“Such Is Her Regard for You”

This afternoon I was at the Massachusetts Historical Society, studying the print edition of its Robert Treat Paine Papers. A couple of letters from the second volume struck me as shedding unusual light on Paine’s marriage to Sally Cobb.

Bob and Sally married on 15 Mar 1770. He was a lawyer in his late thirties, prominent enough for the town of Boston to hire him the next month to be a special prosecutor in the trials of Ebenezer Richardson and the Boston Massacre defendants. She was about thirty, daughter of a Taunton iron manufacturer and tavern owner.

Bob Paine wrote to his sister from Plymouth on 17 May of the same year (yes, the same year):

Dear Eunice,

I have just time to inform you that last Monday [14 May] 5 oClock P.M. my Sally brought forth a remarkable fine Boy having Endured a natural Regular uncommonly tedious & painful Travail for 21 hours. The poor Girl endured beyond description.

I left her very comfortable being obliged to come here to Court, & yesterday heard she was well, but I have not yet recovered from the distress of my Anxiety. The Boy weigh’d between 12 & 14 lbs.

Pray give my Love to Mrs. Cranch & Mrs. Adams & inform ’em of this matter. Hoping yr. Welfare I am yr. married father Brother

R. T. Paine

“Mrs. Adams” was Abigail Adams, and “Mrs. Cranch” was her older sister Mary. The big new baby, named Robert, grew up to become a lawyer like his father, but he died at twenty-eight of yellow fever. (His younger brother Thomas then took the name “Robert Treat Paine. Jr.”)

A young lady from Boston named Abigail Tailor was visiting Sally Paine in Taunton on 5 Sept 1770, while Bob Paine was in Boston on legal business. She wrote to ask him to stop by her mother’s house and pick up a cloak “in case it should be Cold when she returns to Boston.” Tailor then added:

Mrs. Paine was so disconsolate in your absence she was Determin’d to have something that belong’d to you so got your plad Gownd & laid it as Close to her as she possible could, such is her regard for you, I think she justly Merits yours

The Paines were married for forty-four years, until Bob’s death in 1814. Sally died two years later.

Capt. McDonald Manages His Company

Here are more extracts from the letterbook of Capt. Alexander McDonald, as transcribed and made available to all on AmericanRevolution.org. The last installment quoted McDonald’s letters seeking a higher rank for himself, and oh-by-the-way an officer’s commission for his twelve-year-old son. At the time, he was helping to organize a company of Scottish and other Loyalists into a British army regiment, eventually called the Royal Highland Emigrants or 84th Regiment of Foot.

Here’s how McDonald said he dealt with his non-commissioned officers. On 15 Nov 1775, he wrote from Halifax to Maj. John Small in Boston:

I am sorry to tell you Serjt SinClair Serjt McArthur and one Corpl McQuinn a rascal I inlisted here all three Highlanders are the most unruly drunken rascals I have in the whole recruits and I was obliged to Lay hands on McMillan even before I brought him to some order.

McArthur and SinClair fought the other day and were both Confined after they got Sober was kept one night in the guard I gave them both a severe reprimand and desired them to forgive one another and Make friends. McArthur insisted on a Court Martial. I told them they may both depend on being broke and may be receive Corporal punishment besides when I told them what A pretty figure two highland Serjeants would shew to all the rascals in this place stripped at the whipping post after being broke and I swore to them by a most violent oath that it Certainly would be the Case if they did not forgive one another and promise never to be guilty of the Like again

finding I was in Earnest and their honours touched up a Litle they thought proper to Setle Matters amongst themselves and are now upon their good behaviour.

A military company of the time required drummers to beat out signals during training and maneuvers. The Loyalist Institute offers the 12 June 1775 orders from Gen. Thomas Gage for organizing the regiment in ten companies, each with “two Drums.” On 9 Jan 1776, Capt. McDonald told Maj. Small, “I want much a drum Major and two or three drums” for his company in Halifax. McDonald seems to have gotten the job of recruiting and training drummers for the whole regiment. In a letter dated 27 January, McDonald updated the major on his progress:

I have picked out fourteen boys to be Drummers. I have got two Drumms from Mr Buckley the Secretary of the province and I am about hiring the Drummer that acts as Drum Major of the 65th to teach these boys, but he Says that Each of them Should have a Drumm and then he would teach the whole with the Same Ease as one.

The thumbnail picture above leads to the King’s Orange Rangers photo gallery, which includes images of reenactments undertaken with the recreated Royal Highland Emigrants.

James Otis’s Lessons in Human Nature

As Massachusetts and many other states vote today, it seems like a good time to take another look at politicking in pre-Revolutionary Boston, as portrayed in William Tudor’s 1823 biography of James Otis, Jr.

This passage recounts a conversation that lawyer had with a “gentleman of great shrewdness and capacity, who was one of the delegates” to the Massachusetts General Court when Otis was first elected in 1761. Three men fit that description, all merchants:

• John Phillips, who died in 1763
• Thomas Cushing, who was Speaker of the Massachusetts House during the 1760s and early 1770s, and later a delegate to the Continental Congress and a Lieutenant Governor
  
• the elder Royall Tyler, who held other Boston offices as well
  

Tudor also wrote that this gentleman “was chosen from the House to the Council,” moving into the upper house of the legislature. Of the three delegates, only Tyler made that shift before the Revolution, which implies he was the subject of this anecdote.

Reportedly, the gentleman told Otis:

“You will never succeed in the General Court.”

“Not succeed! and why not pray?”

“Why, Mr. Otis, you have ten times the learning, and much greater abilities than I have, but you know nothing of human nature.”

“Indeed! I wish you would give me some lessons.”

“Be patient and I will do so with pleasure. In the first place what meeting do you go to?”

