) My paper on “grandmothers’ stories” of the Revolution argues that well-structured tales we learn early in life—as the “quilt code” aspires to be—have a particularly strong hold on our understanding of history later. So this myth could be around for a while, even after people realize it’s a myth. (The “quilt code” has also been publicized in other influential, non-scholarly ways: Oprah, quilting patterns, the web.)

The National Park Service, on its guard against feel-good myths, has issued guidelines for evaluating historical traditions about the Underground Railroad. The “quilt code” doesn’t match up to those guidelines for strong evidence.

On the other hand, the National Security Agency has a webpage all about the “quilt code,” which it insists is based on ”strong oral tradition and collateral information.“ And that’s the agency we’re supposed to trust to judge our electronic communications?

Liberty Boys of '76 Dime Novels

People often say that the Revolutionary War seems far more remote than the U.S. Civil War, the outward fashions especially, and that’s prevented the earlier conflict from becoming as popular with American readers and moviegoers as the latter. Of course, we are in a period of “founders’ chic,” but that seems to be taken up with biographies (many very good) of the very top men in society.

One hundred years ago, however, when the Civil War was almost as recent as the Vietnam War is to us today, Revolutionary War adventures were still highly marketable. The Stanford University library has created a website archiving the dime novels of that period, but for our purposes today only one series matters:

The Liberty Boys of ’76!

As the Stanford librarians explain, this 1901-1920 series

Chronicles the adventures of Captain Dick Slater and the Liberty Boys, a band of patriotic, young freedom fighters during the American Revolutionary War. Stories are set at pivotal moments in the war and peopled by historical figures such as Washington, Cornwallis, Franklin and Lafayette. The heroics of Slater and his men are credited with playing a vital role in the American army's ability to outmaneuver British forces.

Unfortunately, the full texts of these pieces of fine literature aren’t available for online reading. All we can see are the covers, which make the series seem less staid, less historically based, less—let’s face it—sane than that description. So, direct from the Stanford servers, here are two samples from the scores available for viewing.


Left: Cross-dressing British spies! “Dick and Bob were almost paralyzed with amazement. The supposed women were British officers, and this was not what the youths were looking for.” (Dick learns to cross-dress himself by the time of “The Liberty Boys’ Oath.”)

Right: Dangerous dwarfs! “The dwarf knocked one ‘Liberty Boy’ senseless and seized the other in a grip of iron, handling the youth as if he were a child. The other ‘Liberty Boys’ rushed to the rescue.” (The boys find their own small ally in “The Liberty Boys and the ‘Midget’.”)

I’m sorry to say that whoever wrote this series didn’t seem to find much inspiration in New England battles. Except for the Battle of Bennington (which wasn’t really in New England anyway), most adventures of the “Liberty Boys” appear to take place in the middle and later years of the war, and in the Middle and Southern states. The young soldiers may not have enlisted in time for Lexington & Concord or Bunker Hill.

The series’s insatiable need for material seems to have prompted the writers to concoct stories involving non-white characters. I have little hope that those characters are much more than stereotypes, but there are Native American fighters (“Reds”) and blacks on both sides of the conflict.

Just as American students today get much of their sense of the Revolution from such fiction as Johnny Tremain and My Brother Sam Is Dead, probably The Liberty Boys of ’76 and any similar popular literature influenced how young Americans of a century ago understood the war. The main difference was, of course, that no teacher ever had to assign these dime novels, or dreamed of doing so. Did the “Liberty Boys” influence how young Americans viewed Britain during World War 2? Did they have any influence over the Progressive historians of the 1920s and beyond?

Another John Adams Portrait

Back in May, I wrote about the many faces of John Adams one could find in museums and/or online. Here's a link to yet another portrait of John Adams, which I didn't know about until it appeared in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal. Charlestown native Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1862) painted it in 1816, and it's now at the Brooklyn Museum. (Folks interested in the theory that Adams suffered from a thyroid disorder can check his eyeballs.)

This was the same Samuel F. B. Morse who developed Morse code in the 1830s and 1840s; that was back when portrait artists could also be at the forefront of communications technology. Morse wasn't the first person to invent an electric telegraph, but he was the first to produce an efficient way of sending ordinary messages across it, and thus made the invention into part of daily life.

Other people had toyed with the same idea for decades, going back to a 1753 letter in The Scots' Magazine signed by "C.M." and datelined "Renfrew, Feb. 1, 1753." That letter, which contained some other electrical ideas also well ahead of their time, was reprinted in full in Notes and Queries, 25 Mar 1854, and thus available through Google Book. By the end of the nineteenth century, British historians seem to have settled on Dr. Charles Morrison of Greenock as the most likely identity for "C.M." He was said to have emigrated to Virginia, so the telegraph was still, in one way, an American invention.

