Bluster about the Boston Caucus

It’s still caucus season (at least in Nevada), so I’m returning to the topic of the original caucus—the somewhat mysterious gathering of politically-minded gentlemen in advance of Boston’s town meeting elections.

After my posting on the “Caucas Club” that builder Thomas Dawes hosted in 1763, architect Frederic C. Detwiler alerted me to an article he wrote about Dawes in Old-Time New England, the magazine Historic New England used to publish when it used to be the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Click here for a PDF download of Rick’s article, and here for his follow-up on Dawes’s design of the Brattle Square Church.

Rick’s article about Dawes alerted me in turn to another odd source on the caucus in 1763, which seems to have been the first year it became an open political issue. I quoted a complaint about the “Corkass” from the 21 Mar 1763 issue of the Boston Evening-Post. That same newspaper carried this little advertisement:

THIS AFTERNOON will be published,
And to be had of the Printers hereof.
[Price Five Coppers.]
PROPOSALS
For Printing by Subscription, the History of Adjutant Trowel and Bluster, together with a Specimen of the Work.—

In the eighteenth century, authors would often advertise such “proposals” and “specimens” (or advance peeks) of books they were working on as a way to drum up advance orders and pay for printing the whole book.

In this case, however, the proposal was just an excuse for publishing an eight-page pamphlet attacking a couple of Boston Whigs. A copy of that pamphlet at the Boston Athenaeum has handwritten notes identifying its author as Samuel Waterhouse, “Adjutant Trowel” as Dawes, and “Bluster” as James, Otis, Jr. The major reference guide to colonial publications tentatively dates this pamphlet to 1766, when Waterhouse wrote newspaper articles calling Otis “Bluster,” but the Evening-Post ad shows it appeared three years earlier.

Even in the midst of Waterhouse’s allegory and satire, we can spot details that match other accounts of the caucus meetings in Dawes’s large attic. Highlighted phrases like “General court” and camouflaged phrases like “g——l a———y” make the link to contemporary Massachusetts politics. Here’s an extract that takes up when “Adjutant Trowel” is serving with the army.

Chap. VII. He assembles a number of Malcontents at a large tent, prepared by him for that purpose, to endeavour to obtain their votes, in order to carry a favourite point at the next General court martial, which, partly by their assistance, and partly by stratagem, he effects.

Chap. VIII. Flush’d with success, he forms a plan to new model the army & cashier all those who he imagin’d might oppose any of his future schemes, for which purpose he collects all the discontented officers of the regiment, at the great tent, endeavours to stir them up to sedition, and mutiny against the new General.

Chap. IX. The great increase of his levee—he is look’d upon as an officer of consequence, by the ignorant and illiterate part of his brother officers—applications are made to him instead of the General.—

Chap. X. He boasts of his consequence—takes upon himself the state of a general officer—the army repairs to winter-quarters—he builds himself a stately house, superior to the General’s, with a large hall in the upper story, appropriated to the same use as his large tent.

Chap. XI. He cabals with the inhabitants of the city were [sic] he is quartered, against the mayor and aldermen who from their being men of probity and honor are caress’s by the General quarter’d in the same city.

The “new General” was probably Gov. Francis Bernard, who took office in 1760.

Then “Bluster” comes on the scene, a lawyer upset that a friend has been passed over for the office of “C—f J——e.” In real life, James Otis, Sr., thought he was in line to be Chief Justice; when Bernard appointed Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson to that post instead, his son broke with the royal party and took up popular politics. And so did “Bluster”:

Chap. XIX. Finding every other method fail, he applies to Trowel—is admitted into his junto, or nocturnal assembly—a specimen of his low artifice and cunning—he is look’d upon by the whole herd of fools, tools, and sycophants, as a fit person to represent them, at the next g[enera]l a[ssembl]y—it it publickly declar’d at the junto—he is chose at the g[enera]l e—l[ectio]n.— . . . .

Chap. XXVI. He becomes the darling of Trowel’s Junto, and presides at the head of their affairs—a specimen of his oratory—with his smooth tongue he persuades the junto into an implicit obedience to his will in every respect.—

Chap. XXVII. According to a previous resolution of the junto, he is advanced to a higher post of honor than ever he aspired after—unmerited and unsolicited favors heap’d on him in abundance, for which he thanks the people at their an[nua]l as[sembl]y with the wheedling epithets of F-th-rs, Fr—nds, F-ll-w C-t-z-ns & C—ntrym-n.

Chap;. XXVIII. The transactions of the an[nua]l as[sembl]y,—business postpon’d in order to facilitate some private views of the junto, contrary to the usual and constant custom—partiality to voters, junto officers allow’d to count their own votes without being sworn to the faithful discharge of their office.—

Waterhouse’s pamphlet strikes me as another example of how Loyalists didn’t even try to adapt their rhetoric to the new, popular politics. Imputing that Otis was wrong to call his supporters “Friends, Fellow Citizens & Countrymen” was hardly the way to win support from those very men.

[UPDATE: Article links restored, thanks to Boston 1775 reader Charles Bahne.]

On the Lines in Charlestown

Yesterday’s posting quoted four accounts of the brief panic inside Boston—inside Faneuil Hall, to be exact—at news of a Continental Army raid on Charlestown Neck on 8 Jan 1776. Here are two recollections from men who were involved in that event as teenaged soldiers, one on the American side and one on the British.

First, Continental fife-major John Greenwood (1760-1819) wrote that the raid was “planned by old [Israel] Putnam,” (shown here) with the immediate goal of setting fire to a few houses remaining in that part of Charlestown, “inhabited by a parcel of stragglers, such as sutlers, mechanics, and camp women.”

Greenwood added that the attack a larger secondary goal:

The reason for this frolic being undertaken was that, as General Washington had many spies in Boston and could ascertain everything the British were about, he had learned that on the very evening in question they were about to enact a new play in derision of the Yankees, called the “Blockade of Boston.” . . .

one of the actors was representing a Yankee sentinel, rigged out like a tailor with his paper measures hanging over his shoulders and his large shears sticking out of his pocket, etc., resting or leaning upon his gun and conversing with a countryman who had a newspaper. . . . My father and mother were in the house (Faneuil Hall) at the time and witnessed the scene.

On the other side of the Charlestown siege lines from young Greenwood was nearly-as-young Lt. Martin Hunter (1757-1847). He eventually became a general and a knight. In his memoir he recalled:

A farce called “The Blockade of Boston,” written, I believe, by General [John] Burgoyne, was acted. The enemy knew the night it was to be performed, and made an attack on the mill at Charlestown at the very hour that the farce began.

I happened to be on duty in the redoubt at Charlestown that night. The enemy came along the mill-dam, and surprised a sergeant’s guard that was posted at the mill. Some shots were fired, and we all immediately turned out and manned the works. A shot was fired by one of our advanced sentries, and instantly the firing commenced in the redoubt, and it was a considerable time before it could be stopped. Not a man of the enemy was within three miles of us, and the party that came along the mill-dam had effected their object and carried off the sergeant’s guard.

However, our firing caused a general alarm at Boston, and all the troops got under arms. An orderly sergeant that was standing outside the playhouse door heard the firing, and immediately ran into the playhouse, got upon the stage, and cried “Turn out! Turn out! They are hard at it, hammer and tongs.”

The whole audience thought that the sergeant was acting a part in the farce, and that he did it so well that there was a general clap, and such a noise that he could not be heard for a considerable time.

When the clapping was over he again cried, “What the deuce are you all about? If you won’t believe me, by Jasus you need only go to the door, and there you will see and hear both!”

