Gordon S. Wood on Narrative History

Last month leading early American historian Gordon S. Wood wrote an essay for the Washington Post on the state of history writing today. He said:

Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history.

Narrative history is a particular kind of history-writing whose popularity comes from the fact that it resembles a story. It lays out the events of the past in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end.

Indeed, most professional historians use the term “narrative history” to mean a chronological telling of events, as opposed to other ways to extract meaningful information from the past: tracing different themes, for instance, or analyzing numbers.

I think that conception of “narrative” misses some of the key qualities that appeal to folks outside of the profession. “Narrative” has a more elaborate meaning for fiction writers, and specifically those who write within genres and/or for young readers—in sum, writers who have to create engaging plots.

When fiction writers discuss narrative, they’re not just thinking of one event after another (“The king died, and the queen died,” in E. M. Forster’s formulation). They’re thinking of an interesting plot with actors, interrelated events, and emotional meaning. That almost always requires:

• a protagonist or group of protagonists readers can follow—i.e., an individual person or small group of individuals. It’s harder to get emotionally involved with an entire population, however eye-opening the statistics may be.
• a goal that matters for that protagonist, whether it’s providing for her children or writing a constitution.
• obstacles or antagonists blocking the protagonist’s way to that goal.
• a resolution of the conflict for the protagonist, ideally growing out of forces or factors already established in the narrative.

A plot’s goal, obstacles, and resolution connect to Wood’s “beginning, middle and end,” but go well beyond. As he notes, stories of politics and wars are particularly useful for narratives. I think that’s because those events offer a clear sense of each side’s desires, stakes, and challenges, and a very clear resolution. For instance, at Yorktown we know what each commander wanted, what each faced, and how events turned out: the whites and blues won, and the reds lost.

Another popular form of history finds its narrative in the process of investigating the past. The author (or, on a television show, the host) is the protagonist, with the goal to find answers to defined questions. The historical investigator overcomes obstacles by unearthing obscure documents, interpreting difficult sources, and getting around preconceived notions. The resolution is a convincing answer to the original questions.

One interesting example of this form is leading early American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale—not the book, but the movie, written and produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt. The book doesn’t offer a strong narrative structure: it traces Martha Ballard’s life over many years, with many events but no unified plot or satisfying resolution, much like real life. In contrast, the movie creates a narrative by using Ulrich herself as the protagonist, seeking a way to find meaning in Ballard’s diary. The result is an engaging, as well as informative, story.

TOMORROW: And what’s wrong with that?

Thanks to PhiloBiblos for the link to Wood’s article.

All the Battles Fit to Print

Norman Desmarais, a librarian at Providence College, has announced the publication of The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in Canada and New England: Battles, Raids, and Skirmishes. He says it:

covers 403 battles, raids and skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, most of which do not get covered, even in the most detailed history books. It intends to provide comprehensive coverage of the confrontations of the American War for Independence and to serve as a guide to the sites.

The text identifies the location of the sites as best as can be determined, provides the historical background to understand what happened there, indicates what the visitor can expect to see and identifies any interpretive aids. It includes URLs for websites of various parks and tourist organizations.

The publisher’s website offers a thorough bibliography, lists of all battles and skirmishes in the war, and a gallery of photographs, though without descriptive labels. (In other words, in true New England fashion, if you don’t already know where you are, you don’t belong there.)

Since the appendices cover all of the eastern U.S., and as far west as Arkansas and Illinois, I assume that Desmarais is working on a book or two about the Middle and Southern Colonies. And what about the Caribbean?

Looking Back on Dr. Church and Mary Lobb

I started investigating Dr. Benjamin Church’s last years because I’d made an error in an old posting about him, and wanted to be more accurate. And I admit to hoping to find new information to make up for the lapse.

In that respect, I think I filled out details of the abortive attempt to trade Dr. Church for Dr. James McHenry, prisoner of war, future aide-de-camp to George Washington, and future Secretary of War.

There are more Dr. Church mysteries to clear up. Though documents confirm that his widow was named Sarah, some early sources say he “married Miss Hannah Hill, of Ross, in Herefordshire, a sister of his early friend, a young student in London.” So Sarah Church might have been the doctor’s second wife. And we still don’t know the name of his mistress.

What really tickled me about that inquiry was how it spiraled off in a direction I never imagined. I looked up Capt. James Smithwick’s name in hope of tidbits about Dr. Church’s departure, and stumbled into the life of the captain’s widow, Mary Lobb—separated from her next husband, joining Boston’s first Catholic church, doling out real estate in her dotage.

Those topics fit Boston 1775 promise of “unabashed gossip,” my cheeky term for intriguing facts about individuals’ lives. They taught me a lot, and offered a great reminder of how the approximately 16,000 people in Revolutionary Boston were interconnected in so many ways. Because of that social network, looking through historical keyholes at individuals helps to illuminate the broad social movement behind the launch of the U.S. of A.

That movement also spiraled off in directions that people of the time never imagined. In the late 1760s, Dr. Benjamin Church joined other Massachusetts gentlemen in protesting Parliament’s new taxes, an attempt to restore autonomy to their traditional, Congregationalist-dominated society. Fifteen years later, their movement had led to Mary Lobb’s freedom to worship in a Catholic church in the heart of Boston. Amazing.

(Above is an image from the Massachusetts Historical Society showing the bustling center of Boston in 1801, as painted by James Brown Marston.)

