Dr. Windship Assures Gen. Washington

Yesterday we left Dr. Amos Windship stuck in Boston at the start of the Revolutionary War. According to Dr. Ephraim Eliot, recording stories he’d heard from and about the man:

In the disguise of a sailor, with his head shaved & covered with a milled cap, he escaped from the town

That was in July 1775, and Windship, with a drive for social climbing, appears to have gone right to the top. On 21 July, Gen. George Washington reported to John Hancock, chairman of the Continental Congress:

I have also received a more authentick account of the loss of the enemy in the late battle [Bunker Hill], than any yet received. Doctor Winship, who lodged in the same house with an Officer of the Marines, assures me they had exactly one thousand and forty-three killed and wounded, of whom three hundred fell on the field, or died within a few hours; many of the wounded are since dead.

That was a fairly accurate count; Windship might even have helped in treating the British wounded, as some Whiggish physicians did from a sense of professional responsibility.

Washington’s report is interesting in a couple of other ways. It suggests that Windship had heard the memorable stories of Maj. John Pitcairn’s death from the Marine officer. And in an ironic twist nobody could have foreseen, Washington’s headquarters, where the doctor probably went to make his report (shown above, courtesy of the National Park Service), would after the war become the home of Nathaniel Tracy, who had gotten Windship booted out of Harvard.

During the siege, according to Eliot, Windship

got employment as a surgeon in the military hospital at Cambridge, where he continued several months, was every intimate with the Director general Doctor [Benjamin] Church, who being charged with holding a treasonable correspondence with the Enemy, our Doctor was suspected of having concern with him, but the suspicion soon died away, and he was never called to an account.

No evidence has ever surfaced that Windship was involved in Dr. Church’s espionage. This was probably just an example of his knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time just when he thought he was doing well.

TOMORROW: I know this series is supposed to be about Maj. Pitcairn’s body, but I have to share an anecdote about Dr. Windship and Abigail Adams.

Dr. Amos Windship and Nathaniel Tracy’s Four Guineas

Tracking Maj. John Pitcairn’s body means getting a handle on that Christ Church warden who reprimanded sexton Robert Newman in 1788, as I mentioned yesterday.

Dr. Amos Windship (1745-1813) was a man of energy and ambition who repeatedly plunged himself into awkward situations, but never stopped striving. He seems to have been both pushy and pathetic, and after his death Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote down a lot of juicy stories about him; I’m going to get to only a fraction of those.

Windship was born in Holliston to a middling farm family, and his father died when he was eight. He was raised by relatives and guardians as a farm boy. In 1767, he got into Harvard. At twenty-two he was older than almost all the other undergraduates, and almost certainly poorer, but he’d managed to educate himself enough to qualify.

Alas, Windship left after eight months under shadowy circumstances. According to Eliot, the young man:

was freshman [i.e., designated gofer] to N[athaniel]. T[racy]. of Newburyport who was a monied Lad. Frequently missing money from his desk, suspicions were excited against our friend.

One day in order to ascertain who was the pilferer if possible, he [Tracy] pretended to be obliged to leave Cambridge a few days, his chambermate being also absent. It was customary for freshmen to study in their senior’s rooms, and he left the care of his room to Windship.

Returning after a few hours, he enquired if any one had been there? was assured that no one had, & that he himself had not been out of the room, not even to prayers. On examining his desk, he missed four guineas, and directly charged his freshman with the theft.

It was strenuously denied, but symptoms of guilt appearing in his countenance, he was searched and no money found. But T[racy]. insisted upon his leaving College at once or he would prosecute him, he wisely followed his directions, and ran away without taking up his bond, & did not finish his education there, or at any other seminary.

After a few days the sweeper on removing the bedstead in T[racy]’s room, found a guinea under each Bed post.

Eliot seems to imply that Windship hoped to return to Tracy’s room to retrieve those hidden coins. But if he didn’t expect Tracy back that afternoon, why didn’t he just take the money? Are there circumstances Eliot didn’t record? Was it all a set-up? In any event, Windship was gone from Harvard after July 1768.

He then studied medicine with Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham, brother of the later general Benjamin Lincoln, and possibly with other rural physicians. Windship set up a practice at Wellfleet for a few years. He moved to Boston in 1774, when other men were moving out because of the Port Bill, and was stuck there when the war began.

TOMORROW: Dr. Windship’s intelligence for Gen. Washington.

“Used to shew a set of human bones in a very large coffin”

Boston 1775 has already discussed when Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines was shot (in the middle of the Battle of Bunker Hill, not at the climax), who shot him (probably no one knows, but Pitcairn’s notoriety after Lexington meant many people wanted to claim the shot), and where he died (in a house in the North End, but it’s not clear which one).

Now this CSI: Colonial Boston series offers a chance to address the next important question: What happened to the major’s body?

All sources agree that after the battle Pitcairn and some other British military officers were placed in a crypt under Christ Church in Boston’s North End. Within fifteen years—probably within ten—those bodies had become a public attraction.

This information comes to us through Dr. Ephraim Eliot (1761-1827), son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot and brother of the Rev. John Eliot. The doctor left a number of gossipy manuscript reminiscences of Boston written in the early 1800s. He wrote, probably from personal experience:

The Major was a very large & stout man, was well known to the inhabitants of Boston & notwithstand[ing] the errand he was sent here upon, such was his gentlemanlike deportment, he had their respect.

The sexton of the church taking advantage of this disposition in the people used to shew a set of human bones in a very large coffin as those of the Major.

