“To arms!” he declaimed. “Where is my musket?”

My remarks earlier in the week about John Hancock at Lexington, arguing that he had to confront the approaching British troops, reminded me of this depiction of the man in Robert Lawson’s Mr. Revere and I.



A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing the original of this art at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington. At the time, I hadn’t looked inside Mr. Revere and I in years. But I immediately recognized this image. It was one part of the mental picture of John Hancock that I grew up with.

Shoes Found in Hancock-Clarke Wall

Last week I had a lot to say about what was (or wasn’t) happening at the Hancock-Clarke House in Lexington, where John Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying until the very early hours of 19 Apr 1775.

This month the Lexington Minuteman reported on what’s happening at the Hancock-Clarke House right now: a renovation that’s unearthed some unusual items in the walls. Ian B. Murphy reported:

One of Lexington’s treasures, the Hancock-Clarke House, has a treasure of its own: six 18th-century shoes buried in its wall.

The shoes, known as concealment shoes, were discovered while the house was being refurbished and reconstructed. They were used to bring good luck and ward off evil spirits. These shoes were hidden away in the historic house’s walls with a cartridge box, a child’s corset, a shoe buckle, and a letter dated 1768.

As Guy Curtis pointed out when he alerted me to this story, cartridge boxes from the eighteenth century are relatively rare. Reenactors will be eager to know what shape this one is in and how it’s designed.

Here is Murphy’s photo for the Minuteman of the find.
As of spring 2005, the Sharon (Connecticut) Historical Society newsletter reported, “According to Jennifer Swope at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, no one has ever photographed a concealment shoe in its discovered location.” So this might be a historic image.

The same article says, “the consensus seems to be that it [concealing an old shoe] was usually done during renovation rather than original construction.” That could fit with the architecture of this house since this wall links what’s thought to be the oldest part of the house with an extension added at an unknown time. The 1768 letter could valuable there. Also, someone is doing dendrochronology.

The University of Southampton’s Textile Conservation Centre has an entire website devoted to Deliberately Concealed Garments. Brian Hoggard has a site on Concealment Shoes as part of a larger website on British folk magical beliefs, including an analytical study by June Swann of the phenomenon in Britain. The early modern British colonists in the New World brought that habit with them, so concealed shoes are a surprisingly common find in buildings that date from before 1800. Here’s a page about some from the Wayland Historical Society, for example.

Who Really Wanted to Fight at Lexington?

Yesterday I wrote about how unlikely it seems that Samuel Adams secretly manipulated Capt. John Parker and the Lexington militia into standing their ground as the British army marched onto their Green at dawn on 19 Apr 1775.

But I still think it’s possible that another Patriot leader urged the militiamen to do exactly that. Indeed, we have evidence that one politician argued for confronting the army column—not because he expected the redcoats’ reaction to trigger a war, but because he believed it would be dishonorable not to stand up to them.

Arthur Bernon Tourtellot was so intent on building a case against Adams that he didn’t recognize how the evidence he’d amassed pointed to another man. Citing William Sumner’s notes on a dinner conversation with the widow of John Hancock in 1822, he wrote:

Hancock insisted on fighting the British himself. “It was with very great difficulty that he was dissuaded from it by Mr. [Jonas] Clarke and Mr. Adams.” He nevertheless went down to the Common to see the minutemen and came back to the Clarke house to repeat his desire to fight. Adams finally stopped the protests by pointing out the importance of Hancock…to the leadership of the cause.

Hancock’s widow, by then named Dorothy Scott, actually told Sumner:

Mr. H. was all the night cleaning his gun and sword, and putting his accoutrements in order, and was determined to go out to the plain by the meeting house, where the battle was, to fight with the men who had collected, but who, she says, were but partially provided with arms, and those they had were in most miserable order...

She was probably dramatizing her story; other parts of her recollection, such as Hancock’s aunt nearly being struck by a musket ball, are unlikely, given what other witnesses said about that night. Tourtellot read the widow’s recollections to mean that Hancock actually went down to the Green himself. I don’t think she said that—she said he wanted to.

But as for the wealthy young merchant’s wish to fight, we don’t have to rely on his widow. Tourtellot also quoted William Munroe’s 1825 deposition about this night. As a militia sergeant, Munroe was guarding the Hancock-Clarke parsonage when Paul Revere and William Dawes arrived. He recalled:

it was thought advisable, that Hancock and Adams should withdraw to some distant part of the town. To this Hancock assented with great reluctance, and said, as he went off, “If I had my musket, I would never turn my back upon these troops.”

That sure seems like a hint about what Munroe and other men with muskets should do.

Tourtellot tried to to argue that Adams and Clarke, the Lexington minister, must have gone to the Green with Hancock:

Samuel Adams...would never have let him out of sight in the midst of such promising events; and Clarke would have guided them down the road from the parsonage, around the corner of the Common to Buckman’s. . . .

Expert as he was in town mobs and their behavior, Adams, who had lived all his life in the heart of Boston, was weak in his knowledge of country people. Hancock knew nothing of them.

Hence the need for Clarke’s involvement in the plot.

In fact, Hancock had grown up for several years in rural Braintree and in Lexington itself. Hancock had lived in Clarke’s house for a while as a boy; it’s called the “Hancock-Clarke House” because it was built for the merchant’s grandfather, the town’s minister for half a century. Hancock had also been staying there for weeks before 19 April while his secretary and a trunk of papers were in Buckman’s tavern. Thus, he had probably gone back and forth between the parsonage and the Green many times.

Why didn’t Tourtellot think that Hancock could have inspired the Lexington militiamen? He wrote:

Hancock’s behavior, brave or simply foolhardy as it may have been, during those last four hours, ruled him out as a serious advisor on the military situation (he apparently saw nothing unwise and useless in the President of the Provincial Congress standing with sword drawn and pistol cocked in the line of march of British soldiers supposedly intent on arresting him)...

In other words, Hancock couldn’t possibly have told Capt. Parker, Sgt. Munroe, or the others that they should stand up to the redcoats because he was too busy yelling about how someone had to stand up to the redcoats. Hmmm.

Hancock, unlike Adams, had some military authority in colonial Massachusetts. He had been captain of the Company of Cadets, an upper-class militia unit in Boston, until late 1774, when Gov. Thomas Gage removed him from the post and the company dissolved in protest. People continued to refer to Hancock with the honorary title of “colonel.” (Because the Cadets were so upper-class, their captain got this honorary rank.)

Hancock also had more official civil authority than Adams. In April 1775, he was both the President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the chairman of its Committee of Safety. Adams didn’t have those titles. There was no one in Lexington better positioned to give orders to Capt. Parker than John Hancock.

I’m not arguing that Hancock actually influenced the men on Lexington Green. None of those men described being inspired by him or his words, and in the early 1800s he remained popular enough that they would have had every reason to point to his leadership. But if authors want to find evidence of a Patriot leader prompting the fight in Lexington, they needn’t try to thread tenuous arguments about Samuel Adams. They should look at all the evidence about John Hancock.

(This posting is the culmination of a week of articles that began here.)

The Real Samuel Adams and Real Life

I’ve been tracing the idea that Samuel Adams somehow instigated the shooting at Lexington on 19 Apr 1775, from the first suggestion by Harold Murdock through the development by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot to a recent elaboration by William H. Hallahan. I see three major holes in this thesis, even beyond the lack of any positive evidence for it whatsoever.

