“Happen’d to Swallow a Silver Spoon”

This is the 5th of November, celebrated in colonial New England as Pope Night. So it’s time for my annual invitation to visit the “5th of November in Boston” website I made for the Bostonian Society a few years back. The site traces the history of the holiday, shows Pierre Eugene du Simitière’s sketches of the 1767 celebration, and describes how Pope Night dissolved and evolved during the Revolutionary War.

Here’s an additional tidbit, quoted from the 14 Nov 1749 Boston Gazette:

Pope’s Night Disaster.
Last Monday, the 6th Instant [i.e., of this month], at Night, some of the Pope’s Attendance had some Supper as well as Money given ’em at a House in Town, one of the Company happen’d to swallow a Silver Spoon with his Victuals, marked I H S. Whoever it was is desired to return it when it comes to Hand, or if offer’d to any Body for Sale, ’tis desired it may be stop’d, and Notice given to the Printer.

This is one of the earliest printed records of Pope Night in Boston, and already the celebration was getting a bad reputation. However, the celebrants were pious enough to postpone their revelry for a day when the 5th fell on the Sabbath.

“An Exhibition of Effigies at Portsmouth”

In 1765, the Stamp Act was due to take effect on 1 November. And four days after that was the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, which young men in most American seaports celebrated with processions, bonfires, and perhaps a few hangings in effigy. New Englanders called this holiday “Pope Night.”

That year, Boston’s town fathers worked hard to convince the South End and North End gangs, led by shoemaker Ebenezer Mackintosh and shipwright Henry Swift respectively, not to have their usual Pope Night parades and brawls. They feared the violence might get out of hand, and ruin the town’s reputation. That story is pretty well known.

I didn’t know, however, that there was a similar effort on a smaller scale up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Unlike Boston, that port doesn’t appear to have had rival Pope Night gangs. But town officials did worry about the town’s young men getting out of control.

This is how Portsmouth handled the Stamp Act crisis, according to the Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s History of New Hampshire:

The person appointed distributor of stamps for New-Hampshire, was George Messerve, son of the late Colonel, who died at Louisbourg [in 1758]. He received his appointment in England, and soon after embarked for America, and arrived at Boston. Before he landed, he was informed of the opposition which was making to the act; and that it would be acceptable to the people if he would resign, which he readily did, and they welcomed him on shore.

An exhibition of effigies at Portsmouth had prepared the minds of the people there for his reception; and at his coming to town he made a second resignation, on the parade, before he went to his own house. This was accepted with the usual salutation; and every one appeared to be satisfied with the success of the popular measures. Soon after, the stamped paper destined for New-Hampshire arrived at Boston in the same vessel with that intended for Massachusetts; but there being no person in either Province who had any concern with it, it was, by order of [Massachusetts] Governor [Francis] Bernard, lodged in the castle.

The stamp-act was to commence its operation on the first day of November. . . . In the mean time, the newspapers were filled with essays, in which every plea for and against the new duties was amply discussed. These vehicles of intelligence were doomed to be loaded with a stamp; and the printers felt themselves interested in the opposition. On the last day of October, the New-Hampshire Gazette appeared with a mourning border. A body of people from the country approached the town of Portsmouth, under an apprehension that the stamps would be distributed; but being met, by a number from the town, and assured that no such thing was intended, they quietly returned.

The next day, the bells tolled, and a funeral procession was made for the Goddess of Liberty; but on depositing her in the grave, some signs of life were supposed to be discovered, and she was carried off in triumph. By such exhibitions, the spirit of the populace was kept up; though the minds of the most thoughtful persons were filled with anxiety.

It was doubtful, whether the Courts of Law could proceed without stamps; and it was certain that none could be procured. Some licentious persons began to think that debts could not be recovered, and that they might insult their creditors with impunity. On the first appearance of this disorderly spirit, associations were formed at Portsmouth, Exeter and other places, to support the Magistrates and preserve the peace.

The fifth of November had always been observed as a day of hilarity, in remembrance of the powder-plot. On the following night, a strong guard was kept in Portsmouth. By these precautions, the tendency to riot was seasonably checked, and no waste of property or personal insult was committed; though some obnoxious characters began to tremble for their safety.

