New Draft of Constitution? Well, Not New. And Not a Real Draft.

Last Tuesday the Philadelphia Inquirer reported about the rediscovery of a document in the holdings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, said to be a lost “early draft” of the U.S. Constitution by James Wilson (shown at right, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Law School). The researcher who made the find, and the claim of its importance, is Lorianne Updike Toler, a lawyer pursuing graduate studies at Oxford.

That article quoted one established constitutional scholar on the significance of the discovery: “John P. Kaminski, director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”

Kaminski is also one of the six directors of ConSource: The Constitutional Source Project, and chair of its Academic Advisory Board. Toler is a co-founder and former executive director of ConSource, which quickly used the news coverage in an appeal for funds.

However, the same Inquirer story also acknowledged: “The document - one of 21 million in the Historical Society's collection - was known to scholars…” On Friday the society showed on its blog how this document was transcribed and published in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, a widely used authority edited by Max Farrand, in 1911.

The H.S.P. contacted other historians who’ve worked on this subject, and their comments on that blog entry indicate that they were underwhelmed. Mark David Hall, author of The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742-1798:

I was disappointed to find that these documents had long been known to scholars. They were published in the same order suggested by Ms. Toler by Max Farrand in 1911. . . . It seems a stretch to call these notes a “draft” of the Constitution, and labeling them as such adds little to our knowledge of Wilson or the Constitutional Convention.

Richard R. Beeman, University of Pennsylvania, author of Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution:

Max Farrand, in his 1911 edition of The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, reprinted all of the documents discovered by Ms. Toler, and in exactly the order in which they appear in the manuscripts she discovered in the HSP archives. It is also the case that the location of those documents is not at all obvious, so Ms. Toler should be given credit for diligent searching and sleuthing. But the lion’s share of the credit truly does belong to Max Farrand, who long ago not only discovered the documents, but also recognized them for what they were—important contributions by Wilson to the Committee of Detail Report.

William B. Ewald, University of Pennsylvania Law School, author of “James Wilson and the Drafting of the Constitution” (PDF download):

The Wilson drafts are extremely well-known. They were first systematically studied at the end of the nineteenth century by Franklin Jameson, whose monograph appeared in 1902. Jameson did much of the work of piecing together the various drafts of the Constitution. His work was supplemented by Max Farrand, whose magisterial Records of the Constitutional Convention, published in 1911, carefully assembled all the known documents. . . . [This document] is to be found, properly catalogued, in the Wilson collection, exactly as Farrand reported a century ago.

Apparently Toler found a page that got separated from the rest of its original stack, bound with other Wilson papers, and finally acquired by the H.S.P. Following common archival procedures, the library staff did not undo that binding and refile the page with the rest. And the pre-computerized catalogue did not specify what each piece of that volume was, meaning that Toler had the thrill of spotting how it fit with other H.S.P. documents.

The Mormon Times picked up on the story from Philadelphia because Toler is a Provo native and graduate of Brigham Young University. It didn’t do her any favors by quoting her as saying:

“This makes James Wilson very much equal to Thomas Jefferson as a drafter of the Constitution,” she said. “It means to truly understand the Constitution, we need to study James Wilson a whole lot more.”

Jefferson was in Paris as the U.S. minister to France during the constitutional convention, and didn’t see a need for a stronger national government. [ADDENDUM: Toler has told American Creation: “I was misquoted on Jefferson. The Deseret News has apologized individually to me, and I have asked them to officially print an errata. The quote should have been ‘I believe this draft may indicate that James Wilson is to the Constitution what Thomas Jefferson is to the Declaration of Independence.’ Understandable error: it’s hard to type as fast as I talk.”]

Toler’s own comment on the H.S.P. blog acknowledges that she is “currently alone in calling these two disparate pieces a ‘draft’” of the Constitution, rather than notes prepared for the Committee of Detail or even written during that committee’s discussions. But it’s not clear even that interpretation is significant. Historians have long credited Wilson with an important role at the Constitutional Convention, and the final document was truly a group effort—that’s why there was a convention, after all.

This episode does underscore the value of computerizing sources to make them widely available, as ConSource was founded to do—though it may be duplicating other, larger efforts. The H.S.P. can file the original paper document in only one place. However, digital copies of the pages, transcripts, and catalogue entries can be duplicated and linked in many ways, helping to ensure that scholars never lose the trail to all of Wilson’s surviving notes.

The Picture For Liberty Leaves

Timothy Decker’s illustrations in For Liberty are in striking black and white, with hatching and patterns to produce the illusion of grays. The effect is in some ways reminiscent of eighteenth-century engravings.

Decker chooses dramatic visual angles, such as an overhead view of King Street immediately after the Boston Massacre, probably inspired by Paul Revere’s hand-drawn scene of the scene.

One spread uses a background of radiating lines to isolate our attention on a soldier firing his gun, a technique I think comes from Japanese comics. This illustration may be why the publisher classifies the book as “graphic fiction.” But really it’s a traditional picture book.

I saw one anachronistic mustache on a townsman, but the book sidesteps other common visual errors, such as the pre-Revolution French flag.

That said, the For Liberty illustrations reflect the same pro-Crown bias as the text, as I discussed yesterday. One picture and caption portray a leather-aproned apprentice throwing a snowball right into Pvt. Edward Montgomery’s chest and knocking him down. The next shows a man in the crowd holding a stick spiked with nails; some waterfront toughs brought sticks to King Street, but those were pieces of firewood the men had picked up along the way, not prepared weapons.

In contrast, another picture shows the soldiers just standing around, not pointing their bayonets out at the crowd as witnesses agreed they did. There’s no mention that Montgomery responded to being knocked down by shouting “Fire!” to his comrades.

I saw other misstatements and omissions in the text, some bearing directly on the Massacre:

• The book dates the Seven Years’ War as “From 1753 until 1760.” The seven years of that war actually run from 1756 to 1763. Americans like to date its start from 1754, when George Washington led Virginia troops in a clash with the French at what he called Fort Necessity.
• “Called the Sons of Liberty, they ruled the city through boycotts and riots.” I don’t think Sons of Liberty was really an organized group in Boston; it was a label for any men opposed to Parliament’s new taxes. Regardless, this statement ignores how opponents of the new Crown taxes really controlled the town of Boston: through a big majority in town meetings.
• “A sentry saw Private White in distress and sought help...” Hugh White was the sentry outside the Customs House. The man who ran to the Main Guard for reinforcements was Thomas Greenwood, an employee in the Customs House.
• “A moment of silence descended over the street” after the first shot. Some witnesses recalled such a pause, but most testified to “a space of some seconds,” in the words of merchant Richard Palmes.
• “Turning, Captain [Thomas] Preston lost his footing. As he fell, he was struck by a club.” Actually Palmes, upset by the shooting, swung at Preston with his walking stick. And it wasn’t the captain who slipped, but Palmes, so his cane glanced against Preston’s arm.
• “After a few minutes of chaos,...” Preston “shoved their musket barrels skyward.” This line and its position in the text implies Preston stopped the shooting. In fact, he testified to having knocked the barrels of his men’s guns up after the crowd had fallen back, the soldiers had reloaded, and a few men, led by watchman Benjamin Burdick, came forward to pick up the bodies.
• “The soldiers were taken into custody and thus protected from the angry citizens.” The soldiers were taken into custody because they were accused of murder. On the night of 5 March, townspeople were angry (three dead and eight wounded tends to produce anger), but after promises of legal action from Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson there was no attempt to attack the soldiers.
• “Lawyers were hired to prove that the soldiers provoked the riot.” Boston hired lawyers to prove that the soldiers had committed murder (or manslaughter) by shooting into a crowd of civilians without legal authority. Politicians argued in print that stationing soldiers in the midst of a town was bound to produce violence, and they blamed the government in London and local appointees for that provocation, not the soldiers.
  