First, this theory writes off the fact that the Revolution was a mass movement. It involved hundreds of thousands of people. It was organized through committees, conventions, congresses, and other means of collective decision-making. Since the Powder Alarm of early September 1774, the Boston Whigs had realized that the Massachusetts countryside was more eager to fight than their own town.

Even among the political leaders of Massachusetts, Adams was only the foremost of a large group. Some twentieth-century writers gave him credit or blame for everything that happened in Boston and then in eastern Massachusetts. But Adams didn’t come to prominence until after 1765. He had a lot of colleagues in Boston, some of them (William Molineux, Dr. Thomas Young) much closer to the crowds than he was. He was pulled along by many significant events, and far away from some others. It’s foolish to believe that Adams was guiding every political development of the day.

Second, Adams’s contemporaries considered him to be a cautious politician, especially when it came to violence. There’s no strong evidence that he led mobs. James Otis, Jr., reportedly trusted Adams—and only him—to keep him from speaking too rashly. Adams’s writings show a consistent belief that there was no need for dramatic actions. Rather, he usually stated that steady unity and resolve would cause royal officials to back down or reveal their true tyrannical aims.

Thus, on 21 May 1774, Adams wrote from Philadelphia to James Warren:

I beseech you to implore every Friend in Boston by every thing dear and sacred to Men of Sense and Virtue to avoid Blood and Tumult. They will have time enough to dye. Let them give the other Provinces opportunity to think and resolve.

Rash Spirits that would by their Impetuosity involve us in unsurmountable Difficulties will be left to perish by themselves despisd by their Enemies, and almost detested by their Friends. Nothing can ruin us but our Violence. Reason teaches this. I have indubitable Intelligence, dreadful, as to the Designs against us; consolatory, if we are but prudent.

Even as he itched for independence, Adams wrote to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper on 30 Apr 1776:

Indeed I have the Happiness of believing that what I most earnestly wish for will in due time be effected. We cannot make Events. Our Business is wisely to improve them.

To believe that Adams had indeed “made Events” in Lexington is to believe that he was completely duplicitous about his philosophy throughout life, even with his closest colleagues.

Furthermore, all the eyewitness testimony we have about Adams’s actions in the early hours of 19 Apr 1775 says that he spoke against confronting the troops. He urged leaving the Lexington parsonage as quickly and quietly as possible. Dolly Quincy reportedly heard him tell her future husband as the royal army approached, “that is not our business. We belong to the Cabinet.” In other words, elected officials had the responsibility to stay away from possible violence and keep the government running.

The third weakness of the Murdock/Tourtellot hypothesis is that it’s a conspiracy theory: a secret agreement among Adams, local minister Jonas Clarke, and militia captain John Parker to carry out a complex plot. That scheme depended on a precise understanding of how the Lexington militiamen would behave if ordered to stand on the Green, how the British troops would respond, and how the people of Massachusetts would respond in turn. The hypothesis requires nearly every action that men took in the early hours of 19 Apr 1775 to be the result of planning, and not just habit or circumstance. It posits a plot that men considered noble yet kept completely secret for decades.

(Hallahan’s wild tangent off the Murdock/Tourtellot hypothesis is even more clearly a conspiracy theory: in addition to those actions and reactions, it also posits a secret agreement between Adams and an unidentified gunman.)

One of the wisest rules for making sense of life, either in the present or in the past, is never to come up with a conspiracy theory for what can be explained by incompetence. (For variations on this dictum, see “Hanlon’s razor” and the words of Sir Bernard Ingham.) The British reports on the Concord march and the depositions from American veterans in the 1820s and 1830s offer little evidence of a conspiracy. But they show lots of evidence of incompetence, or rather of the limits on human competence: incomplete knowledge, inaccurate assumptions, misunderstandings, hesitations, poor memory, fatigue, compromises, circumstances beyond people’s control. In other words, real life.

TOMORROW: Which Patriot leader really called for standing up to the regulars.

“For the price of a few dead farmers”

I’ve traced how in 1916 Harold Murdock proposed that Samuel Adams had urged the Lexington militia to stand before the advancing British troops on 19 Apr 1775 because he expected their presence would provoke those soldiers into an aggressive act that would trigger the war for independence. Arthur Bernon Tourtellot adopted that theory and made it a basis for his William Diamond’s Drum in 1959.

Though I’m not convinced by their arguments on this question, both Murdock and Tourtellot wrote solid, significant books about the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. They offered new thinking and marshaled lots of sources. Most important, they were clear about where their sources left off and their hypotheses and suppositions began. But not every author is so wise or so careful.

Which brings me to William H. Hallahan’s The Day the American Revolution Began, published in 2000. This is a terrible book. It’s riddled with so many factual errors that, after I started to list them for this posting, I realized they’d fill an article on their own (maybe next week). Hallahan’s bias against Samuel Adams is blatant and unhampered by logic (I’ll post about that, too), so it was only natural for him to seize on the Murdock/Tourtellot theory.

But Hallahan egregiously makes no distinction for his readers between statements backed up by documents and those backed up by nothing more than supposition or bile. Instead of providing evidence or arguing a case, he just declares that people had particular motivations and that events happened a certain way, and then he repeats those statements over and over. Here’s Hallahan’s version of the Murdock/Tourtellot hypothesis:

in October 1774—at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia’s Carpenter’s Hall, Sam Adams pried and squeezed, wheedled and cajoled a promise from the other delegates to the Congress that if British troops attacked the people of Massachusetts the other colonies would come to their aid. But because of their deep distrust for Adams’s mobbish ways, many of the delegates warned him that the British had to be the first to shoot. If Adams’s followers provoked an incident—which they had already done a number of times—or if they fired first on the British, Massachusetts would find itself facing the might of England all alone.

So Adams returned home with a passionate mission: to goad General [Thomas] Gage into an attack. [page 15] . . .

For Samuel Adams, standing in the doorway of the parsonage [in Lexington in the early hours of 19 Apr 1775], it was a moment of near triumph. The answer was in—yes. Gage had finally taken the bait. Tonight, just one shot from a Brown Bess musket, one bloody shirt and Adams would have his revolution. [25] . . .

An exultant, expectant Sam Adams, now fully dressed, and always tending to business, walked the few hundred yards down Bedford Road with [John] Hancock and Reverend [Jonas] Clarke to Buckman’s Tavern, on the Commons, to chat with the armed militiamen. [26]

(Hallahan thus takes Tourtellot’s argument that Adams went to Lexington Green, though no witness recalled that he did, and makes it into a factual statement without a hint of doubt.)

Sam Adams was not the type of man who would leave anything to chance. With those British troops on the road—and American militiamen waiting for them, with orders not to fire first—Adams had found himself in a classic situation. All he would have to do was light the fuse. With the two antagonists facing each other, he could arrange to have someone—not himself; he would be far away—fire a single shot from behind a wall or a window that would provoke the British troops into a violent response against the militia. Afterward the British regulars would be accused of having fired first.