A Final Glimpse of Mary Lobb

Yesterday I discussed the precedent-setting marriage of Capt. James Smithwick in 1800. He appears to have died just ten years later, leaving his wife with two small children. Fortunately, her sister died in 1813. That meant the widow Smithwick could move her small family in with her widowed brother-in-law, looking after the house while he provided for everyone. The eldest of all the young cousins, Edward Kavanagh, eventually represented Maine in Congress. (This picture of him comes courtesy of the Maine Historical Society.)

Capt. Smithwick’s mother, Mary Lobb, died before 1817. Another item from the Massachusetts court records gives us a glimpse of her last years.

In her will Lobb had left one of her properties to a seven-year-old grandson, Francis Campbell Smithwick, specifying that the tenant, William Jordan, would be his guardian and manage the property for his benefit until he turned twenty-one.

Jordan then came up with deeds showing that Lobb had signed the same property over to him after that will. He now owned it outright, he said. And that was a step too far. Some of the boy’s relatives sued Jordan. The lead plaintiff was another grandson—also named James Smithwick, just to make my searches more confusing.

The court decided that Mary Lobb had shown “evidence of extreme old age, and habits of intoxication.” The deeds were therefore void, her “extreme old age and imbecility having been taken advantage of, by the pretended grantee.” The court removed Jordan as the child’s guardian and created a “trust estate” instead.

And that ends my gossip about James Smithwick and Mary Lobb.

The Younger James Smithwick’s Controversial Marriage

The sea captain James Smithwick, who disappeared at sea with Dr. Benjamin Church in 1778, left behind a son, also named James. I mentioned him back here. When young James grew up, he also became a mariner. Most of the references to “Captain James Smithwick” that I found when I was seeking reports of Dr. Church’s departure turned out to be about the son.

The younger James Smithwick’s mother, Mary Lobb, appears to have raised him and his sisters as Catholics. He became a business partner of James Kavanagh and Matthew Cottrill, who arrived in Boston from County Wexford, Ireland, about 1781 and eventually set up a shipyard in Newcastle, Maine. Together the three owned a ship called the Hibernia, which was captured by a French privateer in 1800.

Father Francis Matignon, Boston’s first long-tenured Catholic priest, presided over Cottrill’s marriage in 1793, and Kavanagh’s in 1794. Then in 1800 the younger James Smithwick wanted to marry Mrs. Kavanagh’s sister, Eliza Jackson.

At this point Matignon’s former student Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus was working as a missionary to the Indians out of Point Pleasant, Maine. He had become known, at least in America, as John Cheverus. (Eventually he became the first Catholic bishop of Boston, and the picture of him above comes from the blog of his latest successor.) Capt. Smithwick and Miss Jackson asked Cheverus to marry them at the Kavanaghs’ home on the first day of 1800.

The Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review was one of the publications that reported the wedding months later, when the news reached Boston:

At Damascotty [i.e., Damariscotta], by the Rev. John Chevers, Capt. James Smithwick, to the amiable and accomplished Miss Eliza Jackson, both of this town.

Naturally such an event led to a landmark lawsuit.

Under the Massachusetts marriage law of 1786, Cheverus was not authorized to marry Smithwick and Jackson. The law specified that a clergyman could marry couples only in the town where he was settled as a minister. But Cheverus had come to Damariscotta for the marriage; according to the Roman Catholic Church, his parish included all of Massachusetts and Maine.

Cheverus himself recognized the conflict between those two authorities because he advised the Smithwicks to go to a justice of the peace the day after the ceremony to make sure their marriage was legal in the eyes of the state. But he was nonetheless hauled up on charges.

Some analyses of this case say that Massachusetts Attorney General James Sullivan prosecuted it as a way of clarifying the law, perhaps even changing it. Sullivan had represented Matignon in a previous lawsuit aimed at freeing Kavanagh and Cottrill from having to pay taxes to support their town’s Protestant minister.

In August a grand jury in Wicasset indicted Cheverus. Cottrill paid his bail. The court of common pleas found in the priest’s favor, and Sullivan declined to prosecute further. However, Judge Theophilus Bradford took it upon himself to continue the case to the next court session. On the day in March 1801 that the second trial was to start, Bradford suffered a stroke. Nobody else pursued the matter, and thus a precedent was created.

TOMORROW: A last glimpse of Mary Lobb from yet another court case.

Mary Lobb: divorced Catholic church lady

Being a widow with young children didn’t make Mary Lobb unusual in eighteenth-century Boston. Even living apart from her second husband probably wasn’t that odd, especially after the disruption of the war. What makes Mary Lobb notable is that she became a stalwart Catholic.

It’s quite possible that Mary Lobb had long thought of herself as a Catholic. The 1944 History of the Archdiocese of Boston says Mary Lobb was “Born in 1734, the daughter probably of Patrick Connell, mariner and sea-captain,” but it’s also possible she came from Ireland. Though she was married and saw her children baptized in Boston’s Anglican churches, those might simply have been her best choice before the 1780s. Up until the Revolution, after all, Boston was a site of violent annual anti-Catholic parades.

In November 1788 a priest named Abbé Claude F. B. de la Poterie, who had arrived in Boston as chaplain to the French fleet, celebrated the Roman mass in what had been the Huguenot Church on School Street. He was soon joined by another priest named Louis Rousselet. This was the beginning of a formal Catholic presence in the town. It wasn’t a smooth start—both men had scandals in their past, and the new bishop for the U.S. of A., headquartered in Baltimore, dismissed each after a short time.

The Rev. John Thayer took up duties as Boston’s priest in June 1790. He was a native of the town, born in 1755 and raised Protestant. In 1781 he had traveled to France to learn the language, then did more study in Europe. In May 1783 Thayer was in Rome, where he chose to convert to Catholicism, as he described in a memoir published five years later.

