“One of the Ancient Anakim of the Primeval Forest”

In November 1850, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published an article by Benson J. Lossing titled “A Pilgrimage to the Cradle of American Liberty.” Amidst descriptions of the battlefield in Concord, the Bunker Hill Monument, and other landmarks he had visited in 1848, Lossing wrote of a stop in Cambridge:

During the first moments of the soft evening twilight I sketched the “Washington elm,” one of the ancient anakim of the primeval forest, older, probably, by a half century or more, than the welcome of Samoset to the white settlers. It stands upon Washington-street, near the westerly corner of the Common, and is distinguished by the circumstance that, beneath its broad shadow, General Washington first drew his sword as command-in-chief of the Continental army, on the 3d of July 1775.

Normally Lossing was ecstatic about being able to interview survivors of the Revolution, or to quote documents, but in this case he didn’t have them. He just passed on the story that everyone was telling him.

In 1851 Lossing adapted his articles into the first edition of The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, which stated:

On the morning of the 3d of July, at about nine o’clock, the troops at Cambridge were drawn up in order upon the Common to receive the commander-in-chief. Accompanied by the general officers of the army who were present, Washington walked from his quarters to the great elm-tree that now stands at the north end of the Common, and, under the shadow of its broad covering, stepped a few paces in front, made some remarks, drew his sword, and formally took command of the Continental army.

Curiously, the elm tree had moved from the “westerly corner of the Common” to the “north end.” It actually stood near the intersection of modern Garden and Mason Streets, so west is more accurate than north. (I’m assuming that Lossing’s “Washington-street” was renamed.)

The Pictorial Field-Book included an engraving of the tree, possibly based on Lossing’s 1848 sketch. A footnote to the illustration added:

The house seen in this sketch is one of the oldest in Cambridge, having been built about 1750. It has been in the possession of the Moore family about seventy-five years. Since I visited Cambridge I have been informed that a Mrs. Moore was still living there, who, from the window of that house, saw the ceremony of Washington taking command of the army.

Other sources say that house belonged to Deacon Josiah Moore and his family. However, Moore didn’t move into it until several years after 1775, and he and his widow were both long dead by the time Lossing came through Cambridge.

It’s possible that the “Mrs. Moore” whom Lossing learned about was a young Cambridge girl in 1775 who witnessed that “ceremony” from that house, then married into the Moore family who moved into the same house and survived to 1848. It’s also possible, especially since Lossing never got to interview her, that she never claimed to be an eyewitness, but simply relayed a story she’d heard, and people made assumptions.

Either way, that version of the story is unconfirmable. Nevertheless, in 1862 Lossing (returning to his notebooks for another Harper’s series) referred to “the venerable Mrs. Moore” as a witness to Washington taking command. And other authors followed suit.

TOMORROW: The good Christian witnesses.

Cambridge Celebrates the Washington Elm

When Edward Everett designed a seal for the city of Cambridge in 1846, he included the Washington Elm alongside a Harvard building (now gone) built with a bequest from Christopher Gore.

As Thomas J. Campanella discusses in Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (2003), those images had particular appeal in the middle of the nineteenth century because they represented Cambridge’s past more than its present.

Cambridge was no longer a rural college town, but an industrial city with a growing immigrant population. Streets were getting crowded; in fact, the Washington Elm had ended up on what we’d now call a traffic island in the middle of a broadening road.

In 1864, the city of Cambridge honored the Washington Elm in another way, installing a granite monument at its side to proclaim its place in the nation’s history. That was, of course, in the middle of a very big, deadly fight over the meaning of that history.

According to tradition reported as early as 1884 (in the Bay State Monthly), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow composed the line on that monument:

Under This Tree
WASHINGTON
First Took Command
OF THE
AMERICAN ARMY,
July 30, 1775.

I can’t say I recognize Longfellow’s poetic touch in those words. But he was quite aware of the tree, and appears to have had strong feelings for it. In April 1871 Longfellow transplanted a seedling from the elm on his property, and in March 1875 the city forester brought him some items made from branches that had been pruned off the big tree.

In between those events Longfellow lobbied the mayor to preserve the Whitefield Elm (discussed yesterday). When it came down anyway, he wrote in his diary, “Cambridge has an ill renown for destroying trees.” All the more reason to memorialize them.

TOMORROW: So where’s the historical evidence?

James R. Lowell: “Musing Beneath the Legendary Tree”

On 3 July 1875, Cambridge planned a big public celebration of the centennial of Gen. George Washington’s first full day as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The focus of that event was the Cambridge common, and specifically the Washington Elm.

The city invited local poet James Russell Lowell to compose and deliver an ode on the occasion. Lowell wrote to a friend:

We, too, here in my birthplace, having found out that something happened here a hundred years ago, must have our centennial; and since my friend and townsman Dr. [Oliver Wendell] Holmes couldn’t be had, I felt bound to do all the poetry for the day. We have still standing the elm under which Washington took command of the American army, and under which also [Rev. George] Whitefield had preached some thirty years before.

Actually, Whitefield’s name had become attached to another elm, “a few rods” away; he reportedly preached under it in 1740 when he wasn’t welcomed into the pulpit of the Congregationalist meeting-house. But that tree had fallen down in 1872, and his audience might have been big enough to range under the Washington Elm, too, right?

Lowell’s letter shows how the idea that Washington “took command of the American army,” really only hinted at in the first published mentions of the Washington Elm, had become standard history. His poem is quite long, and doesn’t even get to the tree and Gen. Washington until the third section:

Beneath our consecrated elm
A century ago he stood,
Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood
Whose red surge sought, but could not overwhelm
The life foredoomed to wield our rough-hewn helm:
From colleges, where now the gown
To arms had yielded, from the town,
Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to see
The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he.
No need to question long; close-lipped and tall,
Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone
To bridle others’ clamors and his own.
Firmly erect, he towered above them all,
The incarnate discipline that was to free
With iron curb that armed democracy.

A motley rout was that which came to stare, 

In raiment tanned by years of sun and storm, 

Of every shape that was not uniform, 

Dotted with regimentals here and there; 

An army all of captains, used to pray 

And stiff in fight, but serious drill’s despair, 

Skilled to debate their orders, not obey; 

Deacons were there, selectmen, men of note
In half-tamed hamlets ambushed round with woods,
Ready to settle Freewill by a vote,
But largely liberal to its private moods;
Prompt to assert by manners, voice, or pen,
Or ruder arms, their rights as Englishmen,
Nor much fastidious as to how and when:
Yet seasoned stuff and fittest to create
A thought-staid army or a lasting State:
Haughty they said he was, at first, severe,
But owned, as all men own, the steady hand
Upon the bridle, patient to command,
Prized, as all prize, the justice pure from fear,
And learned to honor first, then love him, then revere:
Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint
And purpose clean as light from every selfish taint.