For the price of a few dead farmers, Adams could buy his war. [33]

Hallahan thus ends up going well beyond Murdock and Tourtellot’s hypothesis. He actually tells readers that Samuel Adams arranged for an agent provocateur to fire the first gun at Lexington. Who was that person? What connects that person to Adams? Hallahan never offers any answers—or any evidence.

TOMORROW: The big holes in the “Sam Adams provoked it” theory.

“Adams and Clarke unquestionably made up a policy”

As I quoted yesterday, the writer Arthur Bernon Tourtellot was a big fan of banker-historian Harold Murdock. In his 1959 book William Diamond’s Drum, now published as Lexington and Concord, Tourtellot had special praise for Murdock’s The Nineteenth of April 1775: “Informed, critical, witty, the essays are of immense value for the lines of inquiry that they suggest...”

In particular, Tourtellot picked up on Murdock’s forty-three-year-old suggestion that Samuel Adams had maneuvered the Lexington militia into provoking the British troops at dawn on that fateful day. Tourtellot also pointed his finger at on the Rev. Jonas Clarke, minister of the town of Lexington. He concluded:

Adams and Clarke unquestionably made up a policy between themselves. Adams knew the broad strategy of the resistance, because he was at this point its sole architect. Clarke knew the men of Lexington and, what is more, could control them as no outsider could. The policy determined upon between the time of [Paul] Revere’s first alarm and of the minuteman’s first muster and the time of the actual arrival of the British troops, was for the minutemen, however outnumbered, to make a conspicuous stand but not to fire.

When Murdock had first proposed that theory, he had conceded there was no evidence for it. But in American Heritage magazine, Tourtellot noted how many documents about the skirmish at Lexington had come to light since Murdock had written. So what new evidence had convinced Tourtellot that Murdock was right, that Adams and Clarke had “unquestionably” decided the Lexington men should “make a conspicuous stand”?

Actually, none. The intervening decades had brought out lots about the British side of the march to Concord, but the documentation about the Massachusetts politicians and officers was nearly the same as it was when Murdock spoke in 1916. So to make his case, Tourtellot had to fall back on arguments like this:

Dorothy Quincy remembered that [John] Hancock went down to the Common. It can be taken as certain that, if he went, so did Samuel Adams, who would never have let him out of sight in the midst of such promising events; and Clarke would have guided them down the road from the parsonage, around the corner of the Common to Buckman’s.

Somehow Tourtellot seems more certain that Adams and Clarke visited Lexington Green than that Hancock did, even though Hancock was the only one of the three men that anyone described as going there. And just as no Lexington militiaman recalled being urged by Adams to stand in front of the regulars, no witness described Clarke as advocating that policy, either. This was still a conspiracy theory in search of supporting evidence.

But a lot of people read William Diamond’s Drum/Lexington and Concord. Overall, it’s a very good book: researched in detail, focused on individual stories as most of us readers like, and well written. Until it was superseded by David H. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, it was the best twentieth-century book on the first day of the Revolutionary War in Massachusetts. And just as Murdock’s “informed, critical, witty” writing and his prescience about the British officers’ motivations probably convinced Tourtellot that his theory about Samuel Adams had substance, so Tourtellot’s book has probably made lots of readers and some other authors overlook the holes in his variation on that theory.

TOMORROW: An example of Tourtellot’s legacy.

Eighteenth-Century Events This Weekend

Two Boston 1775 readers have alerted me to two events rooted in the eighteenth century taking place in greater Boston this weekend.

On Saturday, 17 May, the Historical Society of Watertown will celebrate the opening of the Edmund Fowle House (shown here) on 28 Marshall Street. The ceremony will begin at 11:45 A.M., and there will be an open house from noon to 2:00 P.M.

Starting in July 1775, this house (then on Mount Auburn Street) was the headquarters of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Council, taking over the executive function from the royal governor, who was tied up in Boston.

The next day—Sunday, 18 May—the Garrison House in Chelmsford will host its annual spinning bee. Spinners in either period or modern dress are welcome to bring their wheels, chairs, fiber, any materials they wish to trade or sell, and food for a potluck lunch starting about 11:30 A.M. The event opens to the public at 1:00 P.M. and lasts until 4:00 or as long as people want to stay. For more information, see organizer Judy Cataldo’s website.

Murdock Remembered in 1959

Yesterday I quoted Harold Murdock’s provocative suggestion that the skirmish on Lexington Green on 19 Apr 1775 came about because Samuel Adams had somehow manipulated Capt. John Parker into lining up the militia there as British soldiers marched in. Murdock originally proposed this idea in a paper to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which published it in 1916. He reprinted that paper in his 1923 book The Nineteenth of April 1775, which Houghton Mifflin issued in two editions: 575 numbered copies for insiders and libraries and, in 1925, a cheaper edition for the public.

In 1959, Murdock’s “Historic Doubts on the Battle of Lexington” essay suddenly received much wider circulation. The August issue of American Heritage excerpted most of it with additional commentary by Time-Life writer Arthur Bernon Tourtellot (1913-1977). And Tourtellot was very complimentary to the older historian:

Few episodes in American history lend themselves more easily to romanticizing than the stand of the embattled patriots on Lexington Common. . . . But forty years ago a voice was raised against the chorus of national sell-exaltation. It belonged to a Boston banker named Harold Murdock, a descendant of the original settlers, a man of wit, of insight, of scholarly persistence in tracking down details, and of a judicious temperament. . . .

Murdock was the first fully to explore and then explode the traditional version of what had happened on that memorable day, but in the three decades since he wrote, new evidence has come to light which reinforces his skeptical, though tentative, conclusions. The significance of Murdock’s achievement as a triumph of American historiography has been confirmed.

Indeed, a lot of new information had surfaced in the 1920s about the British officers involved in the march to Concord. Allen French had examined and written about Gen. Thomas Gage’s papers at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor. Reports from Lt. Frederick Mackenzie and Ens. Jeremy Lister had been published. Murdock himself had edited the accounts of Lt. William Sutherland and a man named Richard Pope, probably a civilian volunteer.

Some of that new attention was probably spurred by the 150th anniversary of American independence in 1926. I suspect there was an economic factor as well: aristocratic families in Britain deciding to sell some old ancestral papers to rich Americans so they could fix the roofs of their manors.

The result was a much clearer picture of what the British commander and officers were trying to do and how they saw the situation. Murdock was right about them not being out for colonial blood. Tourtellot went on:

“Historic Doubts on Lexington” marked the end of the romantic, insipid view of the origin of hostilities in the war of the American Revolution. To most historians and to other commentators, it was a welcome relief, coming as it did during the almost irresponsible nationalism of the 1920’s. In The Saturday Review of Literature, the Murdock essay was “prayerfully recommended to over-zealous patriotic societies and the begetters of ‘pure history’ laws.” Charles A. Beard, then at the height of his own powers as a revisionist historian, writing in The New Republic, proclaimed that the essay marked, after a century and a half, the end of Anglo-American hostilities.

Tourtellot concluded this article by saying that Murdock had “written probably the most forceful single revision of a major episode in American history.”

Tourtellot was particularly hot on “Historic Doubts about the Battle of Lexington” because he’d echoed Murdock’s theory in his own book, William Diamond’s Drum, which was to be published a month after the American Heritage article.