“Obnoxious characters” being Belknap’s terms for supporters of the royal government.

Henry Knox on Pope Night

In the 1840s Charles Daveis was an official with the Society of the Cincinnati in Maine. He started to collect information for a biography of Gen. Henry Knox, a founder of that hereditary order who had settled in Maine (on land grants his wife Lucy had inherited from her Loyalist father).

One of the stories Daveis tried to track down involved Knox and the raucous celebration of patriotism and anti-Catholicism that Bostonians called “Pope Night.” On 21 July 1848 a Cambridge man named George Ingersoll sent Daveis a letter setting down a story he had heard from another man named Charles Hayward:

The South & North ends of Boston were, in old times, (that is that exceedgly wise & important [?] portion of the Population the boys) in decided and unceasing opposition to each other. In celebration of that immortal day the fifth of Nov. each Party had its Pope accompanied by the “gentleman in black”—there were thus the South End Pope & the North End Pope.

These two parties always continued to meet at some half way spot where a regular fight ensued (an annual battle)—which lasted until one Party drove off the other & took possession of its Pope—the victorious Party then took both Popes to some particular place—generally the Mill Pond, & then burnt them both together.

On the present occasion, one of the wheels which supported the Platform of the South End Pope came off—or broke down—this, of course, would tend to Slide off his Holiness into the Street or at least compel him to lower his head before the rival Pope which would be regarded as a Sign of Submission.

To prevent this awful catastrophe, Knox immediately placed his Shoulder under the platform & kept the Sacred image erect until the fight was over. Which way the victory turnd Mr. Hayward does not remember.

Knox at the time was not—properly speaking—a boy, but rather as Mr. Chamberlain said, a dashing young man, about 18 or so. The belligerents—by the way—on these occasions were not by any means mere boys only, but were composed also of young men.

The South End Party was then commanded by a certain Abraham Foley—usually known as Niddy-Noddy, a nickname given him from a peculiar motion of the head. This man afterwards became a Servant and at last died in the Hospital [i.e., was poor and possibly insane]. Knox as Pope man was Subject to his orders—among others of the South End Party. And here, as the Showman says, is the illustration which the anecdote affords—Foley the comander, dying in the Hospital—Knox, the dashing young man, at last the Major-General.

Over the next two years, Daveis collected similar versions of this anecdote from Hayward and from yet another man, Charles Knapp. They guessed the event had taken place in the early 1770s, but if Knox had indeed been “about 18 or so,” it would have been in the late 1760s. Ebenezer Mackintosh is well documented as the South End captain in 1764-65, but he may well have yielded the position later in the decade.

Daveis never finished his Knox biography. He left his papers to another man with the same goal, Joseph Willard—who also didn’t finish. Eventually Francis S. Drake used their research in his Life and Correspondence of Henry Knox, published in 1873. The Daveis-Willard material is now at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Vote Your Views

Last month the Boston Globe published a reader letter that managed to span two of my professional interests, so I’m quoting it on both blogs today:

Members of the Tea Party movement claim that their name was adopted from the Boston Tea Party, an act of civil disobedience against the tyrannical government of the time (“Understanding the Tea Party,’’ Letters, Oct. 12).

I contend that the name must derive from another historic tea party, namely, the one from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.’’ In that classic tale and its follow-up, “Through the Looking-Glass,’’ there exists a vast cast of characters, many reminiscent of today’s Tea Partiers who talk jabberwocky on a regular basis.

There are the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee who bicker over insignificant issues; the Red Queen who constantly orders the beheading of anyone who displeases her; and the imbecilic White Queen. And let’s not forget the Mad Hatter.

To those offended by the current use of the term Tea Party, I suggest they shift their point of reference. They’ll find that the current movement is more than aptly named.

Whatever your views, if you’re an American citizen I hope you’ve voted by the end of the day. Otherwise, those of us who do vote don’t have to listen to you.

“Lost Holiday” Talk at the Boston Public Library, 3 Nov.

This Wednesday, 3 November, I’ll give an illustrated talk at the Boston Public Library on the topic “Lost Holiday: How Colonial Boston Celebrated the Fifth of November.”