Samuel Breck, who had met Thayer in Europe during a brief period of being a Catholic himself, described the reopening of the church:

We fitted up a dilapidated and deserted meeting-house in School-street that was built in 1716 by some French Huguenots, and it was now converted into a popish church, principally for the use of French Romanists. A subscription put the sacristy or vestry-room in order, erected a pulpit, and purchased a few benches. A little additional furniture and plate was borrowed.

Thomas H. O’Connor’s Boston Catholics says:

One of the first and most active members of Father Thayer’s little congregation was Mrs. Mary Lobb (née Mary Connell), widow of a sea captain…

Thayer was a bit of a loose cannon; in 1790 the bishop in Baltimore wrote that he had “proved turbulent, ambitious, interested,” and combined “much ignorance with consummate assurance.” The bishop sent him to do missionary work in Kentucky. Thayer then had the better idea of starting a Catholic school for American girls, and went to Europe to raise funds. He died in Limerick in 1815.

The Rev. Dr. Francis Matignon (1753-1818) arrived in 1792, first serving as an assistant to Thayer and then taking over. He had been driven out of France by the Revolution. Abbé Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus (1768-1836), Matignon’s former student, arrived in October 1796 to assist him. And their landlady was Mary Lobb.

That 1944 history of the archdiocese says, “Father Matignon lived at the house of Mrs. Mary Lobb, in Leverett’s or Quaker Lane (now Congress Street), in what was a small Catholic section.” Lobb donated money to help build the new Church of the Holy Cross, which stood from 1803 to about 1862 (shown above late in its existence). As late as 1810, Mary Lobb was a subscriber to a book by John Milner answering an anti-Catholic tract.

TOMORROW: Mary Lobb and her family get involved in a landmark lawsuit.

Statuary Lunch at Massachusetts Historical Society, 4 Dec.

The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Beehive blog says that as part of the Brown-Bag Seminar series, Library Assistant Heather Merrill and Boston By Foot volunteer Tod Forman will speak about “Legacies in Stone: Some Statues of Boston” on Friday, 4 December, starting at 12:00 noon.

Based on the title, I assume this is a version of the same presentation as described on a flyer Tod gave me last month:

Often taken for granted, each and every sculpture comes with a life story, a history, a reason for being, criticism, controversy and placement issues and, of course, a sculptor.

Legacies in Stone is an entertaining one-hour illustrated lecture that should appeal to anyone interested in the history, the art, the politics and the characters that inhabited the Boston of days gone by.

In addition, on Thursday evening at 5:15 the M.H.S.’s Boston Area Early American History Seminar discusses Elaine Forman Crane’s “Cold Comfort: Rape and Race in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island.” with comments by Gerald F. Leonard of Boston University Law School.

The End of Mary Lobb’s Marriage

When Capt. James Smithwick was lost at sea in early 1778, as I recounted last week, he left in Boston a widow named Mary and at least three children under the age of ten. Mary remarried the following spring to a man named George Lobb.

That match didn’t work out. By 1781 Mary Lobb was petitioning to end the marriage.

Divorce was unusual in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, but not unheard of. Among the divorced people I’ve read about are:

• printer Isaiah Thomas, who discovered his wife Mary had an affair with Benjamin Thompson.
• Ann Lovell, whose husband John (eldest son of the longtime schoolteacher with the same name) went insane. (Brent Simon’s Witches, Rakes, and Rogues tells that story.)

In addition, Thomas Paine’s separation papers were recently rediscovered. Thanks to PhiloBiblos for the tip.

In Massachusetts between 1692 (when the Crown established a new royal charter) and 1786, the governor and Council heard divorce cases. Nancy F. Cott’s article “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts” in the William and Mary Quarterly says:

Puritan divorce theory allowed divorce for incorrigible enmity between spouses or for dangerous abuse, but canon law prescribed only separate bed and board. . . .

Of the twenty-three Massachusetts petitions entered on grounds of cruelty,…Not a single one granted divorce.

“Separate bed and board” meant the spouses were legally separated, with husbands paying a sort of alimony, but no freedom to remarry. Wives usually asked for that status, perhaps because they knew it was the best they could realistically hope for.

Mary Lobb petitioned for a separation from her husband George on grounds of cruelty in 1780 or ’81. I haven’t seen the documents of her filing, so I don’t know what she said George had done. Gov. John Hancock and the Council dismissed Mary’s first petition, and she sued again the next year, offering more evidence. That time the body ruled that she deserved “separate bed and board.”

Mary Lobb also took steps to support herself and her children. The town licensed her to sell tea in 1781, then approved her “as a Retailer of Spirituous Liquors at her Shop in Fish Street” in January 1782. That August, town records say:

The Selectmen agree to allow Mrs. Lob, for a Building improved as a Watch house, Seven pounds ten p Annum to commence from the expiration of the last Quarter

The 1798 tax valuation listed Mary Lobb as the owner of three buildings: her home on Reas Court North and more valuable houses rented to “Mary Jenkins” on Fish Street and “Mrs. Doble” on Middle Street.

TOMORROW: What made Mary Lobb really stand out in eighteenth-century Boston.

Old South Remembers the Tea Crisis in December

Old South Meeting House, site of the large public meetings that led up to the Boston Tea Party, will host three events next month looking back at that history.

First come two lunchtime lectures by Prof. Benjamin Carp of Tufts University, drawing on his research for the upcoming book Teapot in a Tempest.