(William Diamond, incidentally, was a teenager from Boston who drummed for Capt. Parker’s militia company in Lexington. He’s remembered in the name of a local school and a youth fife and drum corps. However, his name apparently wasn’t famous enough to keep Tourtellot’s book selling, so it was retitled Lexington and Concord and is still in print.)

TOMORROW: Tourtellot’s version of the Mr. Murdock’s meme.

Harold Murdock and the Birth of a Meme

Yesterday I introduced Harold Murdock, a Boston banker and historian who voiced some provocative new ideas about the Revolutionary War’s beginning in his 1916 essay “Historic Doubts on the Battle of Lexington.” The U.S. of A. was then having a national debate about whether to enter the World War on the side of Great Britain. It was an interesting time to argue that perhaps the British troops weren’t the villains of the skirmish at Lexington, as most previous American historians had agreed.

Here’s what Murdock asked his audience at the Massachusetts Historical Society:

And now, as we shift the scene to Lexington, let me ask if it has ever occurred to you to question the wisdom of sixty or seventy men going out and forming on the level ground of the Common, in plain sight of an advancing force of eight hundred of their enemies? . . .

How could he [Capt. John Parker] expect that sixty or seventy armed men, grouped between the meeting house and the Buckman Tavern, should fail of discovery by troops passing along the road but a few steps away, and how could he imagine that these troops would ignore them, standing as they did with shotted arms and in a posture of war? . . .

Captain Parker was a soldier of experience, and he chose a post for observation and consultation where his men would be almost brushed by the scarlet trappings of the passing enemy. . . . high land and thick woods, admirable spots for observation and consultation were close at hand, and yet Parker and his men stood quietly by the wayside inviting insult or molestation.

Has it ever occurred to you that Parker acted under orders, that the post he took was not of his choosing? Samuel Adams, the great agitator, had been a guest at Parson [Jonas] Clark’s for days, and he was the dynamo that kept the revolutionary machinery in motion. The blood shed by [Capt. Thomas] Preston’s men in King Street had been ably used by Adams to solidify the popular cause, and now did he feel that the time had come to draw once more the British fire? It is perhaps a foolish query, but it is engendered by an historic doubt. I cannot satisfy my mind that Parker was the responsible agent in the affair.

Murdock, in a nutshell, suggested a conspiracy to explain the shots at Lexington: Adams had somehow convinced or ordered Capt. Parker to put himself and his men in harm’s way so as to provoke an angry reaction from the British soldiers, and then an angrier, larger response from the provincial militia.

In 1923, Murdock included this “Lexington” essay and others in a book titled The Nineteenth of April 1775, published by Houghton Mifflin. He added a footnote to the passage quoted above:

There is no evidence to support this theory. On the other hand, there are precedents that justify suspicion.

Murdock’s precedents consisted of hints about the fights that led up to the Boston Massacre in the Rev. William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America and John Adams’s autobiography.

But those are vague hints indeed, hardly firm “precedents.” Gordon wrote of “certain persons among the leaders of the opposition,” and Adams of “designing men” spurring confrontations between citizens and soldiers. Neither writer pointed at Samuel Adams, whom they both admired and were close to. Some contemporary supporters described Adams as a voice for moderate measures—firm, unyielding, but not provocative. Other Whig leaders, such as William Molineux, were known for being close to the working-class crowds and being hot-headed, but by the twentieth century their names were largely forgotten.

Murdock wrote shortly before American historians and popular writers started to describe Adams in a new way: as an unreasonable radical, the sort of restless troublemaker who would indeed lure men to their deaths in order to bring about a war. And his theory about Lexington fit that picture, even though there was no evidence behind it.

TOMORROW: Murdock’s theory rediscovered.

“The Tory and the Redcoat will be given a fair hearing”

In May 1916, Harold Murdock (1862-1934) presented a paper to the Massachusetts Historical Society with the title “Historic Doubts on the Battle of Lexington.” A few months later it appeared in volume 49 of the society’s Proceedings, and Google Books makes it available here.

Murdock wasn’t an academic or a professional writer. He was much better off: he was vice president of the National Shawmut Bank. Murdock collected and read Revolutionary books and manuscripts, was active in the M.H.S., and became a director of the Harvard University Press. As an author, he made important contributions to the study of the outbreak of the Revolution in Boston.

In particular, Murdock broke from a tendency of American historians, both popular and scholarly, to accept American sources less critically than British sources, and thus to blame Crown policies or actions for all the Revolution’s violent episodes. His paper on Lexington stated his principles:

Let me say at the outset that I am in possession of no evidence regarding my subject that has not been accessible to historians for years. It is not my purpose to laud villains or to depreciate heroes, but as all the actors who played their part at Lexington were Englishmen and professed loyalty to the British King, I shall discuss the episode as belonging as much to English as to American history. The Tory and the Redcoat will be given a fair hearing on the stand.

Despite his professed neutral stance, however, Murdock was clearly an Anglophile. He wrote admiringly about British officers while criticizing local politicians. In particular, he made himself the expert on Earl Percy, the British army’s second-in-command in Boston at the outbreak of the war—and the highest-ranking aristocrat in town.

Murdock’s first major Revolutionary writing was, I believe, a 1907 Atlantic Monthly piece titled “Earl Percy’s Dinner-Table,” which was later published in limited editions under that title and Earl Percy Dines Abroad: A Boswellian Episode. It imagined the conversation at the earl’s house about the political troubles in Boston, with only British officers and high-born Tories in the party. (The thumbnail image above comes from Krown & Spellman Booksellers, which offers a copy of Murdock’s Earl Percy Dines Abroad.)

At the time, Murdock’s leanings were a valuable corrective to the biases in American histories. But his own biases could sometimes affect his historical judgment. His Lexington essay stated that Gen. Thomas Gage “knew that there were thousands in the town [of Boston] who welcomed his presence, even as an enforcer of the Port Bill and the Regulating Acts.” The number “thousands” is hard to square with the town’s population of under 3,000 white males of voting age, the relatively small number of men who signed addresses welcoming their new governor, or the one thousand people of all sorts who left with the royal forces in March 1776.

Murdock was a conservative of the old-fashioned sort, which is to say a snob. In his paper on Lexington, he wrote that the Boston Massacre “deprived the town of some of its undesirable citizens.” He ended up, unconsciously or not, echoing the view of the Revolution that we see in the writings of Loyalist officials: that the common people of Massachusetts had never had it so good, so they must have been drawn into revolt only by the secret designs of cunning leaders.

In particular, Murdock proposed that sort of explanation for the shooting on Lexington Green early on 19 Apr 1775. It was, he admitted, a “theory” for which he had no evidence. Nevertheless, it eventually inspired one very good study of the Battle of Lexington and Concord as well as being uncritically inserted into some very bad books. This week I’m going to trace the life of this meme before examining the evidence for and against it.

TOMORROW: Mr. Murdock’s meme.

One-Page Review: Mark Puls, Henry Knox

Henry Knox was the commander of the U.S. army artillery from late 1775 through the end of the Revolutionary War, and then Secretary of War under the Continental Congress and President George Washington—a significant figure in American military and political history.

Knox was also one of the definite “winners” of the Revolution, coming out significantly ahead of how he went in. In 1770 he was a fatherless apprentice bookseller with charm, intelligence, ambition, and very few assets. Twenty years later, he was a popular army commander, a powerful national figure, and a major landowner in Maine. Knox succeeded through both hard work and good fortune: the Revolution opened up paths to the top of society for him, and he also inherited a lot of property from his wife Lucy’s Loyalist father.