“Dr. Sewall’s [i.e., Old South Meeting-house]”

“Very well, you must stand up in sermon time, you must look devout and deeply attentive: Do you have family prayers?”

“No.”

“It were well if you did: what does your family consist of?”

“Why only four or five commonly, but at this time I have in addition one of Dr. Sewall’s saints, who is a nurse of my wife.”

“Ah! that is the very thing: you must talk religion with her in a serious manner, you must have family prayers at least once while she is in your house: that woman can do you more harm or more good than any other person; she will spread your fame throughout the congregation.

“I can also tell you, by way of example, some of the steps I take: two or three weeks before an election comes in, I send to the cooper and get all my casks put in order: I say nothing about the number of hoops. I send to the mason and have some job done to the hearths or the chimnies: I have the carpenter in to make some repairs in the roof or the wood house: I often go down to the ship yards about eleven o’clock, and enter into conversation with them. They all vote for me.”

Tudor went on to write that after this gentleman ascended to the Council, he stopped making so many “friendly visits” to the shipyards. The next time he showed up, one man remarked “that since he had got into the Council, he did not come to see them so often.”

The expert politician reportedly answered, “O yes, that was true, but my time was so taken up; and then you know, it is the House of Representatives, that chooses the Council.” He no longer needed the town meeting’s votes.

An Alarm as Occasioned a Great Blustering

In early February 1776, it appears, Boston selectman Timothy Newell was startled by the sound of artillery. Which seems odd since he was stuck inside a besieged town that was the main battleground of a civil war. But I think his surprise tells us something about warfare in the eighteenth century

On the 2nd, Newell wrote in his diary:

Just at 11 oclock at night, some wanton soldier or officer fired a bomb from the battery, at New Boston, which bursted in the air, did no harm, but made such an alarm as occasioned a great blustering.

“New Boston” was the western wing of the peninsula, nearest to Cambridge, where the Americans had their headquarters.

On the 4th he wrote:

At half past nine in the evening, 3 cannon fired from the lines at Charlestown and a number of small arms at the Soldiers pulling down the Mills—say two men killed and one wounded. The next day many cannon fired.

The “Mills” were powered by the tides in the Charles River estuary.

I suspect what made these events notable for Newell—guns fired during a war!—was the time of year. February was the middle of winter, and eighteenth-century armies usually sat out that season. The British army was mostly concerned with keeping warm and fed. The Americans probably had enough food, but also hunkered down in their barracks. In his 1849 History of the Siege of Boston, Richard Frothingham wrote, “Through the month of February,...no enterprise of importance was undertaken.”

New Rule! No Football Games in the Streets

On 25 Nov 1657, the selectmen of Boston issued a new rule about a pressing public concern:

For as much as sundry Complaints are made that severall persons have Received hurt by boyes and young men playing at foot ball in the streets; these are therefore to Injoyne that none be found at that game in any of the streets, Lanes, or Inclosures of this town, under the pœnalty of twenty shillings for every such offence.

The selectmen immediately went on to issue another rule about people “buing out of servants tymes and redeeming others from Engagments,” and then letting those now free people become burdens on the government. The selectmen warned “that what ever person or persons they soe sett att Liberty they are to see after their Imployment, and to secure the Town from any charge that might otherwise be ocasioned by such.” In both cases, the town fathers were concerned with too much freedom.

The rule against playing football in Boston’s streets was still in effect over a century later on 3 Jan 1787, when the selectmen issued another warning:

The Selectmen recommend to the several Masters of the public Schools, that they make their respective Scholars acquainted with the By Laws forbidding to throw Snow Balls and play Foot Balls in the Street and any other of those Laws that concern their Scholars

The game of football has changed greatly, but local authorities are still worried about football-related rowdiness in the streets today. Let’s enjoy the game sensibly.

How He Made Himself So Important

One of the more curious curios of pre-Revolutionary Boston is a broadside titled “The CONVERSATION of two Persons under a Window on Monday Evening the 23d of March.” The dialogue that follows is about a town meeting, which indicates the date of the printing: the only year when Bostonians met on Monday, 23 March, was 1767.

The dialogue focuses on a politician referred to as “Pug Sly.” One surviving copy of this broadside has a handwritten note identifying that character as Royall Tyler—not the playwright, novelist, and jurist who took that name as he came of age, but his father. The senior Royall Tyler held several respected offices in Boston, including Fireward, Overseer of the Poor, and Representative to the General Court. By 1767 he was being elected each year to the Governor’s Council, where he was one of the more radical Whig voices.

The broadside describes how “Pug Sly” built his political popularity. It’s obviously a hostile portrait, but also some of our best evidence about how politicians won elections in this period when they weren’t supposed to openly campaign. One of the broadside’s voices says:

When quite young, how did he work himself into the Corcas; and was knowing to all their transactions: and whenever he found there was to be a change of [town] officers, he would as a fawning sycophant, let them know they were to be chose in office; so as to take the merit of it to himself: that some was made to believe that “PUG’s interest alone was all the Town.”

And every one that did not sacrifice to him, he would (to use his own word) give them a trip: and at this game there is not his equal. His thirst for honor, has put him upon the most dirty actions that a reasonable being is capable of:

I once ask’d him how he made himself so important. “Why, says he, I’ll tell you. To some I cry: some I coax: to some I scold: and put on an important appearance of friendship to all. As to the mechanicks; I take my rounds, turn in about eleven o’clock; and mix in with the conversation, and nothing will take them fellows in like it. When there is to be an engine supper [i.e., banquet of a volunteer firefighting company], I lay a plan to be invited; and they fix me at the head of the table, and pay me as much homage as a demi-god: You would sometimes laugh your soul out, if you was to see how I work them poor toads.

