“Kissed Him, Before All the Company in the Room”

After last week’s postings on Boston’s Sandemanian congregation and the theological debate they inspired, a longtime Boston 1775 reader asked me, “So there was all this fuss over kissing?”

It wasn’t just the kissing, I tried to explain. The Sandemanians irked the descendants of Puritans by challenging their claim to worship properly according to the Bible. The congregation’s political loyalty to the Crown made them suspect in another way. The kissing was just the issue that people chose to argue over.

Then I happened across this passage from John Adams’s diary. On this date, 6 June 1771, he was at Stafford Springs, Connecticut, drinking some of the mineral water there for his health. Adams kept bumping into people he knew from Boston and his travels on the legal circuit:

In the afternoon [Sandemanian merchant] Colburn Barrell and his Wife and Daughter came, and took Lodgings at our House. Drank Tea and spent the Evening with them. When the Dr. [William McKinstry of Taunton] took his Hat to go out to a Neighbours to lodge, Colburn sprung out of his Chair and went up to the Dr., took him by the Hand And kissed him, before all the Company in the Room. This is Sandemanianism.

So, yeah, I guess it was about the kissing.

Samuel Adams, Riches, and Poverty

Yesterday’s Boston Globe included an opinion essay by Ira Stoll, most recent biographer of Samuel Adams, on the man’s relevance to our times. Ira was editor at the late New York Sun and, like Adams, is using the power of opinion journalism to catch public attention. This essay has the theme of living frugally.

Here are a couple of relevant observations from the diary of Adams’s second cousin John Adams, starting with 27 June 1770:

Took an Airing in the Chaise with my [metaphorical] Brother Sam. Adams, who returned and dined with me. He says he never looked forward in his Life, never planned, laid a scheme, or formed a design of laying up any Thing for himself or others after him.

I told him, I could not say that of myself, if that had been true of me, you would never have seen my Face—and I think this was true. I was necessitated to ponder in my Youth, to consider of Ways and Means of raising a Subsistence, food and Rayment, and Books and Money to pay for my Education to the Bar. So that I must have sunk into total Contempt and Obscurity, if not perished for Want, if I had not planned for futurity.

A couple of years later, on 30 Dec 1772, John Adams was a little more cranky about life, and perhaps even about the cousin he admired:

He affects to despize Riches, and not to dread Poverty. But no Man is more ambitious of entertaining his Friends handsomely, or of making a decent, an elegant Appearance than he. He has lately new covered and glased his House and painted it, very neatly, and has new papered, painted and furnished his Rooms. So that you visit at a very genteel House and are very politely received and entertained.

However, part of being an eighteenth-century gentleman was putting on the proper appearance for other eighteenth-century gentlemen. So John Adams’s remarks about Samuel’s wish to make a decent appearance for his friends was in many ways a compliment.

Fire in a Barn at Cambridge

This is a quotation from an “Account of Fires in Massachusetts” published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1838:

Aug. 8, 1783. In the evening of this day, a barn at Cambridge, belonging to Nathaniel Tarcy, Esq. was set on fire by lightning, which consumed it, with his carriages, and a large quantity of hay.

The name Tarcy is obviously a misprint for Tracy.

Nathaniel Tracy was a Newburyport merchant who invested heavily in privateers during the Revolutionary War. He made enough money to own several houses, including the Cambridge estate that this item probably refers to. It’s now the Longfellow National Historic Site, shown above. There’s no longer a barn on the lot, but there is a late nineteenth-century carriage-house modified with pipes for a car wash. There are two lightning rods on the main house, one of which reaches the ground.

The year 1783 was not a good one for lightning. About three months before this fire, a bolt struck the house where James Otis, Jr., was being treated for mental illness and killed him.

An Happy New-Year

In the eighteenth century, it was common for the teenagers who worked for newspaper printers to print up “New Year’s verses,” which they appear to have either read, sang, or sold to their customers for a little spending money. Here’s a sample from 240 years ago:

An happy New-Year to the worthy Customers of the Massachusets-Gazette & Boston News-Letter, Boston, January 1769.

Dialogue between two Lads who are News-Carriers.

SAID Ned unto Sam, What’s the News of the Day?
Is it peace? is it war? I prithee now say——
While the Red-Coats in throngs infest ev’ry Street,
And with Vessels of War the Town is beset;
How direful the Prospect in peaceable Times!
Such martial Parade—each Freeman condemns:

Be silent Friend Ned, let your Passion subside;
And hope better Times may sudden succeed:
Whilst GEORGE wields the Scepter we’ve nothing to fear,
To AMER’CA’s Complaints He will lend an Ear;
Then Oppression must cease, and Freedom once more—
In Triumph shall bless NORTH-AMER’CA’s Shore.

AMEN,

This reflects the prevailing colonial attitude in 1769, and indeed right through the outbreak of war: that once the king understood his American subjects’ difficulties and determination, he would overrule his corrupt ministers and reverse their misguided policies. It may also reflect the News-Letter’s editorial stance, which under the Drapers leaned toward the royal government more than most other Boston papers.

Boston Discovers Universal Salvation

I’ve been following the religious evolution of two men who left the Old South Meeting-House congregation in the late 1760s: retired artillerist Richard Gridley (1711-1796) and blockmaker Shippie Townsend (1722-1798).

As soon as the Revolutionary War began in April 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent for Col. Gridley. He had proven himself as an artillery commander and engineer in the attack on Fort Louisbourg in 1745. Even the British army had recognized his ability, giving him a rank and a pension. Would he take command of the Massachusetts artillery regiment?