I’m very intrigued by Henry Knox, and I was eager to see Mark Puls’s Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, published this year by Palgrave Macmillan. It’s the first full biography of Knox in decades. After examining the book, however, I decided not to write a full review. Instead, I’m going to sum up my thoughts by discussing a single page.

A sentence near the top of page 31 says:

After Colonel William Prescott was found guilty of “threatening and abusing a number of persons,” a court-martial sentenced him to the humiliation of riding “the wooden Horse, fifteen minutes.”

Prescott was the commander in the provincial redoubt on Breed’s Hill. Was he really sentenced to this painful humiliation? This sentence comes with a citation to Washington’s general orders for 10 July 1775, but what that document actually says is:

The General Court Martial of which Col. William Prescott was president having tried William Pattin of Col. [Richard] Gridley’s [artillery] regiment, and found him guilty of “threatening and abusing a number of persons, when prisoner in the Quarter Guard.” The Court sentence the prisoner to ride the wooden Horse, fifteen minutes.

Prescott was thus the chief judge in this case, not the defendant. The man punished for threatening and insulting his guards was William Pattin. (Pattin had been in Capt. Samuel Gridley’s artillery company early in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and was compensated 18s. by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for personal property he lost there. Col. Jonathan Ward had ordered him confined on the charge of “leaving his post on guard.” Pattin’s court-martial was scheduled for early July, but no one showed up to provide evidence against him. Nevertheless, Washington decided not to free him “untill farther consideration.” So Pattin might have felt that “threatening and abusing” words were justified by the situation. But I digress.)

The next paragraph on page 31 contains a sentence that spells Gen. Nathanael Greene’s last name two different ways; that’s a proofreading lapse. But it gives me just enough of an excuse to discuss how earlier, on page 21, the book states that Knox and Greene had met in Boston before the war. I suspect that information came from a footnote in Noah Brooks’s Henry Knox, a Soldier of the Revolution, published in 1900. Unfortunately, Brooks was relying on (and quoting) the fictional diary of Dorothy Dudley, composed and published in 1876. Knox and Greene probably didn’t meet until they were both on the provincial siege lines in the summer of 1775.

The final paragraph on page 31 starts:

The next day, Knox was relieved that she [his wife Lucy] had left the camp when the British artillery opened a cannonade on the American position. Henry was not impressed with these grenadiers, who were not as skilled as the gunners aboard the battleships who leveled Charlestown.

Here the author is obviously under the impression that the British soldiers behind that cannonade were “grenadiers.” Grenadiers were specialized infantry troops, not artillerists. This wouldn’t be a big problem except that this book is about an artillery commander.

The citation for this passage quotes Henry’s letter to his younger brother William, dated 25 Sept 1775:

Last Friday Lucy dined at General Washington’s. Last Saturday, let it be remembered to the honor and skill of the British troops, that they fired 104 cannon-shot at [our] works, at not a greater distance than half point blank shot,—and did what? Why, scratched a man’s face with the splinters of a rail-fence!

That letter says nothing about Knox feeling “relieved” about his wife’s safety. For one thing, Washington’s headquarters, where Lucy had dined, was the Cambridge mansion now known as Longfellow House [open for tours this month every Thursday through Saturday]. That was miles away from the fortified “works” that Knox described the British guns reaching. Lucy had never been in danger from a cannonade.

A more systematic lapse of this book, I think, is that this is far from the only time it puts an emotion into Henry Knox’s head not justified by his own words. It often states what he was thinking or what he saw when there’s little or no evidence for those statements. Yes, we can make a logical case that Knox was “was relieved” when his wife was far out of firing range, or that he “often watched the British soldiers drill” in Boston in 1774. But without letters, journals, or other documents as evidence, a historian or biographer should be clear what are suppositions and what are facts.

It’s a shame that the early part of Henry Knox’s life is poorly documented. I’d love to know more about his growing up, when and how he got out of Boston during the war, and how he jumped from being an unranked volunteer to commanding the Continental Artillery. But we don’t have definite answers. Most of Knox’s biographers have been popular writers, not scholars, and have filled in the gaps in the record with legends and speculation. This new book is part of that tradition.

America’s Bravest Defender: The Fighting Yank

Last year I analyzed several nonfiction comics designed to teach topics in American Revolutionary history. [The impressively talented illustrator of one of those comics, Ross Watton, recently posted a thoughtful comment in response to my criticism.] I return to the theme of Revolutionary comics today, but we’re leaving the world of nonfiction far behind.

In the early 1940s, the superhero was new and hot. This was when Superman, Batman, the Human Torch, Captain Marvel, the Sub-Mariner, the Spirit, and Wonder Woman were created—as well as hundreds of other, forgotten heroes, most clearly derivative and others simply ludicrous. (Doll Man? The Human Bomb? Stardust?) Almost any superhero seemed to sell, at least well enough for the publisher to stay in business, or to slip away and reopen under a new name.

At the same time, the Second World War was raging in Europe and Asia. By 1941, most Americans expected the U.S. of A. to enter that conflict as well. Those expectations produced a flurry of ultra-patriotic superheroes, of which only Captain America remains well known today.

Into that world burst the Fighting Yank, in the tenth issue of Startling Comics, with a cover date of September 1941 (and thus on newsstands a couple of months before). This magazine came from a second-rate publisher doing business at different times as Standard, Better, Four Star, and Nedor. The first story was created by writer Richard E. Hughes (a pseudonym for Leo Rosenbaum) and artist Jon Blummer. Eventually the Fighting Yank appeared in his own magazine as well as the original America’s Best Comics, but the end of the superhero fad led to his disappearance in 1949.

What made the Fighting Yank stand out from the superhero pack was his Revolutionary War heritage. His origin story starts with an appearance by Gen. George Washington himself, as well as a Longfellovian “wayside inn.” Redcoat soldiers shoot a Patriot messenger named Bruce Carter, but he will return as a ghost whenever danger threatens the U.S. of A.—which brings us to 1941.

Bruce Carter III, great-great-grandson of the dead Patriot, does “nothing but lie around all day reading history books.” Unfathomably, his father and his fiancée, Joan Farwell, think this is a Bad Thing. (One wonders why Joan agreed to marry Bruce III in the first place.)

Then the threat to the U.S. of A., not to mention Bruce’s engagement, grows so great that the dead Patriot appears before his young descendant and leads him to a cloak hidden in the attic. As soon as Bruce III puts on his ancestor’s cloak, he discovers that he’s super-strong and invulnerable.

But of course a superhero must have a secret identity and a special look. Thus, Bruce III becomes the Fighting Yank! With his keen knowledge of history and attic full of antique garments, he dresses himself in a tricorn hat, breeches, buckled shoes, and a shirt with a small American flag on it. (Sometimes this flag even has the circle of stars associated with Revolutionary times.)

It’s never clear exactly how the Fighting Yank’s cape of invulnerability works. It appears to deflect bullets shot at his chest even when it’s streaming out behind his back, but it doesn’t keep him from being felled by a sock on the jaw or a lead pipe to the tricorn, should the plot demand that he be knocked out. The Fighting Yank doesn’t fly, but he figures out how to propel himself through the air by wrapping his cape around his body and setting off an explosion under himself.