[“]As to those in higher life, I put on a sabbady [serious, Sabbath-Day] face; frequently apply to them for advice; sometimes upon affairs of great importance. I suppose (now under the rose) I have been to fifty, to ask advice about making my will. I have taken my pipe in the evening, collected the neighbours, set an affair on foot only to see how far I could carry it; and when I have got it to the pitch I wanted it, then I lower’d, and set it down just where I found it.”

As this election year proceds, I’ll quote more political advice attributed to “Pug Sly” and the elder Royall Tyler.

Love Letters to Be Read in Westford, 9 February

Dan Lacroix at the Westford Museum has sent out this announcement:

On Saturday, February 9th, starting at 7:30 P.M., the Westford Museum will host “Love Letters: The Intimate Correspondence of John and Abigail Adams,” just in time for Valentine’s Day.

The correspondence between John and Abigail Adams over their months and years of separation gives us unparalleled insight into one of the world’s great love affairs. The fact that this love affair took place at such a critical time in America’s history is most remarkable! Reenactors Tom Macy and Pat Bridgman bring the Adamses’ letters to life as the audience is brought from 1764 and the beginnings of their courtship, to 1777 when John is preparing to leave for France. Learn more about these iconic personalities as they reveal their homely pleasure in their children and their farm, their deepest hopes for their nation, and their undying love and respect for one another.

Special Valentine’s refreshments will be served. Tickets are $12 per person ($20 per couple for Westford Historical Society members). Contact the Museum at 978-692-5550 or by email to buy tickets.

As an advance taste, here’s how John, signing himself “Philander,” opened a letter dated 20 Apr 1763 to Abigail, his “Diana,” who was living in Weymouth:

Love sweetens Life, and Life sometimes destroys Love. Beauty is desirable and Deformity detestible; Therefore Beauty is not Deformity nor Deformity, Beauty. Hope springs eternal in the human Breast, I hope to be happyer next Fall than I am at present, and this Hope makes me happyer now than I should be without it.–

I am at Braintree but I wish I was at Weymouth! What strange Revolutions take Place in our Breasts, and what curious Vicissitudes in every Part of human Life. This summer I shall like Weymouth better than Braintree but something prompts me to believe I shall like Braintree next Winter better than Weymouth.

What would be different about “Braintree next Winter”? I suspect that John and Abigail had started to talk about getting married then, or maybe Abigail was simply planning a long visit to her sister there. John underwent smallpox inoculation in early 1764, requiring a period of separation (lots of letters), and Abigail married him at last on 25 October.

All the letters between Abigail and John are available in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Electronic Archive. A new print collection, titled My Dearest Friend, was just published.

Fifty-two Words, One Diagram

For some reason, nothing will do today but to pick up this image of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution “diagrammed,” found on the delightful Separated by a Common Language blog, and originally from Hartford’s own Capital Community College Foundation.

No, I never had to learn how to diagram a sentence in school. And this approach to analyzing sentence structure and grammar was unknown in the eighteenth century. But the formal prose of that era required long, complex, cascading sentences, and diagramming can help show how those sentences make sense.

Eugene Montoux has diagrammed an even longer and more complex sentence—the opening of the Declaration of Independence—as well as several Amendments.

Capt. Alexander McDonald Raises a Regiment

In November, Ed St. Germain added a nifty primary source to the resources available at AmericanRevolution.org: the letterbook of Alexander McDonald, a British army captain who had retired on Staten Island. He married Susannah Livingston of the important New York political family, and remained on the British army half-pay-pension list.

In October 1774, McDonald recognized that a rebellion was imminent in New England, and indeed had already started, so he set off to recruit a Loyalist regiment from among his fellow Scotsmen. In late 1775, McDonald sent letters to top army commanders reviewing his work. Those letters advanced his other purpose: to compete with rival officers in seniority.

Here’s some of McDonald’s 30 Nov 1775 missive to Gen. William Howe in Boston:

Last October was a year when I found the people of America were determind on Rebellion, I wrote to Major [John] Small desiring he would acquaint General [Thomas] Gage that I was ready to join the Army with a hundred as good men as any in America, the General was pleased to order the Major to write and return his Excellency’s thanks to me for my Loyalty and spirited offers of Service, but that he had not power at that time to grant Commissions or raise any troops; however the hint was impproved and A proposal was Sent home to Government to raise five Companies and I was in the mean time ordered to ingeage as many men as I possibly Could.

Accordingly I Left my own house on Staten Island this same day year and travelled through frost snow & Ice all the way to the Mohawk river, where there was two hundred Men of my own Name, who had fled from the Severity of their Landlords in the Highlands of Scotland, the Leading men of whom most Chearfully agreed to be ready at a Call, but the affair was obliged to be kept a profound Secret till it was Known whether the government approved of the Scheme and otherwise I could have inlisted five hundred men in a months time, from thence I proceeded straight to Boston to know for Certain what was done in the affair when General Gage asur'd me that he had recommended it to the Ministry and did not doubt of its Meeting with approbation.

I Left Boston and went home to my own house and was ingeaging as Many men as I Could of those that I thought I Could intrust but it was not possible to keep the thing Long a Secret when we had to make proposals to five hundred men; in the Mean time Coll McLean arrived with full power from Government to Collect all the Highlanders who had Emigrated to America Into one place and to give Every man two hundred Acres of Land and if need required to give Arms to as many men as were Capable of bearing them for His Majestys Service.