• “The Boston Massacre was the first in a series of conflicts between the Sons of Liberty and the agents of the king.” This leaves out the Stamp Act protests of 1765, the standoff outside Capt. Daniel Malcom’s warehouse in 1767, the Liberty riot in 1768, the Neck riot of 1769, and the tar-and-feathering of Customs employees in 1769. The Massacre wasn’t even the first fatal conflict—that was the riot that ended in Christopher Seider’s death on 22 Feb 1770.

The book’s last page says:

John Adams foresaw a troubled future.

The lawless mob and the presence of soldiers were signs of a defective system of government. He understood that no nation held dominion over liberty, the protection of one person from the actions of another. He knew that liberty was precious and required wise, vigilant, and reasonable citizens to protect it, even, at times, from the ignorance of one’s own countrymen.

The implication of this text is that Adams was troubled by the riots. He was far more troubled by the London government using its army to force laws on a colony that had never approved them. That’s why Adams went on to lead the argument for independence. He didn’t like mobs, but For Liberty’s language of needing “reasonable citizens” to oppose “the ignorance of one’s own countrymen” is a profoundly conservative misreading of Adams’s position at this time.

But that fits with the book’s profoundly conservative distortion of the Boston Massacre. As in any conflict, there were two sides to the fatal confrontation on King Street in 1770. For Liberty consistently shows only one.

The For Liberty Bias

For Liberty is an ironic title for Timothy Decker’s picture book about the Boston Massacre, published last year by Calkins Creek. It portrays that historic event almost entirely from the perspective of supporters of the royal government, who felt Bostonians were taking too much liberty.

This perspective begins on the front cover, drawn from behind a British soldier and thus making us share his view of the crowd. One youth yells a taunt while another is about to throw a snowball at close range. The single soldier holds his bayonet away from the boys, not defending himself. This picture makes a clear statement about who were aggressors and who was a victim.

The pattern extends to the historical figures that the book presents as individuals rather than part of a group. For Liberty doesn’t name any of the eleven men and boys killed or wounded by gunfire on 5 Mar 1770. One picture shows a black man being shot, clearly meant to be Crispus Attucks, but no text on that page identifies him.

The book doesn’t name Edward Garrick, the barber’s apprentice who got clubbed in the head by Pvt. Hugh White, beginning the spiral of violence on King Street. Instead, the text says, “At the Customs House, Private White found himself harassed by apprentices and street toughs,” as if people had spontaneously decided to bother an armed sentry.

In contrast, For Liberty supplies last names for Capt. Thomas Preston and all eight of the enlisted men tried for the shootings on 5 Mar 1770. It gives full names for two people, both gentlemen who supported those soldiers: defense attorney John Adams and magistrate James Murray. And the latter may not even have been there. (I’ll discuss that later.)

The book doesn’t name any of Adams’s colleagues on the defense team, nor either of the prosecuting attorneys, nor any of Boston’s political leaders (though it says they “planned” riots).

Decker’s text actually erases some people from the scene when it says: “The mob swelled. The reasonable men went home.” Up until the shots, several men at the Customs House were trying to speak to Capt. Preston or separate the soldiers and the crowd, including merchant Richard Palmes, young bookseller Henry Knox, and town watchman Benjamin Burdick. Decker’s line allows no possibility that anyone in the crowd was acting reasonably.

For Liberty doesn’t mention Christopher Seider, a boy shot dead eleven days before the Massacre by an unpopular Customs employee, and undoubtedly on Bostonians’ minds when they heard about White hitting Garrick. Instead, the book shows an effigy of an army officer hung on a rope (no such incident is documented) and says: “By March 5, 1770, it was dangerous to be a soldier in Boston.”

Soldiers in Boston suffered in street fights with locals, and didn’t receive equal justice from the local magistrates. Customs employees were tarred and feathered in 1769 and later in 1770. But of the six people killed in political clashes in Boston in that period, all were civilians who died “for liberty,” and none were soldiers.

TOMORROW: Details large and small in For Liberty.

“Rumford was decidedly attached to the cause”

While looking up something else, I came across this statement of how New England scholars viewed Benjamin Thompson in the 1800s. It appeared as a footnote to Dr. Jacob Bigelow’s inaugural address as Rumford Professor at Harvard, as published in the North-American Review in 1817:

Count Rumford was decidedly attached to the cause of American liberty, and earnestly sought for a commission in the service of Congress. He was present at the battle of Lexington, and afterwards remained sometime with the army at Cambridge.

His expectations of promotion were disappointed, in consequence of suspicions arising from his former intercourse with Governor [John] Wentworth of New Hampshire, and some others attached to the British cause. These suspicions it was impossible to overcome, although he demanded a court of inquiry, and was honourably acquitted of all intentions inimical to the cause of his country. After remaining some time in fruitless hope with the American army, and seeing the post of his ambition filled by a rival candidate, he retired in disgust, and embarked for England in January, 1776.

While at Cambridge, he exerted himself in preserving the library and philosophical apparatus, when the Colleges were occupied as barracks by the soldiery.

So we can see how shocking it was in the early 1900s when Allen French studied Gen. Thomas Gage’s intelligence files and realized that Thompson had been spying for the British throughout 1775—all that time he’d supposedly been traveling around the American lines trying to help.

Though you’d think the facts that Thompson had become secretary to the London official overseeing the war and then led a troop of dragoons on Long Island would have been a good clue about his attachments well before 1817.

“This Day is to be Executed at Worcester…”

At Early American Crime, Anthony Vaver just traced the short, unsuccessful criminal career of William Linsey, hanged in Worcester on 25 Oct 1770. Vaver wrote:

In September 1768, Linsey broke into the shop of Thomas Legatt of Leominster and took a great quantity of items, including fabrics, hats, gloves, cakes, biscuits, chocolate, razors, ink pots, two spelling books, two primers, and a Bible. This burglary turned out to be the second time Linsey targeted Legatt’s shop. . . .