But Pitcairn wasn’t the only British officer in that cellar. Eliot said that it also contained the remains of

a Lieutenant of the Major’s battalion, who was much like the Major in size & shape. He died of an inflammation of the brain, this is probable from the circumstance of a large Blister plaster upon the head which was in this coffin, & was removed by a friend of the writer.

Who was that sexton, who was undoubtedly pocketing tips from people who viewed these bodies? Eliot called him “as great a villain as ever went unhung,” but didn’t record his name.

The evidence points to that man being Robert Newman, the same Christ Church sexton who on 18 Apr 1775 had helped hang lanterns in the church steeple for Paul Revere. In December 1788 Newman received a severe reprimand, a few months before being replaced, from a church warden who determined to send Pitcairn’s remains to Britain.

TOMORROW: The church warden and the skeleton.

(The photo above comes from Sara L. Brooks’s Flickr set under a Creative Commons license. It shows the Maj. Pitcairn’s name engraved on a sign in the cellar of Old North Church today. His resting-place is still attracting visitors. But is he still there?)

Boston 1775 Twitter Feed, 14-16 Jan 2010

• Sarah Palin, stalling for time, says she admires "diversity" of Founding Fathers. Something else she doesn't know: meaning of "diversity." #
• RT @lucyinglis: Most hanged in 18thC London? Butchers (handy weapons?), weavers (poverty?), and cobblers (no bloody idea). #georgianlondon #
• RT @kwnewton: Satan sets Pat Robertson straight in a Letter to the Editor of MINN STAR-TRIB tinyurl.com/ybhdl9e #
• RT @LooknBackward: The Boston Newsboys' Republic in 1909 bit.ly/5UfyN1 #
• RT @2palaver: Somerville MA slave history highlighted in new book "Ten Hills Farm" by C S Manegold- bit.ly/73pObr #
• Nathaniel Philbrick to write account of Bunker Hill battle: bit.ly/4HMlUH #
• RT @rarenewspapers: Insight on newspaper circulations in the 1700s -- bit.ly/4nb2Rv // grain of salt #
• RT @rarenewspapers: Time lag in news w/analysis of Declaration of Independence printing in 1776 -- blog.rarenewspapers.com/?p=1650 #
• COMMON-PLACE: trying to parse inside jokes in an 1802 Newport caricature - bit.ly/7u0rYs #
• COMMON-PLACE: how a scholar approaches a history of emotion in 1700s Pennsylvania - bit.ly/6V9x4J #
• COMMON-PLACE: Pvt. Joseph P. Martin and a soldier's hunt for food: bit.ly/525ZPj With bonus Israel Putnam! #
• RT @history_book: Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (The History of Medicine in Context). j.mp/77qmlT #
• COMMON-PLACE: overlooked list of books offers glimpse of George Wythe's and Thos. Jefferson's libraries: bit.ly/5jcmBe #
• RT @TJMonticello: Special Architecture Tour of Monticello, now thru end of Feb. (including a trip to the Dome Room) bit.ly/4yazUy #

Boston History Comics Creators in Cambridge, 21 Jan.

The Boston Comics Roundtable recently published an anthology of short comics called Inbound 4: A Comic Book History of Boston. Some of the writers and artists behind this volume will be at Porter Square Books on Thursday, 21 January, at 7:00 P.M.

Inbound 4 is a 144-page paperback with 35 stories that discuss events from the first British settlements in Massachusetts through the search for Whitey Bulger. A few pieces have eighteenth-century or Revolutionary import:

• A tour of the Granary Burying Ground and the story of Boston’s first duel (with anachronistic mustache) by Eric Heumiller.
• A spread on the “Dark Day” of 1780 by Bob Flynn.
• Introductions to the Sons of Liberty by Matt Aucoin and Pope Night by Baldemar Byars.
• A Cape Cod pirate comic by Richard Jenkins.
• Aya Rothwell and Dave Unger’s graphic explanation of the main roads in Waltham.
• Will Clark’s recount of Shays’ Rebellion, which uses the same trick as in the picture book Unite or Die! and tells the history through a class pageant.
• A glimpse of Harvard in 1776 in Dave Kender and Ron Lebrasseur’s curiously laid out dissection of town-gown tensions in Cambridge.
• Braden D. Lamb’s depiction of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes writing “Old Ironsides,” about the U.S.S. Constitution.

We also get a couple of glimpses of the iconic Paul Revere, and African-American soldier Barzillai Lew shows up in one panel, but his name is spelled phonetically as “Barzilia.”

The art and storytelling styles vary greatly, and some of my favorite pieces are well outside the Revolutionary period: Susan Chasen and Dan Mazur’s story of the last meeting of the Booth brothers in April 1865, Troy Minkowsky and Samuel Ferri’s depiction of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla-marketers as the Katzenjammer Kids, and Jaime Garmendia and Dirk I. Tiede’s history of the Molasses Flood, which told me stuff I didn’t know.

I’m not sure which contributors will be at the talk and signing at Porter Square, but I understand David Marshall will be there to speak about his efforts to portray Dee Brown’s detention at gunpoint in Wellesley with historical accuracy. Because one of the challenges of depicting history in comics form is portraying details that prose histories don’t have to deal with.

Copies of Inbound 4 are available through the Boston Comics Roundtable and select local retailers; I got mine at the Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square, and of course it will be sold at Porter Square Books.

“Silver Bowl, Belonged to Joshua Loring”

Yesterday I quoted a press release from the Sotheby’s auction house about a big silver punch bowl up for bids later this month. Sotheby’s suggests that the bowl was hidden in a well on Commodore Joshua Loring’s estate in Jamaica Plain (shown above, courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Flickr collection), then retrieved at the end of the war.