Coll [Allan] McLean and I Came from New York to Boston to know how Matters would be Settled by Genl Gage: it was then proposed and Agreed upon to raise twenty Companies or two Battalions Consisting of one Lt Colonl Commandant two Majors and Seventeen Captains, of which I was to be the first, or oldest Captain and was Confirmed by Coll McLean under his hand writeing in the beating order he gave me. I now See by a List that came here of ten Companies that Coll McLeans, Major Smalls and Wm Dunbars Commissions are dated the 13th June and all the rest of the Captains dated the 14th, I suppose to Settle their Ranks when they Come together by a throw of the dice and I may have the good Look to be the youngest in place of the oldest Captain in the Regt

Captn Dunbar Sold his Company Som’time agoe and of Course his rank of the Army the same time and I think it hard that he should be now put over my head after all my Services, and the trouble I have taken from first to Last about this Regiment. I am now going on to fifty Years of Age and if my Loyalty and Long Services are to be rewarded In this Manner I have but a poor Chance of dying a field officer. I am far from blaming Major Dunbar for accepting of the oldest Company I know he has merit to deserve Every promotion that Can be given him. without prejudice to others, there are few people I wish better than he but if it were my own brother I Could not help Complaining this time.

McDonald complained more directly to Gen. James Grant on 3 Dec 1775:

Besides my Long Services of about one & thirty years, I have taken more pains about the raising of this Chore than any other person Concernd in it. I have Sacrificed my wife & four Children & all I had in the world to Contribute all in my power for the Service of my King & Country.

I was promised to be the oldest Captain in this Regiment and now I find that Major Wm Dunbar is put over my head, a Gentleman who a few years agoe Sold his Company and of Course his Rank and I think it very hard and very unjust that he should take rank of me, notwithstanding I have a Sincere Reguard for him and think him worthy of every Step that can be given him without prejudice to others; this is the Grievance that I Complain of, and You’re the only officer of rank in the Army that I have the Least dependance upon I hope you’ll Use your Intrest to See me Redressed.

On 27 Jan 1776, McDonald hinted to Gen. Gage, “I am almost fifty years of Age and if Your Excellency thought proper its almost time I was A Major.” Of course, Gage was no longer in any position to help, having been superseded by Howe.

And Capt. McDonald wasn’t just looking out for himself. On 29 Dec 1775, he wrote to Maj. Small:

I gave you a hint before of my Eldest boy being twelve years of age and that I have seen Officers Children even bastards get Commissions at three years of age, witness Lt Colonel Alexander Campbell at the havannah and I think it would Not be adoeing a great deal of injustice either to the Regiment or the Army to give My Child an Ensigncy [the lowest officer rank].

McDonald’s 15 Jan 1776 letter to his wife Sukey implies that this boy had been at Princeton until a short time before: “Pray Let me know whether Mr Weatherspoon refuse to keep the boy in the College or whether it were your own Choice that he should remain at home...”

(As usual, I added a few paragraph breaks to these passages to make them easier to enjoy online. Please go to AmericanRevolution.org to check out more exact transcriptions. The thumbnail picture shows an officer of the 42nd Regiment of Foot in full dress uniform, courtesy of Parks Canada. This uniform resembles that of McDonald’s regiment, the Royal Highland Emigrants, after 1776. But the men may well have worn trousers or breeches while on the march.)

Comics and Crispus Attucks

I learned about an upcoming Revolutionary War comic book from Publishers Weekly today. It’s part of a push at Simon & Schuster’s Aladdin paperbacks imprint into comics, led by editors Ginee Seo and Liesa Abrams.

My hopes weren’t raised by the news that one wing of this advance will be “fictionalized” comics-style adaptations of the Childhood of Famous Americans series. I devoured those books when I was in third grade, but at the time I was living in Bakersfield, California, and there really was nothing else to do. All the volumes have about ten chapters on their subjects’ childhood, the various episodes prefiguring their adult careers, and a final chapter showing them doing whatever has made them famous. The series includes volumes about Abigail Adams, Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, Benjamin Franklin, Molly Pitcher, &c.

Dharathula Millender’s biography of Crispus Attucks is a most interesting example from the C.O.F.A. series. Millender was a teacher and librarian active in the civil rights movement in Indiana, the home state of Bobbs-Merrill, which then published the series. In 1965 she convinced the firm to add a book about Attucks, one of the first (if not the first) about an African-American.

Like all the other authors contributing to the series at the time, Millender filled out the historical record with anecdotes, conversations, and other details that have no basis in documented history. She had to describe Attucks’s childhood, of course, so she described his mother and father and gave them the names of Prince and Nancy. Her final chapter cast Attucks as a political activist, orating from a platform before the Boston Massacre. (He was at the head of the crowd that approached the soldiers at the height of the confrontation, but there were no public speeches of that sort.)

Because there’s so little solid information about Attucks, and the C.O.F.A. books weren’t labeled as “fictionalized” until about a decade ago, some people have taken Millender’s story as factual. The Wikipedia entry on Attucks puts those details in a section headed “Folklore,” but NNDB.com treats them as accurate. The statements have even shown up in a recent Dublin Seminar volume. So far as I can find, those details go back no earlier than 1965.

Alongside the new C.O.F.A. books, Simon & Schuster plans another series of comics called Turning Points, “placing fictional kids in adventure stories set in the midst of important and well-researched historical events.” The idea for the series came from agent Bob Mecoy. [Peek inside.] “It’s historical fiction that places kids in the center of big events,” editor Liesa Abrams told Publishers Weekly.

That series will launch with Sons of Liberty, “a story introducing the reader to the major battles of the Revolutionary War”—which was a span of seven years, longer than most children’s stories cover. The writer of record is historian Marshall Poe, who wrote some interesting articles for The Atlantic but, as far as I can tell, nothing about the Revolutionary War. The art is by Leland Purvis. The book hits the shelves in June.

The New Discussion of Olaudah Equiano

Tonight I’m quoting from Douglas B. Chambers’s review for H-Net of Vincent Carretta’s Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. I read this review a while back, but then it appeared two years after the book was published, so I don’t think I’ve been dilatory.