Gridley agreed to that post, on the condition that the congress would take over the payments on his pension. He thus laid out the first siege lines around Boston, fought and suffered a wound in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and became the first artillery commander of the Continental Army. In late 1775, Gen. George Washington arranged for Gridley to be made Chief Engineer but relieved of battlefield command. Henry Knox replaced him.

Townsend, in contrast, had become a Sandemanian, and therefore felt religiously obligated to obey the government in power—i.e., the king and his ministers in London. Many of his fellow congregants sailed away with the British military in 1776 and resettled in Canada. But Townsend stayed behind. In August, the Boston Committee of Correspondence complained that he wasn’t fulfilling his militia requirement. Eventually he and the few remaining Sandemanians convinced the authorities that they weren’t threats, that they could be as loyal to the new government as the old. The fact that Townsend’s son David was serving as a Continental Army physician probably helped.

Meanwhile, Gridley had been given responsibility for strengthening the defenses of Massachusetts’s ports. According to his biographer, “when engaged on the fortifications on Cape Ann,” the colonel heard the Rev. John Murray (1741-1815) preach in Gloucester.

Murray (shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia) was an English minister who had moved from the Anglican church through Methodism to an early form of Universalism—he believed in universal salvation, though he also believed in the Trinity and many other Christian traditions. Murray had settled in Gloucester in 1774, prompting some locals to suspect him of being a British spy. Gen. Nathanael Greene and Col. James Varnum of Rhode Island insisted on employing him as a chaplain during the siege of Boston, but he then returned to Gloucester.

Gridley became one of Murray’s supporters and friends. In 1790, after the colonel’s wife died, Murray and his second wife, the feminist author Judith Sargent Murray, visited the Gridley house in Stoughton. According to Gridley’s biographer, Murray later preached at the colonel’s funeral.

As for Shippie Townsend, he also became a Universalist—in fact, a leader of the Boston society. An 1890 history of the Old South Meeting-House, where I found the quotation started this series of postings, reported:

In 1785 its members purchased and enlarged the meeting-house in Hanover street, in which the Rev. Samuel Mather had preached for forty years. Shippie Townsend’s name headed the list of contributors, and he was chosen deacon.

Townsend thus helped take over the church of the minister whom he had debated back in 1768. Even more ironically, the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy, who had encouraged Mather to attack the Sandemanian faith back then, had finally published his own Universalist writings in 1784; he had been sitting on them for years, worried that such unorthodoxy would rile his congregation.

In 1793 the Boston Universalists invited Murray to become their minister, getting Judith Sargent Murray in the bargain. Among their acolytes was Townsend’s former apprentice and journeyman Jonathan Balch, who in 1798 interrupted a visiting minister at Mrs. Murray’s behest. The blockmaker’s son Dr. David Townsend also became an ardent Universalist, writing Gospel News in 1794.

Meanwhile, Townsend continued to publish his own pamphlets on religious and other topics:

• Repentance and Remission of Sins Considered (1784)
• The Master and Scholar Attending Catechising: or, An attempt to imitate Timothy’s catechism (1787)
• Peace and Joy: being a Brief Attempt to Consider the Blessings of the Peace between Great-Britain and America, &c. (1788)
• A View of a Most Magnificent Singing-Choir (1793)
• The History of the Mother and Child: A new primer, attempting an easy, entertaining, and effectual method of teaching young children the alphabet (1794?)
• An Attention to the Scriptures: for an answer to the important inquiry, whether unbelievers are under the law and under the curse? (1795)
• Observations on the Religious Education of Children (1797)
  

Townsend’s name doesn’t appear in most of those publications, but his authorship seems to have been an open secret. The Universalist minister Nathaniel Stacy later credited “some of the writings of Shippy Townsend” for contributing to his own conversion. Not bad for a self-educated blockmaker.

Shippie Townsend, Author

In the spring of 1768, a pamphlet was published in Boston with the title A Modest Account concerning the Salutations and Kissings in ancient Times: In a Letter to a Friend, Requesting the same: Wherein Mr. Sandeman’s Attempt, to revive the holy and charitable kiss, and the Love Feasts, is considered. The title page gave the name of the author as “Constant Rockman, M.A.”

In fact, that essay had been written by the Rev. Samuel Mather of the North Bennet Street meeting-house (shown here, courtesy of Reformation Art). On 17 May, he sent the pamphlet to Thomas Hollis, a British philosopher and Harvard benefactor, with a cover letter that said:

I beg leave now to put into your Hands...a Letter obtained from me thro’ Importunity from Dr. [Charles] Chauncey, my Friend and Neighbour, and some others: which I have publish’d under a fictitious Name, lest some Offence might be given by my writing on such a Subject; tho’, I think, there is not any Thing justly exceptionable in it.

Mather had chosen the pseudonym “Rockman” as a contrast to the leader of the sect he was opposing, Scottish preacher Robert Sandeman. As I described yesterday, Sandeman had established a small church in Boston following his father-in-law’s unusual view of Christianity, and then moved on to Danbury, Connecticut.

On 25 July, the Boston Gazette carried the first advertisement for a response:

THIS DAY PUBLISHED,
And to be Sold by NICHOLAS BOWES, opposite the Old
Brick Meeting-House in Cornhill.
[Price 6d.]
An INQUIRY
Whether the Scriptures enjoin the Kiss of Charity, as
the Duty of the Disciples of Christ, in their Church
Fellowship in all Ages.——Or, only allowed it to the
First Disciples, in Consequence of the Customs that
then prevailed.
Occasioned by a LETTER lately Published by CON-
STANT ROCKMAN, M.A.
Intitled “a Modest Account concerning the Salutati-
ons and Kissings in ancient Times,” &c.
Containing some Remarks thereupon.