Musing beneath the legendary tree,
The years between furl off: I seem to see
The sun-flecks, shaken the stirred foliage through,
Dapple with gold his sober buff and blue
And weave prophetic aureoles round the head
That shines our beacon now nor darkens with the dead.
O, man of silent mood,
A stranger among strangers then,
How art thou since renowned the Great, the Good,
Familiar as the day in all the homes of men!
The winged years, that winnow praise and blame,
Blow many names out: they but fan to flame
The self-renewing splendors of thy fame.

Lowell obviously expected his audience to recognize his allusions to Washington without needing to hear the general’s name until later. Indeed, he expected them to understand references like “that old fight in the wood” (Braddock’s defeat) and “buff and blue” (the uniform Washington had designed for his Virginia militia regiment, eventually adopted by the Continentals as well).

The politics of Lowell’s poem are less subtle: Washington’s mission was to “curb that armed democracy.” The final lines are a paean to Virginia, “Mother of States and unpolluted men,” welcoming that Confederate state back into the U.S. of A.

Despite Lowell’s letter, neither he nor Holmes was the most popular poet living in Cambridge at the time. That was their friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but he didn’t enjoy public speaking. Longfellow excerpted Lowell’s ode in his huge Poems of Places anthology, but was never inspired to write his own verse about the Washington Elm. Instead, he supposedly wrote one line.

TOMORROW: Cambridge adopts the Washington Elm as a civic symbol.

O. W. Holmes: “Under the Brave Old Tree”

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was born in the house beside Cambridge common which Gen. Artemas Ward and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety used as their headquarters in the first weeks of the Revolutionary War.

From his father Holmes inherited a keen sense of local history, which came out in poems like “The Last Leaf,” “Dorothy Q,” and “Old Ironsides.” He grew up within sight of the tree that by the late 1830s had become known as the “Washington Elm.”

As the U.S. Civil War began, Holmes took inspiration from that tree for this poem:

Under the Washington Elm, Cambridge
April 27, 1861

EIGHTY years have passed, and more,
Since under the brave old tree
Our fathers gathered in arms, and swore
They would follow the sign their banners bore,
And fight till the land was free.

Half of their work was done,
Half is left to do,—
Cambridge, and Concord, and Lexington!
When the battle is fought and won,
What shall be told of you?

Hark!—’tis the south-wind moans,—
Who are the martyrs down?
Ah, the marrow was true in your children’s bones
That sprinkled with blood the cursed stones
Of the murder-haunted town!

What if the storm-clouds blow?
What if the green leaves fall?
Better the crashing tempest’s throe
Than the army of worms that gnawed below;
Trample them one and all!

Then, when the battle is won,
And the land from traitors free,
Our children shall tell of the strife begun
When Liberty’s second April sun
Was bright on our brave old tree!

According to the American Literary Blog’s analysis of this poem, shortly before Holmes wrote, his namesake son had enlisted to serve in the Union Army after Harvard. It looks like the poet was also responding to news of the riot in Baltimore on 19 Apr 1861 in which four Massachusetts soldiers and twelve local Confederate sympathizers died.

Notably, Holmes did not mention Washington, except in the title of his poem. He emphasized “Our fathers,” the collective community of Cambridge, rather than one heroic leader. His main allusion was to the alleged gathering of militiamen on Cambridge common on 19 Apr 1775 rather than the arrival of the commander-in-chief months later.

TOMORROW: Yet more Victorian poetry.

Lydia H. Sigourney: “A Mighty Chieftain ’neath my Shade”

Earlier in the week I quoted the first article about the “Washington Elm” in Cambridge, by a Massachusetts author named John Langdon Sibley in American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in 1837.

The popular poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865) picked up the idea behind that article—that the tree could speak about the events it had stood beside—and ran with it.

Her 1845 collection Scenes in My Native Land included these lines on “The Washington Elm in Cambridge, Massachusetts”:

WORDS! Words, Old Tree! Thou hast an aspect fair,
A vigorous heart, a heaven-aspiring crest,
And sleepless memories of the days that were
Lodge in thy branches, like the song-bird’s nest.

Words! give us words! Methought a gathering blast
’Mid its green leaves began to murmur low,
Shaping its utterance to the mighty Past,
That backward came, on pinions floating slow.

“The ancient masters of the soil I knew,
Whose cane-roofed wigwams flecked the forest brown,
Their hunter-footsteps swept the early dew,
And their keen arrow struck the eagle down.

I heard the bleak December tempest moan,
When the tossed May-Flower moored in Plymouth Bay;
And watched yon classic walls, as stone by stone
The fathers reared them slowly toward the day.

But lo! a mighty Chieftain ’neath my shade,
Drew his bright sword, and reared his dauntless head,
And liberty sprang forth from rock and glade,
And donned her helmet for the hour of dread.

While in the hero’s heart there dwelt a prayer,
That Heaven’s protecting arm might never cease
To make his young, endangered land its care,
Till through the war-cloud looked the angel Peace.

“Be wise my children,” said that ancient Tree,
In earnest tone, as though a Mentor spake,
“And prize the blood-bought birthright of the free,
And firmly guard it, for your country’s sake.”

Thanks, thanks, Old Elm! and for this counsel sage,
May heaven thy brow with added beauty grace,
Grant richer emeralds to thy crown of age,
And changeless honours from a future race.

And then the book offered a historical essay on the elm.

Both poem and essay were picked up in Joshua Leavitt’s Selections for Reading and Speaking, for the Higher Classes in Common Schools (1850). And when a statement gets into schoolbooks, it get deeply rooted in the culture.

TOMORROW: More Victorian poetry. (For more on Sigourney, see the American Literary Blog and the Victorian Web.)

Crogan’s Revolution—Time for a Shave

Crogan’s Vengeance (discussed here) and Crogan’s March are the first two volumes of what graphic novelist Chris Schweizer calls his “Crogan Adventures”—a planned series of yarns about the men in one fictional family, spanning the last four centuries and several familiar genres of fiction.

Good Comics for Kids interviewed Schweizer about the next volume on his to-do list:

The third book will be the first time I depart from the years stated on the family tree. For the American Revolution book, on the family tree it shows [the brothers] in 1776, but I plan on making the book take place in 1779 or early 1780.

