American Creation and the New England Orthodoxy

I need to update my blogroll, but while I dither about that I’ll say that one new blog I’ve been watching is American Creation, organized “to promote discussion, debate and insight into the religious aspects of America’s founding.” Nine different writers post on the blog, including two founders of the American Revolution Blog; Prof. Jonathan Rowe, known for his libertarian blogs; and Ray Soller, who researches the myths and realities of the first presidential oath.

The topics range from Caitlin GD Hopkins’s recent discussion of the evolving form of New England gravestones to Rowe’s quotation from Prof. Philip Munoz on the original understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment establishment clause, to take examples from only the past week. A fair number of posts involve debunking statements from members of the modern Christian right, but then there are a lot of those to debunk.

As I research New England’s Revolutionary experiences, it’s impossible to miss how much the region’s religious heritage played into the rebellion against civil authority. Most towns had only one place of worship, a Congregationalist (according to later terminology) meeting-house rooted in the English Puritan tradition. That system gave New England church members more practice in daily democracy than most other people in the world, as Lori Stokes discussed. In the 1600s the Puritans overthrew and executed one British king; while most of the eighteenth-century Empire viewed that English Civil War as a Bad Thing and Oliver Cromwell as a dangerous dictator, on Boston’s School Street his name and portrait adorned one of the most prominent taverns in town. The idea of limiting royal authority in favor of locally chosen policies came relatively easily to eighteenth-century New Englanders.

At the same time, that religious heritage created a society that was intolerant, discriminatory, and close-minded. Among the issues that burned hottest for the region’s Congregationalists was whether the Church of England would appoint a bishop for America (shown in the political cartoon above, courtesy of the Library of Congress) and whether Catholicism could be the established church in Québec. In sum, New England Whigs objected heartily to any concessions to other people’s religious worship. Bostonians still looked down on celebrations of Christmas but enjoyed the raucous, anti-Catholic Pope Night celebrations.

One of the biggest challenges for New England leaders was to win over and work with people of other beliefs. Samuel Adams was as close to a Puritan as one could find in the 1770s, but he managed to pull off that political feat, allying with the deist Dr. Thomas Young and the Anglican James Bowdoin in Boston, and convincing the First Continental Congress that he wasn’t as much of a bigot as they suspected. Even so, he and most of the people in the region (outside Rhode Island) sought to preserve the power of New England’s Congregationalist orthodoxy, including state support for the majority church, bans on theater, and rules against work and travel on Sundays. As a result, other regions took the lead in establishing religious freedom in the new U.S. of A. while New England became known for old-fashioned bigotry—until the Unitarian upheaval.

Those tensions, paradoxes, and changes are part of the Revolution’s history, and it’s good to see American Creation examine them from so many potential angles.

Remembering and Restoring the Edmund Fowle House

Last month the Boston Globe ran a story on the restoration and opening of the Edmund Fowle House, funded by the Historical Society of Watertown. In 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress used this building as the headquarters of the Council it had set up to serve as the executive wing of its government, Gov. Thomas Gage having lost the loyalty of the people and being otherwise engaged.

Why Watertown? It was far enough away from Boston to be safe, near enough to the lines for news to travel quickly, and about equidistant between the northern and southern ends of the siege lines. Henry Knox and the printer Peter Edes also set themselves up in Watertown after escaping from Boston.

Why the Fowle house? Apparently it had an unusually large room for a private dwelling. According to the Globe:

The second floor was still unfinished—mostly because Fowle’s wife had died in childbirth before it was completed—when the Provincial Congress took over the house in 1775; at the time, it sat barely 3 miles from the Continental Army’s encampment on Cambridge Common.

The New England army actually occupied many camps ringing Boston, but Cambridge housed the headquarters of its commanding generals, Ward and Washington. The Fowle house was moved off Mount Auburn Street in 1871, but it’s still near the old center of Watertown.

The memory of the Fowle house’s use in 1775-76 didn’t last long.

“Within a decade after the Revolution,” said preservation architect Wendall C. Kalsow, “nobody would have known where the council’s meeting room was. By the 1780s, this was no longer a house of national historical significance.”

By then, he explained during an interview at the house, bedrooms had been constructed on the second floor, cutting up the space used for the meeting room.

Which helps to remind us that historic preservation is a relatively newfangled value. Our Revolutionary ancestors cared more about the usefulness of land and buildings than about what had happened in them many years before.