Bowes added helpfully that customers could also buy the “Rockman” letter at his shop. Which was, incidentally, right across the street from where the Rev. Dr. Chauncy preached. It was a small town. (I haven’t even mentioned that young Henry Knox was working as an apprentice at Bowes’s shop.)

The Inquiry essay was written by Shippie Townsend, a leading member of the Sandemanian meeting. He was a successful blockmaker—the period equivalent, perhaps, of the owner-manager of a tool and die shop. He hadn’t been to Latin School or college, and he was taking on the latest in Boston’s most learned line of ministers, the Mathers. So Townsend started his “letter” this way:

Apprehending something in Mr. Rockman’s Letter, about which we were lately conversing, contrary to what the Apostle glories in, in 2 Corinth. iv. 2. And fearing lest some who are exercised about the will of God in this matter, may receive a wrong bias, from the slight and craftiness wherewith the scripture texts seem to be mentioned.

Having no acquaintance with Hebrew or Greek, and scarce any with the ancient Fathers, and no common place-books, I set down, having only the Bible before me, to see if by a plain literal reading the divine will, may not been seen with controversy.

In other words, Townsend presented his lack of higher learning a virtue. He might not know about ancient languages (or complete sentences), but he could read the plain words of the Bible.

The next year, a committee from the Old South Meeting-House visited Townsend and another lapsed congregant, Col. Richard Gridley, and asked them to return to that fold. Both men convinced their visitors that their new theological views were sincere and firm, as described back here.

In fact, Townsend had discovered that he liked writing about religious questions. Four years later, in 1773, he published another tract titled An Attempt to Illustrate the Great Subject of the Psalms. This time he didn’t need an earlier essay to prompt him; he just had some theological ideas to share. The war interrupted Townsend’s publishing career, but he would resume it in the 1780s.

TOMORROW: Townsend and Gridley end up in the same faith again.

People Who Prayed in Glas Houses

In 1728, a Presbyterian minister named John Glas was asked to leave his pulpit in Tealing, Scotland, because he had published some unorthodox religious views. He then started a small Christian sect that lasted for about a century. In Scotland his adherents were called “Glasites.” In North America they became known as Sandemanians after Robert Sandeman, Glas’s son-in-law and chief disciple.

In late 1764 Sandeman arrived in Boston, come to convert people to “a return to the religious practices of the primitive Christians,” in the words of Jean F. Hankins’s article on the movement in the New England Quarterly for 1987. The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States and British Provinces, published by John Hayward in 1836, described what set the Sandemanians apart from other Protestant congregations:

They differ from other Christians in their weekly administration of the Lord’s Supper; their love-feasts, of which every member is not only allowed, but required to partake, and which consist of their dining together at each other’s houses in the interval between the morning and afternoon service; their kiss of charity used on this occasion, at the admission of a new member, and at other times when they deem it necessary and proper; their weekly collection before the Lord’s Supper, for the support of the poor, and defraying other expenses; mutual exhortation; abstinence from blood and things strangled; washing each other’s feet, when, as a deed of mercy, it might be an expression of love; the precept concerning which, as well as other precepts, they understand literally; community of goods, so far as that every one is to consider all that he has in his possession and power liable to the calls of the poor and the church; and the unlawfulness of laying up treasures upon earth, by setting them apart for any distant, future, or uncertain use.

They allow of public and private diversions, so far as they are not connected with circumstances really sinful; but apprehending a lot to be sacred, disapprove of lotteries, playing at cards, dice, &c.

Sandeman started to hold religious services in 1765, first at blacksmith Edward Foster’s house, later in the long room of the Green Dragon Tavern and the North Latin School. He eventually moved on to Danbury, Connecticut, where he died in 1771.

By then there were regular Sandemanian meetings not only in Boston and Danbury, but also in Providence, Rhode Island, which worried the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles. Like other Congregationalist ministers, he distrusted any form of worship that didn’t fit into his established hierarchy.

To be sure, there were significant religious differences between mainstream New England Calvinism and the Sandemanian creed. Though Glas and his followers rejected good deeds as a way to salvation, they didn’t emphasize repentance from sins like Puritans and their revivalists. Sandemanian worship services seemed strange, with all that foot-washing and kissing. And though they praised charity and brotherhood, eighteenth-century Congregationalists liked the idea of private wealth; the new sect’s emphasis on communal meals, weekly collections for the poor, and a theoretical abjuration of individual property seemed to be taking Christianity too far.

There were other, non-religious reasons that most New Englanders distrusted the Sandemanians. In the 1760s folks were suspicious about anything from Scotland. And Glas’s belief that true Christians shouldn’t get involved in politics came out as support for the established government—i.e., the Crown.

Thus, in the late 1760s the Boston Sandemanians gained a reputation as friends of the royal government. By then the group included some notable men, most drawn away from Congregationalist meetings:

• Walter Barrell, Inspector-General of the Customs
• merchants Isaac Winslow and Colburn Barrell
• Hopestill Capen, who was Benjamin Thompson’s employer and Isaiah Thomas’s landlord

The royal government’s favored printer, John Mein, was also linked to Sandeman, though not apparently a member of the church.