The 5th was the anniversary of the day in 1605 when English officials thwarted a plot to blow up Parliament and King James I. Authorities discovered a man named Guy Fawkes in the cellar, ready to set off barrels of gunpowder. In short order, Fawkes and several co-conspirators were arrested, tried, and executed in various gruesome ways.

The 5th of November gained new power in British culture in 1688 when William III landed at Tor Bay on that date. Soon he and his wife Mary wrested the crown of Britain from her father, James II.

The Fawkes conspirators and James II were all Catholics, the bogeymen of the eighteenth-century British Empire. New Englanders were among the king’s most stridently anti-Catholic subjects, so they observed the 5th of November holiday with particular pleasure. In fact, they highlighted its anti-Catholic message, calling it “Pope Night” and burning effigies of the Pope and the Catholic Pretenders. But then the Revolution came.

My talk starts at 6:30 P.M. It’s free and open to the public. I believe it will be in the McKim Building—the older part of the main library, near the Copley subway station.

[ADDENDUM: The B.P.L.’s event announcement.]

COMING UP: Henry Knox and the 5th of November.

George Washington: Buried Alive?!

On 12 Dec 1799, George Washington caught a cold, which turned into an infected throat. (Acute bacterial epiglottitis, according to this site on his health.) The contemporaneous notes by his secretary, Tobias Lear, describe what happened next in great detail.

The former President’s throat swelled so that he could not swallow any medicine. He called an overseer to bleed him, though his wife Martha feared he would lose too much blood. “A piece of flannel dip’d in salvolatila was put around his neck, and his feet bathed in warm water; but without affording any relief.” Then the professionals arrived:

Dr. [James] Craik came in soon after, and upon examining the General, he put a blister of Cantharides on the throat, took some more blood from him, and had a gargle of Vinegar & sage tea, and ordered some Vinegar and hot water for him to inhale the steam which he did;—but in attempting to use the gargle he was almost suffocated. . . .

Dr. [Elisha Cullen] Dick came in about 3 o’clock, and Dr. [Gustavus] Brown arrived soon after. Upon Dr. Dick’s seeing the General and consulting a few minutes with Dr. Craik he was bled again; the blood came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting. Dr. Brown came into the chamber soon after; and upon feeling the General's pulse &c. the Physicians went out together.

Washington began to put his final affairs in order: rechecking his will, authorizing Lear to settle the account books, thanking his doctors. Meanwhile, they debated Dr. Dick’s suggestion of a tracheotomy, which was then a rare and difficult surgery; Dr. Craik decided it was too risky.

On Saturday, 14 December, Washington had one more piece of business to attend to:

About ten o’clk he made several attempts to speak to me before he could effect it, at length he said,—“I am just going. Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the Vault in less than three days after I am dead.” I bowed assent, for I could not speak. He then looked at me again and said, “Do you understand me? I replied “Yes.” “Tis well” said he.

Evidently the general was afraid that he might be interred before he was truly dead. He had once seen one of his slaves revived after being thought dead, and didn’t want that possibility to be discarded too quickly.

Washington died within an hour of that conversation. The next day, 15 December, another doctor—William Thornton—arrived and proposed warming up the body to try the tracheotomy, just in case. Martha Washington declined. Lear wrote:

Mrs. Washington sent for me in the Morning and desired I would send up to Alxa. [Alexandria] and have a Cofiin made: which I did. Doctor Dick measured the body, the dimensions of which were as follows

In length	6	feet	3 1/2	inchs.	exact.
Across the shoulders	1	"	9	"	"
Across the elbows	2	"		"	"

Of course, that was the general’s length lying down.

George Washington was interred on 18 December, four days after he died—fulfilling his last request.

“The Ball Demolished His Head”

From Jeptha R. Simms’s Trappers of New York, published in 1850, comes this description of a gory incident from the Battle of Saratoga:

Among the death-daring spirits who followed [Benedict] Arnold to the Hessian camp, was Nicholas Stoner, and near the enemy’s works he was wounded in a singular manner. A cannon shot from the breastwork killed a soldier near Stoner, named Tyrrell. The ball demolished his head, sending its fragments into the face of Stoner, which was literally covered with brains, hair and fragments of the skull. He fell senseless, with the right of his head about the ear severely cut by portions of the skull bone, which injury still affects his hearing in that ear.