Elizabeth Smith Has a London Makeover

In October 1769, the wealthy widow Elizabeth Smith sailed for Britain, her first visit in fifteen years, as Patricia Cleary recounts in Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (UMass Press, 2000).

In 1749 Elizabeth had emigrated to Boston from Scotland. Originally she was supposed to live with her older brother James Murray on his plantation in North Carolina, but she saw better prospects for herself as an unmarried shopkeeper in the northern port. She prospered, taught embroidery to a generation of young ladies, mentored a few women in business, and married twice, the second time to elderly merchant and distiller James Smith.

James Smith died in August 1769, leaving Elizabeth a substantial fortune. She put her real estate in the hands of her brother, who hadn’t done so well to the south after all, and went to visit the Empire’s big city. Of course, she had to have clothing and hairstyle appropriate to a woman of her age and station. Cleary describes the arrangements Elizabeth made in London:

“I have submitted to all the forms of Dress,” she reported, ”except blacking my hair.” Instead, Elizabeth paid a barber to come to her quarters every other day to curl and powder her tresses. On the days the barber did not make a house call, she had someone to tend to her locks for her.

In the mornings, before going out, Elizabeth covered her head with a queen’s nightcap that made her look “a strange figure.” Once it was off and her hair elaborately styled, Elizabeth wore a “genteely made” outfit with ruffles and a high crowned cap. “You would be pleased with my appearance,” she told a friend.

(Boston 1775 has also posted some of the other side of Elizabeth Smith’s correspondence with that friend, Christian Barnes of Marlborough.)

The Revolution in Boys' Hair

In the fall of 1821 the Boston Daily Advertiser published an elderly citizen’s reminiscences under the headline “The Olden Time”; those passages were reprinted in other newspapers up and down the Atlantic coast. On the important matter of hair-dressing, the essayist wrote:

Till within about 10 years, gentlemen wore powder, and many sat from 30 to 40 minutes every day under the barber’s hands to have their hair craped—suffering no inconsiderable pain most of the time from hair-pulling, and sometimes from the hot curling-irons.

Astonishingly, this article managed not to say that when the writer was your age, children had to walk to school four miles in the snow, uphill both ways. But it did report that upper-class colonial boys wore their hair as their fathers did:

Before the revolution boys wore wigs and cocked hats, and boys of genteel families wore cocked hats till within about thirty years.

However, fashions change. We saw that in the last two years, when it seemed that every American boy between ten and sixteen received a message to stop getting their hair cut very short and start growing it rather long, especially over the ears. Presumably this suggestion came in some sort of text-message.

I see a similar, perhaps slower evolution in hairstyles in the portraits of American and English boys in the years before and during the American Revolution. Our typical Johnny Tremain image of the time has teen-aged boys wearing their hair pulled back in a queue, perhaps braided. And indeed, there are portraits of boys, even quite young ones, with such styled hair—in the 1750s.

For example, the Gore Children by John S. Copley, painted about 1755 and now at the Winterthur Museum, shows Sammy Gore (he’s on the right, still in his petticoat) with hair combed smartly back from his forehead, side curls, and a queue. Copley hadn’t developed his technique well enough to show whether Sammy and his older brother John were wearing wigs, but clearly a lot of effort had gone into shaping what was on their heads.

The styles of the 1760s look different. Copley painted two pictures of his young half-brother, Henry Pelham:

• a lovely sketch of Henry reading around 1760
• a formal painting with a flying squirrel at age fifteen

Both of these are now in display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Copley did the second in 1765 to show folks in London all that he could paint (satin cloth! tiny links of chain! water in a glass! a reflective table!). So Henry’s hair must have been in a style thought attractive and up-to-date. It was still combed back from the forehead and over the ears, but now it was natural and loose.

Six years later, Copley painted little Daniel Verplanck of New York (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). His hair was short everywhere but in back. The next year brought young Leonard Vassall with his father, and much the same haircut. In 1779, Ralph Earl painted William Carpenter; this picture, now at the Worcester Art Museum and shown above, includes slightly longer bangs and wisps over the ears, still with loose locks in back.

In the 1780s, Copley was an established painter in England, and his portraits show further evolution in hairstyles. Midshipman Augustus Brine, the Western brothers, and the bickering Stillwells indicate that genteel boys’ heads had gotten almost as shaggy as their dogs. Now they wore bangs, hair over their ears, and even more hair in the back. Other artists working in Britain captured much the same look in the 1780s:

• from Joseph Wright of Derby, the cricket-playing Wood brothers of 1789 (but look who's got the ball!)
• from Boston-born Mather Brown, the children of Sir William Pepperell, now at Longfellow House
• from Ralph Earl, the portrait of brothers I linked to last month (and still have not received as a surprise present)
  

But as for the style most right for 1776, that seems to be the way Leonard Vassall and William Carpenter wore their hair: short on the sides and top, long in the back. Yes, the first generation of rich American white boys came of age wearing something embarrassingly like a mullet.