Bruce III’s secret weapon, however, is the first Bruce. About once an issue, when things look their worst, readers can count on the ghostly Patriot reappearing to fetch the cape back to his descendant or aid in some other way. His presence helps to remind us all of what a noble cause Americans are fighting for. Though that cause is rarely any clearer than “Down with the dictatorships! . . . The price of liberty is constant vigilance!”

In his origin story, the Fighting Yank battles a fascist ring that’s kidnapped an influential senator. I don’t want to give away the ending, but keep an eye out for the long-lost evil twin brother.

The truly revolutionary aspect of that and subsequent Fighting Yank stories, I think, is that when our hero first rescues his girlfriend Joan, she doesn’t wail, “Oh, why can’t my Bruce be as brave and strong as the Fighting Yank?” Instead, she starts this exchange:

“Hmm—That costume of yours—It looks familiar!”

“Er, I’d better be going!”

“No you don’t, Bruce Carter! Something’s happened to turn you into a human dynamo...but you’re not fooling me!”

Joan remains at Bruce’s side, encouraging him to fight on in his new guise. Don Markstein’s Toonopedia explains, “Depending on the needs of the story, she could be either an assistant or a hostage.”

Because the publisher of the Fighting Yank went out of business and didn’t renew its copyrights, those stories have entered the public domain. Cash Gorman’s Fighting Yank archive lets us read several stories on the web; that’s where I found them. Others are available (in black and white) in AC Comics’ reprints series, source of the cover image at top.

John Adams Reviews Rachel Wells’s Waxwork

A few days ago I mentioned a museum in Norwalk, Connecticut, that Robert Treat Paine and John Adams visited on their way to the Continental Congress. Here’s another letter from John to Abigail Adams about public exhibits during the war, sent from Philadelphia on 10 May 1777:

The Day before Yesterday, I took a Walk, with my Friend [William] Whipple to Mrs. [Rachel] Wells’s, the Sister of the famous Mrs. [Patience] Wright, to see her Waxwork. She has two Chambers filled with it.

In one, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is represented. The Prodigal is prostrate on his Knees, before his Father, whose joy, and Grief, and Compassion all appear in his Eyes and Face, struggling with each other. A servant Maid, at the Fathers command, is pulling down from a Closet Shelf, the choicest Robes, to cloath the Prodigal, who is all in Rags. At an outward Door, in a Corner of the Room stands the elder Brother, chagrined at this Festivity, a Servant coaxing him to come in. A large Number of Guests, are placed round the Room.

In another Chamber, are the Figures of Chatham, [Benjamin] Franklin, [John] Sawbridge, Mrs. [Catherine] Maccaulay, and several others. At a Corner is a Miser, sitting at his Table, weighing his Gold, his Bag upon one Side of the Table, and a Thief behind him, endeavouring to pilfer the Bag.

There is Genius, as well as Taste and Art, discovered in this Exhibition: But I must confess, the whole Scæne was disagreable to me. The Imitation of Life was too faint, and I seemed to be walking among a Group of Corps’s, standing, sitting, and walking, laughing, singing, crying, and weeping. This Art I think will make but little Progress in the World.

Another Historical Piece I forgot, which is Elisha, restoring to Life the Shunamite’s Son. The Joy of the Mother, upon Discerning the first Symptoms of Life in the Child, is pretty strongly expressed.

Dr. Chevots Waxwork, in which all the various Parts of the human Body are represented, for the Benefit of young Students in Anatomy and of which I gave you a particular Description, a Year or two ago, were much more pleasing to me. Wax is much fitter to represent dead Bodies, than living ones.

The thumbnail image above is Patience Wright’s wax portrait of Admiral Richard Howe, now the property of the Newark Museum. Here’s a link to Rachel Wells’s unsuccessful plea for New Jersey to repay money she claimed she had loaned that state during the war.

Attucks and the A.P. Exam

Today Boston 1775 salutes all the young scholars taking this year’s Advanced Placement U.S. History exam—particularly those at the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science in Boston. Last month I had the honor of speaking to Matthew Kazlauskas’s A.P. history classes there.

I talked about what we know—and don’t know—about Crispus Attucks, based on various primary sources and recollections. I seized the opportunity to share this image; it’s a detail from Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, as reproduced on the poster that hangs on my office wall (purchased from the Old State House gift shop).

The black lines of an engraving are reproduced with a copperplate, but Revere or his artistic partner Christian Remick had to add all the solid blacks and colors by hand. That means every colored copy of this engraving is different. I therefore can’t say that this copy is typical.

Nevertheless, I like to raise the question of whether it shows Attucks, who was usually labeled as a “mulatto” (and once as an “Indian”). This image shows a man with two symmetrical wounds in the chest—Attucks’s wounds, as detailed in an autopsy. He has dark black hair and skin that looks slightly darker than that of surrounding figures. Did Revere and Remick actually depict Attucks as a person of color? Or is that just how the paper has aged?

At least one student smartly pointed out that in this engraving the man with the two chest wounds is the victim farthest from the soldiers’ guns. Eyewitness testimony and an earlier image by Revere tell us that Attucks was struck down at the front of the crowd. So perhaps that figure wasn’t meant to represent Attucks. Or perhaps the artists moved him back, acknowledging his presence but not making him so prominent.

Of course, Revere and Remick could have used their paints to produce different versions of the scene for different customers, or however they chose. As with so many other historical questions, we’re unlikely to find any definite answers, but half the fun is in thinking through the questions.

At the Golden Ball and the Constitution Museum

Here are two events next week in the Boston area for people with historical minds and free weekdays, a little outside the Revolutionary period but not drastically.

On Monday, 12 May, the Golden Ball Tavern in Weston, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society are hosting their biennial symposium, this time with the theme “Comforts of Home?: The Real Truth about Daily Life in Colonial and Early America.” As of yesterday, organizers were still accepting new registrations. The cost is $100 for members of either of those organizations, $125 for everyone else, and includes a lunch.

The program runs from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. and includes these presentations:

• “Jerked and Jostled: Travel, a Non-Comfort in Early America,” by Elisabeth Garrett Widmer, author of At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870.
• “Cloth for Ease: The Battle Between Comfort and Chic,” by Edward Maeder, Director of Exhibitions and Curator of Textiles at Historic Deerfield, Inc.
• “The Technological and Social Transformations of the 19th-Century Kitchen,” by Debra L. Friedman, Head of Interpretation, Old Sturbridge Village.
• “Creating a Comfortable Colonial Home: The Women of the Moffatt-Ladd House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,” by Barbara McLean-Ward, Director/Curator, Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden.

For more information on registering, click on the Golden Ball link above.

On Tuesday, 13 May, the U.S.S. Constitution Museum will unveil its newly acquired series of four paintings of that warship’s victory over the Guerriere during the War of 1812, which gave the ship its nickname of “Old Ironsides.”

George Ropes’s portrayal of that battle was owned for many years by the Woburn Library, and its trustees decided to sell the canvases to raise money. The Constitution Museum seems to be ecstatic about acquiring these paintings. I’m assuming the detail shown here comes from one of the “After” images.