Olaudah Equiano (1745?-97), who for much of his adult life used the name Gustavus Vassa (apparently taken from an English play about a Swedish king), was an interesting man to begin with: at various times slave, world traveler, missionary, political activist, and autobiographer. But Carretta’s research has made him even more interesting by arguing that he wasn’t what he said he was. Chambers explains:

In fourteen chapters, and reflecting meticulous research following the 1995 edition [of the autobiography] he so ably edited, Carretta follows Equiano through his story of enslavement, transportation, maritime slavery in a time of European war (and Christian baptism), kidnapping a second time into slavery (from London to Montserrat), his travels, and his freedom, winding up back in London in 1767, when he was about twenty-two years old.

Carretta then discusses his adventures at sea through the 1773 Arctic Expedition on the royal navy ship the Racehorse, and his rebirth as an ardent Anglican, which ironically was followed by participating in a scheme to create a slave-based plantation on the Miskito Coast (Caribbean Central America).

In the end, Equiano (universally still known as Vassa) turned to anti-slave trade agitation, living as he did in England in the mid-1780s, which led to his official service in the 1786-87 effort to “repatriate” (perhaps better thought of as to deport) Africans in Britain to Sierra Leone, a royal service that made him a controversial public figure. Equiano clearly was inspired by his activism to write and publish and popularize the “interesting narrative” of his life. . . .

The problem, however, is that Carretta thinks (or at least strongly suspects) that Equiano was actually a liar, and one perhaps rising to being a notable fraud. In his archival research, Carretta discovered two separate documents: Equiano’s 1759 London baptismal record and the 1773 royal navy’s ship muster list for the famed Racehorse, both of which state that Vassa was born in (South) Carolina. And on the basis of these two documents, albeit two as interesting and problematic as these are for complicating an already busy life, Carretta has called into question Equiano’s putative African origins, and therefore the credibility, reliability, and authenticity of Equiano as an enslaved African.

Based on these two documents, Carretta goes so far as to judge that Equiano’s accounts of his early life—and all the interpretive weight they are now given as a kind of substitute for ethnographic-historical material on what he called “Eboan Africa,” as well as his wrenching description of being enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, his extended and harrowing Middle Passage—are all “probably fictitious” (p. xvi). As one might expect, Carretta’s use of these two anomalous sources, and his consequent contention of Equiano’s possible birth not in Africa but in North America, have garnered the most notice and disputation. . . .

Carretta’s biography represents an important opening in Atlantic history, and the case of Equiano’s ultimate origins is far from closed. But whereas Carretta would have us see Equiano primarily as Gustavus Vassa, that is, as an “Atlantic creole” and “almost an Englishman,” Vassa himself demanded that we remember him as Olaudah Equiano, that is, as “the African” and “a native of Eboe.” Though reasonable people can reasonably differ, I choose to believe Vassa's Equiano over Carretta's Equiano.

Chambers eventually concludes that Carretta, while having written a very important and interesting book about Equiano, hasn’t fully made the case that the man was born in North America and later claimed birth in Africa to strengthen his authority to speak against the transatlantic slave trade.

I think it’s significant that even before Carretta’s archival discoveries some scholars had raised questions about the authenticity of Equiano’s written memories of Africa. Paul Edwards’s 1988 edition of the autobiography for Longman, for example, notes similarities between Equiano’s descriptions of West Africa and other Abolitionist books. Until recently, people assumed those similarities arose from Equiano supplementing his childhood memories. Now we must consider that his first glimpse of Africa might have come from a ship’s rail.

The Lion, the Unicorn, and Didacticism

Today’s Boston 1775 posting is a call for papers from a scholarly journal on children’s literature, with my footnoted comments.

The Lion and the Unicorn, a journal committed to a broad investigation of children’s literature, is inviting submissions for a special issue devoted to the varieties of the didactic in the long eighteenth century.* Didacticism, often considered the dominant literary form of much European and American eighteenth-century children's literature, has been undertheorized.† Possible topics might include:

• What was the relationship between eighteenth-century pedagogy and didacticism?
• How did children and adults read didactic texts as quintessentially eighteenth-century readers?
• What was the relationship between didactic children’s literature and other didactic eighteenth-century genres such as the novel, the sermon, and the conduct book?
• How were political ideologies, economic theories, and cultures shaped by didacticism during the eighteenth century?
• What constituted an aesthetics of didacticism during the eighteenth century?

Articles of 12-15 pages should be submitted by March 1, 2008, to the editors for consideration for inclusion in the April 2009 special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. Essays should be submitted in PDF format using MLA style. Documents should be sent as an e-mail attachment.

Send submissions to:
Pamela Gay-White
Department of Languages and Literatures
Alabama State University

and

Adrianne Wadewitz
Department of English
Indiana University

* “Long eighteenth century”? C18-L, an academic email list I used to belong to, defined its scope as “the ‘long 18th century,’ which extends roughly from 1660 to 1830.” In other words, from the Restoration in London to the fall of Louis XIV in Paris. Just as the eighteenth century spills over onto either side, that email list spilled over into a blog named Long 18th. In August 2006 its members discussed “How and why do we define the long eighteenth?” Most notable about that interchange is that, out of eighteen comments, only one person actually tried to answer the question. And he ended up deferring to a Norton Anthology.

† Only you can help the undertheorized children of the eighteenth century. Won’t you help?

The picture above shows the unicorn from the Old State House; there’s also a lion, naturally. Clicking on that thumbnail takes you to Prof. Jeffery Howe’s page on eighteenth-century architecture in Boston.

Washington and the Cherry Tree

Every American “knows” the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree, and knows that it has no basis in fact. But how many of us have had a chance to read the original version of that story?

Here’s Mason Weems’s fable as it was published in 1809, transcribed by the George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia.