The endpapers for Crogan’s Vengeance show the brothers already eyeing each other suspiciously in 1776. Which makes me hope it’s not too late to post a public warning to the artist:
Don’t give eighteenth-century British-American men beards!

As you see, the other Crogans in this picture have facial hair, in two cases quite thick beards. I didn’t mind the bushiness of many characters in Crogan’s Vengeance because that’s set at the very start of the eighteenth century, and on pirate ships, beyond the norms of civilization. But by the late 1700s, British-American men shaved their chins. If they were physically unable to shave for a while, then they got rid of their beards as soon as they could.

That applies to pioneers on the western frontier (who also probably didn’t dress like the 1950s image of the 1830s, in coonskin cap and buckskin). That applies to smugglers and gun runners, especially if they were trying to pass as respectable businessmen within the British Empire.

Schweizer draws in a fun, “cartoony” style. In that approach, it’s only natural to seize on different sorts of facial hair to make one man immediately look different from another, as Scott Chantler did in Northwest Passage. And we have a tendency to amalgamate the fashions of different periods into a single past, as in these “educational” comics.

But looking at portraits, prints, and drawings from the late 1700s makes clear that British-American men didn’t wear beards. Some Hessian and French soldiers probably wore mustaches, but all redcoats and “Minutemen” (we can hope that’s shorthand for Continental Army or some state militia) should be clean-shaven.

[UPDATE at the end of the week: Good news! Schweizer was already on the case. Looking forward to volume three of the Crogan Adventures!]

Twitter Feed, 28 June-4 July 2010

• RT @universalhub: US Supreme Court to Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court: 2nd Amendment does apply to states bit.ly/crbf06 #
• RT @alberkes: We are now proud owners of 135 reels of Adams Family microfilm. Only the reels with the best stuff fb.me/AF5aruBh #
• RT @Readex: Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse. The Feuding Fathers WSJ.com on.wsj.com/bbcJH1 #
• RT @myHNN: Marilyn Monroe chest X-rays fetch $45,000 bit.ly/9Kfxhq // Buyer disappointed X-rays didn't just go thru clothing. #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1836: James Madison, 4th president of the US, dies in Montpelier, Va., at age 85. ow.ly/23ebQ #
• RT @history_book: Monmouth Court House: The Battle that Made the American Army - Joseph G. Bilby et al. amzn.to/alJ4U6 #
• RT @mooresclassroom: Slate Contest: Rewrite the Declaration of Independence in one tweet bit.ly/aQSIrG #
• RT @SecondVirginia: 234 Years Ago, 29 June 1776: Virginia adopts its Constitution and makes Patrick Henry governor bit.ly/95bpzv #
• RT @gordonbelt: The Strange Career of Thomas Paine: Responses from "The Age of Reason" to the Tea Party Movement bit.ly/bBBYbi #
• RT @TheOnion: Redcoat Holdouts Still Fighting American Revolution onion.com/aDk6YW #
• RT @mooresclassroom: In honor of the 4th of July weekend, The Onion presents the "Patriotic Issue" onion.com/9JWUwB #
• RT @TheFreedomTrail: Hey #boyscouts and #girlscouts, we just posted info on getting #freedomtrail badges here! fb.me/CbiNYWgw #
• How Benjamin Franklin helped get the mail through in mid-1700s America, from Eric Jaffe and THE KING'S BEST HIGHWAY: bit.ly/c3b4us #
• RT @NewYorkHistory: Abenaki Focus Of Mount Independence July 4th Event: bit.ly/cgYs5X #
• RT @wceberly: 235 yrs today, Jun 30, 1775, Continental Congress drafts rationale for taking up arms vs Britain bit.ly/cWsqK7 #
• RT @Readex: New books on Early American topics, alphabetically by publisher. Society of Early Americanists bit.ly/9GHGwb #
• RT @NewYorkHistory: Abenaki Focus of Mount Independence July 4th Event: bit.ly/cgYs5X #
• @Boy_Monday: Check out the sheer inanity over Gordon Wood & John Ferling on the H-NET OIEAHC list. // Most of us just shaking our heads. #
• RT @NewYorkHistory: New Windsor Cantonment, Knox's Headquarters Independence Days: bit.ly/bnLBkZ #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/Lynch goes 2 #Philly with 3 other young #SC men, all under age34. Perceived as rich dandies; undeserved. #
• RT @SecondVirginia: Revolutionary War Focus Tours at The Charleston Museum's (@ChasMuseum) Heyward-Washington House fb.me/Cj4sOJtb #
• RT @PatriotCast: Army around Boston is in dire need of shirts, stockings. Asking for local donations. // Local women suggest WASHING. #
• RT @asuen1 5 Great Independence Day Books: ow.ly/23Hp2 #kidlit #
• RT @bostonbookfest: Help Sidewalk Sam paint a "walking poem" on the Longfellow Bridge on 7/6! Sign up: bit.ly/celTMp #
• From @larrycebula, an Open Letter to the Baron von Munchausen Historic Home: bit.ly/95bIGO #
• Revolutionary era camp cooking, via Massachusetts reenactors and the BOSTON GLOBE: bit.ly/cl2nyj #
• Illustrated talk on Boston statuary at Newton library, 15 July, 7:00: bit.ly/ctd21W #
• RT @HadasBatTsiyon: "Motivational Posters: #FoundingFathers Edition" tinyurl.com/22nxax7 #USHistory // (Some quotes dubious.) #
• RT @historyfaculty: RT @myHNN: The Liberty Bell: a sliver of American history bit.ly/btre9q #
• NY Public Library online exhibit of rare copies of Declaration of Independence: bit.ly/96GlZU #
• Also from NY Public Library, "From Revolution to Republic" exhibit of Revolutionary prints and drawings: bit.ly/aY8640 #
• Got word my paper on Boston's Revolutionary-era schools was accepted for conference—same week I'll speak about Boston's 5th of Nov. #
• RT @JBD1: LC says Jefferson slipped, wrote "subjects" in rough draft of Declaration, then changed it to "citizens" - is.gd/dd4Gy #
• RT @WilliamHogeland: Review and big excerpt of "Declaration 1776" in tomorrow's WSJ: tinyurl.com/273ws9r #history #books #literature #
• RT @history_book: Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic - by David Howard amzn.to/dA2zKM #
• RT @56Signers: Up for a #JohnAdams #tshirt? Try this one: bit.ly/9DzypA #july4 #independence #1776 #founders #
• RT @classroomtools: Thoughts on Declaration of Independence in today's NY Times online nyti.ms/cg73RT #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/#JohnAdams last words: "#Jefferson survives!" Ah, but TJ had died just hours before! #americanhistory #
• RT @RascofromRIF: learning about & from ABIGAIL ADAMS by Holton. Every girl needs to know Abigail Adams! #
• Robin the Boy Wonder and the Declaration of Independence together in one Silver Age Comics blogpost: bit.ly/9tuuSY #
• A look back at an issue of TOMAHAWK, DC's Revolutionary Western comic book: bit.ly/9hjtJE #
• Snopes on legend of John Hancock's comments on signing Declaration of Independence: bit.ly/abUIYh #
• Did English Civil War prefigure the American Revolution? Oped from NY TIMES: nyti.ms/aCpq5z #
• Rather silly essay by Joe Queenan on adages in POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC: nyti.ms/dmYAA0 Sayings were cribbed from books to fill space. #
• Visiting Bunker Hill Monument with NY TIMES: nyti.ms/9KUGBJ (Note that URL says "Labor Day".) #
• New COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG JOURNAL covers crafts, livestock, Wythe, George III, wars with Natives & ice cream: bit.ly/9LugN7 #
• More historical American ice cream: bit.ly/bKOMfu #
• AXE COP comic, co-created by six-year-old boy and twentysomething brother, visits the Revolutionary War: bit.ly/aIzmnf #
• RT @PennyInkwell: Hampton archeological dig uncovers 18th-century structure: (06/25/2010) bit.ly/cjMnI6 #
• RT @TheOnion: Man Who Fought For Americans' Rights Demands Americans Stop Exercising Their Rights onion.com/aPXW3K #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/#Jefferson watches anxiously as his words edited by #Congress. 86 changes l8r, doc adopted. #july4 #
• RT @Deborahkops: The real Betsy Ross was much more interesting than the demure woman in history books. tinyurl.com/24av5rd #
• BOSTON GLOBE on Freedom Trail Foundation's new "changing of guard" ceremony: bit.ly/df7FrX (Bayonets yay! Beards bah!) #
• Sam Haselby in BOSTON GLOBE on turning Founding Fathers into legends: bit.ly/dtJk43 #
• New self-published historical fantasy for kids set in Boston, April 1775: SHADOW FOX: SONS OF LIBERTY – bit.ly/9ZAcP6 #
• American Independence Museum in Exeter, NH, wants people to come north: bit.ly/bpHMhc #
• Follow the archeological excavations at Munroe Tavern in Lexington thru UMass Boston's Fiske Center: bit.ly/9OsHC2 #
• Boston's Museum of Fine Arts hanging Copleys, arranging silver for reopening wing in Nov 2010—hard to wait that long! bit.ly/cEmEjH #
• Four Cambridge, Mass., historical organizations invite researchers to tour their archives this month: bit.ly/cQYPhQ #
• Exhibit and sale in Newport to benefit Historic New England includes Copley pastel portrait of "Lady Temple": bit.ly/bT73gB #
• Marriage of Whig merchant James Bowdoin's daughter Elizabeth to royal official Sir John Temple a huge deal in Revolutionary Boston politics. #
• After marriage Temple took side of Boston merchants, angered fellow Customs Commissioners, leaked sensitive documents to Franklin. #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: Today in 1789: US intros tax on imported sugar: 1¢/lb on brown, 3¢/ refined white. Sugar standards: ow.ly/26G1P #
• RT @larrycebula: Patriotic blogging with a dash of #Deism: bit.ly/aRfPsv #twitterstorian #history #jefferson #4thofJuly #
• RT @larrycebula: Atlas of Historical County Boundaries shows boundary changes of every US county 1600s to 2000: bit.ly/4V7ALf #
• RT @lynneguist: names for the war that tore us asunder [that would be US Revolution], plus an aside on barbecue: bit.ly/aWMjX8 #
• Okay, these #comics I have to read: JERRY DRUMMER, BOY HERO OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR: bit.ly/9jrh8g Only three issues, after all. #