Among the most visible Sandemanians in Boston was Shippie Townsend, who had withdrawn from the Old South congregation by 1769, as discussed yesterday. Townsend even hosted Sandemanian services in his house in the North End for a while before the group bought property for their own church. And when a Congregationalist minister published a pamphlet meant to refute Sandeman’s preaching, Townsend took up his pen.

TOMORROW: A blockmaker becomes an author.

“Withdrawn Irregularly from the Communion”

The records of the Old South Meeting-House (shown at the right, courtesy of the Freedom Trail Foundation) contain this note of a discussion on 9 May 1769:

Richard Gridley, Shippey Townsend having withdrawn irregularly from the Communion of the Church, and the Church having appointed a Committee consisting of their Pastors and Deacons to converse with them on said conduct, and to endeavour to convince them of their error, so that they might be induced to return to that Christian Fellowship, in which they had covenanted to walk, which Committee had reported that their conference had not had the desired success, said Brethren declaring that they acted on the principles of Conscience, and that they could not see their way clear to return, The Church upon mature consideration voted, to forbear any further Judicial attention to said Conduct of said Brethren and to leave them to God and their own consciences.

Both Gridley and Townsend had risen from the mechanical class into that of gentlemen, and were the sort of men whom the Old South congregation would have liked to keep. But both were exploring new religious ideas.

Richard Gridley (1711-1796) had commanded the New England artillery during the first successful siege of Fort Louisbourg in 1745. In the years before the Revolution he became, according to his enthusiastic late-nineteenth-century biographer Daniel V. T. Huntoon, “an admirer of [Jonathan] Mayhew and [Charles] Chauncy.” Those admired Boston ministers both combined support for Whig politics with private doubts about the orthodox Congregationalist theology. I have no clue about what church services Gridley might have been attending in 1769, but clearly he was no longer showing up at Old South.

The religious journey of Shippie Townsend (1722-1798) is easier to track because he was more public in his ideas. He had been admitted to full communion at the First (Congregationalist) Meeting in Charlestown in 1740, still in his teens. He married Mehetabel Whittemore at the same church, then moved the family to Boston and joined Old South. Townsend was a blockmaker; his workshop supplied the blocks-and-tackle and other equipment ships needed. John Hancock’s brother Ebenezer bought tackle from Townsend in 1767, and Dr. Joseph Warren treated his child in 1765. He was able to send his son David to Harvard (class of 1770).

In the early 1760s Townsend donated “two quintals of cod and a barrel of rice” to the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock’s school, which later became Dartmouth College. But soon he became interested in a new, unorthodox religious group: the Sandemanians.

TOMORROW: The Boston Sandemanians, and why they seemed so dangerous.

The Inevitable Growth of the Government

For pleasant sightseeing without worry about the weather, visit the Historic Buildings of Massachusetts blog’s colonial grouping. And there’s an even larger helping of colonial architecture from Historic Buildings of Connecticut.

Because those sites feature new photographs, the buildings look really good—but not necessarily as they did in the eighteenth century. The websites’ descriptions are very good at pointing out which buildings have been altered, but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

So here’s an image of Faneuil Hall at the end of the 1700s, courtesy of Boston College professor Jeffrey Howe’s Digital Archive of American Architecture. It was built as a central market space (ground level) and hall for town meetings (one story up), and militia arms were often stored in the attic.

And here’s Faneuil Hall today, after a thorough expansion by Charles Bulfinch in 1806. The original three bays on the ends became seven, the original three stories grew into four, and the tower was shifted. Otherwise, it was the exact same building, yep.

I can imagine crusty Bostonians of that time grumbling about why everything has to change so fast. Or did they? Historic preservation is a relatively recent addition to our value system, and maybe people were just glad to have more space for town meetings out of the weather.

The Irregular Spellings Actually Fit the Historical Setting

I can’t believe this corner of the web came as a surprise to me: Johnny Tremain fanfiction.

Once one gets beyond the school assignments, there’s a lot of Johnny x Rab slash—no surprise there. But one writer asks, “Now that Johnny is back in Boston and reunited with Cilla will the war with Britain escalate and force them apart again?” And another: “Suppose Johnny’s hand was examined and healed by a doctor soon after his accident. Would this lead him off to take the path of a Tory, loyal to the king?”

And then there’s: “When a girl from a family who despratly needs money finds a job for the Boston Observer, things will start to happen.” I suspect that girl’s name might be Mary Sue.

Christmas Business in Portsmouth, 1775

On 25 Dec 1775, the white male property-owners of Portsmouth, New Hampshire—ignoring Christmas, like good descendants of Puritans—held a town meeting to select delegates to a Provincial Congress. The men they chose were Samuel Cutts, Samuel Sherburne, and Pierce Long.

One of the big issues at the meeting was the increasing cost of living in wartime:

That the great rise of Goods has given much uneasiness not only to the Inhabitants of this Town, (already being much distressed by being the Frontier & the total Loss of its Trade) but also to those of the Colony in general: Altho’ the Honorable Continental Congress have recommended that the Committees of the several Towns should regulate this matter, yet inasmuch as we have been informed, that Goods, altho’ high here, are higher at Newbury & Salem & higher still at Cambridge, wee are of opinion that it is too extensive as well as too delicate an affair to be in the power of any Town Committee to rectify. Wee therefore look up to the superiour Wisdom of the Congress intreating that they will take up the Matter on a general plan and afford such reliefe as the nature of the case requires.

In other words, prices were okay in Portsmouth, its shopkeepers could undersell those in Massachusetts towns, and the town didn’t want to take any measures to change that.