Ontario Found in Lake Ontario

The biggest Revolutionary news last month was the discovery of H.M.S. Ontario in the frigid waters of Lake Ontario. The story also offered a way to assay how different countries remember the Revolutionary War. Here’s a quote from the dispatch on the find from the Associated Press:

The Ontario went down on Oct. 31, 1780, with a garrison of 60 British soldiers, a crew of about 40, mostly Canadians, and possibly about 30 American war prisoners.

The warship had been launched only five months earlier and was used to ferry troops and supplies along upstate New York's frontier. Although it was the biggest British ship on the Great Lakes at the time, it never saw battle, Smith said.

After the ship disappeared, the British conducted a sweeping search but tried to keep the sinking secret from Gen. George Washington’s troops because of the blow to the British defenses.

The Globe & Mail of Toronto gave less emphasis to Washington and the American prisoners, and more to the threat of invasion from the south:

It was 1780. Yankee militias were threatening to storm across Lake Ontario and seize Montreal from the British. And if it weren't for the intimidating profile of the 226-tonne Ontario - 22 cannons, two 80-foot masts, a beamy hull with cargo space for 1,000 barrels - they just may have.

But six months after it launched, the pride of the Great Lakes fleet sailed into a Halloween squall with around 120 passengers on board and was never seen again.

It remains the worst-ever disaster recorded on Lake Ontario, according to Kingston historian Arthur Britton Smith.

For further contrast, the Independent of London’s article gives no number, even an approximate one, for the American P.O.W.s. The following photograph comes from the Telegraph, and shows the crow’s nest of the Ontario’s foremast.

“A Startling Historical Paradox”

Boston 1775 celebrates this Independence Day with another peek at comic-book depictions of the Revolutionary period. In this installment, Captain America enters into the nagging controversy over how the first American flag was designed.

Jack Kirby created Captain America with with Joe Simon in 1941, as the U.S. of A. was preparing to enter World War 2. Their comic book redefined the visual language of superhero storytelling. Though Cap wasn’t the first all-American costumed hero, he was the most popular and the longest-lived.

In the early 1960s, as part of its explosive rebirth, Marvel brought Captain America back to life. Kirby was once again the illustrator, and Stan Lee wrote the dialogue. (Lee had started in comics by penning a Captain America story in prose.) In 1970, Kirby left Marvel for its cross-town rival, DC Comics, but five years later he came back. He was thus able to write and illustrate Captain America during America’s Bicentennial, creating stories about the 20th-century icon visiting his country’s past.

Such as when the country was looking for a national flag...
For the rest of the story, I’m passing you over to Bully, who says Comics Oughta Be Fun! On Flag Day last year, Bully offered this peek at Cap’s mind-blowing encounter with Benjamin Franklin. It was published in 1976 and collected by Marvel in Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles.

Another Side of Johnny Tremain

So did you all attend the screening of Disney’s Johnny Tremain at the Old South Meeting House last night? If so, you’re now ready to discuss Jeffrey Dennis’s article “The Light in the Forest Is Love: Cold War Masculinity and the Disney Adventure Boys,”, published in the Journal of American Popular Culture in spring 2004.

As in his discussions of nearly every other Disney live-action movie of the era, Dennis detects a homoerotic component to Johnny’s relationship with Rab:

Johnny, a Revolutionary War-era silversmith’s apprentice crippled in an accident (but cured after twenty minutes), was portrayed by a seventeen-year-old newcomer named Hal Stalmaster, with an angelic face, pleasantly swarthy skin, and eyes so bright they seemed to glow. Again, the homoromance of earlier adventure boys is maintained as Johnny and tall, teen-idol sultry Rab (twenty-year-old Richard Beymer) can’t take their eyes off each other. They spend practically every scene together, taming a horse named Goblin, working for the Sons of Liberty, and standing together at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Dennis’s interpretation makes sense for The Shaggy Dog, in which Tommy Kirk (eventually fired by Disney for being gay) tries to hide an embarrassing biological condition from his dad. But I’m far from convinced that it applies to Johnny Tremain.

Of course, American popular culture of the time suppressed such feelings—so strongly that they could often pop out in plain sight. I believe that Johnny Tremain is the most widely read American children’s novel that begins with three boys waking up in bed together. Those are Johnny and his fellow apprentices, whom he looks down on. Notably, after Johnny meets Rab and develops a bit of a boy crush—the first time he’s found an older-brother-figure he admires and loves—Esther Forbes makes clear that the two teenagers sleep in separate beds.

Benjamin Thompson’s Flesh and Cunning

On my way through Washington last week, I was intrigued by the Post’s review of Nicholas Delbanco’s new historical novel, The Count of Concord, about the brilliant and dangerous Benjamin Thompson, later Count Rumford. 