If it was the intention of the enemy to put a stop to the farce for that night they certainly succeeded, as all the officers immediately left the playhouse and joined their regiments.

Hunter’s description of the reaction inside Faneuil Hall was at best secondhand, but it shows how even British officers were struck by this incident.

A Continental Attack Brings the Curtain Down

After several days of having nothing to report in his diary, Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded an unusual skirmish on 8 Jan 1776:

Monday at half past 8 P.M. being dark weather the Provincials attacked Charlestown, burnt the houses, remaining at Neck of land, carried off a serjent and a number of Men. . . Just as the farce began at the Playhouse of the Blockade of Boston—which with much fainting, fright, and confusion, prevented the scene.

When I first read about Continental troops timing an attack on British lines to disrupt the performance of a play in Boston, I feared the story was too good to be true. It seemed to feed right into America’s stereotypical, crowd-pleasing picture of the Revolutionary War: clever Yankees, decadent and flat-footed British. And even if an American attack did disrupt a play, was that any more than coincidence? We humans like to believe that our actions have desirable effects and that events don’t just occur by happenstance.

But when I looked into the story, I discovered that not only is it well documented, but its details really do fit that crowd-pleasing scenario. British officers under the lead of Gen. John Burgoyne (pictured above), who was already established as a playwright, took over Fanueil Hall and turned that site of defiant town meetings into a theater. Since Boston outlawed all theatricals down the Punch and Judy shows, the new “playhouse” was clearly a dig at local sensibilities. Furthermore, Burgoyne wrote a farce he titled The Blockade of Boston to lampoon the American rebels, and an item in the 21 Dec 1775 New-England Chronicle confirms that word of that play had gotten out to the American lines.

As for the night of 8 January, Lt. William Feilding described it in a letter to the sixth Earl of Denbeigh dated 19 Jan 1776:

Some Ladies and Officers for diversion, and for the Benefit of the sick and mamed Soldiers in this Army, have Acted Plays; and Faneuil Hall (a famous place where the sons of sedition used to meet) is fitted up very Elegantly for a Theatre.

And on Monday the Eighth Instant was perform’d The Busy Body [a 1709 farce by Susanna Centlivre]: A new farce call’d The Blockade of Boston (written by Genl. Burgoyne) was to have been introduc’d, but unfortunately as the Curtain drew up to begin the Entertainment, an Orderly Sergeant came on the Stage, and said the Alarm Guns were fired which Immediately put every body to the Rout, particularly the Officers, who made the best of their way to their Respective Corps and Alarm Posts, leaving the Ladies in the House in a most Terible Dilema.

This Alarm was as follows, between 8 & 9 oClock at night, and Very dark about thirty Rebels Cross’d the Mill bridge near Charles Town Neck and set fire to some Empty House and took a Sargeant and three men which lay in one of them not as a Guard but as a Convenience as they belong’d to the Deputy Quar Master General. Upon which the Troops in the Redoubts on the Heights fired very Briskly for a few minutes some small Arms & Cannon at the fire; but as Enemy’s number was so small and Retreated immediately as soon as they had set fire to the Houses, they escap’d without the loss of a man. This Alarm was so trifling that it displeased the General much, but on the other hand he was much pleased to see the Elertness of the men.

Burgoyne sailed away from Boston before the delayed premiere of his farce; according to Lt. John Barker, he had already postponed his departure once in hopes of seeing the play go up. Feilding reported the eventual performances in a letter on 28 January:

The Blockade of Boston has been perform’d twice, and Receivd (tho Short) with great Applause. The Characters of the Yankee General and Figure of his Soldiers is inimatable, the Genl: a man who can’t Read but can Speachifie, and tell his Soldiers they are to obey the Voice of the People in the streets, the Joy the Rebells are in, in reading the Resolves of the Mayor and City of London in favor of the Con-ti-nen-tal Congress in Phi-li-del-phi-a pa-per is truly Characteristick.

Lt. Feilding’s letters appear in The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution, edited by Marion Balderston and David Syrett.

The Boston News-Letter, the only newspaper still published in town and strongly supporting the military government, tried to minimize the event in its 11 January issue:

On Monday was presented at the Theatre at Faneuil Hall, the Comedy of the Busy Body, which was received with great applause. . . .

A new Farce called the Blockade of Boston was to have been presented the same evening, but was interrupted by a Sergeant’s representing, or rather misrepresenting, the burning of two or three old houses at Charlestown as a general attack on the town of Boston. But it is very evident, the Rebels possess a sufficiency of what Falstaff terms the better part of valor, to prevent their making an attempt that must inevitably end in their own destruction.

As soon as these parts in the Boston Blockade which are vacant by some Gentlemen being ordered to Charles Town can be filled up, that Farce will be performed with the Tragedy of Tamerlane [probably the 1702 play by Nicholas Rowe].

Peter Force’s American Archives reprinted a letter “from a Gentleman at Boston to his Friend in Edinburgh” dated 29 January that offers another look at the alarm:

The rebels have been very quiet ever since I arrived. They gave a small alarm about a fortnight ago, which occasioned a little confusion, but was soon over. The officers have fitted up a play-house, and some of them had wrote a farce, called the Blockade of Boston. The first night it was to be acted the house was very full. The play being over, the curtain was hauled up for the entertainment to begin, when a sergeant came in and told the officers the alarm-guns were fired at Charlestown, which made no small stir in the house, every one endeavouring to get out as fast as possible; and immediately we heard a pretty smart firing of small arms.

TOMORROW: Reports on the Charlestown raid from two teenagers on the siege lines.

Colonial Boston Vocabulary: "caucus," part 2

I’ve been writing about Boston’s caucus system for discussing who should serve in town offices, which brought up (as Ron commented) the origin of the word “caucus.” Over nearly two centuries researchers have put forward three theories, none of them entirely satisfactory and none of them coming with a supporting paper trail. Those hypothetical roots are:

“Caulkers.” In his 1816 book A Vocabulary; or, Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the U.S. of America, attorney John Pickering (1777-1846) hazarded this guess, quoting the account of the Rev. William Gordon:

these meetings were first held in a part of Boston where “all the ship-business was carried on;” and I had therefore thought it not improbable that Caucus might be a corruption of Caulkers, the word meetings being understood. I was afterwards informed by a friend in Salem, that the late Judge Oliver often mentioned this as the origin of the word; and upon further inquiry I find other gentlemen have heard the same in Boston, where the word was first used. I think I have sometimes heard the expression, a caucus meeting. [i. e. caulkers’ meeting.] It need hardly be remarked, that this cant word and its derivatives are never used in good writing.

The caulkers of Boston were somewhat organized; the New-England Weekly Journal for 24 Feb 1741 contains an advertisement saying they had agreed to stop taking shopkeepers’ “Notes” or I.O.U.’s as pay.

However, there are big problems with this theory:

• First, Pickering distorted Gordon’s words, which were: “Mr. Samuel Adams’ father and twenty others, one or two from the north end of the town where all the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus and lay their plan...” Thus, caucus meetings weren’t held in the “ship-business” end of town; rather, a couple of men from that North End came down to the meetings.
• The men who met, as John Adams listed them in 1763, weren’t shipyard workers but office-holders and businessmen. It would have been odd for them to take on the guise of “caulkers”; not until the Jacksonian period did American political leaders try to identify themselves with the common man. And if the “caulkers” term was applied by enemies of the group to discredit it, as later authors suggested, why didn’t the 1763 critic make that connection instead of writing “Corkass”?
  