Shortly after, as the young fifer was missing, one Sweeney, an Irish soldier, was sent to seek out and bear him from the field; but a cannon shot whizzed so near his own head, that he soon returned without the object of his search.

Col. Livingston asked Sweeney where the lad Stoner was?

“Ja—s! colonel,” replied the soldier, “a goose has laid an egg there, and you don’t catch me to stay there!”

Lieut. William Wallace then proceeded to the spot indicated by the Irishman, and found our hero with his head reclining upon Tyrrell’s thigh, and taking him in his arms, bore him to the American camp. When young Stoner was found, a portion of the brim of his hat, say about one-fourth the size of a nine-pound shot, was observed to have been cut off very smoothly, the rest of it was covered with the ruins of the head of Tyrrell, who, to use the words of Stoner, did not know what hurt him.

(Irishmen in nineteenth-century stories are always saying, “Jaysus!”)

Nicholas Stoner was a fifer, about fifteen years old at this time, according to Simms. For more on his career (most of the details taken from Simms), here’s a 1965 American Heritage article. According to this webpage from Fulton County, New York, that photo above shows the “Nick Stoner monument at the Caroga Golf Course.”

TOMORROW: George Washington: Buried Alive?!

“The Immediate Cause of His Late Majesty’s Sudden Death”

George II died on 25 Oct 1760, at the age of seventy-seven. That was a long life, especially in the eighteenth century, but the king’s death was still sudden. About seven one morning, servants heard a thump from his rooms, and found him lying on the floor. Although the royal surgeon tried bleeding, it soon became clear that the king was most sincerely dead.

Readers of the Boston Post-Boy on 29 Dec 1760 got this news report from London, dated 4 November:

The following is an account of what appeared to the Surgeons upon opening the body of his late Majesty.

Kensington Palace Oct 26. 1760

“In obedience to the order transmitted to us by the Rt. Hon. Mr. Vice Chamberlain. We the under-signed have this day opened and examined the body of his late Majesty, in preserve of Sir Edward Wilmot, Bar[one]t and Dr Nichols, two of his late Majesty’s physicians; and first, on opening the Belly, we found all the parts therein contained in a natural and healthy state, except only that on the surface of each kidney there were some hydatides, or watery bladders, which however, we determined could not have been at this time of material consequence.

On opening the Breast we observed the pericardium or bag which contains the heart, to be very extended, which was owing to a large effusion of blood that had been discharged therein from a rupture in the substance of the right venticle [sic] of the heart. The quantity of the blood in the pericardium was at least a pint, the most of which was strongly coagulated.

The rupture of the venticle, and the consequent effusion of the blood in the pericardium, were certainly the immediate cause of his late Majesty’s sudden death. The brain lungs, and all the other parts were in a perfect state.

E. Wilmot,
Fr. Nicholls,
John Ranby.
C Hawkins[”]

The newspaper went on to say:

The case of a rupture in the heart of a great personage, is look’d upon by the medicinal gentlemen as without example, inasmuch that had the fact been certified by people of less eminent abilities in anatomy, than those to whom the inspection was committed, it would have staggered the faith of the faculty.

George II’s bowels were placed in an urn and taken to Westminster while the rest of his body laid in state in the House of Lords. The corpse was placed in a lead coffin, which was then placed in a mahogany coffin, which was finally placed in one “of lead, covered with purple velvet.” The coffins and corpse were interred “in Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey.”

I learned about this article from this article from the Historical Society about the transmission of news from Britain to North America. Typing up that article apparently triggered a spellchecker to change “hydatides” to “hydrides.”

Dr. Nicholls sent a much longer description of the autopsy to the Royal Society in 1761, and it was published the next year. It offered more detail, such as that none of the hydatides “exceeded the bulk of a common walnut”; the spelling “ventricle”; and not one but two colored images of the king’s heart. The physician also wrote that it was natural for the king to have strained his aorta just before he died, “having been at the necessary-stool.”