Reviewer Jerome Charyn wrote of Thompson: “He hardly seems to have the flesh or the cunning for the hero of a novel.” This surprises me, given that Thompson was one of the most cunning figures of his age. To be sure, his marriage to Marie Anne Pierrette Lavoisier turned out to be a battle he couldn’t win, but rising from Woburn farmboy to virtual dictator of a German principality shows an above-average nose for opportunity. And along the way he developed the Rumford stove, the vacuum flask, and other scientific advances, and he managed to spy for Great Britain in the Revolution without being discovered until about a century after he had died.

Thompson was one of the main founders of  the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1799. That scientific organization’s website says:

he drew up the proposals to establish a practical scientific institution which, following a meeting at [Joseph] Banks’s Soho Square house on 7 March 1799, was implemented as what became the Royal Institution. His especial contribution in the Institution’s very early years was in overseeing the conversion of 21 Albemarle Street to make it fit for purpose. He abruptly left the Royal Institution in 1802, possibly because he had been embezzling funds, though this was never proved at the time or subsequently.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in London, the institution and its museum aren’t open to visitors. Not that Thompson probably left much behind there.

Admiral Jemm and Betty Martin

A couple of my favorite language websites, World Wide Words and Language Log, have offered facts and commentary on a phrase that shows up in writing just as the Revolutionary War tapered down: “All my eye and Betty Martin!” That basically meant, “Stuff and nonsense!”

The earliest appearance of this phrase is in a 16 Oct 1781 letter from Samuel Crisp to his sister Sophia “Sop” Gast:

Physic, to old, crazy Frames, like ours, is all my eye and Betty Martin—(a sea phrase that Admiral Jemm frequently makes use of).

Who was “Admiral Jemm”? In addition to Crisp’s letters, he shows up in the letters of Fanny Burney. He was that author’s brother James Burney, only a Royal Navy captain in 1781 but indeed eventually an admiral. He made two voyages with Capt. James Cook and wrote books on those travels, on Capt. William Bligh, and on the game of whist. The picture of him above comes courtesy of McGill University.

The “all my eye” part of the phrase is documented earlier than that, and more widely. Most likely Burney and others added “Betty Martin” as an intensifier. Some folks at Language Log find it plausible, though undocumented, that it was a British corruption of the Latin oath beate mater, or “blessed mother.”

Visiting the Roots of William Alexander?

Today I visited Argyll’s Lodging in Stirling, Scotland, a stone’s roll down the crag from Stirling Castle. Before it was bought and expanded to its present dimensions (and more) by the Earl of Argyll, this building was the main residence of William Alexander, the first Earl of Stirling, in the early 1600s. And that provides the tenuous Revolutionary War connection that made me put Stirling on my itinerary.

A top American general also named William Alexander (1726-1783) claimed to be the eldest grandson of the first Earl of Stirling and thus the rightful Earl of Stirling himself. As such, he could have been heir to vast grants of land along the northern North American coast; the first earl had pushed the colonization of Nova Scotia.

It’s not clear to me how solid Alexander’s genealogical claim was. He was born in New York, but the first earl and his eldest son did have links to the New World. What’s definite is that Alexander built up his mother’s mercantile business, married into the Livingston family, and became an aide to Gov. William Shirley of Massachusetts during the French wars of mid-century.

While in London in 1760, Alexander laid claim to the vacated title of the Earl of Stirling. The direct line of heirs had petered out because the title didn’t come with enough money to make it worthwhile to pursue. Alexander argued that he was the most direct living male descendant of the first earl, and some Stirling relatives supported his claim. In 1762 the House of Lords declared that Alexander hadn’t proved his case and had no right to the title of earl.

Nevertheless, Alexander went back to North America calling himself “Lord Stirling.” He built a big mansion in New Jersey, and was active in the militia. During the Revolution, he naturally sided with the Americans rather than with Parliament. Gen. George Washington admired Alexander for his personal bravery and dedication, though his battlefield record was about as mixed as Washington’s own. Everyone referred to the man as “Lord Stirling.”

And that’s actually what intrigues me most about the man. The American Revolutionaries were building a republic, but they still showed a lot of deference to aristocratic titles. Bostonians remembered Earl Percy with respect, even though he commanded the British troops during their bloody march through Menotomy. Everyone always called Gen. von Steuben “the Baron.” The people of Massachusetts knew Agnes Surriage was a tavern serving-maid before Sir Harry Frankland fell in love with and eventually married her, but when she traveled through provincial lines to Boston in 1775 provincial officers referred to her as “Lady Frankland.”