• Caulkers weren’t noted for being active in town politics any more than any other profession. Their 1741 agreement was an economic one, not political.

Noah Webster adopted this theory, stating that caulkers’/caucus meetings started as protests against British troops around 1770—but that was up to half a century after the caucus meetings began. Many authors followed Pickering’s and Webster’s lead, at least mentioning this theory, even as others piled up.

“Kaukos.” Scholar say this Greek term for a wine vessel became caucus in medieval Latin. Was such a vessel central to “Caucas Club” meetings? John Adams wrote of that group, “they drink Phlip I suppose,” and flip was an alcoholic drink. Antiquarian Alice Morse Earle described it this way:

It was made of home-brewed beer, sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and flavored with a liberal dash of rum, then stirred in a great mug or pitcher with a red-hot loggerhead or hottle or flip-dog, which made the liquor foam and gave it a burnt bitter flavor.

A punch-bowl would have been more reminiscent of a Greek kaukos than a flip mug or pitcher.

Furthermore, if the “Caucas Club” first gathered to drink and only later came to talk politics, then the term “caucus” should come up in non-political contexts, and it doesn’t. Some etymologists also argue that classically-educated British-Americans were unlikely to know a medieval Latin term, or to use it when British gentlemen didn’t.

“Kaw-kaw-was.” In the 1870s, James Hammond Trumbull suggested to the American Philological Association that the most likely source of “caucus” was this Algonquin term for “counselor” or a word from a similar root.

An informal abstract of Trumbull’s paper in The Academy said, “As the settlers were fond of adopting native names for their political gatherings, the suggestion seems highly plausible.” Gentlemen in the Middle Colonies did adopt the Tammany name for political clubs in the late 1700s, and an odd celebration of that Delaware leader occurred at Valley Forge in 1778. However, I don’t recall the same sort of behavior in Massachusetts. Bostonians blamed “Mohawks” for the Boston Tea Party precisely to distance that action from their political leaders.

Curiously, John Pickering was a scholar of Native American languages, publishing a treatise titled On the Adoption of a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America, but didn’t see this connection.

Lexicographers today seem to lean toward the third of these theories, but they also say that no one can be sure where “caucus” comes from.

A Complaint about the Caucus

Last week I said that John Adams made the first documented use of the word “caucus,” but only by about one month. Boston’s “Caucus Club” was surfacing as a political issue that year because on 21 Mar 1763 Thomas and John Fleet printed the following complaint in their Boston Evening-Post. To be insulting, the writer used a new spelling of the word “caucus.”

Messi’rs Fleets,
By printing the following you will enlighten many of your Townsmen, and oblige all who are willing to act for themselves.——

An Impartial Account of the Conduct of the Corkass
By a late Member of that Society.

It may be expected that I should give the etymology of the word CORKASS, and some account of the rise of the Society, but as they keep no records, and their oral accounts are so various and dark, it is needless to mention them, or go any further back than the present time; only I wou’d observe they talk much of antiquity.

At present the heads of this venerable Company meet some weeks before a Town-Meeting, and consult among themselves, appoint town officers, and settle all other affairs that are to be transacted at town meeting; after these few have settled the affairs, they communicate them to the next better sort of their brethren; when they have been properly sounded and instructed, they meet with the heads; these are called the Petty Corkass: Here each recommends his friends, opposes others, juggle and trim, and often have pretty warm disputes; but by compounding and compromising, settle every thing before the Grand Corkass meets; tho’ for form sake (as at college on commencement days) a number of warm disputes are prepared, to entertain the lower sort; who are in an extasy to find the old Roman Patriots still surviving.

A night or two before town meeting the Grand Corkass meets, consisting of all sorts of men that want town offices, or other favors; the chairman is chose, who makes a harangue on freedom and English liberty, and every individual is told that he may, and beg’d that he would, speak his mind freely; some have been so credulous as to take him in earnest, and have spoke their minds to their cost, lost their favor, and all chance of town offices for ever.

It may be ask’d how they keep together, for as soon as they are discovered they will be forsaken; and so they are by all, but those that learn their art, and get their own ends answered by them: I don’t say there are no honest men among them; for I believe some of ’em are very worthy men; but they let the chiefs think for them, and by a peculiar cunning which some of the senators are perfect masters of, get deceived for many years. The arts made use of by them to carry a point at town meeting are so notorious, that they need not be here particularly mentioned.——

I can’t conceive what gives them a right to rule, except it be for the outward flow of what is couch’d in the following words of an epitaph which I somewhere came across, on an old Lady.

For the Church and Devotion
No Mortal was higher,
But for Faith and good Works,
They never came nigh her.

This article was signed “E.J.,” but that was probably a mask, not the author’s true initials.

Boston had had its big annual meeting for electing town officials one week before this item appeared, on 14 March. It’s possible that the author of this complaint had wanted it published on that day, but the printers sat on it so as not to stoke controversy. More likely, the author was upset at having lost some vote in that meeting and trying to spill the beans on the whole caucus system. It didn’t work.

Boston’s town meeting for electing representatives to the Massachusetts General Court this year took place on 20 May. In The Urban Crucible, Gary Nash wrote, “Following the 1763 attacks on the Caucus, 1,089 people went to the polls for town elections, a number never exceeded in even in the tumultuous years of the following decade.” The meeting chose James Otis, Jr., as moderator, as well as reelecting him as one of the town’s representatives, and supporters of royal governor Francis Bernard lost.

The Roots of the Boston Caucus

Yesterday’s posting quoted John Adams using the word “caucus” (or “Caucas”) in his diary in 1763, the earliest recorded use of that term for a political meeting. However, there’s evidence that the word, and the custom, were much older.

The Rev. William Gordon’s History of the Independence of the United States of America, published in London in 1784, suggested that the caucus had been a Boston political institution since the first quarter of the century. Gordon (shown here) wasn’t a Boston native, but before and during the Revolution he was a minister in Roxbury and became close to the local Whigs, especially Samuel Adams. This passage implies Gordon got his information about the caucus from Adams himself:

More than fifty years ago Mr. Samuel Adams’ father and twenty others, one or two from the north end of the town where all the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus and lay their plan for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power.

When they had settled it they separated, and each used their particular influence within his own circle. He and his friends would furnish themselves with ballots, including the names of the parties fixed upon, which they distributed on the days of election. By acting in concert, together with a careful and extensive distribution of ballots, they generally carried their elections to their own mind.

In like manner it was that Mr. Samuel Adams first became a representative for Boston.

Samuel Adams was first elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1765. His father had been a selectman and town representative decades before.

Gordon presented his 1784 history in the form of letters written during the events they describe, and this passage comes from a letter dated in 1774. If we take that year as the starting-point for his phrase “More than fifty years ago,” than Adams’s father had participated in caucuses before 1724, when he was in his thirties. That fits with the age of the caucus members John Adams listed in 1763.

I suspect the caucus tradition grew out of Boston’s first political machine based on popular support, assembled by Elisha Cooke, Jr. (1678-1737), in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Cooke held positions of influence for many years through the town meeting and legislature rather than through royal patronage. The largest town meeting in Boston history occurred in 1714, when he mustered opposition to the royal governor’s proposal for a private bank. But no historian is certain when Boston’s caucuses began.

TOMORROW: Opposition to the caucus in 1763.

Colonial Boston Vocabulary: "caucus"

As the U.S. of A. digests the results of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, it seems timely to discuss the term “caucus,” which first surfaced in pre-Revolutionary Boston. The earliest appearance of the word that anyone can find, by about one month, is in John Adams’s diary:

Boston Feby. 1763. This day learned that the Caucas Clubb meets at certain Times in the Garret of Tom Daws, the Adjutant of the Boston Regiment. He has a large House, and he has a moveable Partition in his Garrett, which he takes down and the whole Clubb meets in one Room.