• Thursday, 3 December, 12:15 P.M.: “what led to American outrage in 1773, who became politically active in protesting the Tea Act, and why it ended with the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor. Learn about the global forces of trade and empire that influenced the colonies and why Boston became the site for this grassroots protest."
• Thursday, 10 December, 12:15 P.M.: “The Boston Tea Party lives on in history and memory, inspiring speakers for and against slavery, women’s suffragists, anti-immigration advocates, Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless modern tax protests. But most of the images of the Tea Party are wrong, the Mohawk disguises are misunderstood and Americans’ penchant for coffee has little to do with politics.”

Admission to each lecture is $5.00, $4.00 for students and seniors, free for Old South members. Lunching is encouraged.

Finally, on Sunday, 13 December, from 5:30 to 7:00 P.M., Old South presents the annual reenactment of the Tea Party. The site’s press release says:

Old South’s Tea Party Players will portray historic icons such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and John Hancock and recreate the events of Dec. 16, 1773, when more than 5,000 colonists gathered at Old South Meeting House to debate a British-imposed tea tax.

The reenactment is open to the public, and audience members are invited to choose sides—Patriot or Loyalist—and lend their support for or against the tariff. They will witness first hand how the fiery debate that evening in 1773 decided the fate of over 46 tons of tea and set into motion the events that ultimately led to the Revolutionary War.

That debate will be followed by “a theatrical storytelling piece that will transport you back to Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773.”

Tickets are $8 per person, available through the Old South website, direct from the ticket service, or by calling 800-838-3006.

(Image above from Salada Tea, the reenactment’s “official tea sponsor.” Folks can also sign up for Salada’s “Too Good To Toss” Sweepstakes.)

The Challenges of Pinning John Adams Down on Religion

As I mentioned yesterday, despite the Federalist Party’s portrayal of John Adams as a better Christian than Thomas Jefferson, the two men’s faiths were rather similar. Neither believed in the divinity of Jesus, but both admired Jesus’s teachings. Both men heartily distrusted religious hierarchies.

Pinning down Adams’s beliefs further can be difficult because he was a difficult man. On 28 Aug 1811 he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush:

I agree with you in Sentiment that Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free Government, but of social felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society.

Yet the following year, in the same letter I quoted on Thursday, Adams told Rush:

I agree with you, there is a Germ of Religion in human Nature so strong, that whenever an order of Men can persuade the People by flattery or Terror, that they have Salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, Violence or Usurpation.

Adams’s statements on religion also tended to be personal. Not in the sense that, as Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” Rather, personal in the sense that Adams often thought he was being personally and unfairly attacked—he even took that as a sign of his virtue. He therefore spent a lot of ink refuting what he thought others might say about him.

Here, for example, is more context for the quotation above about how he saw “Religion and Virtue” as fundamental:

I agree with you in Sentiment that Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free Government, but of social felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society. But if I should inculcate this doctrine in my Will, I should be charged with Hypocrisy and a desire to conciliate the good will of the Clergy towards my Family as I was charged by Dr. [Joseph] Priestley and his Friend [Thomas] Cooper and by Quakers, Baptists and I know not how many other sects, for instituting a National Fast, for even common Civility to the Clergy, and for being a Church going animal. . . .

If I should inculcate those “National, Social, domestic and religious virtues” you recommend, I should be suspected and charged with an hypocritical, Machiavilian, Jesuitical, Pharisaical attempt to promote a national establishment of Presbyterianism in America, whereas I would as soon establish the Episcopal Church, and almost as soon the Catholic Church. . . .

If I should recommend the Sanctification of the Sabbath like a divine, or even only a regular attendance on publick Worship as a means of moral Instruction and Social Improvement like a Phylosopher or Statesman, I should be charged with vain ostentation again, and a selfish desire to revive the Remembrance of my own Punctuality in this Respect, for it is notorious enough that I have been a Church going animal for seventy six years i.e. from the Cradle; and this has been alledged as one Proof of my Hypocrisy.

As you can see, this letter was almost all about how the many enemies of John Adams would distort whatever he said, so he was best off saying nothing. We have to dig beneath his self-pitying declarations to find out how he viewed religion, as opposed to how he suspected or hoped people viewed him.

One detail I find notable is Adams’s distinction between two ways of recommending going to church: “the Sanctification of the Sabbath,” as ministers would have it, and “regular attendance on publick Worship as a means of moral Instruction and Social Improvement like a Phylosopher or Statesman.” Which was the basis for his own behavior? Which did he recommend for other people?

John Adams’s Days of “Solemn Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer”

To spot what might have been controversial about John Adams’s proclamations of Thanksgiving holidays on 9 May 1798 and 25 Apr 1799, it’s useful to compare them to others issued before he took office:

• 18 Dec 1777, proclaimed by the Continental Congress.
• 26 Nov 1789, proclaimed by George Washington as President.
• 19 Feb 1795, again proclaimed by Washington.

Beliefnet has Congress’s resolution of 1777. Pilgrim Hall has the texts of five presidential proclamations from 1789 to 1814. (The last came from James Madison.)

One difference pops up right away from the dates. Adams declared holidays in back-to-back years. Though that tradition didn’t continue in 1800, the Adams administration made such proclamations at a higher rate than any previous national government.

Some analysts say people saw Adams’s messages as ominous because they got into political matters, suggesting Americans pray that “our public councils and magistrates may be especially enlightened and directed at this critical period“ in 1798, and that “the United States are still held in jeopardy by the hostile designs and insidious acts of a foreign nation” in 1799.