The crucial point:

The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree, which, by the by, was a great favourite, came into the house, and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author, declaring at the same time, that he would not have taken five guineas for his tree. Nobody could tell him any thing about it.

Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance.

George, said his father, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden?

This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment...

What will our young hero say?

(Today’s picture, also courtesy of the Washington Papers at Virginia, shows Grant Wood’s painting Parson Weems’ Fable.)

Capt. Moses Brown and the Beverly Company

Boston 1775 reader Tom Macy sent a link to his handy online edition of the orderly book of Capt. Moses Brown of Beverly from January to May 1776. Brown’s company was part of the 14th Continental Regiment, stationed in Beverly to guard the first American privateers’ wharfs, supplies, and captured vessels.

Here’s what the regiment’s commander, Col. John Glover (shown here), issued as general orders on this date in 1776:

It is Coll’s Orders that the Captains see that the Soldiers under their Command be disciplined [i.e., trained] twice a day at least, and that they keep their Arms clean and fit for Use, also to divide them into Messes of Six Men each, and to visit their Barracks three times a week & order them to be swept clean, and that the Soldiers keep themselves Neat & Clean, shave once a Week at least – as their Health & Reputation much depends on this, it’s expected this Order is punctually obeyed.

And it is further ordered and directed that the Non-Commissnd Officers & Soldiers attend divine Service at the house of publick Worship, and that no one will presume to go to the house of God in an indecent rude or disorderly manner, or behave so while their, on penalty of being punished therefore agreeable to the Nature of his Offence, and in order to encourage and stimulate the Soldiers, Commissioned Officers will set the Example by going themselves.

Macy’s annotations explain the location of the barracks, the nearest meeting-house, and the local ministers who were paid as chaplains. He also wisely writes, “There must be a good story behind the order that no one should behave ‘in an indecent rude or disorderly manner’ at church.” Almost every time someone writes a rule against certain behavior, we can assume that someone else has been behaving in just that way. Likewise, some officers had probably not been setting the example the colonel wanted.

The website also includes Brown’s breakdown of his company by age, height, home town, and whether they brought their own muskets. Almost all these soldiers came from Beverly, so they were serving in their home town. One, Esop Hales, was African-American, confirming that Glover’s regiment was integrated.

Capt. Brown’s orderly book is on display with his sword at the Beverly Historical Society.

David Library Lectures View the War from Five Angles

The David Library of the American Revolution in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, is, so far as I know, the only library in the U.S. of A. devoted exclusively to that war. It’s a quirky place. Founder Sol Feinstone named it after his grandson David, and the books are shelved in order of his acquisition rather than, oh, logically. Its holdings include lots of published materials, including books, microfilms, and digital resources, though not much in the way of manuscripts and other original documents.

This winter and spring the David Library’s lecture series is called “Five Views of the Revolutionary War,” and the views are:

Thursday, February 7, 2008 — 7:30 PM
Christopher L. Brown, Ph.D., Professor of History, Columbia University, “The British Are Coming: The Politics of Black Loyalism in the American Revolution and After” — Swept up in war, often but not always unwillingly, were America’s African slaves, whom most white Americans would not allow to fight or leave their place of bondage. Thousands, both men and women, responded to the war’s disruption by escaping to the British Army wherever possible, especially in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, and declaring their loyalty to the British Crown. At the war’s end, many departed from the United States for various parts of the British Empire, where they formed new and diverse settlements.

Thursday, March 13, 2008 – 7:30 PM
Scott N. Hendrix, Ph. D., Instructor, Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland, Ohio; David Library Fellow, “Upright Men Who Entered for Steady Advancement: The Centrality of Military Honor and Reputation for the Eighteenth-Century British Army Officer” — Seeing the war as both a duty and a career opportunity, thousands of officers of the British Army ordered their conduct and defined their role in the conflict according to strict rules of honor. This concept of honor largely determined their behavior both in victory and in defeat, from the war’s outset until their departure from America.

Sunday, April 13, 2008 – 3:00 PM
Maj. Jason Palmer, Assistant Professor of History, United States Military Academy (West Point), “George Washington’s Disillusionment: Learning to Command ‘Such Men,’ 1775-1776” — When he took command of the Continental Army, George Washington imagined that he could shape and lead his army much as a British general would do. But he quickly discovered that the Yankee farmers and artisans under his command, both officers and common soldiers, would not be led in traditional ways, and in a difficult first year he devised a new system of command, which he carried through the next five years to victory over a quite different British army.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 7:30 PM
Holly Mayer, Ph. D., Professor of History, Duquesne University, “Congress’s Own: French Canadian Continentals and Camp Followers” — In 1775 Congress hoped to bring French Canada into the war on the American side. This largely failed as Britain’s Quebec Act, the determined resistance of the British army, and a smallpox epidemic in America’s invading forces kept most of Canada loyal to the Crown. But by late 1776, Congress had acquired a regiment of soldiers that were uniquely its own: not raised by any rebelling state, but formed entirely of rebellious French Canadian men, accompanied by their families and other civilians, who were willing to march south to fight in America’s war.

Sunday, June 8, 2008 – 3:00 PM
John Rees, Independent Historian, “The Pleasure of Their Number, 1778: Crisis, Conscription, and Revolutionary Soldiers’ Recollections” — Most Revolutionary War soldiers were volunteers or members of local militias, but not all. In 1778 several states, including New Jersey, instituted a draft, (the first, and last, draft in America before the Civil War). This drastic measure underlines a basic truth about the War for Independence: in both the proportion of the population under arms and the number of casualties, it was, along with the Civil War and World War II, one of the three largest wars in American history.

These lectures are all free, but there’s limited seating, so the library asks folks to call 215-493-6776 x100 to make reservations.