There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one End of the Garrett to the other. There they drink Phlip I suppose, and there they choose a Moderator, who puts Questions to the Vote regularly, and select Men, Assessors, Collectors, Wardens, Fire Wards, and Representatives are Regularly chosen before they are chosen in the Town.

Uncle Fairfield, [William] Story, [John] Ruddock, [Samuel] Adams, [William] Cooper, and a rudis indigestaque Moles of others are Members. They send Committees to wait on the Merchants Clubb and to propose, and join, in the Choice of Men and Measures. Captn. [James] Cunningham says they have often solicited him to go to these Caucas, they have assured him Benefit in his Business, &c.

The Latin phrase rudis indigestaque moles means “rude and undigested mass.” It sounds like John Adams might have been a little miffed at not having been let in on the secret of this smoke-filled room before. Of course, at the time he was still living in Braintree.

Thomas Dawes (1731-1809), host of this caucus club, was a Boston builder who was successful enough to eventually be deemed an architect. He was serving as elected coroner at the time of the Boston Massacre, and achieved the rank of colonel in the Massachusetts militia. His son of the same name became a judge in the early republic. Dawes’s nephew William Dawes, Jr., succeeded him as adjutant of the Boston regiment. In 1806 Gilbert Stuart painted Dawes’s portrait, shown above courtesy of Historic New England.

Most of the other men preparing for Boston’s big March 1763 town meeting were office-holders themselves:

• William Story was Deputy Register of the Vice Admiralty Court, and as such became a target of the Stamp Act rioters in 1765. A couple of years later, his career in the royal government stalled. Story moved to Ipswich and sided with the Patriots.
• John Ruddock was a shipyard owner, militia officer, and justice of the peace in the North End. He became a selectman in 1764. Ruddock was also amazingly fat, and died suddenly in 1772.
• Samuel Adams was John’s second cousin, then serving as elected tax collector.
• William Cooper was Boston’s town clerk for decades both before and after the Revolution.

I haven’t identified “Uncle Fairfield,” who was presumably one of John Adams’s uncles. [How’s that for historical detective work?] Capt. Cunningham was another uncle, and Adams often stayed with him while visiting Boston.

TOMORROW: How far back did the Boston caucus go?

Did the Union Flag Disappoint Boston’s Loyalists?

Yesterday I quoted Gen. George Washington’s January 1776 report that Loyalists in Boston were hopeful that the Continental Army’s new Great or Grand Union Flag (shown at right, as available from FlagandBanner.com) indicated that American soldiers had heard George III’s admonitory speech and decided to capitulate. But was that report well founded?

I rounded up my usual sources from inside the besieged town: selectman Timothy Newell, Col. Earl Percy, Capt. John Barker, merchant John Rowe, and the Boston News-Letter, which was the one newspaper still being printed there. And I found no discussion of the Continentals’ new flag or a renewed hope that they had decided to surrender. And that seems like the sort of thing those people might mention.

In fact, three British reports about the American activity on 2 Jan 1776 indicate that people saw nothing in it but continued defiance. Peter Force’s American Archives includes a letter from the captain of a British ship to his employers in London, dated 17 January, which says:

I can see the rebels’ camp very plain, whose colors, a little while ago, were entirely red; but on the receipt of the king’s speech, which they burnt, they hoisted the union flag, which is here supposed to intimate the union of the provinces.

At the end of the year, the Annual Register, Edmund Burke’s London news round-up, reported (perhaps based on that very captain’s letter):

The arrival of a copy of the king’s speech, with an account of the fate of the petition from the continental congress, is said to have excited the greatest degree of rage and indignation among them; as a proof of which, the former was publicly burnt in the camp; and they are said upon this occasion, to have changed their colours, from a plain red ground, which they had hitherto used, to a flag with thirteen stripes, as a symbol of the number and union of the colonies.

We can gauge the popularity of the Annual Register from the fact that nearly the same sentence, word for word, appeared in James Murray’s An Impartial History of the Present War in America (1780); Robert Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, from 1727 to 1783 (1804); and R. Thomas’s A Pictorial History of the United States of America (1847). Plagiarists cannot hide from Google Books. Schuyler Hamilton’s History of the National Flag of the United States of America (1853) quoted both those sources, with citations. George Henry Preble’s 1872 history of the flag had a short and inaccurate quotation of the Annual Register passage, to match its short and innaccurate quotations of other sources; those, in turn, were reprinted in a number of later flag histories.

Finally, Richard Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston quoted a British officer.

Lieut. [William] Carter...was on Charlestown Heights, and says, January 26: “The king’s speech was sent by a flag to them on the 1st instant [i.e., of this month]. In a short time after they received it, they hoisted an union flag (above the continental with the thirteen stripes) at Mount Pisgah; their citadel fired thirteen guns, and gave the like number of cheers.”

None of these British sources hint that people in Boston saw the new thirteen-stripe flag as a sign of imminent American capitulation. And why would they have done so? The Continentals had been flying a flag with a Union Jack in the corner and a red field—a traditional British flag. This new “great union flag” shifted a little away from that standard by adding symbols of the thirteen colonies. Its Union Jack canton still displayed the Whigs’ allegiance to traditional British rights, but it was now a banner exclusive to America.

Granted, those three British reports all date from two weeks or more after the new flag appeared, so there might have been time for Loyalist hopes to rise and fade. But as far as I can tell, our only source for the belief that people inside Boston expected a surrender is the one anonymous person who came out of the town on 3 Jan 1776 and told Washington something the commander-in-chief was pleased to hear. The whole anecdote might have been based on nothing more than a short conversation between a couple of guys.

“Huh. New flag. What do you think it means?”

“Maybe they’re giving up.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, we did just send them the king’s speech.”

“I guess. Still, that’s a lot to hope for.”

“We’ll see in a few days, I’m sure. You coming for dinner Thursday?”

“Thursday? You know, I might be out of town...”

[ADDENDUM: But a flag expert has raised questions about the traditional interpretation of these sources—did the “Grand Union Flag” even exist?]

The Great Union Flag and the Boston Gentry

Yesterday I quoted George III’s October 1775 speech in Parliament about the American rebellion. Copies were printed in Boston and sent out to the American lines on 1 Jan 1776. As it happened, that was also the day Gen. George Washington showed his staff a new flag, adopted to coincide with his reorganization of the Continental Army. He had the flag raised on Cambridge’s Prospect Hill the next morning.

On 4 Jan 1776, Washington wrote sarcastically to Joseph Reed at Philadelphia:

We are at length favoured with a sight of his Majesty’s most gracious speech, breathing sentiments of tenderness and compassion for his deluded American subjects; the echo has not yet come to hand, but we know what it must be, and as Lord North said, and we ought to have believed, (and acted accordingly,) we now know the ultimatum of British justice.

The speech I send you; a volume of them was sent out by the Boston gentry, and farcical enough, we gave great joy to them, (the red coats I mean,) without knowing or intending it, for on that day, the day which gave being to the new army, (but before the proclamation came to hand,) we had hoisted the union flag in compliment to the United Colonies; but behold! it was received in Boston as a token of the deep impression the speech had made upon us, and as a signal of submission, so we heard by a person out of Boston last night. By this time I presume they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines.