But Washington’s proclamations also mentioned politics, both generally (“render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed“ in 1789) and specifically (“the suppression of the late insurrection” in 1795).

I think the crucial difference is what Adams asked people to do. He proclaimed a day of “solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” with “fervent thanksgiving” as an afterthought. In contrast, the Congress and Washington asked Americans to pray and give thanks, but they didn’t mention humiliation or fasting.

Fasting was the basis of the New England Puritans’ Thanksgiving tradition. The big dinner came only at the end of a day spent in church while eating little and feeling sinful. Adams’s holiday proclamations weren’t meant to produce “an Establishment of a National Church,” as he claimed his enemies said, but they did try to spread one form of worship nationwide. (I should acknowledge one difference: New England’s Thanksgivings were usually late in the year, after harvest, but Adams pegged dates in the spring.)

The New England Thanksgiving had also developed a political dimension during the build-up to the Revolutionary War. As I discussed last year, observing the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Thanksgiving in December 1774 became a dividing line between Patriots and Loyalists, and thus between the majority Congregationalists and smaller sects that supported the Crown for religious reasons.

That division came on top of ongoing distrust of New England’s Congregationalist establishment for a variety of reasons: old oppression (Quakers, Catholics), being taxed to support someone else’s church (Baptists), too much fervency (Anglicans and Enlightenment skeptics). The Puritan fast day was thus a symbol for a bigger issue about the freedom and equality of faiths.

Finally, religious orthodoxy was also a dividing line between Adams and his rival Thomas Jefferson, at least as the Federalist press portrayed the two men. (In reality, they weren’t far apart in their beliefs.) The 1799 proclamation’s warning about “principles, subversive of the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations,” clearly tried to claim all religion and morality for one side—the anti-French Revolution side—of the U.S. of A.’s politics.

In the end, John Adams’s holiday declarations probably did not decide the election of 1800, despite his later grumbling about “the unpopularity of national Fasts and Thanksgivings.” They were simply another irritant in a series of political disputes.

And what controversy they kicked up didn’t come from their call for “thanksgiving,” but from the “fasting” and “humiliation.” Which, not coincidentally, are the aspects of the New England Thanksgiving that we’ve most thoroughly discarded.

“The Unpopularity of National Fasts and Thanksgivings”

In a letter dated 12 June 1812, John Adams wrote to his old Continental Congress colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush about why he’d lost the presidency twelve years earlier. Adams put the blame on...Thanksgiving!

The National Fast, recommended by me turned me out of office. It was connected with the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church, which I had no concern in.

That assembly has allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Swedenborgians, Methodists, Catholicks, protestant Episcopalians, Arians, Socinians, Armenians, &c, &c, &c, Atheists and Deists might be added. A general Suspicon prevailed that the Presbyterian Church was ambitious and aimed at an Establishment of a National Church.

I was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical Project. The secret whisper ran through them “Let us have Jefferson, Madison, [Aaron] Burr, any body, whether they be Philosophers, Deists, or even Atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.”

This principle is at the bottom of the unpopularity of national Fasts and Thanksgivings. Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion.

This letter was first published by Alexander Biddle in a volume called Old Family Letters (1892).

Authors have accepted a lot of Adams’s late-life recollections and analyses uncritically, but not this one. The notion that a Thanksgiving proclamation was the most unpopular of Adams’s acts in office seems incredible.

In fact, the American government had already proclaimed occasional Thanksgiving holidays, and they seemed to be popular. The Congress declared one on 18 Dec 1777 (though with Philadelphia under British control, members had less to be thankful for). When Adams’s predecessor, George Washington, issued such a proclamation in 1789, he noted that “both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested” it.

Jefferson didn’t follow his predecessors in this regard, but he also felt the need of “saying why I do not proclaim fastings & thanksgivings,” as he told Attorney General Levi Lincoln. Jefferson found that opening in his famous 1802 letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, which said:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

And after that, Jefferson was reelected while Adams wasn’t. So was there something about Adams’s proclamations that made them more controversial than others?

TOMORROW: What was different about Adams’s Thanksgiving proclamations.

The Hemingses at Harvard, 2 December

On Wednesday, 2 Dec 2009, The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard hosts visiting law school professor Annette Gordon-Reed, who will discuss her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Winner of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, this is a deeply researched study of a family who served Thomas Jefferson throughout America’s founding. It portrays life in rural Virginia, revolutionary Paris, and republican Philadelphia. And of course it gathers all available information on housekeeper Sally Hemings, her children, and their likely father, the third President of the U.S. of A.

This event begins at 6:00 P.M. in the West Classroom of Austin Hall at Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. For more information, visit the Houston Institute webpage.

The Last Days of Dr. Benjamin Church

Sometime in early 1778, Capt. James Smithwick directed the sloop Welcome out of Boston harbor, carrying accused spy Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., to Martinique. On 24 April the Royal Pennsylvania Gazette reprinted some news from New York dated three weeks earlier:

Doctor Benjamin Church, was, about six weeks ago [i.e., mid-February], sent off from Boston in a vessel bound for Martinico, with orders never to return on pain of death.

The goal [i.e., jail] of Boston is crowded with persons who have refused to abjure the British Government, and swear allegiance to the Rebels, who are tendering these execrable oaths to every man they suspect to be a loyalist.

The same item appeared in the next day’s Pennsylvania Ledger. With the British army controlling New York and Philadelphia that season, the cities’ newspapers were decidedly pro-Crown.

Neither the Welcome, its captain, nor Dr. Church was seen again. I’ve found no comments on this mystery in 1778 newspapers or correspondence. The earliest surviving report of what happened may be an extract copied from a letter that a man named Thomas Brown sent from Halifax on 16 May 1782, filed in Britain’s National Archives.