The Superior Court ordered him to stand in the pillory, to be whipped twenty times, and to be branded—all of which were carried out on the same day. Amazingly, not long after his punishment Linsey went to live and work with Legatt for a month, where he was careful to behave himself before moving on to continue his crime spree.

Working for the man he’d robbed might have been someone’s plan for Linsey to pay back his victim and rehabilitate himself. If so, it didn’t work.

Near the bottom of this article is a clipping from the Boston News-Letter reporting Linsey’s scheduled execution. Even in death, the young man was totally overshadowed by two events in Boston:

• The militia observed the anniversary of George III’s accession by firing off their cannon, including the brass field-pieces later called the “Hancock” and “Adams.” Such annual ceremonies were a way for the townsmen to show off their patriotism and ability to defend themselves.
• Capt. Thomas Preston was on trial for murder, the first of three unusually long, closely-watched trials following the Boston Massacre.

Preston, unlike Linsey, was acquitted.

Myth, Memory, and What Really Happened at Bunker Hill

This essay comes to Boston 1775 from guest blogger Brad Cornelius, a freelance historical writer with an M.A. in European History living in Troy, New York. His latest project is writing corporate histories for established companies and institutions.

In the historical vernacular, to identify something as a myth is to label it as a misconception at best and an outright lie at worst. However, if we accept the broader definition of myth common to other social sciences, myths reveal as much information about the past as any solid historical fact.

In their simplest form, myths are stories that explain the origins of peoples or things. You don’t have to be Joseph Campbell to understand why such myths are useful to the societies that create them. In the half century that followed the battles of 1775, Americans were consciously creating a new nation. Recording the historical origins of this new nation also produced myths because both pursuits sought to define a new people, establish their core values, and chart an ideological course.

From the first shot fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775, the military actions of the Revolutionary War became infused with myth-like meaning that created difficult situations for later historians. A prime example of this process can be found in the events surrounding the battle of Bunker Hill that took place on June 17, 1775.

The traditional narrative of the battle is quite simple. Colonial forces occupied and fortified Breed’s Hill on a peninsula in Boston harbor. British forces took heavy casualties during their three assaults on the hill, dislodging the colonial forces only as the rebels ran low on ammunition and opted for a controlled retreat.

The first pitched battle of the Revolution became legendary due to the actions of high-profile individuals, the heavy casualties inflicted on the British, and the escape of all unwounded colonial forces. As the early decades of the nineteenth century passed, the men who fought on Breed’s Hill became the “greatest generation” of a young nation.

Fifty years after the battle, dignitaries like the Marquis de Lafayette and Daniel Webster gathered to lay the cornerstone for the monument that stands on the site today. Much like our generation, those behind the monument’s construction sensed the inevitable passing of the men behind important events. Just as collecting oral histories from World War II vets is popular today, the directors of the Bunker Hill Monument Association seized the opportunity to document the recollections of the battle’s surviving veterans who attended the 1825 ceremony.

As the reports began to accumulate, the directors became profoundly disturbed and perplexed by what they revealed. As part of the centennial celebration of the battle in 1875, the president of the Bunker Hill Monument Association, George Washington Warren, described how his predecessors reacted to the problem of myth and memory in The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association During the First Century:

While the survivors of the Revolution were convened in Boston to attend the laying of the corner-stone of the Monument, their several depositions were taken of their reminiscences of the Battle. But the accounts they gave were confused and conflicting; so much so that no reliable information could be obtained from them.

At a meeting of the Directors, General [William] Sullivan stated to the Board “that he had possession of the papers containing the accounts given by the survivors of the Battle of the 17th June, 1775, and that he proposed to hold them subject to the inspection of the Directors exclusively.” His proposal was assented to, as the most expedient course to be adopted. Where they are now, nobody knows.

In the past two decades, advances in cognitive psychology and its related disciplines have taught us a great deal about memory formation and the workings of the brain. Historians now understand that where history is dependent on human memory, it is also subject to the shortcomings of the human mind. Lacking this perspective, the historians of the Bunker Hill Monument Association were perplexed by discrepancies in the veterans’ memories and chose to ignore the troublesome data – perhaps even destroy it.

The lost recollections would be a valuable source for any modern historian. We would arrive at some firm conclusions about the path of the battle through contemporaneous sources and analyze the veterans’ accounts in relation to those known facts, pinpointing useful information through a sort of triangulation. Careful analysis of the veterans’ words would allow us to describe the meaning memories of the battle carried within their society. The Bunker Hill Monument stands as a physical representation of that meaning, but the directors of the Monument Association were ill-equipped to deal with the quirks of memory and thus a wealth of sources was lost.

We would like to think that the most important events, those heavy with meaning for the United States, are immune to the uncertainty that accompanies myth creation. In reality, such events deserve our most critical attention. Where meaning is of the utmost importance, human memory often bends in its service, and it falls to the historian to explain both the events as they happened and the cultural meaning ultimately attached to them. Only through such a dual explanation can historians approximate the true nature of past events and honor their myth-like meaning in American culture.

For more information on war, meaning, and memory, Brad Cornelius recommends G. Kurt Piehler’s Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 1995). Thanks, Brad!

William Fowler on the Newburgh Crisis, 3 Feb.

On Wednesday, 3 February, Prof. William Fowler speaks on “An American Crisis: The Newburgh Address” as part of the Friends of Minute Man’s lecture series. Bill is former editor of the New England Quarterly and president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and is working on a book about Gen. George Washington in the closing years of the Revolution.

The more I read about the “Conway cabal” and the “Newburgh conspiracy,” the more I think that Washington was either:

• really good at spotting conspiracies before they grew, or
• a little paranoid, at least in perceiving such conspiracies as bigger and more threatening than they were.

Or maybe both. Regardless of whether there was danger of a military coup against Congress when the commander made his Newburgh Address, Washington did manage to keep the Continental Army out of direct involvement in political matters, and that was important.

Bill Fowler will speak at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord, 81 Elm Street, starting at 8:00 P.M., and all are welcome.

Upcoming Talks at Old South Meeting House

The Old South Meeting House has three upcoming midday presentations that look like fun introductions to life in Boston during the Revolution.

Thursday, 11 February:

Which famous American inventor was born on Milk Street and baptized at the Meeting House? Which congregation member died in poverty, despite her international fame? Who spent her youth being “finished” in Boston and attended services each Sunday with her extended family? Join the education staff of the Meeting House and learn more about some of its famous and not-so famous congregants. Discover what it was like to attend Puritan services, and hear about life in colonial Boston for some of the Meeting House members.

Thursday, 18 February:

An active Patriot from the start, Dr. Joseph Warren was a man who led others down the path to independence. Creating an elaborate intelligence network to gather information on British troops, Warren made crucial decisions that started the American Revolution. Listen to Mike Lepage as he brings Dr. Warren to life and meet the man who sent Paul Revere on his famous ride, fought in the first battles of the war, and organized the resistance to the greatest empire in the world.