Chelsea Creek, or My First and Last Post about Videogames

Yesterday’s Boston Globe reported on efforts to map the skirmish over the Royal Navy schooner Diana on 27 May 1775. That fight began with provincials raiding two islands in Boston harbor to deny food and forage to the British army, the Diana counterattacking and running aground, and finally provincial troops stripping that ship of its artillery and setting it on fire.

Last year the National Park Service awarded a grant to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs to find out more about the fight using archeological studies and GIS mapping. The Globe reported on the search for the Diana last July, a story that got picked up in London.

In January the home-town paper noted another approach to exploring the same history:

A group of students at the Umana Middle School Academy have helped create a video game that may soon be available for free download to mobile devices. Impatient riders stuck on the Blue Line will be able to relive the battle on an iPhone, tapping on the touch screen as Minutemen with muskets charge the HMS Diana, a British ship that ran aground at low tide. . . .

Jason Petralia…and three colleagues worked with the students to develop ideas and had them put pencil to paper, allowing the middle-schoolers to create the building blocks for graphics. After scanning the student’s drawings into a computer, the programmers added color and brought to life the game, which will be submitted to Apple for approval and distribution next month.

The setting is simple: blue sky, yellow sun, and a marooned ship, the HMS Diana. A constant stream Minutemen rush the ship with their muskets at the ready. When a Minuteman reaches the hull, he deposits a bail of hay, which the patriots used to torch the real British ship in 1775.

The person playing the game is on the side of the British, defending the Diana, using the flick of a finger to chase away advancing Minutemen. When 20 hay-carrying colonists reach the ship, it bursts into flames…

I haven’t found the game available at the iPhone store, but then I’ve never visited before. Those same students appear to be part of a push for an East Boston Historical Society.

All these articles refer to the fighting on 27 May 1775 as “the Battle of Chelsea Creek.” As far as I can tell, that phrase didn’t appear until 1906, when Fred W. Lamb used it as the title of an article in the Granite State Monthly. (New Hampshire colonel John Stark led the first raids.) Before then, authors who mentioned the skirmish at all tied it to Noddle’s Island or Hog Island. [ADDENDUM: More on the nomenclature here.]

The fight for the Diana was the first and, I believe, last significant American victory where Israel Putnam was present. But his role was impressive enough for the Continental Congress to make him a major general in June. Diaries and letters show how excited the win left the New England troops outside Boston—twice they’d gone up against the British military, and twice they’d come out ahead.