What’s the evidence for that account? Sotheby’s catalogue offers more detail:

This bowl is accompanied by two 19th century letters. One letter dated 29 November 1873 states: “The chased silver bowl, valued at nineteen guineas, left to me as an heirloom by my father in 1852, I hereby give to my brother Adml. Loring C.B. instead of leaving it to him in my will. - Henry N. Loring.”

The second letter states: “Silver Bowl, Belonged to Joshua Loring & was buried in a well during the War of American Independence (the Loring family was then living in America) & brought up when it was over.”

So we have no contemporaneous evidence for how the Loring family came into or preserved the bowl—only tradition written down decades and generations later. And the auction house has read some assumptions into the documents it has.

Sotheby’s story of the bowl states two details that the second letter doesn’t corroborate:

• that Commodore Joshua Loring owned the bowl; the note simply says “Joshua Loring,” and two men of that name—father and son—lived through the Revolution.
• that the bowl was hidden in Jamaica Plain; the note just mentions a well in America.

And the big question remains: How could the younger Joshua Loring have retrieved the punch bowl from Massachusetts when the war was over, as Sotheby’s suggests? He was in British-occupied New York City, was terribly unpopular with Americans, had no leverage anymore, and had a strict deadline for getting the hell out. The Jamaica Plain property had been legally confiscated and was in possession of another family.

How could Loring have even begun the search? “My dear Mr. Greenough: You don’t know me, and you shouldn’t believe what you’ve heard about me. I used to live in your house before your government took it from my father—but no hard feelings! By the way, have you found anything heavy in your well? Please don’t bother to clean it off. Just ship it to me in New York, and if you could do that so it arrives before the 25th of November, I’d be especially grateful. Your humble servant, &c., &c.”

I think it might be worthwhile to go back and ask how the Lorings came to possess an expensive silver bowl made in the early 1700s by a New York silversmith who catered to that colony’s Dutch elite. Sotheby’s even suggests that it might have been made for

Col. Abraham de Peyster, Mayor of New York (1692-94). De Peyster’s will, probated in 1734, lists “1 large silver Punch Bowl”, whose recorded weight with a serving spoon approximates that of the offered bowl.

So how did a New York punch bowl come to the Lorings?

One possibility is indeed that Joshua Loring, Sr., acquired it before the Revolution. He was in charge of a small fleet on Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario during the Seven Years’ War, which is how he got the title “Commodore.” So he had dealings in upstate New York, where he might have met Dutch aristocrats, and connections to merchants in the city.

Second, Joshua Loring, Jr., spent more than five years in New York during the Revolution as commissary of prisoners. He was a powerful figure in the British military administration. He had a habit, Americans grumbled, of lining his own pockets. (Some say supplying the military prisons in New York was an impossible job for anyone.) Perhaps Commissary Loring took possession of the bowl at that time, and the family preferred to remember it as older patrimony that had been hidden from the rebels.

A third theory: Joshua’s wife Elizabeth was from the Lloyd family of Long Island. Members of that family dealt with Abraham De Peyster and other members of the Dutch business elite. We even have records of the New York Lloyds ordering silver in mid-century, so they were that sort of people.

Perhaps the silver punchbowl was hidden in a well in New York—either the city or Long Island—during the 1775-76 period when Patriots dominated the state. Then the Lloyds retrieved the bowl sometime after the British military’s return in late 1776. It came to Elizabeth (Lloyd) Loring as an inheritance or gift. She and her husband used it to entertain during the war, then brought it with them to England in 1783.

The Mystery of the Loring Bowl

I’m delaying the return of CSI: Colonial Boston to discuss this big silver punch bowl from the early eighteenth century.

A story in the Boston Globe alerted me to Sotheby’s plan to auction the bowl on 22 January. It was made by Cornelius Kierstede of New York, its style dates it to 1700-1710, and the estimated price is $400,000-$800,000. That’s an unusually wide range because, the Globe says, there has never been any piece of American silver this big on the auction market.

Sotheby’s press release (PDF) says:

The bowl has descended in the family of Commodore Joshua Loring, whose stately home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the Loring-Greenough House, has been preserved as an historic site.

In March of 1776, Loring and his wife evacuated to London, escaping the Revolutionary War. Loring’s son, Joshua Jr., remained in America and continued to fight with the British army. Soon after, however, Loring Jr. fled to London, taking with him few possessions.

Among the pieces taken was the present lot, which had been buried in the family well for safekeeping during the war. Once Loring Jr. was reunited with his family in London, the monumental bowl was stored in a bank vault, where it has remained unused for over 230 years.

That story doesn’t make sense to me.

Both Joshua Lorings and their families indeed moved into Boston for the siege. According to Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts, the commodore left Jamaica Plain on the morning of 19 Apr 1775. As for his wife, son, daughter-in-law Elizabeth, and other relatives, they may have gone behind British lines before or afterward.

In the summer of 1775 the younger man jockeyed for appointment as (ironically) auction manager and royal sheriff of Suffolk County. The latter appointment put him in charge of the Boston jail and the wounded prisoners from the Battle of Bunker Hill, many of whom died. By the end of the siege, Joshua, Jr., had a very poor reputation among Massachusetts Patriots.

All the Lorings evacuated to Halifax with the British military. The older generation then went to England while Joshua and Elizabeth Loring accompanied the Crown forces to New York in late 1776: Joshua as commissary of prisoners and Elizabeth as Gen. William Howe’s mistress.