Thursday, 11 March:

Between April 19, 1775 and March 17, 1775 Boston was under siege by local militia men, as British troops struggled to maintain power in the colony. Join the education staff of the Meeting House and learn about the final days of the American Revolution in Boston. Hear about how every day Bostonians struggled to survive and how Old South Meeting House suffered under the occupation of His Majesty’s 17th Regiment of Light Dragoons.

Each of these events will take place from 12:15 to 1:00 P.M. (attendees are welcome to bring brown-bag lunches). The cost is $5, or nothing for Old South members. The site’s schedule includes other events as well, including talks on other historical periods and musical concerts.

The North American Premiere of the Celebrity Actor

The latest issue of Common-Place includes Jason Shaffer’s article “Unveiling the American Actor”, about the rise of theatrical celebrities in late colonial and early republican America. Of course, Boston was late to that game because of the Puritan prohibitions against theater.

Shaffer notes that it took a while for the faces of celebrities from any field to become known:

As Wendy Wick Reaves of the National Portrait Gallery has pointed out, even Washington’s image took time to gain common currency: she documents an engraving of the British poet John Dryden from a 1773 New England almanac that is recycled as an image of Sam Adams in a children’s primer in 1777, then again as an image of Washington in another primer in 1799.

One of the first star actresses in America, Susanna Rowson (thumbnail portrait above, courtesy of Explore PA History), was also its bestselling novelist:

Better known as the author of popular sentimental novels such as Charlotte Temple, Rowson was raised partly in Massachusetts by her father, a British naval officer who was eventually seized by the Continentals, deported, and repatriated in a prisoner exchange. She returned to the United States along with her husband, moved more by economic need than artistic ambition.

While performing with Wignell’s company in Philadelphia in 1794, at which point Charlotte was already available from Philadelphia booksellers, Rowson wrote Slaves in Algiers, a heroic play about Americans held captive by Barbary pirates. The controversy that attended this production illustrates the inherent difficulty of reintroducing British actors to the American stage and the specific difficulties that faced women onstage in the early republic.

While Rowson’s overwhelming emphasis in the play is on the generically American ideal of “liberty,” one of her characters, an Algerian girl named Fetnah who has been sold by her father into the Dey of Algiers's harem, expresses the desire that women should be as free as men.

Meanwhile, Rowson delivered the play’s epilogue not in her starring role of Olivia, a captive of mixed English and American parentage, but as the author of the play. “Disguised” as herself, she comically turned the tables on eighteenth-century gender relations by informing the audience that “Women were born for universal sway, / Men to adore, be silent, and obey.”

Rowson awakened the wrath of the arch-conservative (and fellow immigrant) newspaper editor William Cobbett, who in a pamphlet painted her as an aspiring petticoat tyrant and ally of French radicals while also questioning the sincerity of her conversion to the cause of American patriotism since her emigration from Britain. The controversy was brief, and Rowson went on to enjoy a successful, if short, theatrical career before retiring in 1797 to focus on writing books and opening a school for young women in Boston.

Rowson located her academy in Medford, Newton, and Roxbury at different times. Her school’s curriculum included learning to embroider this map of Boston harbor, featured in a Bostonian Society online exhibit.

Boston 1775 Twitter Feed, 15-29 Jan 2010

• Ray Soller seeks root of myth that George Washington added "So help me God" to Presidential oath of office: bit.ly/af9qUt #
• Past Is Present looks at evidence of how Abigail Adams REALLY observed July 4: bit.ly/c8rZSx #
• Boston middle school students make videogame about Chelsea Creek skirmish early in American Revolution: bit.ly/cr1P4o #
• Salinger/Zinn mashup at Hilobrow – Holden's History of the US: "Boston seems to have been full of class anger…" bit.ly/dvsedc #
• Doubts about overly optimistic identifcation of sankofa symbol on 18th-c coffin in NY's African Burying Ground: bit.ly/aYEaAB #
• The plaque stolen from the site of the belfry on Lexington common in 1775 has been found: bit.ly/a5kOOX #
• RT @Jurretta: Latest vol. in Papers of Jefferson includes "wall of separation" letter—and that Mammoth Cheese: bit.ly/9DvtOe #
• @universalhub But Julianne Moore's accent is SUPPOSED to be awful. Beautiful woman + grating sound = comedy. #
• Luxury British baby walker from 1710: bit.ly/by3VZ7 #
• RT @bostonathenaeum: From Quincy's History of the Boston Athenæum.... bit.ly/bnnwgt #
• Who shot the Elisha Jones house in Concord, Mass? bit.ly/9Qeh19 #
• Boston Looking Backward links to online repositories of historic photos: bit.ly/bBHoMt #
• RT @TJMonticello: Another Jefferson letter discovered, this one at American Legion Post 24 in Old Town Alexandria: bit.ly/7bYAqj #
• Flash! RT @bostonhistory: National Archives bans photos by tourists in an effort to protect historic documents tinyurl.com/y87ug5u #
• RT @TJMonticello: "the more ignorant we become the less value we set on science, & the less inclination we shall have to seek it."—Jefferson #
• RT @dancohen: .@robotnik wonders which t-shirt designs could be hi story's answer to those "Science!" t-shirts: bit.ly/5LFpXX #
• RT @dancohen: Rather obvious way for Obama to regain momentum at State of the Union speech on Wed: unveil revolutionary tablet computer. #
• Percentages in first survey of voters after Massachusetts special Senate elections: bit.ly/67uZGU (PDF) #
• Studying Hannah Mather Crocker, early American feminist, and her unpublished history of Boston: bit.ly/7xSQQg #
• RT @TJMonticello: By way of our Jefferson Library, Top 10 Misconceptions abt Tho Jefferson. bit.ly/4zArFF Do you have your own fave? #
• Just watched 30 ROCK. Didn't hear a single misstatement about John Hancock that I needed to grumble about! #
• RT @odnb: Whig and wings: Life of the Day bit.ly/8XXWFH // Lived 1751–1833, and I'd never heard of her. #
• Prediction: The Roberts Supreme Court next recognizes corporations' 2nd Amendment rights. Coke-Pepsi rivalry really heats up. #
• A criminal gang in Philadelphia, 1750: bit.ly/5DNYbN #
• RT @universalhub: How Jamaica Plain got its name bit.ly/8EoLVt #
• RT @Classicbookmags: 'Inbound 4: A Comic Book History of Boston' is available now. bit.ly/7NCVRc #
• Enjoyed hearing Emily Murphy on privateering to Friends of MMNHP; even more enjoyed hearing her refer to Derbies of Salem by first names. #
• RT @history_book: Thomas Paine: A Collection of Unknown Writings - Palgrave Macmillan. bit.ly/6aq3Hg #
• @GardenKeeper Part of John Hancock's political success is that he avoided hard choices. Managed not to be governor during Shays crisis. #
• For an Election Day in Massachusetts, colonial election cake at Boston Looking Backward: bit.ly/6AJNGc #
• RT @history_book: Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth-Century Britain - by Robin Ganev j.mp/2AOH2 #
• RT @wceberly: 246 yrs today, Jan 19, 1764, Parliament expels John Wilkes for insulting G eorge III in newspaper bit.ly/8e1s3a #
• Discussion seminar on Boston in the 1850s to take place on Wednesday evenings, Feb. 24-Mar. 31: bit.ly/6zo9ut #ushistory #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1706: Benjamin Franklin born. Podcast on his legacy, technology, and democracy: ow.ly/Xnz8 #
• RT @archives_gov: Jefferson's Secret Message to Congress: bit.ly/6O9ROT // SPOILER: need $$ for trip west. #
• RT @TheHistoryPress: First written reference to Isaac Newton's apple story [1752] goes online: bit.ly/8UWZGC #
• For very, very special fans of financier Robert Morris: bit.ly/5VlqiE #
• Foundation garments of the Georgian Empire // RT @lucyinglis: A peep up the skirts of Georgian London post.ly/J8Cb #
• Upcoming comic about escaped slaves in American Revolution with martial-arts powers: bit.ly/8xUIDN (Real war not exciting enough?) #