Then, three weeks later, came the Battle of Bunker Hill. For the provincials, that looked like a loss; there were a lot of recriminations and finger-pointing. It took a while for Americans to realize how much that battle had cost the British. Indeed, it was the main turning-point in the siege of Boston, even though the campaign went on for another nine months. Because the casualties at Bunker Hill dwarfed those from the fighting off Chelsea, the earlier fight was quickly overshadowed.

A year ago Rick Detwiller told me that Heritage Auction Galleries sold a 17th-century Dutch gun (more pictures here). Aside from proximity, however, I don’t see an obvious connection between this gun and the Chelsea Creek fighting. In January Fontaine’s Auction sold grapeshot said to come from that battle, though I don’t see information about how that material was unearthed.

“It Has Stood Like a Watchman”

By 1837, a new character appeared in descriptions of how George Washington took command of the Continental Army on 3 July 1775. This was a large elm tree on the town common, which authors dubbed the “Washington Elm.”

The first mention of that tree, according to the Cambridge historian Samuel F. Batchelder and my own best efforts, appeared in an article titled “The Washington Elm” in John Langdon Sibley’s American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in 1837, more than sixty years after the event. The article said:

The Washington Elm stands in the westerly corner of the large common near Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and is probably one of the trees that belonged to the native forest. Amid the changes which have taken place in the world, and particularly in America and New England, it has stood like a watchman; and if it could speak, it would be an interesting chronicler of events. . . .

the revolutionary soldiers who stood shoulder to shoulder,—blessings be on their heads,—tell us that when Washington arrived at Cambridge, he drew his sword as commander-in-chief of the American army, for the first time, beneath its boughs, and resolved within himself that it should never be sheathed till the liberties of his country were established.

The picture above accompanied that article. I called the tree a “character” because the earliest writings about it emphasized imagining what it would say about the events it had “seen.” The notion of “witness trees” remains resonant today, particularly within the National Park Service.

While this magazine didn’t explicitly state that Washington “drew his sword” as part of a ceremony taking over the army, the mention of “soldiers who stood shoulder to shoulder” is certainly reminiscent of the 1797 picture I showed yesterday of troops lined up for the new commander.

COMING UP: American poets take up the tree’s story.

An Early Picture of Washington Taking Command

As early as 1797, Elkanah Tisdale engraved an image captioned “GENL. WASHINGTON takes Command of the American Army at Cambridge July 3d 1775,” as shown above. It’s an inset under his engraved portrait of the general visible through the John Carter Brown Library’s Archive of Early American Images.

The engraving shows George Washington and three other officers on horseback before a long line of uniformed soldiers carrying muskets with bayonets. In the foreground there’s a vaguely drawn flag, perhaps striped, and in the background some tents.

Tisdale was born in 1768 in Lebanon, Connecticut, and thus wouldn't have been in Cambridge in 1775. When he engraved the Washington image, he had recently started working in New York, and there’s no evidence that he had visited Cambridge to find out how its common looked.

Tisdale’s engraving obviously depicts how Americans wanted to imagine the scene back in 1775. When it appeared, Washington had become their beloved general and first President. The army had become a source of pride (though there was still debate over the danger and value of a standing army); these troops look very uniform and well equipped.

But it’s far from obvious that Tisdale had a historical basis for this picture, even though it was published for an audience that included Revolutionary War veterans, possibly including some who had been in Cambridge on 3 July 1775. Was Tisdale simply creating an iconic scene—the way Americans should think of Washington taking command?

TOMORROW: The “Washington Elm” sprouts.

A Washington Takeover

On this date back in 1775, Gen. George Washington officially took command of the newly renamed Continental Army besieging Boston. I’m pulling together a bunch of research on the general’s nine months in Massachusetts, so Boston 1775 will focus on that topic a lot this season.

Appointed by the Continental Congress on 15 June, Washington had arrived in Cambridge the previous afternoon, during a rainstorm, and stayed overnight in the house of the Harvard president, which still looks out on Harvard Square.

With the new commander-in-chief came Gen. Charles Lee and a small retinue of aides and servants, enslaved and free. Soon Gen. Horatio Gates would arrive, and later several companies of riflemen from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

Those commanders and soldiers embodied how Congress had accepted the New England colonies’ invitation to take over the war, turning it from a regional fight into one that involved all twelve colonies represented in Philadelphia. (Georgia was still on the fence when Washington and Lee arrived.)

Washington taking command was undoubtedly a significant event, but authors have debated just how much meaning people saw in it on 3 July 1775. Specifically, they asked what sort of ceremony, if any, took place when Washington took over.

TOMORROW: The assembled army and the Washington elm.

#TinyDeclaration

Slate magazine announced the winners of its contest to reduce the Declaration of Independence into a Twitter tweet of no more than 124 characters (plus the #TinyDeclaration hashtag).

For obvious reasons, I have to share that news:

The third runner-up, for straddling the delicate balance between the literal and humorous: @Boston1775: "We seek independence based on noble and universal ideas combined with petty and one-sided grievances."

The second runner-up, for his direct and confrontational tweet, goes to @TJMonticello: "All peeps are equal. Sick and tired of your tyrannical BS. Seeking independence. Your permission requested, not required."

The first runner-up, for both historical accuracy and a Twitter-worthy modernization of communication, goes to @badanes: "Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al."

And finally, our winner—according to his Twitter bio, a former writer for Conan O'Brien and The Daily Show—is @ApocalypseHow, for reminding us that brevity is the soul of wit: "Bye George, we've got it."

My favorite not on this list came from @NEHgov: "Dear George, it's not you. It's U.S."

Call for Papers on Boston’s North End

The recently formed North End Historical Society has issued a call for papers for the inaugural issue of its journal. The call says:

The Journal is multi-disciplinary and accepts submissions on a wide range of topics including history, geography, sociology, statistics, biography, and architecture, as well as state-of-the-field essays, book reviews, reviews of films, museum exhibitions, and Web sites.

All works must be of relevance to the North End of Boston. The inaugural issue seeks to encompass the widest possible range of North End history, from the early Puritan settlement into the present.

We encourage submission on, but do not limit to, topics such as:
• Puritan North End
• Colonial History
• Irish Immigration and Settlement
• The North End’s Jewish Community
• Portuguese in the North End
• Sacco and Vanzetti
• Gentrification and Urban Renewal
• Politics and Policy
• Architecture
• Religious History, Festivals, Churches
• Italian and Italian American History

Click here to download submission and writing guidelines. The deadline is 1 Nov 2010. The journal’s editor is Dr. James Pasto of the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Its own scholarly journal! Will folks say the neighborhood is really gentrifying now?