Based on the number of similar phrases, we can be fairly certain that Reed digested that letter into the report that appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet on 15 January:

That upon the King’s Speech arriving at Boston, a great number of them were reprinted and sent out to our lines on the 2d of January, which being also the day of forming the new army, the great Union Flag was hoisted on Prospect Hill, in compliment to the United Colonies—this happening soon after the Speeches were delivered at Roxbury, but before they were received at Cambridge, the Boston gentry supposed it to be a token of the deep impression—That they were much disappointed at finding several days elapse without some formal measure leading to a surrender, with which they had begun to flatter themselves.

The Packet also mentioned “An intelligent person got out of Boston on the 3d,” presumably the same one Washington cited as his source on the disappointment of the Loyalist “Boston gentry.”

I went looking for more detail about that feeling of disappointment within Boston. In his History of the American Flag (1872), George Henry Preble quoted a version of the anecdote that he dated to the very day the flag rose:

An anonymous letter, written Jan. 2, 1776, says: “The grand union flag of thirteen stripes was raised on a height near Boston. The regulars did not understand it; and as the king’s speech had just been read, as they supposed, they thought the new flag was a token of submission.”

I couldn’t identify the source of this quotation, however, and finally came to suspect that Preble had misinterpreted a passage published by “T. Westcott” of Philadelphia in Notes and Queries in 1852:

The grand union flag of thirteen stripes was raised on the heights near Boston, January 2, 1776. Letters from there say that the regulars in Boston did not understand it; and as the king’s speech had just been sent to the Americans, they thought the new flag was a token of submission.

In other words, there was no anonymous letter dated 2 January. Rather, letters from near Boston at some point after the flag-raising—i.e., the commander-in-chief’s, quoted above—were the first written versions of the story.

Americans from Washington down certainly enjoyed the anecdote, which underscored American steadfastness while painting their rivals as fools. A century later the raising of the grand union flag also inspired the painting shown in thumbnail above, with Gen. Washington overseeing the ceremony. For a closer look and more detail, check out Steve Mulder’s website on Prospect Hill.

TOMORROW: But how much evidence is there for that anecdote?

King George Addresses the “Unhappy and Deluded Multitude”

On 27 Oct 1775, King George III addressed Parliament with his and his ministers’ views on the year’s developments in America, and what their government proposed to do:

Those who have long too successfully laboured to inflame my people in America by gross misrepresentations, and to infuse into their minds a system of opinions, repugnant to the true constitution of the colonies, and to their subordinate relation to Great-Britain, now openly avow their revolt, hostility and rebellion.

They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force; they have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive and judicial powers, which they already exercise in the most arbitrary manner, over the persons and property of their fellow-subjects: And altho’ many of these unhappy people may still retain their loyalty, and may be too wise not to see the fatal consequence of this usurpation, and wish to resist it, yet the torrent of violence has been strong enough to compel their acquiescence, till a sufficient force shall appear to support them.

The authors and promoters of this desperate conspiracy have, in the conduct of it, derived great advantage from the difference of our intentions and theirs. They meant only to amuse by vague expressions of attachment to the Parent State, and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me, whilst they were preparing for a general revolt. On our part, though it was declared in your last session that a rebellion existed within the province of the Massachusetts Bay, yet even that province we wished rather to reclaim than to subdue. The resolutions of Parliament breathed a spirit of moderation and forbearance; conciliatory propositions accompanied the measures taken to enforce authority; and the coercive acts were adapted to cases of criminal combinations amongst subjects not then in arms.

I have acted with the same temper; anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects; and the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war; still hoping that my people in America would have discerned the traiterous views of their leaders, and have been convinced, that to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its consequences, is to be the freest member of any civil society in the known world. . . .

When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy! and in order to prevent the inconveniencies which may arise from the great distance of their situation, and to remove as soon as possible the calamities which they suffer, I shall give authority to certain persons upon the spot to grant general or particular pardons and indemnities, in such manner, and to such persons as they shall think fit; and to receive the submission of any Province or Colony which shall be disposed to return to its allegiance. It may be also proper to authorise the persons so commissioned to restore such Province or Colony, so returning to its allegiance, to the free exercise of its trade and commerce, and to the same protection and security as if such Province or Colony had never revolted.

(Full text available through the Library of Congress’s American Memory website.)

According to a Lieutenant Carter of the British forces, the royal authorities in Boston sent copies of this speech “by a flag”—i.e., under a flag of truce—out to the American lines on 1 Jan 1776.

Ode on the New Year 1766

Eighteenth-century America had a tradition at the turn of each year for printers’ apprentices and other young employees to print up and distribute verses for all the newspapers’ customers. I shared an example from 1771 a year ago.

The even worse verse below appeared from the boys of the Boston Evening-Post as 1765 turned into 1766. According to the Stamp Act enacted earlier that year, all newspapers, as well as legal filings and many other documents, had to appear on stamped paper, with a small tax going to the imperial government. But there had been such an outcry in British North America, from Halifax down to Savannah, that hardly any stamped paper was actually being used. The example above, from an exhibit at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, is one of the rare surviving examples.

As the boys of the Evening-Post made clear, their New Year’s broadside certainly wasn’t on stamped paper.

Vox Populi
Liberty, Property
and No Stamps

The News-Boy
Who carries the Boston Evening-Post, with the greatest Submission begs Leave to present the following Lines to the Gentlemen and Ladies to whom he carries the NEWS.

ODE on the New Year.

What Time bears on his rapid Wing,
And of the doubtful Year I sing.
Say Monarch! why thy furrow’d brow
Frowns from thy Chariot on us now?
Thy Wheels, which sometimes seem’d to glide,
In smoother Current than the Tide,
Now lumber heavy as my Verse:
Why com’st thou to us in a Hearse?
As thy approach, when GEORGE first reign’d,
Fair Freedom wanton’d in thy Train:
I saw her move in graceful Dance,
One Foot on Spain and one on France.
But now she droops, deform’d with Fear;
From her dim Eye-ball starts the Tear.
Whence, too, that grisly Form that bears
Bonds made for Innocents to wear?
Will British Steel in GEORGE’s Reign,
Bend for to form a Subject’s Chain?
Avert it—————————
Methinks a mighty Hand I see,
That grasps thy Rein and governs thee.
Him, as in silent Pomp he rides,
No Pencil paints, no Pen describes:
An awful Veil his Body shrouds;
His Head lies hid in Golden Clouds.
When Captives long have groan’d in vain,
His single touch dissolves their Chain.
He over King and Senate rules;
Oppressors, sometimes, are his Tools.
Hail, KING supreme! thy mighty Hand,
Has, more than once, reliev’d this Land;
Descend, and bless the coming Year;
And humble Hope shall banish Fear.

Therefore—————
Ye Months foredoom’d to form th’ ensuing Year,
With ev’ry happy Omen fraught appear:
Each Week, Day, Hour, in all the annual road.
With ev’ry prosperous Event be crown’d;
Nor let one swiftly flying Minute move,
That shan’t New-England’s happiness improve:
Oppressive SCHEMES let Disappointment brand,
Nor let one Tyrant in the Senate stand:
Let Study and Experience make us wise;
And as our Years extend, our Virtues rise:
Let Reason’s Light gild Life’s extremest gloom,
And Virtue’s Lamp attend us to the Tomb;
And the Memorial that we leave behind,
To us be glorious—useful to Mankind.

Thus does the Carrier of your NEWS appear,
To wish you in the New, a happy Year!
Time swiftly flying, hurl’d the Year away,
And once a Week produc’d his running Day,
And whether wet or cold, his Task he still maintains,
(In spite of Stamps) In hopes you’ll now reward him for his Pains.