Old habits are hard to break.

Seeking Meaning in a Murder

The latest issue of the Journal of American History includes Christopher Grasso’s article “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution”. It begins:

In Wethersfield, Connecticut, on December 11, 1782, William Beadle, a respected merchant known as a doting father and husband, cut the throats of his wife and four young children and then fired two pistols into his head.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I’m going to repeat one of my favorite observations: we humans, whether in the past or looking back at the past, often look for external motivations to explain behavior that might have arisen mostly from internal, irrational psychiatric conditions.

As Grasso’s title reflects, many of Beadle’s contemporaries linked his crime to his interest in deism. On 17 Dec 1782, the Hartford Courant said Beadle had “renounced all the popular religions of the world, [and] he intended to die a proper Deist.” Ministers used him as a cautionary example in their sermons. Of course, orthodox New Englander applied the label of “deism” to Unitarianism, Universalism, and any other religion that didn’t accept the notion of divinely inspired scripture (and the labels of “heresy” or “error” to religions that didn’t interpret scripture as they did).

Beadle’s letters on religion survive not in the original manuscripts, but in the papers of the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles of Newport and New Haven. He was one of three eminent men entrusted with the material, but the authorities determined that the letters were too dangerous to release publicly. The letters show that Beadle still believed in God when he died; indeed, he was certain that God was guiding his last acts.

Not every contemporary explained Beadle’s insanity through religion, however. As Grasso discusses, former Continental Congress delegate Stephen Mix Mitchell anonymously published A Narrative of the Life of William Beadle in 1783. This pamphlet emphasized the man’s business difficulties as the large quantities of Continental and Connecticut money he had accumulated lost their value and he feared his family would fall into poverty.

Of course, everyone in New England was dealing with the same economy, and most men didn’t kill their families. Similarly, most deists and Unitarians, including some of the most eminent men in the new republic, died without killing their families. Grasso’s topic is the different interpretations of Beadle at the time, so the adequacy of either of those explanations is less important than how adequate the people of the time considered them.

As we learn more about psychiatric conditions and the biological factors that contribute to them, it might be possible to study Beadle’s writings and actions in a different way. Was he struggling with the manic-depressive swings of bipolar disorder, or some other serious mental ailment? Such a disorder could have fueled his enthusiasm for deist ideas, his business drive, and his final fixed idea that murder and suicide was a good idea. But would the historical record offer enough information to support such a diagnosis, even a tentative one?

Johnny Tremain Rides Again

On Wednesday, 2 July, Old South Meeting House will screen the 1957 Disney movie version of Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain. Showtime is 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. Museum admission is the regular price, but the popcorn is free.

In my eyes, this movie epitomizes the phrase “Disney version.” Dr. Joseph Warren fixes Johnny’s hand halfway through (after what became the first hourlong episode on television) instead of at the end. I don’t recall the British deserter being shot. And I don’t want to give anything away in either the movie or the book, so let’s just say that no one we know dies at Lexington.

On the other hand, the movie starts with a wonderful matte painting of the Boston peninsula that gives a great sense of the town’s scale and isolation in the 1770s. Forbes created a great story with thorough research, and even Disney couldn’t wash that away. Though Johnny’s lawyer Josiah Quincy, Jr., is, sadly, not cross-eyed, the movie does offer a rare glimpse of William Molineux, looking like Spiro Agnew.

Other reviewers also seem ambivalent, noting the sheen of 1950s Disney patriotism while also recognizing its charms. Ultimate Disney offers a thorough summary of the movie and concludes:

Overall, Johnny Tremain is a noble and mostly enjoyable effort but one which demands your attention and sometimes struggles to retain it. With sharp dialogue and fine acting, the stately historical drama proceeds in an interesting and technically sound fashion. The film is even able to overcome one of its biggest drawbacks - namely, that it was clearly shot on a budget. This is evident in how much a film about taking action consists solely of talking...

Monster Hunter snapped:

Now, this Johnny Tremain movie was made by Walt Disney in 1957, which means that the acting by the youngsters on the cast...come across as Mouseketeers playing dress up and being more interested in maintaining these beaming smiles and spewing out their lines with glee than they were with showing anything remotely resembling an emotion that someone who lived in those turbulent times would have experienced. The result is a revolutionary war movie that has the vague feel of a theme park, with everyone in their bright new costumes and Boston looking like a super clean part of Disneyland (Patriotland or something) so that you would expect to go into Paul Revere’s shop and be able to get a funnel cake and/or stuffed Mickey Mouse.