(Aerial photo of the North End by Juliette Melton, via Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

“Black Bostonians of the Revolution” Walking Tour

The Boston African American National Historic Site is offering a walking tour titled “Black Bostonians of the Revolution” on Saturday, 3 July, starting at 11:00 A.M.:

Join a National Park Service ranger on a guided walking tour to learn about Revolutionary War era leaders such as Prince Hall and Colonel George Middleton and how they and other early African American activists in Boston laid the foundation for the Abolition Movement and the struggle for equal rights. The tour will begin at the Samuel Adams Statue in front of Faneuil Hall and end at the Museum of African American History’s African Meeting House on Smith Court on Beacon Hill.

The tour is scheduled to take 90 minutes. It is free, and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Call 617-742-5415 for more information.

Declaration and Counter-Declaration in Lexington, 4 July

Lexington’s plans to observe Independence Day this weekend caught my eye because it includes an unusual opposition voice—and ice cream.

The Lexington Historical Society will host a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, followed by a reading of George III’s official response to it. This event will take place at the Lexington Depot starting at 7:00 P.M.

And did I mention ice cream? Folks from Rancatore’s will cross the street to sell scoops for $2.

Tunnel Under Brattle Street?

On Sunday I was at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, and the question of tunnels surfaced. Apparently some visitors have asked about tunnels from the house either down to the Charles River, or under the Charles River to Boston. Supposedly Gen. George Washington made use of these tunnels while he lived in that house during the siege of Boston. It’s not clear. Then again, it’s not true.

The old tunnel story involving that house is that its first owner, John Vassall, commissioned a passage under what is now Brattle Street to his uncle Henry Vassall’s house nearby. This story was circulating in the mid-1800s. Isabella James, née Batchelder, who grew up in that other house across the road, wrote about it in Theatrum Majorum: The Cambridge of 1776, published in 1875:

A strong belief prevails in Cambridge that a subterranean passage connects this house with Mr. H. W. Longfellow’s, and that it was constructed to enable the two Vassall families to visit each other without exposure to the outside world. Many years ago the writer with her brothers and a brother of the Poet made a progress through the cellars in a vain search after this mysterious and mythical passage-way, one of the party only retaining a conviction that if a walled-up arch of solid masonry could be opened the entrance might be found.

The “brother of the Poet” could have been Samuel, Stephen, or Alexander Wadsworth (Waddy) Longfellow; I’ll have to check with the staff at the House to know which one is most likely.

Oliver Bronson Capen’s 1904 article “Country Homes of Famous Americans” in the magazine Country Life in America apparently alluded to that exploration:

There is a tradition, the origin of which is lost in obscurity, that a subterranean passage connects the houses. A generation or so ago the children of the neighborhood set about to discover this tunnel. Sentinels were posted in both cellars, but diligent knocking of the walls and the most vigorous efforts of youthful lungs failed to unravel the mystery.

Finally, Samuel F. Batchelder, who I think was Isabella James’s little brother, tried to put the story to rest in a 1914 article for the Cambridge Historical Society called “Col. Henry Vassall and His Wife Penelope Vassall with Some Account of His Slaves.” He wrote:

A tradition of delicious mystery connects the two houses by a secret underground passage. A bricked-up arch in Colonel Henry's cellar wall appears to be the foundation of both the tradition and that part of the building. We may assume, from what we know of the owner, that the feature was much more probably the entrance to a wine vault.

Although this primitive “subway” has caved in under the prodding of modern investigation, the touch of romance indispensable for a historic mansion was supplied, up to living memory, by an absolutely authentic secret recess closed by a sliding panel. Since the “secret” of its location—by the fireplace in one of the oldest rooms—was as usual public property, there was, naturally, nothing in it.

And yet the tunnel rumor lives on today, now even longer and attached to the name of Gen. Washington.

Making the Mails Travel

Today Boston 1775 welcomes guest blogger Eric Jaffe, author of a new book titled The King’s Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America. This essay, adapted from the book, describes the development of the British postal system along the Atlantic coast, and how it got caught up in Revolutionary change.

The first American post rider left New York for Boston in January of 1673. Francis Lovelace, colonial governor of New York, made establishing a postal system his personal mission. And his personal obsession. So consumed was Lovelace with the mail that he imprudently left New York that July to discuss the system, only to be interrupted with the news that the Dutch had taken Manhattan.

Following this fateful decision, the colonial postal system endured a period of fits and starts. The new Dutch leader outlawed correspondence with New England, even jailing the English post rider John Sharpe. When Britain regained New York in 1674, Governor Thomas Dongan was authorized to set up post offices all along the East Coast, but was sent “noe power”—read: money—“to doe it.”

A lack of adequate funding plagued the young system for decades. Duncan Campbell, colonial postmaster of New England and firm believer in a system “of so great a benefit to this country,” frequently petitioned the mother country for expenses. Still, by the time his son, John Campbell, assumed this position in the early 1700s, the office lost a considerable 275 pounds a year. By late September 1703, John Campbell was soliciting colonial leaders for “some encouragement” to boost his post office, “else of necessity it must drop.”

It was Ben Franklin who finally gave the post office the “encouragement” it needed to thrive. As joint deputy postmaster general, the post office’s highest position in America, Franklin addressed the problems with mail service that had lingered, nearly unchanged, for roughly a century. He provided postmasters with precise accounting tables and demanded punctuality of his riders. “You are not,” he instructed them, “out of Friendship or Compliment to any Person whatsoever, to delay his Majesty’s Post one Quarter of an Hour.” If a letter sat unclaimed for two months, it was sent to Philadelphia—the birth of the “dead letter office.”

Later on, Franklin devised an odometer that measured distance between routes and called for the placement of milestones to both guide riders and help them calculate costs. He hung rate-tables in every office and slashed the speed of exchange between New York and Boston: “By making the Mails travel by Night as well as by Day,” he wrote, “Letters may be sent and answers received in four Days, which before took a fortnight.”

Taken altogether, Franklin’s designs essentially drew the modern postal blueprint. He made communication in America strikingly efficient. Finally, come 1761, he made it profitable. It had taken eight years, but the colonial post office finally earned money for the English government: a modest 494 pounds. Over the next three years the American office sent the mother country roughly two thousand more.