Thanks to John Maass of A Student of History for the info. The photo above comes from a guide to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which has useful information for anyone visiting the library from out of town.

Voting for the Consent of the Governed

Yesterday’s Boston Globe ran two opinion pieces about the National Popular Vote bill now under consideration in the Massachusetts and other state legislatures. Both writers support the idea of ensuring the U.S. President is elected by a majority, or at least plurality, of American voters. “Consent of the governed,” the Declaration of Independence called that, and folks disagree with the notion only when they’ve noticed that it would block their preferred candidate from taking office.

The two opinion writers disagree on how the country should enact change to the Electoral College’s operations, whether through constitutional amendment or state laws. Pam Wilmot, executive director of Massachusetts Common Cause, wrote:

The National Popular Vote bill uses the states’ existing constitutional authority to choose the manner of selecting its presidential electors and the states’ existing authority to enter into legally enforceable joint agreements with other states to reach the goal of electing the president using the popular vote in all 50 states.

Under National Popular Vote, the agreement would take effect only when identical enabling legislation has been enacted by states collectively possessing a majority of the electoral college—that is 270 of the 538 electoral votes, roughly equal to half of the population. These states agree to give all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in all 50 states, thereby guaranteeing the popular vote winner a supermajority in the Electoral College.

Martin G. Evans, a retired Canadian business professor who has a lot of other opinions as well, argued:

Although the Constitution reserves to the states the procedures that they use to select their representatives in the Electoral College, there are a number of other constitutional issues that would have to be decided by the courts:

For a state in the compact, it could be argued that the due process rights of voters were being violated if the electors went against the state's own balance of party strength.

For a state outside the compact, it is clear that voters' rights are diminished because they would not have an equal right to affect the selection of the president in the Electoral College.

Finally, if a state decided to withdraw at the last minute—something forbidden by the compact—and instruct its electors to cast their votes for the winner of the state rather than for the winner of the national popular vote, it is possible that its action would be sustained by the courts because the Constitution gives the states autonomy to decide the manner of choosing and instructing its electors.

I don’t think Prof. Evans’s first two arguments hold up, while the last is an unlikely contingency. The Electoral College was never designed to ensure an “equal right” for voters or (as he wrote before this quoted passage) to provide “checks and balances.” The Electoral College has always been a thumb on the scale in favor of states with fewer voters; it has thus always given voters unequal rights and thrown the voting system off balance.

The Electoral College was also a way of removing the choice of President two or three steps from ordinary citizens. But since it was never a deliberative body (each state’s electors meet separately), it doesn’t offer the benefits of representational democracy.

Even so, the Electoral College never worked as the men of the Constitutional Convention expected in a contested election. The formation of political parties undermined the original system as soon as George Washington retired. In 1796 the Electoral College seated rivals as President and Vice President. Four years later, the man most electors wanted to be President nearly didn’t get that office. Before the next election, the states passed the Twelfth Amendment to fix the system.

But that still didn’t make the consent of the governed paramount in choosing a President. By then some states (including Massachusetts) were passing laws to assign all their electors to the local winner rather than proportionately, giving some voters even less influence than before. Combine that with the disproportionate Electoral vote for small states, and four Presidents and four Vice Presidents have taken office clearly lacking the consent of the governed.

Supreme Court decisions have held that state governments can choose electors however they choose. The National Popular Vote plan would take that undemocratic aspect of the system and put it to good use at last by ensuring that the consent of the governed matters. Yes, it would be more permanent to change the Constitution by amendment, and we could do that as well. But time’s passing. We’ve given the current, flawed system two hundred years. It’s time we made the Electoral College an empty ritual.

Ministers Telling Stories About Each Other

Boston 1775 promises gossip about the people of Revolutionary Boston, so for new material I’ve gone to a rather gossipy bunch: New England clergymen. Both of these tales involves descendants of the most imposing New England clergymen of all, Increase and Cotton Mather.

The Rev. Dr. James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) passed on an anecdote from his namesake, step-grandparent, and guardian, the prominent early Unitarian minister James Freeman (1759-1835, shown here, courtesy of the Unitarian Universalist Association):

I was once walking with Dr. John Clarke, and we met Mather Byles. He took my arm and said,—“Now we have the whole Bible here. I am the Old Testament, you, Mr. Clarke, are the New Testament, and as for Mr. Freeman, he is the Apocrypha.”

The Rev. Dr. Byles’s inability to resist a witticism was one reason he dropped out of favor with his congregation during the Revolutionary War.

The Rev. Samuel Mather (1706-1785) was Cotton’s son and biographer, and thus at the very top of the region’s Congregationalist orthodoxy. In an 1847 letter printed in the Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit, the Rev. Dr. Charles Lowell (1782-1861) passed on this picture of the man:

Dr. John Lathrop, of Boston, related to me the following anecdote of Dr. Samuel Mather, whom he knew well, being a member of the same Ministerial Association with him for many years:—At a certain meeting of the Association, Dr. Mather talked nearly the whole time; and, when the members were about to disperse, the Doctor said very emphatically,—“Well, Brethren, I don’t remember that I ever knew a pleasanter meeting of the Association than this.”

I understood the anecdote as pointing to the prominent infirmity in Dr. Mather’s character.

Mather also had difficulty with his congregants. He presided over the North Meeting-House for a decade until 1742, when the worshipers “New Light” leanings conflicted with his “Old Light” sensibility. Mather and a quarter of the congregation then formed a new meeting, Boston’s tenth, on North Bennet Street.

Mather and Byles were two of the three Congregationalist ministers who remained in Boston through the siege of 1775-76, the third being the Rev. Dr. Andrew Eliot (1718-1788). Only Byles was a political Loyalist, however, and even he refused to leave the country.