This celebration will take place from 2:00 to 2:30 P.M., and will feature children from area schools. Because the museum is on the Charlestown Navy Yard site, security is tight and parking limited, so the event organizers ask people planning to attend to R.S.V.P. by Monday at 617-426-1812. The paintings will be on display in the museum through the summer and beyond.

Robert Patterson: disabled sailor

As he testified in March 1770, Robert Patterson was wounded in the right arm during the Boston Massacre—one of several Bostonians injured in that shooting on top of the five killed. Patterson evidently suffered such damage that he became unable to do the physically demanding work of a sailor.

On 30 Jan 1771, selectmen John Hancock and Jonathan Mason and Overseer of the Poor Royall Tyler signed the paperwork to allow Patterson to stay in the Boston workhouse. The Boston town records say:

Mr. Paul Farmer Keeper of the Alms house was directed to receive into the Alms house to be supported at the Province Charge one Robert Patterson a Stranger and not an Inhabitant of any Town in this Province, being Poor & having lost the use of his Right Arm on the 5 of March last in the Massacre made by the Soldiers.

It’s not clear how long Patterson remained there.

As I recounted last week, starting in 1774 young Christopher Monk was the beneficiary of donations collected at the oration Boston commissioned on each anniversary of the Massacre. In 1781, after Monk died, Patterson evidently feared all that charitable instinct would go to waste, so he asked if he could start receiving the donations instead. The town records for 5 Mar 1781 say:

a Petition of Mr. Robert Patterson setting forth, “that he received a wound in his Right Arm on the 5th. of March 1770. by a Shot from [Capt. Thomas] Prestons Party, whereby he has entirely lost the use of it; and that since the death of Mr. Monk he is the only one of the unhappy number then badly wounded, that survive,” and therefore praying the Charity of the Town—was read, whereupon

Voted, that a Collection be made at the close of this Meeting, for the said unhappy Sufferer, and Boxes were placed at each Door to receive the Collections

The Collection made for the said Mr. Patterson, amounted to the Sum of

And the blank was never filled in. Instead, two days later selectman John Scollay told his colleagues:

that the Money Collected for Mr. Patterson at the Town Meeting the 5th. of March in consideration of the wounds he received the 5 of March 1770 from Prestons Party, amounted to £326’15’4. Old Money & 4/ & 1/2 hard Money—

Mr. Scollay was desired to retain the Money belonging to Mr. Patterson, till further enquiry can be made respecting him which was accordingly done

Bostonians seem to have been clearing out their old, devalued paper currency but parting with few hard coins. Patterson presented the same petition in January 1782, and the town meeting again approved it. That March, the selectmen’s minutes recorded:

There was Collected for James Patterson, who was wounded the 5 of March 1770, the Sum of Seven Pounds twelve Shillings,—and the same has been put into the hands of Capt. William Mackay, for the use of the said Patterson, & his Wife

Nearly £8! Obviously, Patterson’s public image wasn’t as heart-tugging as Monk’s had been. And town clerk William Cooper even got his name wrong.

In 1783, Patterson’s cause suffered further. First, another surviving Massacre victim turned up, asking for cash. The town records say:

A Petition of John Green one of the Persons wounded on the Evening of the 5th. of March 1770 also the request of Mr. Patterson who lost the use of one of his Arms on that, memorable Night—was read—and considered—

A Collection was made for the aforenamed Persons amounting to the Sum of and put into the hands of the Selectmen to be distributed as they may Judge proper

John Green’s name didn’t appear on the first published list of Massacre victims, but the Boston Gazette that followed named him and said he was a tailor. (A young man named John Green had run to fetch soldiers when a crowd threatened the sentry outside the Customs house, but I doubt this was the same man who was shot since that would have been too ironic not to be mentioned somewhere.)

In 1783, Green and Patterson probably split the few pounds collected, their last chance to do so. It was already clear that the war was coming to a close, and the Massacre remembrances no longer had propaganda value. Boston voted to shift its annual oration to Independence Day. I don’t know what happened to Robert Patterson after that.

Robert Patterson: riotous sailor

Robert Patterson was a sailor. Since Boston was the third largest port in North America, there were many sailors in town over the winter of 1769-1770. But Patterson stood out by standing on the front line of riotous crowds.

On 22 Feb 1770, a mob of boys attacked Customs official Ebenezer Richardson’s house after he tried to break up their anti-importer demonstration. Richardson fired a musket-full of birdshot down at the crowd. Some of those pellets cut Patterson’s pants. (As a sailor, he wore baggy shin-length trousers rather than closely fitted leather or cloth breeches.) Patterson must therefore have been standing close to Christopher Seider and Samuel Gore, the two boys wounded (one fatally) by Richardson’s shot.

Judicial authorities made Patterson agree to a £50 bond to ensure he’d be available to testify against Richardson. They may have thought that necessary because the sailor wasn’t a legal inhabitant of the town and might have gone to sea at any time. We don’t have complete records for that trial, but notes kept by special prosecutor Robert Treat Paine summarize Patterson’s testimony this way:

I went up to R[ichardson], and I saw R fire the Gun, from within the House. The Boy fell. The Shot went thro’ my Trowsers.

One might think that such a close call would have prompted Patterson to stay home quietly the next time there was trouble. But no. Here’s what he did on the night of 5 March, in his own words:

I, Robert Patterson, of lawful age, testify and say, that on Monday night, the 5th current, being at Capt. [Hector] McNeill’s at the North End, heard the bells ring and “Fire!” cried.

I immediately ran till I got into Royal Exchange lane, it being about a quarter after 9 o’clock. I saw a number of people in the lane. I asked what was the matter? They told me that the soldiers were going to kill all the inhabitants.

I immediately went through the lane, and stood in the middle of King street about ten or eleven minutes (the sentinel [Pvt. Hugh White] then standing leaning against his box), when I saw an officer [Capt. Thomas Preston] with seven or eight soldiers coming from the main-guard, clearing the way with their guns and bayonets, go below the sentinel box, and turn up and place themselves around it, facing the people standing opposite Royal Exchange lane; when I saw a man with a light colored surtout at the Custom-house door, the door being wide open, there standing with his shoulder against the side; then I heard the officer order the soldiers to load, which they did. After that I heard the people say, “Damn you, why don’t you fire?”

In about a minute after I heard the word “Fire!” (but from whom I cannot say) which the soldiers did. Looking round I saw three men lay dead on the snow; the snow being at that time near a foot deep.

Immediately they loaded again. The people then gave three cheers, and cried out, “Let’s go in upon them, and prevent their firing again;” upon which they put on their hats and advanced towards them. My hand being raised to put on my hat, still advancing towards the soldiers, the sentinel up with his gun and fired, the balls going through my lower right arm, my hand immediately falling; and finding myself wounded, made the best of my way home with help.

Patterson signed this deposition with his mark; perhaps his right arm was disabled, or perhaps he never could sign his name. Dr. Elisha Story attested to that mark, so he might have been caring for the sailor. Then again, Story might have been on the scene to help his father-in-law, Justice of the Peace John Ruddock, take the deposition.

The historical consensus is that there were not two volleys of shots from the soldiers as Patterson described; instead, the Boston Massacre resulted from an irregular series of shots. Though the soldiers reloaded, they didn’t fire a second time. There’s also no corroboration for Patterson’s recollection of a civilian in the Customs house doorway at the time of the shooting—a detail that would have implicated royal revenue officials in the incident. Paine didn’t call Patterson to testify at the soldiers’ trial, and Pvt. White was ultimately acquitted.