Portsmouth also didn’t want the New Hampshire Provincial Congress to go too far in assuming governmental powers. The town meeting attendees unanimously approved these instructions to their delegates the next day:

The precept sent to this town for the choice of Delegates, mentions our taking up a form of Government in this Colony. This we conceive to be a measure to be entered upon with the greatest caution, calmness, and deliberation. We are of opinion that the present times are too unsettled to admit of perfecting a form stable and permanent, and that to attempt it now would injure us, by, furnishing our enemies in Great Britain with arguments to persuade the good people there that we are aiming at Independency, which we totally disavow. We should therefore prefer the Government of the Congress till God, in his providence, shall afford us quieter times.

In fact, the town of Portsmouth (heretofore the biggest and most important in the province) was playing catch-up. The Provincial Congress had been meeting in Exeter since 21 December. And the delegates there were already at work on instituting a new government for New Hampshire, with a constitution adopted 5 Jan 1776.

New Hampshire was the first of the rebellious British colonies to establish a new constitution, even a provisional one. The state continued to govern itself by that document until the war ended, and then in late 1783 adopted its current, more detailed and formal constitution.

The Cost of War

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (slogan: “Thinking Smarter About Defense”) just released a report by Steven M. Kosiak titled Cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other Military Operations through 2008 and Beyond. It makes a couple of striking points in comparing the U.S. of A.’s current war to those of the past, including the war for independence.

In real (inflation-adjusted) terms, the war in Iraq alone has already cost more than every past US war but World War II. Combined, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already exceeded the cost of the Vietnam War—the second most costly past US war—by about 50 percent.

On the other hand, to date at least, the financial burden imposed by these ongoing military operations is lower—measured as a share of the economy—than was imposed, for example, by the Korean or Vietnam Wars.

Here’s the data for such a comparison, created by ProPublica using figures from the Congressional Research Service in order to produce this visual representation. That analysis treats the current Iraq conflict separately from the war in Afghanistan, as well as from the previous war with Iraq. (The current administration prefers to bunch the first and second; future historians might bunch the first and third.)

Measured in terms of how much of the gross domestic product they consume, however, the current wars are much, much smaller than the World Wars or U.S. Civil War. I haven’t found an estimate of that measurement for the Revolutionary War; economic statistics for the nascent U.S. of A. are rudimentary. However, it’s clear that the conflict had a huge effect on the American economy, lasting into the late 1780s.

The C.S.B.A. report highlighted another way this conflict is set apart:

Prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the only time foreign lenders had been relied upon extensively in wartime was during the Revolutionary War, when the Continental Army was financed in part by loans from France and the Netherlands. . . .

the fact that a substantial share of the national debt is currently owned by foreigners may increase the economic costs of borrowing, since a portion of the interest payments will be sent abroad. But the United States’ growing dependence on foreign lenders may also represent a strategic vulnerability.

The debt from the Revolution—that of the Continental government, that of the states, and that taken on by individuals who accepted those governments’ scrip—became a major economic and political issue of the 1780s. The war’s cost led indirectly both to a more powerful federal government in the U.S. and the fall of the Bourbon dynasty in France.

Some other comparatives measures of the wars’ costs:

• The Revolutionary War (1775-1783) is the second-longest of the U.S. of A.’s wars, after the conflict in Vietnam. The Afghanistan war is now third in length, the Iraq war fourth.
• The Revolutionary War remains the fifth worst in terms of American lives lost, with World War 2 being the U.S. of A.’s most deadly. It’s the second worst (after the Civil War) in terms of percentage of the U.S. population killed while in the military.

Constitution and Consensus

The Boston Review is running an essay by William Hogeland on the challenges (or lack thereof) of public history. It’s framed around a visit to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, an independent museum within Independence National Historic Park (i.e., the National Park Service isn’t getting the resources to create modern museums, even about something as crucial to the federal government as the Constitution, so the private and non-profit sector has stepped in).

Bill situates this museum in a long tradition of public commemoration:

From the Parthenon to Trafalgar Square, from the bronze Andrew Jackson of New Orleans to the gilded General Sherman of New York, from Arthurian legend to Serbian epic, history geared for a whole people usually celebrates founding moments, famous victories, hair’s-breadth escapes, tragic losses. It does not always promote fascism. It does tend, almost by definition, to rally nationalism. Thought and nuanced feeling get stifled by a thrill.

In a real democratic republic, where the whole people is supposed to be required to think, a different kind of public history is needed—lively and accessible, yet able to inspire without falsifying and to encourage consideration along with awe.

It’s notable that four of the six monumental examples in that opening are from societies or struggles that we associate with the rise of democratic republic: ancient Athens, the defeat of Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, William T. Sherman as liberator. There are, as Hogeland notes, many more monuments for dictators and monarchs, and dictatorial systems.

Those narratives encapsulate for the general public what scholars know as a “consensus” reading of American history (though many reject the category as simplistic). The term has various meanings and shadings, but refers generally, as its name suggests, to shared American values, transcending political divides and social conflicts and making us, for all our differences, one nation. Breathlessness about the Constitution is a fairly crude manifestation of the consensus approach, which involves more than simple admiration. It has been supported by many of our more sophisticated historians, who argue that the Constitution put into legal operation essentially American commitments and attitudes, which, despite flaws and setbacks, tend to endow more and more people with freedom and equality.

Consensus history thus gives intellectual underpinning to an American liberalism that many self-described conservatives espouse as well. No serious presidential candidate, whatever he plans to do in office, questions the historical consensus, which is ultimately positive, ready-made for the sound bite, and by definition widely accepted.