Whatever happened to Hal Stalmaster, the teenager who played Johnny? He also had a role in Disney’s next Revolutionary War dramatization, The Swamp Fox. Dick Beymer, who played Rab, went on to star as Tony in West Side Story.

More on Prince, the “Black Limner”

Back in November 2006, I quoted some remarks from Christian Barnes of Marlborough to her friend Elizabeth ((Murray) Campbell) Smith about a young black slave named Prince who was showing remarkable ability as a portrait artist.

Yesterday I revisited that collection of letters at the Library of Congress, and found a little more about Prince. On 22 July 1773, Barnes wrote again to her friend, now Elizabeth (((Murray) Campbell) Smith) Inman:

I had a favor to ask which I must now petition you will grant me which is that if you have an hour to spare at any time when you are in Boston you will allow Prince to make some alteration in the Coppy he has taken from your Picture which he says he cannot do but from the life and Please to give him any directions you think proper as to the Dress of the Head

So in that year Prince was no longer living with Barnes in Marlborough but in Boston. He might have copied the portrait of Inman created by John Singleton Copley, shown on the cover of her biography above.

Then came the war. Barnes and her husband moved to Britain while Inman remained in Massachusetts. On 16 June 1783 Barnes renewed their correspondence with a letter from Bristol, which she closed this way:

P.S. pray let me know if good old Daphney be living and whether she is capible of giting her living. Her son I hear is provided for and so we shall all be in time

Daphney was Prince’s mother, so that postscript implies that by then Prince had died. And as yet I’ve found no trace of him in any other source.

Nonfiction Recommendations for Kids

Earlier this month a Boston 1775 reader asked me if I had any recommendations for a boy who wanted to learn more about the life of a typical New England boy of the Revolutionary period—i.e., a boy growing up on a farm.

The most authentic, unvarnished source that I could think of is a manuscript held at the Massachusetts Historical Society: the diary of Quincy Thaxter of Hingham. It’s little more than a long list of chores and (when it was too rainy for farmwork) visits to school. Quincy’s handwriting, spelling, and punctuation (or lack thereof) suggest that he could have benefited from more hours in school. Here are some typical entries.

15 June 1774: “my self Jacob went to trai lect M lectter Mr Gay preached the Sermon Uncle Smith the prayer Mr Gays text in axts the 12 Chapter 20 verse my self went training and Jacob up in the plain in the aftenoon Catons pasten Captins Ba Barker Captin Lincoln Captin Cushing Captin Whittin Captin Lads Lastrop train.”

16 June: “myself Went to school all the day to Jacob weaded the loar Garding in the forenoon and in the aftenoon Cato and Jacob hoed behind the house after Sch School was done Fathe Fa FATHER and my self went dowon to the Worldend to see the cattle an get some strawberries.”

17 June: “my self Went to school all the day Jacob Worked over to the shop all the day Cato staid at home and thrased out corne all the day fowl fowl Weater all the day.”

But since that’s unpublished and hard to read even you have a copy, I recommended Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake, 1805, filled out and illustrated by Eric Sloane (1905-1985). This comes from the generation after the Revolution, of course, but farm life hadn’t changed that much. Sloane used his talents as a draftsman and his knowledge of farming technology of the period to fill out Blake’s terse record of a few months—also mostly a litany of chores.

I’ve long wondered whether Diary of an Early American Boy was based on a real diary, as Sloane described. I’m pleased to report that, with enough Googling, I found a footnote in another book saying the manuscript is in the collection of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

For folks more interested in Eric Sloane, his work forms part of the Sloane Stanley Museum in Kent, Connecticut.

And for more non-fiction books on the American Revolution written expressly for young readers, here’s a list of recommended titles for different grade levels from The Horn Book magazine. I’ve read some of these, and praised Marc Aronson’s The Real Revolution a while back.

The Grand Tour

Postings on Boston 1775 will be irregular for the next three weeks or so as I embark on a tour of three capitals:

• Washington, D.C.
• London
• Edinburgh (shown here, courtesy of something called the Local Authority World Heritage Forum)

(I suppose I could make that four capitals if I count the seat of the Massachusetts government, too.)

Though I have it on good authority that there are computers and internets and all that in the U.K., I may not be able to access Blogger every day. Therefore, some days may pass without a new post, and it may take longer for your kind comments to appear.