Joshua Loring, Jr., managed supplies for the British military prisons in New York through the end of the war. Americans accused him of starving prisoners of war to enrich himself; his reputation sunk even lower. In 1783 Loring settled in England, and six years later he died. His father had died in 1781.

I’ve heard suggestions that the Lorings hid possessions, including toys, in their Jamaica Plain house, expecting to return after the political turmoil died down. But that didn’t work: Massachusetts confiscated the entire property in 1778 and sold it to a new owner. This is the first statement I’ve found that the family actually got anything out—and it’s a big, extremely valuable object.

TOMORROW: What’s the evidence for the well story?

Boston 1775 Twitter Feed, 11-13 Jan 2010

Through Twitter and my Google Reader blog subscriptions I see a lot of interesting links which don’t leave me with much to say. I decided I’ll periodically aggregate them in a posting like this in case other folks might find them interesting, too.

• RT @KevinLevin: Check out Juan Cole's response to Pat Robertson's idiotic outburst about Haiti #Haiti http://bit.ly/5DoDoU #
• Birthday of Massachusetts Revolutionary with the best political instincts: John Hancock. Active late 1760s to death, never lost a race. #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1773: 1st public museum in America is established. The Charleston Museum: ow.ly/VFM9 #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: John Hancock purchased this baby rattle: ow.ly/VGdh // Sad story behind rattle: bit.ly/71sCI1 #
• RT @Thos_Jefferson: "Thomas Jefferson Needs a Quill" courtesy of Sesame Street. ow.ly/VLIb #
• Thomas Paine's COMMON SENSE was published one day earlier than many books say: bit.ly/7kS3bw #
• RT @teachinghistory: Nominate for Gilder Lehrman's History Teacher of the Year until 3/15. bit.ly/8LD76p #
• RT @HistoricNE: It's Historic New England's centennial! Get involved in the launch of our second century at tiny.cc/fsQot #
• Popular baby names in Boston in 1710—yes, a lot of them were named John and Mary: bit.ly/5QMUzO #
• Not very good, and not very entertaining, either. // RT @RagLinen: Anyone ever see this Rev War movie ? Any good? tinyurl.com/yjef7ug #
• RT @RagLinen: An Unlikely Spy Embedded as a Newspaper Printer During the American Revolutionary War: tinyurl.com/yjqps3x #
• Redcoat soldier stabs another, stabs his wife, stabs himself—what's the story?! From Don Hagist: bit.ly/6chl1F #

“Shot with an Iron Gun Rammer”

CSI: Colonial Boston now takes a field trip to New Jersey, soon after the Battle of Trenton, for a case study of a British soldier’s wound. This passage comes from an anonymous manuscript titled A Brief Narrative of the Ravages of the British and Hessians at Princeton in 1776-1777, published by the Princeton University library in 1906.

The writer seems to have used the verb “lap” to mean “to fold around something.”

On the first day of January 1777 some Regular [i.e., British] Soldiers came along the main road from over Stoney brook

One of them was very Strangely Wounded for he was shot with an Iron Gun rammer in Stead of a bullet, Which entered under his chin and came out again at his nose near his eyes one end of it, and the other end lapt round his thigh (as it is said)

Whether he was a Horsman or not I Know not, but it is very likely he was, and rideing up to the Enemy before he done charging, and perce[iv]ing that he was like to be shot with the Rammer, lean’d back on his horse to avoid it, and so received his wound in that manner, as to the Other end laping round his thigh, one end being Stopt, and the other end being heavy would continue its force until it met with something to stop it, and happened to meet with his thigh

He Languished a few days and Dyed.

And now back to your breakfasts.

(Click on the thumbnail above for a video of how one is supposed to stow a rammer, uninterrupted, courtesy of Fort McHenry.)

The Difficulties of Medical Training in 1796

I’ve already quoted Dr. Edward Warren (1804-1878) on what his father and professor, Dr. John Warren, thought about digging up bodies to for anatomy study: socially awkward but medically necessary.

Here’s a recollection from Edward’s older brother, Dr. John Collins Warren (1778-1856, shown here courtesy of Countway Medical Library), about studying medicine at Harvard under his father at the end of the eighteenth century:

No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection. My father began to dissect early in the Revolutionary War. He obtained the office of army surgeon when the Revolution broke out, and was able to procure a multitude of subjects from having access to the bodies of soldiers who had died without relations. In consequence of these opportunities he began to lecture on anatomy in 1781.

After the peace there was great difficulty in getting subjects. Bodies of executed criminals were occasionally procured, and sometimes a pauper subject was obtained, averaging not more than two a year. While in college I began the business of getting subjects in 1796.

Having understood that a man without relations was to be buried in the North Burying-Ground, I formed a party, of which Dr. William Ingalls was one. He was a physician of Boston at that time. We reached the spot at ten o’clock at night. The night was rather light. We soon found the grave; but, after proceeding a while, were led to suspect a mistake, and went to another place. Here we found our selves wrong, and returned to the first; and, having set watches, we proceeded rapidly, uncovering the coffin by breaking it open.

We took out the body of a stout young man, put it in a bag, and carried it to the burying-ground wall. As we were going to lift it over and put it in the chaise, we saw a man walking along the edge of the wall outside, smoking. A part of us disappeared.

One of the company met him, stopped him from coming on, and entered into conversation with him. This individual of our party affected to be intoxicated, while he contrived to get into a quarrel with the stranger. After he had succeeded in doing this, another of the party, approaching, pretended to side with the stranger, and ordered the other to go about his business. Taking the stranger by the arm, he led him off in a different direction to some distance; then left him, and returned to the burying-ground.