Indeed. Nor is a presidential campaign the right enterprise to open up a debate on those questions. That would be like an N.F.L. team asking whether participatory or spectator sports are better for society, and starting that debate during a game.

You wouldn’t know it by listening to campaign speeches or by visiting the Constitution Center, but there is no agreement about consensus history or the democratic purpose of the Constitution. A hundred-year war rages in history circles over what was really going on at the founding when it comes to equality, liberty, and law, and how those relationships affected the writing and ratification of the Constitution we live by every day.

I think it’s worth noting that museum exhibits in any field are rarely venues for such deep debates. Even when presenting conflicts and uncomfortable truths, they are by their nature the production of many minds trying to communicate to a broad range of visitors. The very nature of a public institution might require the result to reflect consensus thinking.

Bill reports that his Boston Review essays on “political agendas in public history” will become Inventing American History, to be published by M.I.T. Press in April ’09.

Calling Off the Alert

Back in November I posted an “Alert for Historical Hoaxing,” picking up Prof. T. Mills Kelly’s plans for a course titled “Lying About the Past.” One assignment for the class was “to create an online historical hoax that we will then turn loose on the Internet to see if we can actually fool anyone.”

That posting was, I suppose, my own experiment to see if publicizing the possibility of a hoax would make people more skeptical. It prompted some criticism of the whole project in my comments section, and some replies from Prof. Kelly.

Last week I received word from him that the project had run its course; the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about it. Alas, I can’t access or link to that story since the site’s subscription-only. But I now know the topic of the hoax was “Edward Owens, the Last American Pirate,” and it took the form of (fictional) undergraduate Jane Browning sharing her (fictional) research on Owens through a blog.

This seems like the best introduction to the project, the profile for blogger “Jane Browning.” Other aspects of the hoax included a handwritten will, a Wikipedia entry (check the pre-exposure version), and a YouTube channel.

A USA Today blog picked up the story, showing that it’s indeed possible for this hoax to fool someone. However, it’s also notable that that was only on the paper’s website, not the print edition, and that it was part of a general, barely examined round-up of pirate news. More discussion at Bavatuesdays.

It doesn’t look like anyone of us in cyberspace voiced skepticism about Edward Owens or Jane Browning before the class exposed the hoax themselves. So we can’t treat this as an example of how more eyes makes hoaxing harder. On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of attention paid to an undergraduate’s research, even with the sexy topic of pirates. So this isn’t an example of how easy it is to fool the masses, either.

I guess the scariest part of the experiment for me are the encouraging comments “Jane Browning” received on her blog. Whether they came from genuine believers or students helping to perpetuate the hoax, they have the same vacuous, cheerleader, you-against-the-world quality of comments about fanfiction or vacation snapshots or real blog posts.

Comments on Boston 1775 excepted, of course!

Learning About The Black Regiment

I’ll wind up this impromptu series of book reviews with a pointer to The Black Regiment of the American Revolution, by author Linda Crotta Brennan and artist Cheryl Kirk Noll. This nonfiction picture book for the middle grades was first published in 2004 and reissued earlier this year by Apprentice Shop Books.

This book was created largely to answer interest from schools in Rhode Island. It provides a simple but thorough history of the Continental Army’s 1st Rhode Island Regiment, organized by Col. Christopher Greene in early 1778. In order to fulfill its recruiting quota, the state’s legislature authorized Greene and his officers to sign up slaves who were willing the fight the British, granting them freedom and reimbursing their former owners.

Along with free blacks and Native Americans (there was a lot of overlap between those communities), the newly freed slaves made up a bit more than half of the regiment’s strength. Furthermore, while most of the Continental regiments had their smaller numbers of black soldiers mixed in with the white, the Rhode Islanders were grouped in all-black (or all-men-of-color) companies, making their numbers even more visible. The unit thus became known as “the Black Regiment.”

Apparently some whites objected to being assigned to that regiment. On 29 June 1780, Gen. George Washington wrote to Gen. William Heath, his commander in New England:

I think it will be best to march Colo. [Christopher] Greenes Regt. and the Levies when collected, to the Army [outside New York], and upon their arrival here, so arrange and model them, as to level the Regiments [i.e., to make them even in strength]. The objection to joining Greenes Regiment may be removed by dividing the Blacks in such a manner between the two, as to abolish the name and appearance of a Black Corps.

In early 1781, the regiment was merged with the 2nd Rhode Island to create a single regiment.

Brennan describes this history in crisp, clear prose. Unfortunately, she can’t quote first-person accounts from men of this regiment; she has only the names of soldiers to remind us they were individuals with their own stories. As a result, the “Black Regiment” really functions in the narrative as a single collective character.

The dramatic center of the book is the Battle of Rhode Island in August 1778, when the Continental Army and New England militia units tried and failed to drive the British military out of Newport. The Black Regiment helped hold back a British and Hessian attack, allowing the Americans to retreat off the island. Later the integrated Rhode Island regiment was part of the victorious Continental Army at Yorktown, and some of its black soldiers served through the end of the war in 1783.

Noll provides a series of varied, well researched watercolor illustrations in realistic style. Alongside them are images of period documents and artifacts, helpful maps, timelines, and indexes. (One portrait of a black man reprinted in the book has since been revealed as a modern forgery. That was the topic of the second posting on Boston 1775, back in 2006.)

That amount of material makes for crowded pages, even with small type. The book’s design, and the lack of an individual protagonist to follow, may limit its appeal as entertainment. But for students wanting to learn more about American history, it provides a lot of solid information in an attractive package.