That last line is a subtle request for a tip.

Another Cut at the Massacre

To show off and sell its useful but expensive Archive of Americana digital databases, the Readex company offers a few online samples, including this broadside about the Boston Massacre titled “Poem in memory of the (never to be forgotten) Fifth of March, 1770.” Click on the picture here to go to the appropriate page, and click on the picture there to download a PDF version.

I first saw this document reproduced on the wall of the Old State House Museum. The Readex version is a scan from a microfilm photograph of an imperfectly preserved printing, so it’s not pretty. In fact, I’m not sure it’s legible. Here’s my best guess at the second stanza:

Look into king-street: there with weeping eyes
Regard O Boston’s sons—there hear the cries!
There see the men lie in their wallow’d gore!
There see their bodies, which fierce bullets tore!

So as poetry it’s not readable, either.

Still, it’s possible to spot some interesting details.

• At the top is a line of five coffins for the five people killed on King Street, whose names are also listed after the title. Like the dark borders, this was an obvious sign of morning.
• Within the text another coffin appears, representing the death of Christopher Seider eleven days before the Massacre.
• Seider’s coffin, like the one above marked “S.M.” for Samuel Maverick, has a scythe on it as well as a skull and crossbones. I believe that was supposed to symbolize that these boys had been cut down too soon: Seider at nearly age eleven, Maverick at seventeen.
• The poem mentions another badly wounded boy, Christopher Monk, in the tenth stanza. He survived for several years, but people blamed his disability and early death on his wounds.
• Stanza 8 calls for punishment of Ebenezer Richardson, who shot Seider. However, the poem doesn’t complain that he’s been convicted and not punished, which probably dates it to mid-1770.
  

Finally, this specimen of propaganda and the printing art was “Sold next to the Writing-School, in Queen-Street,” so Boston’s schoolboys probably got a good chance to cogitate upon it.

Is That a Veto in Your Pocket?

Yesterday the Bush-Cheney administration produced a mini-constitutional crisis when the White House released a memo stating that the President had rejected a large military spending bill because of one provision, and claiming that he had done so as a “pocket veto.” The obvious question of why the administration had never before objected to that provision, all the while complaining that the bill had to pass quickly, is beyond historical understanding. But the origins and parameters of the pocket veto lie in the eighteenth century.

It was understood that colonial governors, acting as the king’s and Parliament’s representatives, could approve or deny new legislation. Indeed, the first two grievances in the Declaration of Independence refer to what the Continental Congress said was abuse of that executive-branch prerogative:

He [George III] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

The U.S. Constitution of 1787 created a new national executive, but it also limited that President’s power to negate new laws. Article 1, Section 7 says:

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it.

If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively.

If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

The last sentence has given rise to the so-called pocket veto: a President takes no action on a bill when Congress has adjourned, and it dies. A pocket veto is thought to have two advantages over an ordinary veto:

• The Constitution doesn’t state any way that Congress can override one.
• Taking no action on a bill may seem more mild than using an ordinary veto to, say, block funds for soldiers in a time of war after insisting that Congress pass just such a bill.

The first President to use a pocket veto was James Madison, a principal architect of the Constitution. That seems ironic since the obvious thrust of the final clause above is that Congress’s bills become law even in the absence of a President’s signature. The “pocket veto” was simply a provision for an odd contingency (an “unless” within an “if”), and I doubt anyone at the Constitutional Convention foresaw it as granting the President a stronger form of veto.

Indeed, it’s clear that the Constitution’s framers didn’t want to grant Presidents as much power over legislation as those of the past several decades have exercised. The term “veto” never even appears in the Constitution, nor its eighteenth-century synonym “negative” (as in Boston merchant John Rowe’s diary entry for 1 June 1769: “The Governour Negatived eleven counsellors...”). George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, wrote that a Presidential veto “can only be Justified upon the clean and obvious ground of propriety,” not simply because he didn’t like the bill.

As for whether Congress can override a pocket veto, the Constitution doesn’t state that it can’t. In fact, I think the Convention probably felt that Congress could approve the same bill again by majority vote as soon as it resumed business. Section 7 requires a two-thirds vote to override a veto only when the President has formally returned the bill to Congress for reconsideration, not when he’s pocketed it.

But the parameters of the pocket veto have never been fully tested before the Supreme Court. Some Presidents have interpreted Section 7’s language to refer only to the adjournment at the end of a full two-year congressional session, not just a holiday break. With the action on such vague constitutional grounds to begin with, Presidents have been reluctant to push on such disputes with Congress.

In this particular disagreement, there are two additional wrinkles. Kagro X notes that the military spending bill went to the White House on 19 December, and the reply memo is dated 28 December—so obviously “ten Days (Sundays excepted)” had not yet passed and the pocket-veto clause did not yet apply. Furthermore, while the House had adjourned temporarily, the Senate has remained in session to ensure that the administration doesn’t make any more harmful “recess appointments” (under Article 2, Section 2: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session”). If one house of Congress is in session, how can Congress have adjourned at all?

If the Bush-Cheney administration really cared about clear constitutional actions, it should simply have vetoed this bill and endured the resulting public criticism.

Hit and Myth in Common-place

Continuing to clean out my “nifty links” file at the end of the year, I realized I never got around to discussing the latest issue of Common-place, the online magazine of early American history.

Leading off this installment is Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s analysis of how the Betsy Ross legend became so popular, prompting such art as the picture on the right, offered by the Library of Congress’s wonderful American Memory super-website. Ulrich reminds us government decisions aren’t that simple:

The stars and stripes that we know today had multiple parents and dozens of siblings. True, on June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress passed a cryptic resolution specifying that “the flag of the thirteen united States be 13 stripes alternate red and white, that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation,” but nobody specified the shape of the flag, the arrangement of the stars, or the ratio of the canton to the field.

In October 1778, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams actually told the Neapolitan ambassador that “the flag of the United States of America consists of thirteen stripes, alternately red, white and blue.” Flag sheets from the 1780s and 1790s do in fact show flags with three-colored stripes. As for Betsy's nifty five-pointed star, a Smithsonian study showed that four-, six-, and eight-pointed stars were far more common.

Ulrich concludes that, “Ironically, Betsy’s story may have survived because there was no actual flag to confirm or undermine it.” (Though there is a suspicious five-pointed paper star, fortuitously “discovered” in Philadelphia years after Betsy Ross had already become a brand name.) I believe Ulrich’s essay may also be found in her latest book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

Also in this Common-place issue is Edward Larkin’s discussion of Loyalists. Unfortunately, Larkin makes the common mistake of misreading John Adams’s 1815 letter to James Lloyd, in which he said one-third of Americans were “averse to the revolution” and another one-third neutral. Careless authors have often taken that comment as referring popular opinion of the American Revolution. However, phrases like “The depredations of France upon our commerce, and her insolence to our ambassadors” make it clear that Adams was writing about American attitudes toward the French Revolution, and the U.S. of A.’s friction with Revolutionary France during his Presidency. That error calls into question some of Larkin’s enterprise, trying to resituate the Loyalists in American culture. Looking back, I see that I raised similar questions last year, too.

Considering the Consent of the Colonists

Here’s another interesting article from the Boston Review: Barbara Clark Smith’s 2004 essay “Revolutionary Consent: What the public life of American colonists can teach us about politics.” Smith writes:

Who could question that...people had gained important freedoms during the Revolutionary era and the transformative years that followed?