Ten Hills Farm Book Launch, 3 Feb.

C. S. Manegold’s Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North uses the history of a 600-acre grant of land in modern Medford and Somerville to trace the development of slavery in Massachusetts, from Native American war captives and early African prisoners to the enslaved servants of Isaac Royall, last colonial owner of one part of the farm.

Longfellow National Historic Site and the Friends of the Longfellow House are hosting a book launch for Ten Hills Farm on Wednesday, 3 February, at 6:30 P.M. in the Sherrill Library on the Lesley University/Episcopal Divinity School campus in Cambridge. Manegold will speak and sign books. The event is free; to reserve a space, call 617-876-4491.

Here’s an article about the book from the Somerville Journal. In an opinion essay for the Boston Globe, Manegold wrote:

In the several times I have presented these unpleasant truths in talks at major universities, I have inquired afterwards—who knew this history of slavery in the North? Usually only about three hands go up of 30. And most of these people are professors. Among non-professors the void is even deeper. Students, stumbling on this news, tend to ask with some aggression: “Why didn’t they teach us this?’’

To which I think the answer is: because you weren’t paying attention. I heartily doubt that history textbooks on any level leave out the fact that slavery existed in all thirteen original U.S. states before and during the Revolutionary War, or that slavery endured in some northern and/or Union states well into the nineteenth century, or that some people in the antebellum north benefited economically from slavery and supported its continued existence.

What we’re missing is a mental picture of how slavery functioned in northern households, farms, and ports. Movies and histories have given us a crisp and familiar picture of large cotton plantations in the antebellum south (a picture that in turn leaves out a significant amount of the experience of slavery in the antebellum south, but that’s another story). Because we don’t have details about enslavement in the north firmly in our minds, we don’t feel ready for the quiz.

And that’s the benefit of books like Ten Hills Farm, using specific details to make that history more vivid, emotionally rich, and memorable. And I fully understand the need to market a history book as revealing a completely untold or forgotten story.

But when the book’s website asks, “Who, in this century, knows that slavery persisted in Massachusetts longer than it did in Georgia?” I can’t help noting that Boston 1775 pointed that out in 2006.

“Danger is apprehended from the Stoves”

On 29 Jan 1771, the Old South Meeting House had a formal meeting which discussed, among other things, people’s habits of bringing small stoves to services to keep their feet warm. Because those people were seated in wooden pews in a wooden and brick building, untended stoves presented a fire hazard. The meeting therefore decided:

Whereas danger is apprehended from the Stoves that are frequently left in the meeting house after the publick worship is over,

Voted That the saxton make diligent serch on the Lords day evening and on the evenings after a Lecture, to see if any stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them to his own house, and itt is expected that the owners of such stoves make reasonable satisfaction to the sexton for his trouble before they take them away.

And the Deacons are desired to cause the foregoing vote to be read on the next Lords day, that the whole congregation may be apprised of it.

So nobody could say they weren’t warned when the sexton asked for a little tip before handing back their stove!

Old South was nearly burned in Boston’s Great Fire of 1872. Here’s a stereograph from the Boston Public Library’s Flickr set showing how the fire consumed neighboring buildings. The Bostonian Society has matched before and after images of Washington Street from other stereocards (scroll down this page). Damrell’s Fire offers a panoramic view of the devastation; Old South’s steeple is on the left.

“The wrong coffin was delivered”?

The quotations I shared yesterday show how in the first decade of the 1800s people on both sides of the Atlantic understood that Dr. Amos Windship had sent the body of Maj. John Pitcairn from the basement of Christ Church in Boston’s North End to his family in London.

However, some folks in Boston suspected otherwise. Sometime between 1816 and 1827, Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote the gossipy profile of Windship that I’ve been quoting from, and in it he said:

But the probability was that the bones were those 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. . . . .

Now, I really do not think that he [Windship] had any idea that the wrong coffin was delivered to him, but am fully of opinion that the sexton imposed upon him, as he was as great a villain as ever went unhung.

Eliot’s manuscript wasn’t published until 1924, when it appeared in volume 25 of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s Transactions/Publications series. I’ve picked out only about half of its stories about Dr. Windship, so folks interested in the man should definitely read the rest. (And there may be still more to find out; here’s an article on his years in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which I don’t think Eliot mentioned.)

Despite remaining unpublished, the stories Eliot told about Windship circulated in Boston in the early nineteenth century. In 1848 Nathanial Dearborn published a version of the tale in Boston Notions:

when the body was taken from the vault, there was a blistering plaster on the top of its head which indicated that it could not be the body of the Major, and a certain gentleman removed the plaster, and the box was delivered into the hands of the Pitcairn family in London: a Lieut. Shea, belonging to the Major’s Regiment was a large portly man, very much the size and shape of Major Pitcairn, and he died of an inflammation of the brain, for which the aforesaid plaster was applied; but the sexton had often showed these remains to gratify the curiosity of individual friendship, as those of the Major; for the sexton was an unprincipled, low fellow.

There was a Lt. Richard Shea in the Marines’ first company in 1775. But he is listed among the British officers killed at Bunker Hill, always as dead rather than wounded or “wounded, since dead.” Gen. William Howe’s orderly book says that his and another officer’s effects were sold on 14 July. Does that match the story of a brain inflammation?

Samuel A. Drake repeated Dearborn’s tale in Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1873), and Charles Hudson did the same in an 1880 paper on Pitcairn for the Massachusetts Historical Society. Hudson added the mistaken detail that the Pitcairn family had re-interred the corpse in Westminster Abbey, and that resurfaced in Edwin M. Bacon’s Historic Pilgrimages in New England (1898) and Rambles Around Old Boston (1914). All those accounts lay the blame on the sexton, though later authors characterized him as “perplexed” rather than duplicitous.

And then the Colonial Society published Eliot’s manuscript. It offers lots of other stories about Windship’s complete lack of reliability. Even when the doctor did his best, his plans had a tendency to collapse around him—and he didn’t always do his best.