Robert Steele: drummer at Bunker Hill

The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on 17 June 1775. This recollection of the fight is from a letter that Robert Steele (1760-1833) wrote to William Sumner on 10 July 1825, preserved in the Samuel Swett Papers at the New-York Historical Society. Steele was a young drummer in Ephraim Doolittle’s regiment, commanded that day by Maj. Willard Moore of Paxton.

the British…marched with rather a slow step up to our entrenchment, and the battle began. The conflict was sharp, but the British soon retreated with a quicker step than they came up, leaving some of their killed and wounded in sight of us. They retreated towards where they landed and formed again…came up again and a second battle ensued which was harder and longer than the first, but being but a lad and this the first engagement I was ever in, I cannot remember much more…than great noise and confusion. One or two circumstances I can, however, distinctly remember. . . .

About the time the British retreated a second time, I was standing side of Benjamin Ballard, a Boston boy about my age, who had a gun in his heads, when one of our sergeants came up to us and said, “You are young and spry, run in a moment to some of the stores and bring some rum. Major Moore is badly wounded. Go as quick as possible.”

We threw down our implements of war and run as fast as we could and passed over the hill…down to Charlestown Neck and found there was a firing in that quarter. We heard the shot pass over our heads, which I afterwards understood were thrown from a floating battery in Mystic River and from the shipping on the Boston side of the Neck.

We however immediately passed on and went into a store, but see no one there. I stamped and called out to rally some person and a man answered is from the cellar below. I told him what we wanted, but he did not come up, nor did we see him at all. I again told him what we wanted and asked him why he stayed down cellar. He answered, “To keep out of the way of the shot,” and then said, “If you want anything in the store, take what you please.”

I seized a brown, two-quart, earthen pitcher and drawed it partly full from a cask and found I had got wine. I threw that out and filled my pitcher with rum from another cask. Ben took a pail and filled with water, and we hastened back to the entrenchment on the hill, when we found our people in confusion and talking about retreating. The British were about advancing upon us a third time. Our rum and water went very quick. It was very hot, but I saved my pitcher and kept it for sometime afterwards.

Up top is an image of the grave marker for Steele and his wife Lydia in Westwood, Massachusetts, photographed and kindly posted on Flickr by Michael Femia.

Learning from an 1831 Schoolbook

At the end of May, I quoted the account of Boston schoolboys demanding that a British army general preserve their sledding area from Samuel Goodrich’s schoolbook The First Book of History, for Children and Youth. Last week at the American Antiquarian Society I got my first look at a first edition of that book, printed in 1831. (The copy readable through Google Books was printed in 1849, showing its continued popularity.)

I can now confirm that:

• The same text appeared in the 1831 edition, meaning that Goodrich was the earliest author to publish this story—or at least the earliest that I’ve found.
• Edward Everett Hale, born in 1822, might well have read the story in The First Book of History rather than (as he remembered) Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany. (Alternatively, Child might have quoted Goodrich’s account in her magazine but not in any of her own books, where I looked.)

Once a story gets into a school textbook, we have to assume it’s everywhere within the culture that uses that textbook. The story of the sledding schoolboys’ committee was an oral tradition up to 1831, but after that the tales that Bostonians passed down were probably influenced by Goodrich’s “authoritative” account. Of course, that account had already been distorted somewhat from how the primary sources from 1775 tell the story.

In the same schoolbook Goodrich mentioned Sarah Bishop, the Connecticut recluse. I’ve written about the contrast between an 1804 account of her life and an 1839 account from The New England Gazetteer, which said she had been “cruelly treated by a British officer.” It turns out the text in the Gazetteer had already appeared in Goodrich’s 1831 schoolbook (and it reappeared in the 1849 edition). Whether Goodrich wrote it or lifted it from some other source I don’t know. But that pushes back the statement of Bishop becoming a recluse because of specific experiences during the Revolutionary War rather than having “always discovered an unusual antipathy to men.”

For more about Samuel Goodrich and his influence on American youth, as himself and under his pseudonym of Peter Parley, visit the Jamaica Plain Historical Society and the University of Pittsburgh’s library.

Lecture Program at West Point, 27 June

Peter Feinman of the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education sent me an announcement for a series of Revolutionary War lectures in the military academy at West Point on Friday, 27 June. The program is free, but security and parking considerations require that all participants register for the program by Tuesday, 24 June.

Winning the war, Winning the Peace: The American Revolution Historyhostel

10:00 “The Battles of Brooklyn and Saratoga and the Strategic Importance of the Hudson Valley”
Maj. Jeffery Lucas, Department of History, U.S.M.A., and Ray Raymond, S.U.N.Y.–Ulster and U.S.M.A.

The campaigns of 1776-1777 were Britain’s one and only chance to crush the American Revolution. The key was control of the Hudson, which would have cut off New England from the rest of the colonies. These lectures will assess why Britain failed to deliver a knockout blow at Brooklyn and why it lost the strategically vital battle of Saratoga.