And yet there existed in colonial America elements of liberty, forms of participation in public affairs, that later generations would not experience. I want to raise the possibility that some (not all) colonial Americans were not so much less free than succeeding generations as differently free.

Smith warns against evaluating the late colonists’ political expectations by a yardstick created in Jacksonian America or later. In particular, she sees an important difference between how we elect representatives and other officials today and and how the town and county meetings of early America did so:

We want and expect to consent “before-hand,” choosing known candidates who espouse known policies and who do their best to enact those policies when they reach office. . . . We are less accustomed than colonial Americans were to thinking of our policymakers as better or wiser than us, or born to rule over us.

That deference to the genteel was indeed a hugely important factor in eighteenth-century life. That said, Massachusetts towns had a tradition of composing “instructions” to their representatives to the General Court right after each election. Though the town’s representatives had the authority to vote as they chose over the next year, the voters’ sentiments (as expressed, almost always, by other gentlemen) were made clear and often published.

I think Smith does a good job of reminding us that the American Whigs weren’t fighting so much for the personal rights that fire up people today as for the rights of communities to govern themselves, including the power of the local majority to make rules for everyone. She says of that tradition of self-government:

These were not individual rights, and indeed, nothing so misleads us about the 18th century as the tendency to understand “the people” as a mere assembling of individuals. What authorized the people’s presence was not individuality, but rather the subjects’ capacity to hold their liberties in common. . . .

What might this understanding of 18th-century popular participation teach us? First, it helps bring home the sense of dire grievance that drove many 18th-century colonists to resistance and revolution. We see easily enough why colonists would object when, beginning in the mid-1760s, Parliament laid taxes and passed laws to bind the king’s North American subjects, bypassing provincial legislatures altogether. We understand their impassioned defense of elected assemblies, their cry of “No Taxation without Representation.” Surely it was safer to be ruled by not very representative neighbors than by not at all representative strangers.

The major voices for individual rights in pre-Revolutionary Boston weren’t the town’s political leaders, clamoring for “liberty.” Rather, it was the men in disagreement with the great majority of the community who had to speak up for their right to disagree, or stand apart. Usually these were supporters of the royal government, such as businessman Theophilus Lillie and (supposedly) the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles.

If the Leading Founders Were Alive Today

A Boston 1775 reader alerted me to an essay in the Washington Post last week by Mount Holyoke professor Joseph Ellis titled “What Would George Do?”. It discusses the often-posed question of how Washington or other founders would respond to the nation’s challenges today. Ellis answers:

Washington would not be able to find Iraq on a map. Nor would he know about weapons of mass destruction, Islamic fundamentalism, Humvees, cellphones, CNN or Saddam Hussein. The historically correct answer, then, is that Washington would not have a clue.

It's tempting to believe that the political wisdom of our Founding Fathers can travel across the centuries in a time capsule, land among us intact, then release its insights into our atmosphere -- and as we breathed in that enriched air, our perspective on Iraq, global warming, immigration and the other hot-button issues of the day would be informed by what we might call "founders' genius." (Come to think of it, at least two Supreme Court justices who embrace the literal version of "original intent" believe that this is possible.)

I have a friend who wrote for David Letterman (and may soon do so again, once the strike is settled). Whenever the Top Ten List is something like, “Ten Things George Washington Would Say If He Were Here Today,” he offers, “AAAAH! There’s a big metal bird in the sky!”

For myself, I think if I were to have Thomas Jefferson over for a weekend, the first night’s dinner would produce a most stimulating discussion, of which I could hear only about half since he was so soft-spoken. And the next morning I’d find that Mr. Jefferson had electrocuted himself trying to figure out how his alarm clock worked. (Throughout his life Jefferson wrestled with the challenge of building an accurate timepiece.)

Guessing what John Adams might say on an issue seems even harder. I suspect that the easiest way to get him to take a particular position would be to suggest to him that the opposite position is popular and clearly seems best.

Recognizing such challenges, Ellis proceeds:

Suppose, then, that we rephrase the question. It is not "What would George Washington do about Iraq?" Rather, it is "How are your own views of Iraq affected by your study of Washington's experience leading a rebellion against a British military occupation?" The answer on this score is pretty clear. Washington eventually realized -- and it took him three years to have this epiphany -- that the only way he could lose the Revolutionary War was to try to win it. The British army and navy could win all the major battles, and with a few exceptions they did; but they faced the intractable problem of trying to establish control over a vast continent whose population resented and resisted military occupation. As the old counterinsurgency mantra goes, Washington won by not losing, and the British lost by not winning. Our dilemma in Iraq is analogous to the British dilemma in North America -- and is likely to yield the same outcome.

To take another example, your opinion on the current debate about how much power the executive branch should have will be significantly influenced if you read the debates about the subject in the Constitutional Convention and the states' ratifying conventions. For it will soon become clear that the most palpable fear that haunted all these debates was the specter of monarchy. Vice President Cheney's argument that limitations on the executive branch enacted in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate need to be rolled back is historically myopic. Virtually all of the Founding Fathers would regard the expansion of executive power since 1945 as a violation of the republican principles they cherished. And the way Congress has effectively surrendered war-making powers to the president since World War II represents a fundamental distortion of checks and balances as the founders intended them.

It’s hard to argue with those historical analogies. We might say that the solutions of the late 1700s wouldn’t be up to today’s far-flung, fast-moving challenges. But we can hardly deny that Washington led an successful insurgency without winning many battlefield victories, or that the founders put a lot of checks on executive power because they feared that the Presidency would become monarchical.

How Jeduthan Baldwin Spent Christmas 1775

One of my favorite Revolutionary War diarists is Col. Jeduthan Baldwin of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. He was an artillery engineer, which required technical knowledge, but he had a farmer’s blunt style. He tended to punctuate casually and spell phonetically. For instance, he wrote the town name Dorchester as “Dotchester”—which is, after all, still the way it’s pronounced. And he wrote down everyday details that humanize him and his fellow high officers. On 23 Dec 1775, as on example, Baldwin recorded that he “Wore Genl. [Israel] Putnams great coat.”

How did Col. Baldwin spend the next two days? As a New Englander, he had no tradition of treating Christmas as a holiday. Indeed, Congregationalists seem to have taken pride in treating the 25th of December like any other working day. But the Continental Army’s commander-in-chief observed Anglican norms. On Christmas in 1775, therefore, Baldwin both paid a visit to Gen. George Washington and did some dirty work that he saw needed doing.

24 Lords Day & a very Snowy cold Day. Cut down the orchard at Leachmor point, & laid the trees round the fort[.] had 4 oxen Drowned coming of ye point.

25 a Very cold Day. Dind with Genl. Putnam. went upon leachmor Point at Sunset, & then went to Genl Washing. in the Evning. found & Skind ye 4 drownded oxen.

(Click on the image above for a larger map of the siege, published in the late 1800s and posted on a Phipps family genealogy page. The 1906 edition of Col. Baldwin’s diary is available through Google Books.)

Royall Tyler Recalls the Christmas Anticks

Last year I posted a recollection and a complaint about Christmas mumming, an old British tradition that surfaced in Boston shortly after the Revolution, once Pope Night was no longer celebrated on the 5th of November. A longtime Boston 1775 reader reminded me of yet another description of mummers, from playwright, novelist, and Vermont judge Royall Tyler, so I saved it for this Christmas Eve.

This passage comes from Tyler’s unfinished novel The Bay-Boy, written in 1824-25 but first published in The Prose of Royall Tyler in 1972. That story is set in and supposedly recalls Boston before the Revolution, so it’s possible that Tyler remembered such mumming from his childhood. Since no one else appears to have done so, however, he probably just moved the picturesque tradition a few years back in time so he could include it in his novel.