So these days, writers suggest that Windship himself was primarily responsible for sending the wrong body to England, either by mistake or not caring if the corpse was actually Pitcairn’s. This Pitcairns website calls Windship “a notorious conman and crook,” and this one says he was a “thief, fraudster and attempted bigamist.” (I told you there was more gossip about him.)

I don’t think Dr. Windship deserves all the blame. There was a trail of lost information. The confusion started when a Christ Church sexton—probably Robert Newman—showed visitors the Marine officers’ corpses, not taking much trouble about who was who. Around 1789 Windship apparently fired Newman, so it’s possible that no one left at the church had direct knowledge of which bodies were laid where in 1775.

Then one of Eliot’s friends removed the only detail that distinguished the corpses of two big Marine officers: the “Blister plaster” that had come off one skull. Eliot didn’t specify when his friend took that bandage, or why. If the man did so before Windship and the new sexton went down to move the body, then they would have only a fifty-fifty chance of picking out Pitcairn.

Dearborn’s later account differs somewhat from Eliot’s. It says the “certain gentleman” took the plaster right off the skull, not from inside the coffin, and did so as the body was being packed to go to London. Those details would suggest that the men were definitely not moving Pitcairn’s corpse, and were hiding evidence of that fact. But the story might have improved by the time Dearborn recorded it.

In any event, Pitcairn’s widow, relations, and friends in London never heard anything about the whispers back in Boston. They could feel satisfied at having the remains of the man they loved back with his family. In gratitude, Mrs. Pitcairn gave Dr. Windship her late husband’s watch, and later a small seal engraved with the words “Je blesse en secret.” According to Eliot, Dr. Amos Windship “fancied it to be a motto taken from Virgil.”

(The photo above comes from Sara L. Brooks’s Flickr set under a Creative Commons license.)

“When the corpse arrived here”

Yesterday I described how Dr. Amos Windship of Boston was asked to ship the remains of Maj. John Pitcairn to his widow and relatives in London, to be reburied with his family.

This webpage on the Pitcairns expresses doubt that any body actually to be interred:

It has been alleged that in 1791 the family sent for John’s body to be reinterred in his brother Dr. William Pitcairn’s vault at St. Bartholomew the Less in London [shown here]. . . . .

However,...there is no entry in the burial register at Bart’s about the alleged re-interment. The only Pitcairns buried there are John’s brother Dr. William (d. 1791), son Dr. David (1749-1809), Betty Dalrymple, John’s widow, who outlived her son by only a month (1724-1809), and David’s widow, Elizabeth Almack (1759-1844). So this looks very much like an old wives’ tale.

The Pitcairns and their circle in the early 1800s would disagree. In the Gentlemen’s Magazine for 1809, Dr. John Coakley Lettsom published a long letter addressing the question:

In answer to your Correspondent’s query, in June, p. 548, respecting the place of interment of the late Major Pitcairn; I am induced to explain the apparent contradiction noticed there, as I believe no other person is enabled to do it. . . .

Dr. Winship of Boston visited London about 20 years ago; and his indisposition occasioned my being consulted, and thereby acquiring his acquaintance. Some time afterwards I was daily in consultation with Dr. David Pitcairn; a circumstance which was casually mentioned to Dr. Winship, who then informed me, that he had with him the key of the vault in which Major Pitcairn had been deposited; that he saw him a little before his departure from Boston, in the vault in which he was laid, in his regimentals, as has been observed; and that he counted at least 30 perforations from balls, which must have entered his body; and that the stone vault, in the cold climate of Boston, had so preserved the corpse as to enable him to recognize his features. At the same time, the Doctor very politely assured me of his services to send the Major to England, were it desirable to the Son.

All this time I was attending a person near London, who had been Churchwarden at Boston at the period that the Major was placed in the vault there, who corroborated Dr. Winship’s narrative.

I communicated these particulars to Dr. David Pitcairn; who informed me, on the subsequent day, that he had consulted his uncle, Dr. William Pitcairn; and that it was their joint wish, to have the Major conveyed to London. They had then an interview with Dr. Winship, who undertook this kind office; and when the corpse arrived here, it was interred in a new vault, built purposely by Dr. William Pitcairn, in the burying-grouud of St. Bartholomew, near the Hospital; since which have been deposited the remains of Dr. William himself, the brother, and Dr. David, the son of Major Pitcairn.

In addition, in The Stranger in America, an 1807 travel book, Charles William Janson described a visit to Christ Church in Boston this way:

The tomb in which were deposited the remains of the gallant Pitcairn, was empty. The sexton informed us, that his brother. Dr. Pitcairn, of London, had obtained permission to remove them; but we saw many skeletons, which, we were told, were the relics of some who held commands under the Major.

On one of them hung the remains of regimentals, and a pair of leather breeches, in high preservation. The pipe-clay, with which the latter had evidently been cleaned, probably for the fatal occasion, appeared fresh and white; but the flesh of the body was entirely decayed. Another presented a fractured bone; and the whole formed a painful picture of mortality.

The effect it produces on the spectator is so much the more powerful, as these bodies are not deposited in coffins, but lie exposed one upon another in the vault, without any farther covering.—Gallant, but unfortunate men!

So in that decade people on both sides of the Atlantic clearly believed that Maj. Pitcairn’s body had been returned to his family in London, and reburied there.

TOMORROW: But was that the right body?

“Requested my friend to send the Major to England”

In preparation for his second visit to London, Dr. Amos Windship convinced Harvard to give him degrees of Bachelor of Physic and Master of Arts in June 1790. He told the college that back in the 1760s he

being under the direction of his Guardian, was induced to dissolve his connexion therewith at the commencement of his Sophomore year.

In fact, he had entered Harvard at age twenty-two, past the age of majority, and left under a cloud before finishing a year. But Windship had practiced as a physician for over two decades, with service in the army and navy, so the college apparently granted him credit for life experience.

Dr. John Coakley Lettsom of London didn’t know about Windship’s tangled affairs. He introduced the eager American doctor to his colleagues, including Dr. William Pitcairn (1711-1791, shown here), president of the College of Physicians and brother of the late Maj. John Pitcairn of the Marines, and Dr. David Pitcairn (1749-1809), the major’s son and at some point “physician extraordinary to the Prince of Wales.”

The Pitcairns were no doubt interested to hear that Windship had shared a house with an officer of the Marines in the spring of 1775. And that he was a vestryman of the church where Maj. Pitcairn’s body lay. They introduced Windship to the major’s widow, and expressed a wish to have the major’s remains brought back to Britain.

Windship and the Pitcairn family made an arrangement which Dr. Lettsom described in a letter to a friend on 11 July 1791. (Lettsom, by the way, was a Quaker.)

Thou must remember the affair of Bunker’s Hill last war, when Major Pitcairn fell. A friend of mine, lately at my house on a visit from Boston, was a particular acquaintance of the Major’s, and this officer was beloved by all parties. My friend loved him as a father, although he is an American born and bred. The Major received 30 balls through his body.