The body was then quickly taken up, and packed in the chaise between two of the parties, who drove off to Cambridge with their booty. Two of us staid to fill the grave: but my companion, being alarmed, soon left the burying-ground; and I, knowing the importance of covering up the grave and effacing the vestiges of our labor, remained, with no very agreeable sensations, to finish the work.

I love the image of Warren, age eighteen, hurrying to refill this anonymous man’s grave while fuming at his so-called friends who’d left him to do all that work himself. But he’d no doubt heard his father speak of the necessity of filling in the hole so no one can tell you’ve taken the body.

However, I got off without further interruption; drove, with the tools, to Cambridge; and arrived there just before daylight.

When my father came up in the morning to lecture, and found that I had been engaged in this scrape, he was very much alarmed, but when the body was uncovered, and he saw what a fine, healthy subject it was, he seemed to be as much pleased as I ever saw him. This body lasted the course through.

Harvard Medical School’s Anatomical Gift Program is the legal and worthy replacement for the Warrens’ early efforts.

TOMORROW: CSI: Colonial Boston takes an excursion to New Jersey.

The Warren Family and Other People’s Bodies

Dr. John Warren (shown here, courtesy of the Countway Medical Library) was the younger brother of the much-disinterred Dr. Joseph Warren. He became a Continental Army surgeon after his brother’s death.

Dr. John Warren didn’t hold with sentimental ideas about preserving the human body. At Harvard he was part of the club of Spunkers, introduced here, who sought corpses for research and practice. And apparently he had a strong opinion about the incident, described yesterday, when soldiers from Woodbridge’s regiment noticed that one of their recently deceased comrades had been dug up.

This is from Dr. Edward Warren’s biography of his father John (which probably dated the event based on Dr. James Thacher’s published journal):

In November, 1775, the body of a soldier was taken from a grave, as was supposed for the purposes of dissection. Much general indignation was excited, and the practice was forbidden for the future, with stern reprobation by the Commander-in-chief. It was done with so little decency and caution, that the empty coffin was left exposed.

It need scarcely be said that it could not have been the work of any of our friends of the Sp——r Club. It must have been the act of a reckless agent or a novice. In cases of this kind, where the necessities of society are in conflict with the law, and with public opinion, the crime consists, like theft among the Spartan boys, not in the deed, but in permitting its discovery.

In other words, Dr. John Warren felt that the real problem was how the grave-robbers had let people see they’d taken the body!

Dr. John Warren himself wrote of the challenges of anatomical training before the war:

In some of the more populous towns students were sometimes indulged with the privilege of examining the bodies of those who had died from any extraordinary diseases, and in a few instances associations were formed for pursuing the business of dissection, where opportunities offered from casualties, or from public executions, for doing it in decency and safety.

But the Revolution was the era to which the first medical school east of Philadelphia owes its birth. The military hospitals of the United States furnished a large field for observation and experiment in the various branches of the healing art, as well as an opportunity for anatomical investigations.

Like many other wars, the Revolutionary War was a boon to medical training. It inured people to death, provided a larger than usual number of anonymous corpses to work on, and gave regimental surgeons and their assistants lots of practice.

Dr. John Warren went on to be a leader in educating and training American doctors. In 1783, he offered a series of anatomical lectures at the house that had belonged to radical leader William Molineux; the tickets for those lectures were engraved by Paul Revere. Later this Warren helped to found the Harvard Medical School.

TOMORROW: Peacetime brings a shortage of corpses. What could Dr. Warren’s son find to practice on?

“Taken from His Grave by Persons Unknown”

From Gen. George Washington’s general orders for 1 Sept 1775:

Complaint has been made to the General; that the body of a Soldier of Col [Benjamin Ruggles] Woodbridges Regiment has been taken from his grave by persons unknown;

The General and the Friends of the deceased, are desirous of all the Information that can be given, of the perpetrators of this abominable Crime, that he, or they, may be made an example, to deter others from committing so wicked and shameful an offence—

The corpse was almost certainly removed for anatomical study. Ironically, Col. Woodbridge himself practiced some medicine at his home in South Hadley; in rural towns, the local gentleman of learning might be the best one had for medicine, the law, and science. Here’s the house in South Hadley Woodbridge built in 1788 on Historic Buildings of Massachusetts, and the picture of him above comes courtesy of Wikipedia.

Regimental surgeon James Thacher wrote of this incident:

I am sorry to have occasion to notice in my journal the following occurrence. The body of a soldier has been taken from the grave, for the purpose, probably, of dissection, and the empty coffin left exposed.

This affair occasions considerable excitement among our people; both resentment and grief are manifested; as it seems to impress the idea that a soldier’s body is held in no estimation after death. Such a practice, if countenanced, might be attended with serious consequences, as it respects our soldiers.

Much inquiry has been made, but without success, for the discovery of the persons concerned; and the practice in future is strictly prohibited by the commander in chief.

Curiously, when Thacher prepared his journal for publication decades after the war, he dated this paragraph in November 1775, at least two months after Washington’s order.

TOMORROW: The Warren family on this same incident.

“Stained…with the hero’s blood”

Yesterday I described how the Rev. William Montague of Dedham came to possess the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren—or at least was taken out of the doctor’s body after his death.

Alexander Hill Everett brought that relic to public attention during an oration in Charlestown on 17 June 1836. That was the Battle of Bunker Hill’s 61st anniversary, not usually a noted date, so Everett may have had to try extra hard to make a splash. He stated:

The bullet by which he [Warren] was killed had been previously taken from it [the body] by Mr. [Arthur] Savage, an officer in the Custom House, and was carried by him to London, where he afterwards delivered it to the Rev. Mr. Montague of Dedham.