12:00 Lunch

1:00 “Reassessing Yorktown and the Southern Insurgency”
Maj. Lucas and Prof. Raymond.

These lectures will reassess Yorktown and the Southern insurgency led by Gen. Nathanael Greene, which eventually won the Revolutionary War. They will address such questions as:

• Was Yorktown more of a French military victory than an American one?
• Was Yorktown’s real importance political rather than military?
• How close did the British military come to rescuing Cornwallis?

2:15 walking tour of the U.S.M.A. grounds from an American Revolution perspective

3:30 bus trip to Fort Putnam (not normally open to the public)

4:30 “Fort Putnam: The Thomas Cole Perspective”
Peter Feinman, IHARE

Thomas Cole is known as the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. When he emigrated from England, one of the first subjects he chose to paint was Fort Putnam. What did this site mean to him and to American culture in the 1820s?

To register, email Dr. Feinman or call 914-933-0440.

More on Joel Adams of Arlington

Earlier this month, I told the story of the Adams children of Menotomy village on the exciting afternoon of 19 Apr 1775, based on an 1864 local history, and mentioned having leads to earlier versions. On Monday I stopped into the American Antiquarian Society and looked at one of those sources, the Rev. James F. Brown’s Old Age: A Sermon Preached at West Cambridge, February 8, 1852, on the Sabbath Succeeding the Death of James Hill.

This sermon has some nice, if not entirely comprehensible, praise for Hill: “He was brought up to farming; and, agreeably to his good mother’s promise, when he was able to swing a scythe, he was allowed to retire from his dish of bean porridge and take a cup of tea with the ‘grown folks.’” Brown seems to have thrown other stuff that he couldn’t fit into the sermon into an appendix.

In particular, Brown wrote about the family of Hill’s widow, Ann. She was still living in the town, by then independent of Cambridge and on its way to becoming Arlington. And she was obviously a source for Brown’s story of the Adams family in 1775:

When the British soldiers were retreating from Lexington, a detachment entered the house of Mr. [Joseph] Adams (which is now owned by Mr. Artemas Locke) and began the work of plunder and destruction. Mr. Adams being connected with some secret committee, and fearing for his life, secreted himself in a barn now owned by Miss Bradshaw. Mrs. Hill (as we have said) was then an infant in her mother’s arms. The lives of mother and daughter were spared from the bayonet of a common soldier through the interposition of an English officer; but they were ordered from the house, and accordingly fled and concealed themselves in the barn.

Several of the children were under the bed. Parlors, probably, were not as common then, as now, and beds were “made up” upon the lower floor of the house. In this snug retreat, the children were suffered to remain and watch the movements of their household foes. As the soldiers were about to take possession of the Communion Service, Joel Adams, then a lad of about nine years of age, knowing how sacred these things were to his father, could restrain himself no longer, and thrusting his head from beneath the bed-quilt, with a burst of eloquent indignation, told them, “Not to touch them things, or Daddy would lick ’um.”

The name of our spirited hero is worthy of being remembered. He grew up to be a man, and, no doubt, “acted well the part;” but we follow him no farther than to say that he died at New Salem, at the age of seventy-six. Tradition tells us that the silver tankard [given to the congregation by Jonathan Butterfield in 1769] was taken and pawned to a silversmith in Boston by the name of Austin. After the British army evacuated Boston, however, it was redeemed, and is now in the hands of the church. The deeds of the place were taken and were found afterwards on board of an English vessel that was captured by an American cruiser under the command of Captain, afterwards Commodore [Samuel] Tucker.

The house of Mr. Adams was set on fire before the soldiers left it; but the fire was soon extinguished by one of the older children, at the expense of the “good beer” that had just been brewed, together with water brought from the tank by the side of the house.

In interpreting this account, it’s important to recall that the former Ann Adams couldn’t have witnessed what had happened on 19 Apr 1775, or even learned about it shortly afterward. She was only “about three weeks old on the day of the Lexington battle.” So we’re dealing with family lore, not eyewitness recollections. Furthermore, Joseph Adams’s decision to run and hide, leaving his wife and children behind, gave the family a motive to try to excuse his behavior and claim heroism for the children.

As far as I can tell, there’s no corroborating evidence for Deacon Adams being on Cambridge political or military committees before the war. Towns were usually straightforward about naming the men on their Committees of Correspondence because part of their message to the world is that they were behaving legally and honorably, unlike that secretive Tory cabal.