Allen French’s General Gage’s Informers says Brown wrote that Church had been “exiled to some island in the West Indies, and threatened with death in case he shôd ever return.” E. Alfred Jones summarized Brown’s information this way in The Loyalists of Massachusetts:

it would seem that Dr. Benjamin Church was put on board a small schooner which Captain Smethwick bought of Jo. Clark and sailed from Boston in February, 1778, bound for the West Indies, and was lost at sea. A number of other vessels sailing at the same time foundered at sea. One man only was saved and brought back an account of the melancholy disaster.

That appears to mean only one man from all the vessels which hit the same weather. Gen. Thomas Gage’s highest placed spy had been swallowed by the Atlantic.

Dr. Church’s father, who had lobbied for his release from jail, resisted the conclusion that his son had died. In his will he still mentioned the doctor as a potential heir. The doctor’s widow, Sarah Church, moved to England, as described here.

In contrast, Thomas Brown wrote in 1782 that “Captn. Smithwicks widow has married another husband.” And indeed, Mary Smithwick remarried in March 1779 at Christ Church. Her new husband, stepfather to her three young children, was a man named George Lobb.

COMING UP: More about Mary Lobb. (That new marriage was a mistake.)

James Smithwick: mariner

James Smithwick was a mariner from Britain or Ireland, according to the understanding of descendants related in Charles Hudson’s History of the Town of Lexington. That fits with how when he came to Boston he attended the town’s Anglican churches rather than its many Congregationalist meetings.

On 20 Aug 1763, Capt. Smithwick married Mary Connell at Christ Church, now often called Old North. The couple’s first child, also named Mary, died a year and ten days later. They also lost children a daughter named Margaret at fifteen months in 1769 and a son named Peter at two years in 1773.

Happily, other children survived: James, born 11 Mar 1770 (six days after the Boston Massacre), Francis in 1773, and another Mary in 1774.

During the war Christ Church was closed for a while, and the family might then appear on the Trinity Church records. A “Capt. John Smithwick” and his wife Mary had a son named Cunnell or Connell in July 1777, and he died in October 1778. That unusual given name was Mary Smithwick’s family name.

By the mid-1770s Capt. Smithwick was prosperous enough to own real estate and slaves. On 23 Sept 1777 two of his enslaved servants, Rose and Waterford, announced their intention to marry.

(Waterford Smithwick remarried in 1787 to a woman listed as “Tamer Phillips.” In 1792, Tamar Smithwick married a man named James Scott; both were labeled as “molattoes.”)

In 1776, Capt. Smithwick’s name came up in a draft for the Continental Army from Boston’s ward 3, in the lower North End. (This listing of Smithwick in connection to ward 3 might be why Hudson wrote that the captain “was warden of the town in 1776.” He never held that office.)

The captain paid a fine to be excused from army service, as most men of means did. That left him free to continue sailing out of Boston harbor.

TOMORROW: Which turned out not to be the best idea.

Dr. Benjamin Church Sails Away at Last

Yesterday I quoted from the Massachusetts House records on that body’s vote on 8 Jan 1778 to put accused but unproven spy Dr. Benjamin Church on board the brig Friendship, which Joshua Winslow was supposed to sail to “Martinico.”

However, the resolution that actually came out of the state legislature the next day said something different:

That Doctr Benjamin Church be & he hereby is permitted to take Passage on board the Sloop Welcome Capt. James Smithwick Master bound for the Island of Martinico;

And the Majr. Part of the Council are desired to give Order to the Sherriff of the County of Suffolk to remove the said Doctr Church on board the said Sloop, when she is ready for Sailing, directing him to search his Person & Baggage to prevent his carrying any Letters or other papers that may be to the detriment of the American States;

And the sd Church is not to return to this State during the Continuance of the present War without Leave therefor first had & obtain’d from the General Court, under such pains & penalties as they shall see fit to order.

The House records make no mention of the change in ship between its first vote and final approval. Perhaps Capt. Winslow objected to carrying Church. Perhaps Capt. Smithwick was leaving earlier, or Capt. Winslow had already sailed.

(As printed decades later, the Massachusetts Acts and Resolves gives the captain’s name as “Smitharick,” but other sources say “Smithwick,” and A Staunch Whig has confirmed that that’s what the original document in the Massachusetts Archives says.)

“Martinico” was the Caribbean island now known as Martinique. In 1778 it was part of the French Empire, the U.S. of A.’s new ally. Wikipedia says that one of the island’s inhabitants that year was the future Empress Josephine. Apparently that was far enough away for Dr. Church and the Massachusetts authorities to agree that it would be safe for him to be there.

I’ve found no mention of the Welcome and its sailing date in early American newspapers. Not all departures were reported, and during the war printers might have been especially careful with that information. So all we can say is that Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., left Boston a short time after 9 Jan 1778.

And promptly disappeared.

TOMORROW: Who was Capt. James Smithwick?

(Photo of Martinique coast above by guillaumeo, via Flickr.)

Dr. Church and the Rule of Law

Even after the Continental Congress strongly disapproved of the idea of trading accused spy Dr. Benjamin Church for an American physician captured by the British, Church kept petitioning for his release from the Boston jail. So did his father, a respected merchant.

Another likely source of pressure on the Massachusetts authorities who were keeping Church locked up was their values. Though the state was still struggling to approve a constitution replacing its royal charter, its political leaders felt a strong commitment to the concepts of natural rights and the rule of law.