It was brought to me a day or two ago by a son of Mr. Montague with an affidavit authenticating the facts, and is the one, fellow-citizens! which I now hold in my hand.

The cartridge paper which still partly covers it is stained, as you see, with the hero’s blood.

According to chronicler James Spear Loring, in April 1843 the minister’s son, William H. Montague, sent the musket ball to Edward Warren, junior editor of the Boston Daily American, with a note stating that he was to hold it “till called for.” I suspect Edward was a grandson of Dr. John Warren, younger brother of the doctor killed at Bunker Hill.

That prompted a letter from Richard E. Newcomb, widower of Dr. Joseph Warren’s youngest child, Mary, asking for the bullet on behalf of his son as the dead man’s only direct descendant.

But it appears that the younger Montague, who in 1845 became one of the founders of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, enjoyed owning the relic himself. The ball was in his possession when he died, and the N.E.H.G.S. recorded in its proceedings for 1884:

The librarian would also report the gift, in March last, by William H. Montague, of Boston, the only survivor of the five founders of the Society, of a ball, taken by Arthur Savage, who was a personal acquaintance of Gen. Joseph Warren, who fell at the battle of Bunker Hill, from the body of that hero the morning after the battle.

The ball was presented by Mr. Savage to the father of the donor, the Rev. William Montague, while he was on a visit to England, in the year 1789 or 1790. A deposition to this effect by the Rev. Mr. Montague, taken March 5, 1833, accompanies the bullet.

Reportedly ball and deposition were displayed in a frame at the society. However, Samuel Adams Drake had to report in Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston:

The identity of this ball has been disputed by some of the martyr’s descendants, on the ground that it was said to have been taken from the body, while Warren received his death from a ball in the head. The controversy was maintained with considerable warmth on both sides, the general opinion favoring the authenticity of the fatal bullet.

Mucking about with dead bodies? Controversies over how people died? Single-bullet theories? Why, it can only be the return of CSI: Colonial Boston! (And this time we’ll get to the mystery of Maj. John Pitcairn’s body. Eventually.)

ADDENDUM: Note this observation on the musket ball in question.

“This ball I took from his body”

Longtime Boston 1775 readers will recall our keen scholarly interest in Dr. Joseph Warren’s body, head, skull, and teeth after the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In the same vein, we now report that on 5 Mar 1833, the Rev. William Montague of Dedham went to a magistrate and prepared the following affidavit:

I, William Montague, of Dedham, County of Norfolk, State of Massachusetts, clergyman, do certify, to whom it may concern, that in the year 1789 or 1790, I was in London, and became acquainted with Mr. [Arthur] Savage, formerly an officer of the customs for the port of Boston, and who left there when the Royalists and Royal troops evacuated that town in 1776.

When in London, Mr. Savage gave me a leaden ball, which is now in my possession, with the following account of it, viz.:—

“On the morning of the 18th of June, 1775. after the battle of Bunker or Breed’s Hill—I, with a number of other Royalists and British officers, among whom was Gen. [John] Burgoyne, went over from Boston to Charlestown, to view the battle field. Among the fallen we found the body of Dr. Joseph Warren, with whom I had been personally acquainted. When he fell he fell across a rail. This ball I took from his body, and as I shall never visit Boston again, I will give it to you to take to America, where it will be valuable as a relic of your Revolution. His sword and belt, with some other articles, were taken by some of the officers present; and, I believe, brought to England.[”]

Montague had been rector at Christ Church in Boston from 1786 to 1791, and then went out to Dedham to reopen the Episcopal church there.

Arthur Savage (1731-1801) served as Comptroller of Customs at Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, until 1771, when a mob attacked him for seizing a ship. He then moved to Boston and worked in that Customs office until the evacuation.

Montague died only a few months after preparing his affidavit, in 22 July. His son William then reported finding a 1792 letter to his father from Harrison Gray, the last royal Treasurer of Massachusetts, which said:

I hope you will take good care to preserve that relic which was given you at my house, for in future time it will be a matter of interest to you rebels.

And indeed it did become a matter of interest.

TOMORROW: Where is that musket ball now?

Clo Pratt at Old Sturbridge Village, 18 Jan.

I thought I’d finished with announcements of events this month, and then I read how Old Sturbridge Village is offering a historical presentation on an intriguing and hard-to-research aspect of life in colonial America:

Storyteller and museum educator Tammy Denease Richardson will present “Life after Slavery: the Clo Pratt Story” as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities at Old Sturbridge Village Jan. 18. The performance is based on the true story of Clo Pratt, an African-American woman born into slavery in Massachusetts in 1737. . . .

In character as former slave Clo Pratt, storyteller Richardson introduces her audience to a fascinating woman whose story has been obscured through history, but who was influential in the African-American community of her day. In 1774 after her owner’s death, Pratt finds she has been willed her freedom and must earn a living and make a place for herself in colonial New England.

Old Sturbridge normally presents life in the 1830s, but also tries to do well by other aspects of life in central New England, and this is one of them.

Clo Pratt was owned by the Rev. Daniel Russell of the Rocky Hill section of Wethersfield, Connecticut; it was common for New England ministers to own a person or two as household servants. Russell died in 1767. His widow Katherine made out a will in June 1773 that said:

my will is that my Negro woman Named Cloe prut Shall then Be free and Have Her time and also I Give to Her the Bead that She Lyeth on and furniture Belonging to it and a Loom that she weaveth in and tackling & a porige pot one old Chest with one Draw one puter pint pot one knife and fork and a plate and one puter platter and one quart Bason one tramil peil and tongs two old Chairs one pail one Small Square table one Large trunk and Several Books that are Called Her own one Small Brass Kittel and my Every Day wearing apperel and a Red Short Cloak and two spoons

I’m especially struck by “Several Books that are Called Her own.”