The longer 1864 account said nothing about a committee. It suggested a different reason for Deacon Adams to flee: “on account of his name [i.e., the British troops would think he was related to Samuel Adams], and also from his reputation for patriotic zeal.” Zeal which had not led him to take up arms that day.

No other version of the Adams family story mentions an “English officer” restraining the soldiers from attacking Hannah Adams in her bedroom. She gave a deposition about her experience to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775. It specified that three soldiers entered the house, and one of them told her to get out.

Another divergent detail: This account credits only “one of the older children” with putting out the fire in the Adams house.

Finally, this account raises the question of why Brown could share no more information about Joel Adams than that he had died in New Salem about 1841. Had he fallen out of touch with his baby sister Ann?

Seeing Portsmouth as President Washington Did

On Thursday, 26 June, Historic New England is offering a special walking tour of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, focusing on sites that George Washington saw in his one visit to the city in 1789.

At the time, Washington had just been elected President, and was visiting all the states to acknowledge and shore up their support. I think his tour recalled the “royal progress” that monarchs made around their realms, and if American civic culture had gone the way of an imperial presidency, Washington’s trip might be regarded that way instead of as a forerunner of campaign tours.

This Portsmouth tour ends at the mansion of Gov. John Langdon, Washington’s host in 1789, where there will be a wine and cheese reception. The cost is $15 for members, $25 for non-members. Historic New England recommends reserving a spot in advance, way down on this page.

Along the way to that listing, you’ll plenty of other Historic New England events this summer, focusing on a variety of periods and places.

Josiah Flagg, Surgeon Dentist

The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Object of the Month for this month is a 1796 broadside advertising the expert services of dentist Josiah Flagg (1763-1816). It assured Bostonians that Flagg:

Traisplants [sic] both live and dead Teeth with greater conveniency, and gives less pain than heretofore practiced in Europe or America:—Sews up Hare Lips;—Cures Ulcers;—Extracts Teeth and stumps or roots with ease;—Reinstates Teeth and Gums, that are much depreciated by nature, carelessness, acids, or corroding medicine;—Fastens those Teeth that are loose; (unless wasted at the roots) regulates Teeth from their first cutting to prevent feavers and pain in Children;—Assists nature in the extension of the jaws, for the beautiful arrangement of the second Sett and preserves them in their natural whiteness entirely free from all scorbutic complaints. . . .

I suppose if one had to have live teeth transplanted, one would want it to be done “with greater expediency.”

The broadside includes images of toothbrushes and dental tools. The reverse side includes valuable advice on dental self-care, written in Flagg’s own hand. Alas, the M.H.S. can’t shed light on why a 1795 newspaper notice referred to Flagg as a “vile miscreant Son.”

The Words of Noah Webster

In the past month the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room has offered some choice writings from Noah Webster. Well, he thought he was writing all about the right choices. Not everyone agreed.

Webster had conservative New England tastes in many things, as apparent in his thoughts on music, published in Boston in 1787:

The establishment of schools for teaching psalmody in this city is a pleasing institution; but people seem not to understand the design, or rather are not properly conducted and encouraged. Most people consider music merely as a source of pleasure; not attending to its influence on the human mind, and its consequent effects on society. But it should be regarded as an article of education, useful as well as ornamental. . . .

Instrumental music is generally prefered to vocal, and considered as an elegant accomplishment. It is indeed a pleasing accomplishment; but the preference given to it, is a species of the same false taste, which places a son under the tuition of a drunken clown, to make him a gentleman of strict morals. . . . I have often heard the best vocal concerts in America, and the best instrumental concerts; and can declare, that the music of the latter is as inferior to that of the former, as the merit of a band box macaroni is to that of a Cato.

In the same post-Revolutionary period, Samuel Adams, who was a great fan of psalm-singing, also used his influence to discourage other forms of musical entertainment in Boston, most especially theater.

Ironically, at one early point Webster was a radical reformer in the area we associate with him most: standardizing the American language. Here’s part of his introduction to a 1790 collection of essays:

During the course of ten or twelv yeers, I hav been laboring to correct popular errors, and to assist my yung brethren in the road to truth and virtue; my publications for theze purposes hav been mumerous; much time haz been spent, which I do not regret, and much censure incurred, which my hart tells me I do not dezerv. . . .

In the essays ritten within the last yeer, a considerable change of spelling iz introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over that of Gower and Chaucer. The man who admits that the change of housoonde, mynde, ygone, moneth into husband, mind, gone, month, iz an improovment, must acknowlege also the riting of helth, breth, rong, tung, munth, to be an improovment. There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, still exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proove that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.

Riiiite.