Reviewing Let It Begin Here!

The January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, landing on librarians’ desks now, contains my review of Let It Begin Here!: April 19, 1775, a new history book for young readers by author-illustrator Don Brown.

I praised the book for its quick pace and lively watercolor art. Brown describes the fighting from both sides’ perspectives, and avoids some common myths and misconceptions. Unaccountably, a summary page misquotes Thomas Paine and misspells his name (not so far off as to be wrong by eighteenth-century standards, but wrong by ours). So the second printing should be even better than the first. I do wish the book had a map.

In the same issue of the magazine, Kathleen Isaacs reviews Russell Freedman’s new Washington at Valley Forge, for older grades, as “a pleasure to read.”

Six Books on Two Battles, part 2

This posting continues my expanded response to a question Ed Roche of the Charlestown Militia Company asked in September:

What are the six books you would recommend to the public regarding Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill? Not scholars—the public.

For my caveats and commentary on the first three books, go back one day. And here are the second three titles. Clicking on the links and images will take you to Powell’s Books.

Allen French, General Gage’s Informers: New Material Upon Lexington and Concord, Benjamin Thompson as Loyalist, and the Treachery of Benjamin Church, Jr. (1932). This is an unusual title for this sort of list. It doesn’t provide a start-to-finish overview of a battle, a man’s life, or a political process. But it’s neat. French was a novelist and author of a once-over-lightly popular history of the siege of Boston. And then he got the research bit in his teeth. The Clements Library in Michigan had made Gen. Thomas Gage’s papers and other Revolutionary material available to scholars. French dug into that archive and others, and came out with documents showing:

• Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., was definitely a spy early in 1775.
• So was Benjamin Thompson, later Count Rumford; until then, the standard line on Thompson was that he would have been an asset to the American forces if only some people hadn’t been so suspicious and driven him away.
• Gage had another, still unidentified spy near Concord feeding him detailed information about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s arms.
• Gage’s orders, including his draft orders, never mentioned arresting Samuel Adams, John Hancock, or other Patriot leaders—a long-held American misconception.
  
• The whole day looked quite different through the eyes of Lt. William Sutherland, Ens. Jeremy Lister, Lt. Frederick Mackenzie, and Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie, all junior British officers. American historians hadn’t found or used those men’s reports before, which naturally produced one-sided analyses.
  

Just as interesting as those stories, I think, is watching a historian at work, tossing out and remolding established ideas in front of your eyes. And French knew how to turn that process into a story. (I don’t have a cover image because I’ve linked to the Scholar’s Bookshelf print-on-demand paperback, the only edition available today; it’s not pretty, but it’s fully functional.)

David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (1994). This was one of the books that got me intrigued about Revolutionary War history, though I also came away believing that scholars had already found everything significant about the Battle of Lexington and Concord that there was to be found. I know better now, but Fischer’s book is such a thorough and well constructed overview that it’s still the title to choose if you read only one on the topic. As Fischer notes, the story of 18-19 Apr 1775 is a rarity among events of historical significance: Revere’s ride easily fits the mold of a heroic narrative, and the whole episode has a dramatic unity. At the same time, the book covers more ground than Revere on his horse. Fischer and his research team pull out the stories of the many towns that mobilized, the experiences of the British soldiers, and the spread of the news down the coast and across the Atlantic. Finally, don’t skip the appendix on the tale’s historiography—i.e., how the story of Paul Revere’s ride got into history books, became part of the American legend, and has been treated by historians and popular commentators over the years.

Richard M. Ketchum, Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill (1974). Compared to the battle on the 19th of April, there are fewer books, especially scholarly-level books, to choose from about the 17th of June. It wasn’t always that way. In the nineteenth century, books about Bunker Hill seem to have been just as numerous, and a lot longer. Of the books now in print, Ketchum’s strikes me as having the best combination of dramatic narrative and sourcing (not notes for each statement or quotation, alas, but at least commentaries on sources). A book and magazine editor, Ketchum describes the struggles of both sides with an eye for drama and detail, and generally avoids the myths that have built up along the sides of Bunker Hill—though he can’t avoid including a lot of traditions that go back only to the early 1800s but seem reliable.

My runner-up for that last slot was John R. Elting’s The Battle of Bunker’s Hill (1975). I think it dug deeper into primary sources and military questions, challenging common beliefs about the battle, but at the expense of drama and scope. In any case, it’s no longer in print.

Six Books on Two Battles, part 1

Back in September, Ed Roche of the Charlestown Militia Company passed this question to NEREV, the email list for New England Revolutionary War reenactors:

What are the six books you would recommend to the public regarding Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill? Not scholars—the public.

So, in my unceasing wish to find easy material for blogging, I’m going back to the answer I posted then and offering a little more detail on each title.

But first, a couple of caveats. This is a narrow question, focused on two action-filled days of a long conflict. Which means I ruled out good books on political ideas and conflicts (Pauline Maier’s From Resistance to Revolution, John Tyler’s Smugglers and Patriots), social history (Gary Nash’s The Urban Crucible, Robert Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World), and even other dramatic events (Hiller Zobel’s The Boston Massacre, Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party), not to mention books about the whole war or even the whole siege of Boston. And the books had to be fun to read as well as enlightening. (Sorry, Dirk Hoerder’s Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780.)

Second, on another day I might come up with a slightly different list.

So here we go with the first three titles. Click on the covers or titles to go straight to that page at Powell’s Books.

Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution (2002). This book describes the year of political, and occasionally armed, conflict in the New England countryside preceding April 1775. Okay, I’m cheating a little on the question’s timeframe, but I don’t think one can understand the mass mobilization on that day without understanding what the rural militiamen’s motivation and how they had organized themselves under the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. There was a political side to the Revolution, after all. Ray argues that British government had been overturned in most of Massachusetts before the first battle (which I agree with) and a new republican government launched (which I’m not so sure about). Ignore the two pages of John Howe myth and enjoy the argument for Worcester as the real center of the rebellion.

John R. Galvin, The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution (1989). Too many colons in the title aside, this book digs up the roots of the Massachusetts militia system before providing a detailed analysis of the military maneuvers of 19 Apr 1775. Alarm riders and minuteman companies had a history almost as old as English settlement in America, and the militiamen’s training was well adapted to their circumstances. Does Galvin know his tactics, strategy, and logistics? He was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe before becoming Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. (An equivalent book on the British forces? Maybe John Shy’s Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution, no longer in print.)

Esther Forbes, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942). This book has an old-fashioned emphasis on a heroic narrative and a quaint past. The dark side of American history isn’t much in evidence here, and a number of poorly sourced legends got through the research Forbes and her mother did. But there’s a reason this book won the Pulitzer Prize and remains popular and respected today: it creates a vibrant, 360° portrait of mid-1700s Boston and of Revere, the hard-striving silversmith who put himself at the center of the Patriot alarm network. Forbes went on to write a certain “novel for all ages” called Johnny Tremain.

TOMORROW: The next three titles, of course.

Courting Indifference

I’ve been enjoying Caitlin GD Hopkins’s studies of early American gravestones at the Vast Public Indifference blog. Two easy ways to find those postings are to read the entries labeled gravestones and 101 Ways to Say “Died”. The 18th century track is fun, too.

Above all, there are Caitlin’s quotations from young printer John Boyle (1746-1819). Boyle kept a marvelously miscellaneous and gossipy “Journal of Occurrences in Boston” between 1759 and 1778. He probably started it in the early 1760s while apprenticed to John Green, then went back and filled in what he’d missed. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register published the whole in 1930-31. An entry that probably interests both Caitlin (for her interest in deathways) and me (for my interest in Gores) appeared on 3 Sept 1771:

This Morning (Tuesday) Mr. John Gore, Junr. intending an Excursion in the Country with his Friends arose vigorous and cheerful: being casually detained longer than he expected, his friends Set out without him, with the expectation that he would soon overtake them, but alas! his bounds were determined that he could not pass He was seized with an Apoplectic Fit at ten o’Clock, and expired at four in the Afternoon.

After looking at lots of colonial and Federalist gravestones, you’ll be ready to take this Vast Public Indifference quiz:

I’ll give you some names and you tell me whether they belong to people born in Connecticut between 1701 and 1800 or to Muppets who have appeared on Sesame Street.

1. Herbert Birdsfoot
2. Sherlock Doolittle
3. Hannah Hobby
4. Vincent Twice
5. Herman Bird
6. Orange Wedge
7. Alice Braithwaite Goodyshoes
8. Bathsheba Bird
9. Bathsheba Bugbee
10. Appleton Osgood . . .

Follow the quiz link for the rest of the list, and the answers.

Seeking a Peek at Hannah Mather Crocker

Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) was a descendant of the leading Puritan ministers Increase and Cotton Mather, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Mather of the North Bennet Street meeting-house during the Revolution, and niece of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Apparently she was actually in Hutchinson’s house on 26 Aug 1765 when an anti-Stamp Act mob attacked it.

Crocker inherited the Mather family’s scholarly library. In 1827 she finished writing a manuscript titled Reminiscences and Traditions of Old Boston, which assembled stories she’d heard and read about the town’s founding with some personal experiences. It was never published. Maybe, just maybe, because she was a woman?

The New England Historic Genealogical Society, which has preserved that manuscript, announced this month that Prof. Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser of the University of Notre Dame are editing it for publication in 2010. I’m intrigued by the prospect of recollections of the Revolutionary turmoil from a young female perspective.

The authors are now looking for “a portrait or any image of Hannah Mather Crocker” to be used on the cover or frontispiece of that book; Prof. Hunt asked anyone who might have such a portrait up in the attic to email her. There are well-known portraits of all her famous ancestors, but none of her. Maybe, just maybe, because she was a woman?

Crocker is linked to the even less documented figure of Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727). In Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818), which Botting calls “the first book-length treatise on women’s rights in the United States,” Crocker wrote of Knight:

Among some of the early instructors of writing may be found Mrs. Sarah Knights, in the year 1706. She was famous in her day for teaching to write. Most of the letters on business, and notes of hand, and letters on friendship were wrote by her. She was a smart, witty, sensible woman, and had considerable influence at that period.

Seven years later, Madam Knight’s journal of a journey from Boston to New York in 1704-05 was published by Theodore Dwight, one of the Hartford Wits. Here’s an online edition.

The actual manuscript of Knight’s diary has never turned up, nor other significant documents from her. Dogged research has found evidence of a Sarah Knight in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but there’s still a leap of faith that she took a journey of this sort in 1704 and wrote this diary. Early on people suggested that the text was created by Dwight and his cronies. Why would those conservative Federalists wish to lampoon both Crocker as an author and a learned colonist whom she had written about? Maybe, just maybe,...

On the other hand, what might have made those early reviewers of The Journal of Madam Knight insist that no woman of 1704 could have written it, so it had to be the creation of a man? Maybe, just maybe...