Dr. Church was a big test of that system. He’d been high in the Massachusetts Patriot network before the war, a member of the Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety and Supplies, which organized the resistance to the royal army. He’d been the top-ranking medical officer in the Continental Army. If Benedict Arnold hadn’t switched sides in 1780, we Americans might well use the name “Benjamin Church” as a synonym for “betrayer.”

And yet American authorities didn’t have enough evidence to convict Dr. Church of more than corresponding with the enemy—specifically, with a Loyalist in-law, as he admitted. And even the military and legislative bodies that convicted Church on that charge in late 1775 didn’t have legal authority to do more than expel him from the army and the legislature. The New England governments then locked him up not as a formal punishment but in order to figure out what to do with him.

The idea of torturing Dr. Church to make him say more about his dealings with Gen. Thomas Gage was anathema to the founding generation. Corporal punishments such as whipping were part of that society’s judicial system, slave-labor system, and child-rearing practices. Nevertheless, the founders viewed torture to obtain information from prisoners as both cruel and unreliable.

The Massachusetts authorities also appear to have been troubled by locking up a man (well, a white man of property) who had never been legally convicted and sentenced. There was a war going on, of course, with the British army seizing New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and other American territory. Even so, the authorities had trouble justifying their decision to keep Church in jails for two years, much less five or seven.

In 1776, Connecticut balked and sent Church back to Massachusetts. In 1777, as I discussed in previous posts, Massachusetts jumped on an invitation from the British to treat Dr. Church as a prisoner of war and trade him, but a Boston crowd and the Continental Congress blocked that deal from going through.

The Massachusetts General Court finally decided to get rid of Church by accepting his promise to go into exile. Letting him leave America this way didn’t technically break the state’s promise to the Congress not to free him as part of a prisoner exchange—the state would free him without getting anything back. Except for a return to the rule of law.

On 8 Jan 1778, the House approved

a Resolve permitting Doct. Benjamin Church to take Passage on board the Brigantine Friendship, Joshua Winslow Master, bound for the Island of Martinico.

The chamber then sent this legislation to the Council for its concurrence.

TOMORROW: Yet another change of plan for Dr. Church.

(The photo of the Old State House, where the Massachusetts legislature met in 1777-78, comes from Chris Brown via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.)

Still Debating What to Do with Doctor Church

We last left Dr. Benjamin Church back in the Boston jail in early July 1777. The Massachusetts General Court had agreed to trade him for Dr. James McHenry, but a crowd objected. The legislature then voted to certainly not trade him for Dr. McHenry without getting the Continental Congress to take the heat.

I’ve mentioned a letter from Joshua Loring, Jr., formerly of Jamaica Plain, proposing that prisoner exchange. Last night I found a copy of that document in the Papers of the Continental Congress material online at Footnote. It says:

New York 3d: June 1777

Doctr: Benj: Church,

Capt: [Colin] McKenzie of the 71st Regt: having made his Excellency Sir William Howe acquainted with your Situation; I have Authority to Assure you that on your Arrival here Doctr: McHenry of Philadelphia shall be immediately Exchanged for you.

I hope this Proposal will be accepted & that you may soon be sett at Liberty & in order the more speedily to Effect this purpose, I shall write to Mr. Boudinott on the Subject.

I am Sir Your Most Humbl: Servant
Josha. Loring Commis. of Prisrs.

It’s striking that Loring first proposed this trade by writing to Church himself, and only then promised to write to the American Commissary of Prisoners. I’ve found no evidence that Elias Boudinot, who had taken on that job less than a month before, passed Loring’s proposal on to Congress. (Boudinot’s picture later in life, above, comes courtesy of the U.S. Mint.) Rather, Church himself kept pushing the idea.

Even after the debacle in July, Church kept pushing. It wasn’t until 17 September that the president of the Massachusetts Council, Jeremiah Powell, wrote to Congress, enclosing a copy of Loring’s letter. He asked for a reply “as soon as possible” because “Doctr. Church has applied in a very pressing Manner for Liberty as soon as possible to proceed to New York.” At the same time, Powell insisted that the state did “not incline to sett him at Large to permit the Exchange without the Directions of the Congress.”

That letter went south in the week after the big British victory at Brandywine, when Congress was busy getting out of Philadelphia. Delegates reassembled in York, Pennsylvania, and on 2 October they considered Powell’s letter. John Hancock wrote back to Boston with the decision about his old colleague:

York Town: Pennsylvania, Octr. 3d. 1777.

Gentlemen,

Your Favour of the 17th ult[im]o. [i.e., last month] enclosing a Copy of a Letter from Mr. Loring Commissary of Prisoners, relative to the Exchange of Doctor Church for Doctr. McHenry, was duely received and laid before Congress:

In Consequence of which I am to inform you, they immediately, and in the strongest Terms, expressed their Disapprobation of the Proposal, and put their Negative upon it.

I have the Honour to be, with the greatest Respect, Gentlemen,
your most obed & very hble Servt.
John Hancock Presidt.

So Dr. Church remained in jail through the end of 1777.

TOMORROW: A breakthrough in the new year.

Tracing Sarah Church and Her Children

By July 1777, Sarah Church, wife of accused traitor Dr. Benjamin Church, realized that she was no longer welcome in America. A mob carrying off your possessions tends to have that effect. Sarah gathered the silver plate that remained and bought passage for herself and her children to France, and from there to Britain.

The dates of their voyages aren’t clear. Back in Massachusetts, the state included Church’s name on its list of people banished for disloyalty in October 1778, and confiscated his Boston house for sale to support the war effort.