He was brought into Boston, and buried in the King’s church, in a vault by himself in a close coffin, in his regimentals, and is at this moment in a perfect state. I informed Drs. Pitcairn, the brother and the son, of the circumstance, who requested my friend to send the Major to England, and I hope and believe he accompanies my bust of Washington.

According to Dr. Ephraim Eliot, Windship returned to Boston with another supply of medications bought on credit. Back in the North End, he ordered the Christ Church sexton to take Maj. Pitcairn’s coffin out from under the church, pack it in a box marked “Organ,” and ship it to London. Perhaps alongside a bust of Washington.

TOMORROW: And did it get there?

An African-American Neighborhood in Boston’s North End?

Boston historian Alex Goldfeld has a new book called The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood, and will be speaking about his findings at a couple of venues in the next two weeks.

On Wednesday, 27 January, at 6:00 p.m., Goldfeld will present an illustrated lecture called “Investigating ‘New Guinea’: Evidence for a Black Community in Boston’s North End in the 1600s” at Historic New England’s Otis House Museum, 141 Cambridge Street, in Boston. Many sources have asserted that a community of free and enslaved African-Americans lived on Copp’s Hill in colonial times, but this wasn’t definitively proven. Goldfeld has unearthed several historical facts that, when taken together, he believes confirm Boston’s colonial New Guinea.

This event is presented by Boston African American National Historic Site and Historic New England, and is free of charge. Seating is on a first-come basis. For more information, call 617-742-5415 or visit the Boston African American National Historic Site website.

On Wednesday, 10 February, at 6:30 p.m., Goldfeld will speak on “In Slavery and Freedom: Boston’s Black Community since 1638“ in the Orientation Room of the Boston Public Library (First Floor, McKim Building). This event, also free, is part of the Boston Public Library Local and Family History Lecture Series.

Goldfeld’s illustrated presentation will start with the African-American community in the North End and then follow those Bostonians to the north slope of Beacon Hill, where African-Americans established a new base to fight for equality. New facts coming to light during this overview include a black church established over 110 years before Boston’s nineteenth-century African Meeting House.

At both events Goldfeld will sign copies of The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood.

Dr. Amos Windship and the Christ Church Pew

Boston’s Anglican churches were rebuilding themselves in the 1780s. Not physically—they weren’t dismantled in whole or in part like some of the Congregationalist meeting-houses. But the war had made some of their richest members leave town, and they had to redefine their relationship with the king and Church of England.

That created openings for men like Dr. Amos Windship, who joined the congregation of Christ Church (now called Old North) in Boston’s North End. He was a warden starting on 28 May 1787, and a vestryman from 21 Dec 1789, deeply involved in church business.

Since 1777, William Montague had read in the Christ Church pulpit. Dr. Ephraim Eliot called him “a low bred man, of much cunning but mean literary abilities. He was a favorite among the lower class of the people.” Montague visited England in 1789, returning in August 1790 with the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren.

Some of the wealthier congregants took advantage of Montague’s absence to go to Halifax in 1790 and invite the Rev. Dr. William Walter (1737-1800) to become their minister. He had been rector at Trinity Church before the war, leaving Boston with the British military in 1776.

When Montague returned, he found himself in the position of assistant. He still preached a lot since Walter had also agreed to be minister at the Episcopal church in Cambridge. But there was soon conflict between the two men and their followers.

In March 1792 Montague asked to resign, citing “those who call themselves the Doctor’s [i.e., Walter’s] friends” and “the unchristian and abusive conduct of some towards me,—their constant endeavor to injure my Character and good name.” He went out to the Episcopal church in Dedham, where he spent a lot of his ministerial time on real-estate deals. Decades later, the congregation there asked him to step down.

During his trip to England, Montague had gotten into some sort of embarrassment. Eliot wrote that the man became

acquainted with some buckish English clergymen, who wishing to put a trick upon their raw Yankee brother, had introduced him into bad company.

And then the editor of Eliot’s manuscript for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts chose to omit a few lines. Just when it was getting good! Whatever happened, Dr. Windship had heard about it, and told other people in Boston.

By that time, Dr. Windship himself had been gotten in trouble with Christ Church. In 1791 he borrowed the Treasurer’s Ledger, and when he gave it back it now assigned pew number 30, in the back of the church, to him. Senior warden James Sherman wrote an angry note in the book:

this May Certifie all Whom it may Concern That the above Pew No. 30 was from the first settlement of Christ Church in Boston devoted wholy to the use of His Excelence the Governor and other Gentlemen and so continued untill August 1791 at which time this Ledger was in the Possession of Doctor Amos Windship who had borrowed it of James Sherman Senr Warden of said Church in order to settle his account with the Revd. Mr. Montague

he the sd. Windship kept it near a month and when returned “Governors Seat” as it stood above and as it was before was erased and “Dr. Amos Windship” as it now stands was wrote in its Stead with the account under it which account was brought from folio 91 which was erased about the middle of the lead, for which I the Subscriber as Warden and for the Honor of said Said was obliged to Lay the Same before the Attny. General and what followed may be seen by turning to a Meeting of the Proprietors of said Church Monday September 26th. 1791.

The two pages in question had apparently been treated with “some form of acid.” Attorney General James Sullivan advised the church to bring Windship to court, but in October the doctor admitted he had altered the ledger, saying it “was an error in judgement (and for which, I am very sorry).”

Dr. Windship started attending the Rev. Dr. John Lathrop’s New Brick Meeting. But he’d been involved with Christ Church long enough to move Maj. John Pitcairn’s body.

TOMORROW: At last! Mucking about with Maj. Pitcairn’s body!

Dr. Amos Windship’s “Description of a Dissection”

What did Dr. Amos Windship do after leaving the Continental Navy? I actually told the next chapter of his saga back here.

That trading voyage to London wasn’t a total loss for the doctor. While he was in London, he made the acquaintance of a leading British physician, Dr. John Coakley Lettsom (1744-1815, shown here courtesy of the Medical Society of London).

Windship returned to America with some medications, which he ended up never paying for (apparently because Bell’s creditors were seizing any money they could). The doctor kept up a correspondence with Lettsom, who offered to make him a corresponding member of the London Medical Society.

Of course that too led to trouble. Dr. Ephraim Eliot later explained:

Doctor Letsom now found that he had gone too fast in regard to our Doctors election, as the requisite qualification was, that the candidate must be a Batchelor or Doctor of Physic, to neither of wch. had he been admitted.

To save himself his friend Letsom advised that he should immediately go thro’ the courses of Lectures, requisite to obtain one of them, & if the expence should be more than he could spare, he gave him authority to draw upon him for it thro’ Mr. Crawley of London to the amount of fifty pounds sterling, after the object should be obtained.

He [Windship] complied. & when a diploma was taken out, he forwarded it to Letsom, together with the description of a dissection which he pretended he had made of a subject in which there were some uncommon appearances & some facts discovered which were not usual.