TOMORROW: What the future held for Robert Patterson.

Curiosities in Connecticut

On 5 May 1775, the Massachusetts delegates to the Second Continental Congress were in Norwalk, Connecticut, on their way back to Philadelphia after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Enthusiastic crowds were greeting those men in every big town they passed through. They were concerned about converting that fervor into concrete support and supplies for the militia troops besieging Boston; gunpowder, for example, was already rare on the continent.

So what did the delegates do on that Friday? They visited a private museum! Robert Treat Paine wrote in his diary for 5 May about stopping in Norwalk “to see Mr. Edward Arnold & saw his Museum a very large Collection of Birds, Insects, Fossills Beasts Fishes &c.”

This visit eventually turned out to be more than just sightseeing. Two years later, on 10 May 1777, John Adams sent his wife Abigail a letter that said:

Upon a Hint, from one of our Commissioners [i.e., diplomats] abroad, We are looking about for American Curiosities, to send across the Atlantic as presents to the Ladies.

Mr. [David] Rittenhouse’s Planetarium, Mr. Arnolds Collection of Rareties in the Virtuoso Way, which I once saw at Norwalk in Connecticutt, Narragansett Pacing Mares, Mooses, Wood ducks, Flying Squirrells, Redwinged Black birds, Cramberries, and Rattlesnakes have all been thought of.

Just what an influential European noblewoman might want: a rattlesnake! (The snake would probably have been dead, but still.) With American wildlife still considered exotic, this was an early version of what we now call cultural diplomacy or even “panda diplomacy.”

Adams still recalled that Norwalk museum when he wrote to Abigail from Paris in May 1780:

When shall We have in America, such Collections? The Collection of American Curiosities that I saw at Norwalk in Connecticutt made by Mr. Arnold, which he afterwards to my great mortification sold to Gov. Tryon, convinces me, that our Country affords as ample materials, for Collections of this nature as any part of the World.

Arnold had moved behind British army lines to live in Huntington, New York, and sold his collection to Gen. William Tryon (1729-1788), governor of New York, who had actually led a military raid on Norwalk in 1779. Arnold died sometime before 15 Sept 1780, when the probate court approved an administrator for his estate.

Madam Hayley in Massachusetts

The latest issue of the online journal Common-place includes Amanda Bowie Moniz’s article about Mary Wilkes Hayley (c. 1728-1808) and her time in Boston shortly after the Revolution. Hayley was the younger sister of John Wilkes, the English radical politician whom the Boston Whigs admired in the 1760s. She was also the widow of a merchant with substantial business in America, and no qualms about collecting the debts that her trading partners owed her.

Moniz writes:

In May 1784, Mrs. Hayley arrived in Boston. Before she set sail, she had already made a savvy decision to shape Americans’ perceptions of her. According to a newspaper report, she had bought the American frigate, the Delaware, which had been captured by Britain during the Revolutionary War, and had renamed it the United States. (It sailed under Captain James Scott, who was often employed by John Hancock [and would eventually be the second husband of Dolly Hancock].)

The stunt paid off. Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina. Here, Americans were seeing somebody very different from the woman they met through business correspondence or the London press. This visitor was neither an aggressive merchant nor an object of ridicule but an enlightened friend of the new republic.

As Abigail Adams wrote, “nothing but the ardent desire she had to visit a Country so distinguished for its noble and ardent defence of the rights of Mankind could have tempted her at her advanced age to have undertaken a sea voyage.” . . .

Ever alert to burnish her image, in October 1784, on the third anniversary of Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, Mrs. Hayley commemorated the American victory with “a very brilliant firework” display in her garden. She again signaled her political sympathies when, with much pomp, she presented John Hancock with a new chariot. The gesture, one newspaper explained, “was a mark of her respect for the good conduct of this great patriot during the war.” In addition, she helped fund a variety of public and charitable projects—a very uncommon role for a woman. She contributed to a meeting house in Charlestown [the old one had burned during the Battle of Bunker Hill]; gave three pounds to a fund for improvements to the Boston Common; was a founding member of the Massachusetts Humane Society, an organization devoted to the rescue and resuscitation of drowning victims; donated blankets to Boston prisoners and wood to Boston's poor.

Samuel Breck, born in Boston in 1771, provides a more eccentric portrait of Hayley, perhaps exaggerated by the passage of years:

She had certainly passed her grand climacteric, and in her mouth was a single tooth of an ebon color. Her favorite dress was a red cloth riding-habit and black beaver hat. In these she looked very like an old man. . . .

This most excellent woman had surrounded herself with a menagerie, so that the court-yard was filled with cockatoos, poll-parrots, and monkeys. . . . She gave frequent dinners, at which I was often invited. We were sometimes annoyed by her monkeys and other pets, which, like spoilt children, were brought into the parlour at the fruit-dessert to gather nuts and gorge with raisins and apples. It was the custom at her table to place a well-filled punch-bowl in the centre as soon as the last cloth was removed. Surrounded by the choicest wines, there stood the huge vessel, always brought in with a little parade. On one occasion, when this ample bowl occupied its accustomed place, a mischievous monkey who was skipping about the table seized the wig of an Amsterdam merchant, old Mr. de Neuville, and, running to the bowl, soused it in.

In 1786 Hayley married a British-born merchant in Boston named Patrick Jeffrey. The marriage didn’t last, and people gossiped that he “treated her with great brutality.” Six years later the former Madam Hayley returned to England without her young husband or much of her old property. Jeffrey bought Thomas Hutchinson’s former estate in Milton from James Warren, husband of Mercy Warren, and in the late 1800s Edmund J. Baker wrote a history of that estate which said:

He had the furniture, library, paintings, plate, relics, and ornaments that had graced the mansion of his wife’s first husband while an alderman and a mayor of London. With his two housekeepers and a retinue of servants he kept up a magnificent style of living. Dr. [Charles] Jarvis, the leading politician, Robert Hollowell [Gardiner], and the late Governor [William] Eustis were members of the club that dined with him weekly.

Jarvis and Eustis were leading Democratic politicians, which might give a hint to Jeffrey’s own politics.

The Dublin Seminar, Caribbean Style!

It’s supposed to be spring by now, even in New England, but today’s rain is awfully chilly. All the more reason to think about the Caribbean! Here’s the announcement of this June’s Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife:

New England and the Caribbean is a two-day conference on New England’s involvement with the West Indies and the Caribbean basin in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The conference opens with papers on American and Caribbean slavery practices and New Englanders’ roles in slave revolts and anti-colonial revolutions. It continues with an examination of extractive and provisioning trades (sugar, mahogany, and draft animals). Saturday evening sessions address maritime issues such as whale-hunting and piracy. The conference concludes on Sunday with lectures on New England business ventures, plantation ownership, the ice trade, and the decorative arts.

The Seminar is designed for educators, historians, collectors, dealers, authors, librarians, and museum curators; students and the general public are cordially invited to attend.

Here’s the complete program for the seminar, with registration information. Not every scholarly gathering includes “open-hearth chocolate making and tasting” in Historic Deerfield.