On Christmas eve, when a small party of friends were assembled in Dr. G’s parlor, the kitchen door was suddenly thrown open and in rushed a party of lads grotesquely dressed, their faces masked, several of them armed with wooden swords and daggers, who notwithstanding the opposition of the cook maid, immediately began to enact a little farce or comedy. This brought all of the family and visitors into the kitchen and the doctor suffered them to proceed.

I have not a very correct recollection of these antics, as they were called, but I well remember that two of the party soon quarrel’d and engaged in deadly combat but the why and the wherefore would be as difficult to comprehend as it often is in a recounter between real duellists. One of the masked combatants soon fell, and to appearance expired, and suddenly there was as great a demand for a doctor as ever Cooke made for his gelding in the character of the tyrant Richard.

“Five pounds for a doctor,” “Ten pounds for a doctor,” was vociferated on all sides.

Soon the son of Galen appeared: “I am a doctor.”

“You, a doctor? What can you cure?”

“The itch, the stitch, the cholic and gout,
The pains within and pains without;
I can take an old woman of ninety-nine,
Wrap’d up in pitch, tar, and turpentine
And then with what lays on the point of this knife
Quickly I’ll bring the old lady to life;
And for the price of a half pistareen
Can make her dance like a girl of sixteen.”

This wonder-working medicine which seemed to have all the virtues of Dr. Solomon’s Balm of Gilead was soon applied to the deceased, who jumped up and declared himself as sound as a roach and presented his cup for the contribution of the company. The largess was given, the masque retired and we could hear them rush into neighboring mansions.

This is all I can recollect of the performance of the antics. I thought the custom merited a memorandum as evidencing singular anomali in the habits of our ancestors, that bitterly opposed as they were to everything that savored of popery they should have suffered this forlorn fragment of monkish mysteries to pass unnoticed among them.

The picture above, from the B.B.C., shows the doctor, knight, and man of straw from a Northern Ireland mummers’ play in recent years.

Thomas Jefferson Looks at the Ladies

Today’s Boston Globe offers a review of Mr. Jefferson’s Women, by Jon Kukla. The reviewer is Prof. Michael Kammen of Cornell, whose A Season of Youth is an interesting exploration of how the memory and symbolism of the American Revolution played out in American art and literature.

Kammen writes:

Jon Kukla never uses the familiar colloquial phrase, but [Thomas] Jefferson comes across as a male chauvinist pig - a misogynist even more committed to patriarchalism than many of his contemporaries. He had no interest in education for women, except to prepare them for deferential roles as republican mothers. Equally serious, he strongly opposed any place for women in civic life.

Of course, the same could be said for most of Jefferson’s contemporaries, male and female. His misogyny appears not in his policy ideas but in his private writings.

This lifelong outlook had its genesis in 1763, when a socially inept Jefferson at 20 proposed marriage to the lovely and well-connected Rebecca Burwell, age 17, who rejected him in favor of a gentleman less rustic and with a superior lineage. For almost a decade thereafter, even as his male friends married, Jefferson displayed a dismissive mistrust of the fair sex and in 1770 recorded the following in his memorandum book: “Entrust a ship to the winds, do not trust your heart to girls, / For the surge of the sea is safer than a woman’s loyalty.” There was nothing wrong with his libido, however, because during the summer of 1768 he made repeated attempts to seduce the wife of one of his closest friends, who was away for months on frontier militia duty and had asked Jefferson, who lived nearby, to serve as the guardian of his wife and young child.

On Jan. 1, 1772, at the age of 29, Jefferson married a 23-year-old widow, Martha Wayles Skelton. . . . The Jeffersons appear to have enjoyed a happy marriage that produced six children, only two of whom survived to maturity. When Martha died of exhaustion in 1782 following her final pregnancy, Jefferson's grief was not only genuine but overwhelming. As Martha lay on her deathbed, she displayed four fingers and said to her husband that “she could not die happy if she thought her four children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. Holding her other hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again.” He did not, yet two intense but very different relationships ensued.

One of those relationships was Jefferson’s unrequited interest in Maria Cosway, an Englishwoman he met in Paris. The image above is an engraving of her that Jefferson had at Monticello; click on it for more detail about her.

The other relationship was with Sally Hemings, Martha’s half-sister. Jefferson’s own words acknowledge his attempts to woo the four white women, but the evidence of his affair with Hemings appears in his closely documented activities and her pregnancies, in other people’s words, and in the Jefferson Y-chromosome haplotype. Kukla’s book and Kammen’s review testify to how many scholars now accept without quibble that Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship, an idea still controversial a decade ago when Annette Gordon-Reed analyzed the previous historiography in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Kukla ultimately credits Jefferson with “thoughtful actions that implied respect, gratitude, and some measure of affection” during that relationship, noting how the law hemmed him in from treating Hemings better.

When it came to women, Jefferson was also hemmed in by his own personality. Though he was eloquent on paper, and thus eloquent to us, he was a diffident speaker and apparently shy. But as a rich, intelligent Virginia gentleman, he didn’t like to admit such shortcomings. Kukla’s book tracks how we know Jefferson showed interest in four women not enslaved to him. Three turned him down, two while they were married to other men. Yet, in a bitter irony, he wrote complaints about the uncertainty of “a woman’s loyalty,” putting the blame on the other sex. Jefferson certainly felt the bitterness, but I think he was too close to the situation to note the irony.

Seven on One Side, and Six on the Other

Last month Boston 1775 reader Leslie Hauschildt contacted me with a question about fashionable women’s hair during the Revolution, and specifically if there was a style called “à l’indépendence,” with thirteen curls to represent the thirteen states.

I found several references to that hairstyle, but they all seem to go back to one item that appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet on 1 Sept 1778. It was actually a translation of a story from the 11 June Martinico Gazette, the newspaper of the French island of Martinique, with some additional commentary:

Mr. [William] Bingham, Agent of the Congress, yesterday gave a concert, supper and ball to celebrate the conclusion of the treaty of friendship between France and the United States of America. The General and his lady honored the Assembly with their presence. The entertainment was at once splendid and well conducted. More than two hundred, of all ranks, were present.

What particularly attracted the attention of the company, was upwards of forty ladies, dressed with the utmost magnificence, and a part of whose dress corresponded with the occasion. Their head dress a la independance, was composed of thirteen curls, seven on one side, and six on the other.

The Americans are indebted to them, in the meantime, for the small sacrifice they have made in departing from perfect order and proportion; but it is expected that next year, by the revolt in Canada, the States, and consequently the curls, will be brought to an even number.

The varied pleasures of the dance made time slip away insensibly, so that when Aurora, with her rosy fingers, looked in upon them, she found the ball going on with as much spirit and animation as at first. Americans and French seem to be but one people, and to have but one heart.

I suspect that Americans and French might not have fully seen eye to eye about Canada. While this newspaper dispatch indicates that the U.S. of A. still hoped to bring Britain’s northern colonies into the Confederation, France might have still hoped to regain its former territories. Of course, those areas remained British for many decades.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, then published out of Worcester, picked up the Pennsylvania dispatch, and other newspapers may have as well. But did those reports start a new hairdressing fashion in America? I’ll keep my eyes open for other references to this style, but I suspect it was too fancy for the wartime republic, despite the popularity of the number thirteen.

The image above shows the Battle of Martinique, between British and French warships, in 1779, painted by Auguste-Louis de Rossel de Cercy and made available through Wikipedia and a Creative Commons license.