Eventually Pratt, by then in her sixties, lived with Hagar and Pompey Dorus, who had been enslaved in the house of Silas Deane.

In January, Old Sturbridge Village is offering free admission for children not in school groups when accompanied by an adult. Other King Day activities include “ice skating (bring your own skates), sledding on 1830s-style sleds, and sleigh rides (snow permitting).”

Shifts, Caps, Pockets, and More

The Ladies of Refined Taste & Friends, in partnership with Minute Man National Historic Park, have announced their 2010 schedule of “Hive” workshops for reenactors and park volunteers seeking to improve their interpretation. These Sunday sessions are free for people who want to participate, but some involve a fee for materials and all require advance registration.

Sunday, 17 Jan, 1:00-4:00 P.M., Minute Man Visitor Center, Lincoln: Why We Wear What We Wear — Several speakers will examine primary sources, including New England inventories, wills, advertisements, ships manifests, run-away ads, period art, and extant garments, to explain the background behind the current Battle Road clothing standards.

Sunday, 14 Feb, 10:00 A.M.-4:00 P.M., Noah Brooks Tavern, Concord: SHIFT-O-RAMA — Sharon Ann Burnston, author of Fitting and Proper, will explain the evolution of shifts through the 18th century, and participants will construct their own shifts using period sewing techniques. They will also be entertained during the day with 18th-century prose. Attendees will need to buy, pre-wash, and iron their linen before the workshop; information on yardage and sources will be supplied upon registration. During the same afternoon there will be two-hour sessions on “Sewing” for children aged six and older, “Making a Huswif” ($10 materials fee), and “Learning the Norfolk Drill.”

Sunday, 14 Mar, 1:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M., Noah Brooks Tavern, Concord: Ladies’ Caps — Try on different styles of caps till you find the one that looks good on you. Then construct your cap. Materials cost of $15. There will also be two-hour sessions on “Making a Sampler” for children who took the previous month’s workshop ($10 materials fee), “Musket Tune Up,” and “Learn the Norfolk Drill.”

The Hive is also offering Saturday workshops for higher fees with more advanced projects: how to make a frock coat or jacket, an English gown, a knapsack, a bonnet, a fashionable pair of stays, and a powder horn.

All these sessions are leading up to the big Battle Road events on 17 Apr 2010, commemorating the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, when the reenactors’ hard work will enhance the experience for us ordinary folks. This being New England in winter, visit the “Hive” website for any changes required by the weather.

Shown above is another sort of sewing project: a “dimity pocket” owned by Abigail Adams, which the Massachusetts Historical Society featured on its website last month. Sarah Sikes described it this way:

Measuring a full fourteen inches in length, this pocket is composed of eight pieces of dimity sewn together with an opening halfway down the front. Two ties are attached to the top seams of the pocket to be secured around the waist. The simple and sturdy striped fabric of the pocket—the polar opposite of the sheer cotton known today as dimity—suggests that this was a utilitarian garment to be tied under an apron or worn beneath a skirt and accessed through an opening in the outer garments.

Because this one is so well preserved, Adams probably did not wear it for very long. But the provenance looks quite solid.

Ahoy! Upcoming Talks on the Naval War

I’m looking forward to two lectures about the naval side of the American Revolution in New England coming up in the next two months.

First, the Friends of Minute Man National Park will present Emily A. Murphy speaking on “The War Has Made Such An Alteration in People & Things: Privateering and the Revolution at Sea.” This talk will come on Wednesday, 20 January, at 8:00 P.M. at the Trinity Episcopal Church at 81 Elm Street, Concord, Massachusetts. It’s free and open to the public.

Emily is the Historian and Public Affairs Officer for Salem Maritime National Historic Site. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University, where her dissertation, “To Keep Our Trading for Our Livelihood”: The Derby Family and Their Rise to Power, examined how that Salem mercantile family reached political and social prominence. For the National Park Service she’s written the walking tour guide Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem and Merchants, Clerks, Citizens, and Soldiers: A History of the Second Corps of Cadets.

Privateering produced an outsourced navy, with governments (mostly the colonies/states) licensing private citizens to arm vessels, hire crews, and hunt down enemy shipping. Instead of receiving government pay, privateers’ crews would share the value of the ships and cargos they captured. Although serving on a privateer carried a lot of the risks of soldiering (death, disease, imprisonment), there was also the possible upside of lots of money.

On Saturday, 20 February, at 4:00 P.M., the Friends of the Longfellow House and Longfellow National Historic Site will host a lecture titled “Cambridge: Birthplace of the American Navy?” That cheeky title reflects the fact that in Cambridge, within that very historic mansion, Gen. George Washington gave the first orders for an armed ship to attack enemy shipping under Continental authority. In the fall of 1775 he put army funds into a schooner called the Hannah, and assigned men from Col. John Glover’s regiment to serve aboard her.

Sending troops out on a ship was a bold move. For one thing, attacking British supply ships was offensive rather than defensive warfare, and could be read to mean the American colonies were seeking independence. For another thing, Washington’s orders from the Continental Congress didn’t really authorize him to oversee a fight at sea.