In England, Sarah Church petitioned the Crown for support. She referred to “certain services” that her husband had done for the Crown, and said Gen. Thomas Gage could provide more details. A Mr. Sparhawk testified on her behalf, saying that Dr. Church had been a British spy. In addition, a Loyalist named William Warden stated in his own petition for support that “he was sent by General Gage to Salem and Marblehead to receive intelligence from Dr. Benjamin Church, but failed to execute his business.”

These documents seem to confirm what the American authorities of that time were never quite able to prove: that Dr. Church had been a paid spy for the Crown.

The royal government granted Sarah Church an annual pension of £150, which she collected until her death in August 1788.

The couple’s two sons, Benjamin (born 1758) and James Miller (born 1759), had apparently both started to train as doctors under their father when he was arrested.

According to Boston author James Spear Loring, who said he got information from Church descendants, Benjamin “married a lady of London, and became a surgeon in the British army.” Some books don’t mention Benjamin, apparently because there’s no record of his baptism in Boston (the family may not have moved from Rhode Island yet), and he wasn’t mentioned in his grandmother’s 1794 will (so perhaps he died before that year).

James Miller “was granted an appointment as surgeon’s mate and ensign to the West Middlesex Militia in England”; he retired as that militia’s surgeon in 1817 and died fourteen years later, receiving a small pension as a Loyalist of £12.10s. per year.

The family also included two girls, Sarah (born 1761) and Hannah (born 1764). I find it notable that there’s no sign the Churches had any children after that—four is a small number for an eighteenth-century couple who could have children at all. Benjamin and Sarah Church might therefore have been estranged for a decade before the Revolution.

The younger Sarah Church married a Loyalist refugee named Benjamin Weld. Some sources say he was also her cousin, and she indeed had a cousin of that name. But it’s more than possible that there were multiple Benjamin Welds.

Hannah married a London merchant named William Kirkly and had sixteen children, said Loring in the 1852 edition of his Hundred Boston Orators. However, in the next edition of that book, published two years later, Loring said her husband was named Kirkby. (Other sources use the spellings Kilby and Kirby, just to confuse matters further.) Loring said “a descendant of this branch” was his source on the Church family, meaning they kept up some sort of connection with people in Massachusetts.

In fact, a “Mrs. Hannah Kirkby” married William Longhurst in Boston in 1807. That year’s town directory listed Longhurst as a shopkeeper on Newbury Street. I’ve seen a report that government records from the War of 1812 list William and Hannah Longhurst as British subjects living in Boston; Hannah was said to be forty-five years old, meaning she was born in 1767. John Haven Dexter’s genealogical notes in an earlier town directory (part of the collection of the New England Historic Genealogical Society) state that Mrs. Hannah Longhurst died on 7 Apr 1836 at age 68—giving a birth year of about 1768.

So was Hannah Kirkby Longhurst the younger daughter of Dr. Benjamin Church, discreetly returning to the town of her birth? Or is this simply coincidence?

Dr. McHenry Exchanged at Last

I’ll wrap up Dr. James McHenry’s story first. When we left him back here in 1777, he had been captured at Fort Washington in New York and then paroled—released in a trade for a prisoner to be named later.

The British Commissary of Prisoners suggested that Massachusetts release Dr. Benjamin Church. The state government agreed, but the people did not. Which left Dr. McHenry still on the sidelines.

On 5 Mar 1778, Alexander Hamilton wrote to the young doctor:

It gave me pleasure to inform you that Mr. [Elias] Boudinotte has been able to effect your exchange for a Doctor Mentzes. Allow me to congratulate you on the event.

I haven’t been able to identify this doctor, either under that name or “Menzies.” He could have been a military surgeon or a prominent Loyalist. Dr. Archibald Menzies served as a Royal Navy surgeon later in the war before embarking on a significant career in botany, but I can’t find any indication he was a prisoner this early.

In any event, the completed exchange meant McHenry was free to rejoin the Continental Army, which he did at Valley Forge in early 1778. Gen. George Washington quickly made him an aide-de-camp. Later the commander-in-chief wrote:

McHenry’s easy and cheerful temper was able to bear the strain which we suppose must sometimes occur between two persons thrown so closely and so constantly together in a position of social equality and military inequality.

[CORRECTION: Whoops! This quotation is attributed to Washington on the Valley Forge National Historical Park website. However, on probing further after a query from Boston 1775 reader Dan Shippey, I found that it actually came from Fred. J. Brown, as quoted in The Magazine of American History in 1881. Brown apparently wrote these words for a profile of McHenry published by the Maryland Historical Society in 1877, contrasting how McHenry remained on good terms with Washington while Hamilton had a couple of blow-ups.]

After two years McHenry left Washington’s military family to serve Gen. Lafayette in the same capacity until Yorktown. [So McHenry might have avoided blow-ups by taking another job. Nonetheless, on 15 Aug 1782 Washington closed a letter to McHenry by writing, “It is unnecessary for me to repeat to you, that I am Your sincere friend & affecte. Sevt.” And that quote I found in the Washington Papers at the Library of Congress.]

McHenry then entered Maryland politics, serving in the state senate, Continental Congress, and Constitutional Convention. A strong Federalist, he was Secretary of War under Presidents Washington and John Adams, feuding with the latter. With the ascension of the Jeffersonians, he retired to his estate in Maryland and died in 1816.

Fort McHenry is named for him. Indeed, the fort is now more famous than the man because Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” after seeing it withstand a British siege during the War of 1812. Ironically, McHenry as a Federalist strongly opposed that war.