Records from Col. Scamman’s Regiment

A Boston 1775 reader has alerted me to Seth Kaller’s offering of documents from Capt. Samuel Leighton’s provincial company during the siege of Boston. The document dealer’s description says:

The present papers primarily illustrate the administration and supply of Captain Samuel Leighton's Company in the 30th Regiment of Foot commanded by Colonel James Scamman. They include a 44 page Book of Accounts kept by Leighton, recording pay receipts and meetings with soldiers, 3 “Returns,” 4 muster rolls for the company in July–September 1775, 15 receipts for guns, and 12 pay receipts for the company.

Leighton’s company was involved in the fight for Hog Island.

Col. Scamman (also spelled Scammon) interests me because of what he did during the Battle of Bunker Hill—or rather what he didn’t do. He was ordered to take his regiment into action on the hill. Instead, he stopped on Lechmere Point in east Cambridge, where Maj. Scarborough Gridley of the artillery was trading ineffectual shots with a British warship in the Charles River and Col. John Mansfield was also holding his regiment.

On 12 July 1775, Gen. George Washington’s general orders included this item:

A General Court Martial of the Line to sit at Head Quarters, in Cambridge, to morrow morning at Nine OClock, to try Col. Scammons of the Massachusetts Forces accused of “Backwardness in the execution of his duty in the late Action upon Bunkers-hill”. The Adjutant of Col. Scammon’s regiment, to warn all Evidences [i.e., witnesses], and persons concern’d to attend the court.

Scamman argued that he had thought his orders to march “to the hill” meant Cobble Hill on Lechmere Point, not Bunker Hill, and he had sent a message to Gen. Israel Putnam asking if his men were needed in Charlestown.

On 18 July, Washington announced that Scamman had been acquitted. The colonel then accused Ens. Joshua Trafton of “abusive Language, to the said Colonel Scammons while under Arrest,” but Trafton was also acquitted. Gridley, Mansfield, and other American officers weren’t so fortunate in their courts-martial. However, Washington and his command didn’t bring Scamman into the Continental Army when they reorganized at the end of 1775.

In February 1776, Scamman had the record of his trial published in the New-England Chronicle, apparently to uphold his reputation. That November, he petitioned the Massachusetts Council this way:

whereas his conduct has been called in question respecting the Battle of Charlestown in June 1775 wherein the Disposition made was such as could render but Little prospect of success and he being willing to shew his Country that he is ready at all Times to risque his Fortune and Life in defence of it would readily engage again in the service thereof and begs leave to inform your Honours that he has no doubt that he can raise a Regiment immediately for the service of the Continent and therefore prays to be indulged with a Commission for that purpose...

It doesn’t look like Scamman’s request was ever granted.

Basely Deprived Him of the Whole

It’s been a while since we checked in on John Morrison, the minister from Peterborough, New Hampshire, who marched with his town’s militia company to the siege of Boston and then, shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill, deserted to the British.

The Pennsylvania Packet for 1 Jan 1776 printed a dispatch datelined “Cambridge, December 21”:

That one Morrison, who officiates as a Presbyterian Minister, being appointed searcher of those people who were permitted to leave the town, promised, on receiving a bribe, to let a person bring out 240l. sterling in cash and plate; but afterwards basely deprived him of the whole of it.

Such a shame when you can’t trust the people you bribe.

The Legacy of Little Dams

This week the New York Times ran an article about how environmental history is changing the way geologists consider natural river flow. It turns out that many waterways that scientists thought were natural may have already been shaped by human industry in the eighteenth century. Reporter Cornelia Dean wrote:

The researchers [at Franklin and Marshall College] examined historical records and maps, geochemical data, aerial photographs and other imagery from river systems in Pennsylvania and Maryland. They discovered that beginning in the 1700s, European settlers built tens of thousands of dams, with perhaps almost 18,000 or more in Pennsylvania alone.

In a telephone interview, Dr. [Dorothy J.] Merritts described a typical scenario. Settlers build a dam across a valley to power a grist mill, and a pond forms behind the dam, inundating the original valley wetland. Meanwhile, the settlers clear hillsides for farming, sending vast quantities of eroded silt washing into the pond.

Years go by. The valley bottom fills with sediment trapped behind the dam. By 1900 or so the dam is long out of use and eventually fails. Water begins to flow freely through the valley again. But now, instead of reverting to branching channels moving over and through extensive valley wetlands, the stream cuts a sharp path through accumulated sediment. This is the kind of stream that earlier researchers thought was natural.

“This early work was excellent,” Dr. Merritts said, “but it was done unknowingly in breached millponds.”

Merritts’s paper with Robert C. Walter, “Natural Streams and the Legacy of Water-Powered Mills,” appears in the 18 Jan 2008 issue of Science. Its abstract reads:

Gravel-bedded streams are thought to have a characteristic meandering form bordered by a self-formed, fine-grained floodplain. This ideal guides a multibillion-dollar stream restoration industry.

We have mapped and dated many of the deposits along mid-Atlantic streams that formed the basis for this widely accepted model. These data, as well as historical maps and records, show instead that before European settlement, the streams were small anabranching channels within extensive vegetated wetlands that accumulated little sediment but stored substantial organic carbon. Subsequently, 1 to 5 meters of slackwater sedimentation, behind tens of thousands of 17th- to 19th-century milldams, buried the presettlement wetlands with fine sediment.

These findings show that most floodplains along mid-Atlantic streams are actually fill terraces, and historically incised channels are not natural archetypes for meandering streams.

I have no idea whether geologists have thought the same model applied in New England, but British-American farmers and small mill-owners were undoubtedly shaping that landscape even longer than in Pennsylvania.

(Aerial photo of the Assabet River in Concord above by Steve Dunwell, creator of Massachusetts: A Scenic Journey and other books from Back Bay Press.)