“Cambridge: Birthplace of the American Navy?” will focus on what that early naval war looked like from Washington’s headquarters, which had a view of the Charles but was many miles from the useful American harbors. One reason I’m looking forward to that talk is that I’m giving it, so I’m naturally interested in hearing what I’ve found to say.

Choc-Talk at the Old South Meeting House, 7 Jan.

Boston chocolate lovers will be torn this Thursday at midday. Not only is Anthony Sammarco speaking at the Athenaeum about the history of the Baker Chocolate Company, but the Old South Meeting House is hosting a lunchtime lecture on “Stimulating Beverages: A Brief History of Tea, Coffee and Chocolate”:

Before 1650, a New England breakfast often included a mug of ale, beer or hard wine, but with the introduction of tea, coffee, and chocolate the tastes of the Western world were forever changed. Originally prescribed as cures for ailments ranging from headaches to depression, tea, coffee, and chocolate were soon counted among the necessities of daily live. Hear Amanda Lange, curator at Historic Deerfield, explain how these three beverages emerged as the popular drinks we know today.

That will start at 12:15 P.M., and people are invited to bring their lunches in case they develop an appetite. The admission cost for each event in this series is $5, $4 for students, and nothing for Old South members.

This talk is the first of a month of events on a largely libational theme. On Thursday, 14 January, there will be music from Poor Richard’s Penny, and on Thursday, 28 January, two more musicians perform a program titled “Rum and Revolution!”

In between, at 12:15 P.M. on Thursday, 21 January, comes a more genteel refreshment titled “‘One Bowl More and Then’: Punch Drinking in the 18th Century”:

Punch was introduced to England in the 17th Century, and its exotic ingredients immediately made it a staple in English and American parlors. The mixture of spirits, sugar, fruit and spice caught the eyes and inspired the imaginations of painters, printmakers, and cartoonists. Learn from Donald Friary, president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, as he explains how this beverage and its accoutrements brought conviviality to English and American taverns.

Here are Revolutionarily notable punch bowls from Massachusetts and New York.

Unlikely Events and Unlikely Allies

On Saturday the Boston Globe ran a brief interview with Joel Richard Paul, author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution. The paper described that book as “a story too good not to tell—involving the celebrated French dramatist Caron de Beaumarchais, a cross-dressing secret agent named the Chevalier d’Eon, and a boatload of duplicity, hypocrisy, and corruption.”

I hadn’t thought that D’Eon de Beaumont had much to do with the American Revolution, but the book’s jacket copy says the chevalier’s “decision to declare herself a woman helped to lead to the Franco-American alliance.” I’ll have to put this on my list.

The interview contained some interesting observations about researching and interpreting historical documents:

Q. Tell me about doing research for this book. These are three pretty fringe characters you write about.

A. I spent a lot of time at the archives of the French foreign ministry and Bibliotèque nationale de France. I love France, but let’s just say that library science is not their forte. I came away convinced they hadn’t lost their colonies as much as misfiled them.

Q. We like to put the Founding Fathers on a pedestal, and your book paints a quite flawed and human picture of them. What kind of response are you getting?

A. When I speak to groups I always start off saying that the one thing we all know about the diplomacy of the American Revolution is that Ben Franklin went to France in 1776 and forged the Franco-American alliance that provided us with arms. And that’s wrong. Most people are very surprised, and very interested.

Q. Does it make you wonder how many more people are out there who changed the course of history and who we know nothing about?

A. Yeah. I think that most of us start with the assumption that history is shaped by great men or great ideas or great social movements. And one of the things I’ve seen is the extent to which history is shaped by accident, and people acting on the periphery of great events.

Another lively book based, like this one, in Silas Deane’s stumbling attempts at diplomacy and espionage is The Incendiary (also published as John the Painter), by Jessica Warner; I wrote more about it here.

Paul’s third answer above brings up the the question of “agency”—historians’ jargon for the idea that individual decisions can affect the course of major events. Usually that argument gets played out through “great men” and women, leaders making decisions for many other people. But might the real argument for individual effects lie in the plane of peripheral events, quirky accidents, and unintended consequences?

Finalists for the Cybils Awards

The Cybils are a set of awards for children’s books given by bloggers. Their criteria include both literary excellence, as in the awards given by librarians and book reviewers, and kid appeal. A few of the books on this year’s short lists, announced yesterday, may have special appeal to young students of the eighteenth century.

Among the finalists in middle-grade fiction is Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson. The nomination committee says:

Chains is told through the eyes of Isabel, a slave girl. Sold after her master dies, Isabel is thrust into the middle of the war where both sides claim they want what is best for her. She passes along messages to the Loyalists only to learn that the only one she can trust to help her gain her freedom is herself. Anderson has presented a story that with the proper foundation can be read, enjoyed and understood by the youngest to the oldest middle-grade student.

On the short list for older nonfiction is Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland, by Sally M. Walker:

Written In Bone takes readers along the journey as scientists uncover skeletons and other artifacts from colonial-era Virginia and Maryland. We learn not only about the skeletons themselves, but also about the way of life during this often brutal and even deadly time period.

Finally, in the category of Graphic Novels for Young Adults, two of the five nominees are set in the eighteenth century. There’s the first collection of Lora Innes’s The Dreamer:

Seventeen-year-old Beatrice “Bea” Whaley vividly dreams of a handsome Revolutionary War soldier and she welcomes her nightly adventures. Later though, she finds they might be more than just dreams.

And the second nominee is Crogan’s Vengeance, by Chris Schweizer:

…the saga of Catfoot Crogan, a privateer from the early 18th century. Clever dialogue and Schweizer’s caricature-like drawings merge into a cinematic story of pirates and mayhem.