Doct Letsom supposing the communication to be designed for the society, presented it, & it was printed in their transactions.

Lettsom read the report from Windship at a meeting on 31 Mar 1788. The volume recording that event made its way to America, and Dr. Abijah Cheever (1760-1843) recognized the patient as one he had treated in 1786, and described in a paper for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on 31 Jan 1787. Eliot said of Windship, “probably he had no idea of its being published” in London.

Dr. Windship nevertheless made another voyage to London about 1790, and renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Lettsom. And on that trip Lettsom introduced the American doctor to the family of the late Maj. John Pitcairn.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, back at Christ Church…

“Not without fears that they will be embezzled”

Abigail Adams didn’t like her husband John being away in Europe for years at a time, but as long as he was there, she asked him to send her fabrics and other goods that were scarce in wartime Massachusetts. Some of those things she used and most she resold at a profit. Woody Holton’s new biography of Abigail examines her investment activity in detail.

In a letter dated 12 May 1780, John wrote to Abigail that he had sent a chest of goods her way:

I have this day a Letter from Mr. Moylan, that he has delivered to Dr. [Amos] Winship in the Alliance a Chest with the Things you desired and others.

As Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote in his posthumous profile of Windship, “For years he was employed in the Navy of the United States, was first Surgeon of the Alliance.” As a naval surgeon, Windship traveled somewhat regularly between the U.S. of A. and France, and he was of the genteel class, worthy of trusting with valuable items.

Abigail’s feelings about Dr. Windship were more mixed. She knew him as a squatter in her house in Boston in 1777. But in June 1779, after John had sailed to Europe, the doctor’s wife Desire shared a letter from him, so the Windships also represented a lifeline to her husband.

Then in the fall of 1780 the Alliance arrived in Massachusetts without the goods for Abigail, and without Dr. Windship. On 24 November Abigail wrote to John:

Dr. Winship...neither came in the vessel or sent the things. I am not without fears that they will be embezzled. I have taken every opportunity to let you know of it, but whether you have got my Letters is uncertain.

The cabals on Board the Ship threw the officers into parties, and Winship chose to involve my trunk in them. He certainly sent goods by the same vessel to other persons. General [James] W[arre]n, my unkle and others examined and went on Board, but could find no Trunk for me.

The “cabals” Abigail referred to started with Capt. Pierre Landais of the Alliance becoming irrational and paranoid, as related in this American Heritage article from 1960. During the battle between John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and H.M.S. Serapis on 23 Sept 1779, Landais kept the Alliance out of the fighting for a long time, and then attacked Jones’s ship.

In the following year, Jones had taken over the Alliance, and Dr. Windship served under him. Then in July 1780 Landais had grabbed the ship back and sailed it to Boston. On the way, his officers and crew had turned against him. In all the tussles over who was in charge of what, and who was loyal to whom, the Adamses’ goods were moved and mislaid.

They ended up reaching Philadelphia early the next year, where Continental Congress delegate James Lovell unpacked the boxes and then sent the goods north in batches, including “two small Packages” entrusted to…Dr. Windship! He visited Abigail in Braintree in the spring of 1781, and she described his explanations this way:

Dr. Winship whom I have seen, says that when Mr. Moylan requested him to take them; he refused them, unless he would repack them, and purchase a hair Trunk for them; he replied that he had no money in his hands, that he had sent the account to you, and you had paid it, and that if he would not take it, he would deliver it to Capt. Jones, which he accordingly did; when Mr. L[ovel]l received them together with a Box for Mr. [Elbridge] Gerry, they were in a smoaking state.

He examined his [goods], found them rotton upon which Mr. L[ovel]l unpacked mine and found them so wet as to oblige him to dry every thing by the fire. The linnings, the diaper all damaged, Mrs. [Mary] Cranchs cambrick mildewed, happily the wollen cloths were only wet, the leather Gloves quite rotton. I could wish you to repeat that article by the first opportunity and order a peice of wollen between every pair as they are the most liable to damage by wet.

This enterprise fits a pattern in Dr. Windship’s affairs: he would build a connection to someone influential, promise to do that person an impressive favor, and then, through some combination of chicanery, overreaching, and bad luck, screw it up entirely.

TOMORROW: Which brings us back to Maj. Pitcairn’s body.

Dr. Amos Windship and the House on Queen Street

When John Adams was in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, Abigail Adams had to handle the family finances. Among her responsibilities was a house that John had bought on Queen Street in Boston in 1772. Since Abigail and the children were living at the farm in Braintree, that house was sitting empty.

On 6 and 13 Feb 1777, the Continental Journal ran this advertisement:

To be Let, a House in Queen-Street, Boston, next Door to Powers and Willis’s printing-office.—For further Particulars enquire of the printer.

“The printer” was John Gill, formerly partner of Benjamin Edes. Abigail told John that when she placed the ad for the house, she, “supposing any person would chuse to see it, before they engaged it, desired him [Gill] to Let them know where the key was to be found.” (That means the house was locked but the key hidden somewhere convenient—a detail of everyday life.)

Nathaniel Willis, one of the two men printing the Independent Chronicle next door to the Adams house, went to Abigail in Braintree to discuss it. They reached a deal for a rent of “22 per annum.” But Willis had trouble moving in, as Adams described:

Upon his return to Boston and applying to Mr. G–ll for the key he found the famous Dr. [Amos] W[ind]ship had taken it and would not deliver it to him, tho He let him know that he had hired the House of me, and this same Genious had the Confidence to remove his family into the House without either writing to me or applying to me in any shape whatever, and then upon the other insisting upon having the House, he wrote to Let me know that he had moved in and would pay his Rent Quarterly, and that he supposed Mr. G–ll had the Letting of the House, which was absolutely falce for Mr. G–ll never gave him any leave, and had no right to.

In Reply to him I let him know that I had Let the House to Mr. W——s, that I could do nothing about it, that I had nothing more to do with it than with any other House in Town. He and Mr. W——s must settle the matter between themselves.

In this Time Mr. W——s had taken advice upon it and was determind to prosecute him; tis near a Month since they have been disputing the Matter, and the Dr. finding Mr. W——s determind has promised if he will not put him to farther Trouble to remove in about a week.

Given that history, one might think that John Adams would have been upset to find Dr. Amos Windship as the surgeon on the ship taking him to Europe in 1779. But Windship, with his knack for social climbing, found the way to win over the most important man aboard: he told Adams that other people were secretly badmouthing him.

On 11 May, Adams wrote in his diary:

Dr. W. told me of [navy captain Samuel] Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marblehead man.—Another [anecdote] of [captain Elisha] Hinman, that he had been treated with great Politeness by me, and his first Attention must be to see Mrs. Adams, and deliver her Letters.

Yes, Abigail Adams would be so happy to encounter Dr. Windship again.

TOMORROW: Dr. Windship and Abigail Adams’s trunk.