Sure enough, the throne took a renewed interest in the colonial post. King George III ordered colonies to do whatever it took so “the Posts may meet with no delays or interruptions.” Soon the crown decreed that anyone caught robbing the post “upon the King’s Highway … shall suffer Death as a Felon.” The measures largely worked. By 1774, England annually brought in 3,000 pounds from the American post.

But early that year, in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, British leaders dismissed Franklin as deputy postmaster. Anyone considered “too much of an American,” like Franklin, was replaced with postal workers willing to put British interests ahead of colonial rights. The safety of American mail, wrote Franklin, “may now be worth considering.”

Indeed, rebellious colonial printer William Goddard was considering just that. In response to Britain’s tightened grip, Goddard formulated a plan for a “constitutional” post office. Not only would Goddard’s mail service employ only American sympathizers, but any revenue would be shared within the system, rather than sent to England as a general tax.

During the spring of 1774, driven by a single-mindedness worthy of Francis Lovelace, Goddard sold his plan to colonial leaders along the Post Road between New York and Boston. Samuel Adams embraced the plan with gusto. Paul Revere called it “one of the greatest strokes that our Enemies have mett with (except the late affairs of the Tea).” At the second Continental Congress, the following year, the gatherers finally ratified the constitutional post—unanimously naming Franklin the first American postmaster general.

Thanks, Eric! Check out the King’s Best Highway website for more information on the Boston Post Road and the many things that have happened along it.

Twitter Feed, 17-27 June 2010

• Day by day @CC_1787 tweets the Constitutional Convention. (Or rt's @philly1787's tweets as last year.) Will it turn out the same? #
• From @natlheritage, a silver platter commemorating the Battle of Bunker Hill and its Masonic connections: bit.ly/cAZGJt #
• What 18th-century American town records look like: bit.ly/d5SNns And these are the well-kept ones! #
• RT @gordonbelt: 650 lbs. of bronze transformed into reproduction 67-inch 18th-century cannon at Colonial Williamsburg: bit.ly/dlWZlN #
• RT @gordonbelt: Rooms with a View: New Monticello boss opens rarely seen rooms at @TJMonticello bit.ly/b2x3st #
• RT @2palaver: Gulf crisis highlights concerns over potential drilling off Gloucester bit.ly/91JxZq #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/Hooper See #statue at #grave in #Greensboro: flic.kr/p/5RR2fN // Hooper, NC signer, grew up in Boston. #
• Last night attended James Fichter's talk on book SO GREAT A PROFFIT about early American trade with east Asia. Tea ruled! #
• Story of Capt John Callender's shame at Bunker Hill and redemption the following year: bit.ly/ak11IP #
• RT @HistoryNet: 1st novel written by an American and published in America. bit.ly/atyxD3 // Was roman à clef on Boston sex scandal! #
• Tonight attended signing by Thomas J. Fleming for reissue of NOW WE ARE ENEMIES, history of Bunker Hill. #
• Tomorrow will head to Deerfield for Dublin Seminar on "Dressing New England: Clothing, Fashion & Identity": bit.ly/9IJdP0 #
• Thomas Paine portrait vandalized in Daytona Beach Museum: bit.ly/aY7bd1 Random act or political statement? #
• Ken Burchell explores origin of Thomas Paine portrait in Florida: bit.ly/92g3AN #
• "Poetry with a Purpose" workshop for history & language arts teachers at Boston-area history sites in August: bit.ly/9TUgB2 #
• Laying out a plot of land in 18th-c Windham, Conn.: "to a heap of stons neer walnut tree…" bit.ly/aan8Pe #
• Smallpox in Boston in 1721 throws together two funeral gatherings, black and white: bit.ly/dta9wv #
• RT @NewYorkHistory: Ranger Guided Evening Strolls at Saratoga Battlefield: bit.ly/bn9hYA #
• RT @rjseaver: posted will of Elizabeth Smith (died 1758) of RI in Amanuensis Monday post - tinyurl.com/AMESmith #genealogy #
• RT @universalhub: BPL president: Still plan to shut four branch libraries, just not at end of summer. #
• Curly-haired angel/soul on gravestone of Pompey Brenton in Newport, RI, 1772: bit.ly/alglqN #
• Gravestone of Adam, 12-year-old servant (slave?) who died in Newport, RI, in 1792: bit.ly/dbsI9O #
• AP literature students have trouble recognizing that poem "The Century Quilt" reflects African-American history: bit.ly/dALZcd #
• RT @Readex: Poetry indexed in "The Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783." www.colonialmusic.org/ #
• RT @history_book: Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox - by Gareth Williams - Palgrave Macmillan. amzn.to/cxApmC #
• RT @gordonbelt: E Pluribus Confusion: the tangled history of apportioning representation since 1787: bit.ly/clCbPT #
• Colonial Williamsburg preparing to mold brass cannon, major 18th-c technical challenge, on 23 June: bit.ly/c26XLf #
• Death of Revolutionary historian and memorializer Ellen Hardin Walworth in 1915: bit.ly/agYjWl #
• RT @56Signers: 56DaysofSigners/Walton Captured signers often treated with respect befitting officers. (Not true of men from lower classes.) #
• RT @SecondVirginia: New Book: "Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution" by Ira D. Gruber fb.me/A7YpQhYk #
• RT @jmadelman: Glad to see support for Washington's HQ in Westchester - places like this got me interested in history bit.ly/bPGuD5 #
• Questions raised by 1766 gravestone in Lexington: bit.ly/chj70Z #
• RT @WilliamHogeland: More on states' declaring individual independence - Smith's (@amhistorymuseum) comment: tinyurl.com/32fcc22 #
• RT @AmerCreation: No, Mr. Beck, Jefferson Did Not Date His Documents "In the Year of Our Lord Christ" nblo.gs/5abnZ #
• RT @amhistorymuseum: 1776 one-shilling bill "emitted by a Law of the Colony of New Jersey." ow.ly/22RIX #
• At Boston1775 blog, do folks want a more detailed analysis of this gun? bit.ly/drCSYU (Not by me; by someone who knows something.) #
• Harvard has appointed Annette Gordon-Reed, scholar of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a professor of law and history. #
• Call for papers from Boston's newly formed North End Historical Society: bit.ly/bLQhcg #
• Rediscovering Sgt. Horatio J. Homer, Boston's first black police officer, on force from 1878 to 1919: bit.ly/b9dNJo #
• RT @history_book: The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714-1837 - Cambridge University Press. bit.ly/cHH0r4 // Dimension? #
• RT @history_book: Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914 - by Christine MacLeod amzn.to/9k1fJN #
• Expert doubts photograph of enslaved children announced weeks back: bit.ly/cOvmLK Most likely post-Civil War plantation nostalgia #
• Eyewitness accounts of George Washington's visit to (progress thru?) Boston in 1789: bit.ly/aYVQ50 #

“Numbers of Them Were Mounted”

As I described in my first posting about Hezekiah Wyman, the great power of his legend is how it describes the fear of the British soldiers each time they spot the white-haired farmer on his white horse, riding closer for another shot. To quote from “The White Horseman”:

“Ha!” cried the soldiers, “there comes that old fellow again, on the white horse! Look out for yourselves, for one of us has got to die, in spite of fate.” And one of them did die, for Hezekiah’s aim was true, and his principles of economy would not admit of his wasting powder or ball.

Descriptions of such British fears and the nickname “Death on the pale horse” remain in the story as retold more calmly in Henry Smith Chapman’s History of Winchester and David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride. That emotion is what made the tale stick in my mind the first time I read it.

But what evidence supports those statements? None of those tellings and retellings cite any specific accounts from British soldiers, prisoners, deserters, letters, memoirs, or newspapers. In fact, back in 1835 when the Hezekiah Wyman legend was first published as “The White Horseman,” historians had very few eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Lexington and Concord from the British side. Even now, we have several from officers, but almost none from enlisted men.

And to my knowledge, none of the surviving accounts mentions the soldiers fearing a man on a white horse. There’s a single statement about mounted provincials, from Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Regiment, first published in 1926:

Those Rebels who came in from the flanks during the march, always posted themselves in the houses and behind the walls by the roadside, and there waited the approach of the Column, when they fired at it.

Numbers of them were mounted, and when they fastened their horses at some little distance from the road, they crept down near enough to have a Shot; as soon as the Column had passed, they mounted again, and rode round until they got ahead of the Column, and found some convenient place from whence they might fire again.

These fellows were generally good marksmen, and many of the used long guns made for Duck-Shooting.

While acknowledging “generally good marksmen,” Mackenzie didn’t describe any of those men as noticeably deadly. He didn’t describe men firing with their guns laid across their saddles. He didn’t describe a white-haired rider on a white horse. In sum, there’s no British evidence for the parts of the story that make Hezekiah Wyman seem special.

As I’ve noted, there was a Hezekiah Wyman with a white horse who lived within riding distance of the fighting. But there’s no contemporaneous evidence or reliable family lore that he took part in the battle.

There are hints that the author of “The White Horseman” was aware of some Middlesex County oral traditions about 19 Apr 1775. But even if a story was going around about an old marksman striking fear into soldiers as “Death on the pale horse,” that was inspired by what Americans wished the British had felt. At most, the real Hezekiah Wyman would have been riding along with a bunch of other farmers on horseback, creeping down to a house or wall near the road, and shooting with “generally good” results.

In the end, I don’t see big contradictions or anomalies in the tale of Hezekiah Wyman to show that it must be fiction. But it’s not up to us to disprove any story we inherit from the past. The weight of the evidence has to be there for us to believe it. Barring new discoveries, I think the evidence for this tale is too light to shift it from literary legend to historical episode.

(Photo above by Alex Starr, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.)

Oral Tradition or Coincidence?

I started digging into the legend of Hezekiah Wyman after reading the brief description of that episode in David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride and later the original version, “The White Horseman” from 1835.

How, I wondered, did that purple legend, which didn’t even retell the story of the shooting on Lexington common correctly, get into so many history books? Could there nonetheless have been a real person behind the unreal tale?

A family named Wyman settled in Woburn in the early 1600s, and they had lots of male descendants. As a result, by the late 1700s you couldn’t throw a stone in parts of Middlesex County without hitting a Wyman. In the published vital records of Woburn, the list of marriages involving people named Wyman runs from the bottom of page 313 to the top of page 324.

Therefore, if an author sat down to write a fictional story about a Middlesex County farmer in 1775, and wanted a name that sounded believable, he (or she) could do a lot worse than to choose the surname Wyman.

As for the given name Hezekiah, in a study titled “Continuity and Discontinuity in Puritan Naming: Massachusetts, 1771,” Prof. Daniel Scott Smith found that Hezekiah was the 62nd most common name in his sample of taxpayers. As a comparison, the 62nd most common name for American men born in 1950—i.e., men who would be the same age as the fictional Hezekiah Wyman today—is Samuel. Not uncommon at all. (Though I have to acknowledge that the distribution of names across the population wasn’t the same.)

The name Hezekiah apparently lost popularity in America in the early 1800s. Out of a sample from the 1850 census list of 30,000 names of males born between 1800 and 1830, Douglas Galbi found fewer than 30 named Hezekiah. Of course, that was a national sample, not limited to New England, but the trend seems solid. (Presently Hezekiah is bouncing around the 900th spot as most common name for male babies in America.)

Thus, calling a character Hezekiah would signal early-19th-century readers that he dated from a previous era, the time of their grandfathers.

I therefore hypothesized that whoever wrote “The White Horseman” came up with the name Hezekiah Wyman along those lines, as a fictional character meant to evoke the old men of Revolutionary days.

Later in the nineteenth century, after the story’s original literary context in The Boston Pearl had faded away, new authors rediscovered “The White Horseman” and went looking for Hezekiah Wyman. And they found him! Okay, he wasn’t a sixty-year-old from Lexington; he was a fifty-four-year-old from what became Winchester. (Or that man’s son, from Weston.) And they found no contemporaneous evidence for a Wyman riding on 19 Apr 1775. But they were able to correct the later versions of the story that said Hezekiah was eighty years old.

Given the frequency of the names Wyman and Hezekiah, however, how unlikely was it to find a man of that name within riding distance of the Battle Road? The real Hezekiah Wyman’s 1779 will shows that he had a “white mare” (which he used with a “Horse cart”) and a “Gun.” But again, lots of established Massachusetts farmers had horses and guns.

Was the identification of the hero of “The White Horseman” with Hezekiah Wyman of Woburn like connecting the grave of Israel Bissell out in Hinsdale with a post rider on 19 April—a name that, simply by coincidence, matched an unreliable document?

Or was there some truth to the “White Horseman” legend, however its author had dressed up the details? Supporting this possibility is how the story alluded to the documented ambush of British supply wagons in Menotomy, apparently using local oral traditions not fully set down until almost thirty years later. So had the author heard a tale about a rider named Hezekiah Wyman, and decided to run with it?

In the end, I came back to the original appeal of the story.

TOMORROW: At last, the British army perspective.