Some people might have seen Nicholls’s report as an invasion of royal privacy or even an affront to royal dignity. But the article stated at the outset:

The inclosed papers have been laid before the Lord Chamberlain, for his Majesty [George III]’s inspection; and his Majesty’s answer was, That he saw no reason, why they may not be made public.

Later in life George III would, of course, have his own medical problems.

TOMORROW: CSI: Saratoga.

The Blood of a Blue-Eyed King?

I read about this study in Chemical and Engineering News, but here I’m quoting from the Wired Science blog:

French revolutionists condemned Louis XVI to the guillotine on the morning of January 21, 1793. After a short but defiant speech and a menacing drum roll, one of the last kings of France lost his head as a crowd rushed the scaffold to dip handkerchiefs into his blood as mementos.

Or so the story goes.

Lending new life to the demise of Louis XVI, scientists performed a battery of DNA tests on dried blood inside a decorative gunpowder gourd that purportedly contained one such handkerchief. The results, described Oct. 12 in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, show the blood belongs to a blue-eyed male from that time period: a possible dead-ringer for the executed king.

“The next step is find a descendant either of the king or his mother,” said Davide Pettener, a population geneticist at the University of Bologna in Italy who helped with the analysis. “Otherwise we’ll have to try to get a sample of the dried heart of Louis XVI’s son.”

Scientific investigation? Blood? The dried heart of a dead child? Why, it can only be a brief return of CSI: Colonial Boston, in time for the modern Hallowe’en holiday!

TOMORROW: Another dead king.

Were Your Revolutionary Ancestors Marbleheaders?

On Thursday, 4 November, at 2:00 P.M., the Marblehead Museum will host a lecture by Walter Hickey of the National Archives on “Researching your Revolutionary War Ancestors.” The museum’s press release says:

“This lecture supports the Museum’s genealogy initiative whose current research is focusing on the soldiers of [John] Glover’s Regiment,” says Pam Peterson, Executive Director of the Museum. “Led by Board Members Dick Carlson and Lynne Ambrose, our Genealogy Committee responded to the Old Burial Hill challenge put forth at the Museum’s Annual Meeting last April. At that meeting, historical conservation expert Ivan Meyjer challenged Marbleheaders to identify the names of all 600 soldiers who are buried in that cemetery.”

(I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work. If we know that 600 soldiers are in that cemetery, then shouldn’t we know their names already? And don’t we already have the names of lots of soldiers in Glover’s regiment?)

Hickey’s presentation will take place in the J.O.J. Frost Folk Art Gallery at the Marblehead Museum, 170 Washington Street. Admission is $10 for Museum members and $15 for non-members. Because of limited space, the museum recommends making reservations at 781-631-1768.

“No Religious Test Shall Ever Be Required”

Tea Party Nation, one of the many overlapping political groups that grew out of the Republican right last year, has sent out an email stating reasons to vote against Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. Among them:

He is the only Muslim member of congress.

That’s factually wrong, as Rachel Maddow’s commenters pointed out; two Congressmen are Muslim.

It’s also directly contrary to the language of the U.S. Constitution, which states in Article VI:

…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

The Constitution doesn’t bar individual voters from exercising their private bigotries, of course. But Tea Party Nation’s message undermines that movement’s claim to comprehend and follow the Constitution better than anyone else.

Indeed, this stipulation in Article VI is significant because it’s part of the original document, predating even the Bill of Rights. In an essay at History News Network, Prof. Jon Butler of Yale, among the most respected historians of religion in early America, argues that the legislative history of the First Amendment shows Congress choosing to expand the religious freedom it implied:

In June 1789 Congress declined a proposal from James Madison for a constitutional amendment about religion that said, “nor shall any national religion be established.” In September 1789, Congress rejected several additional proposals for a narrow religion amendment. These would have prohibited establishing “one religious sect or society in preference to others,” or “establishing any religious sect or society,” or “establishing any particular denomination of religion in preference to another.”

In the final version of the First Amendment, congressmen and senators used the broader word “religion,” and when discussing the issue of “free exercise” of religion they never limited its meaning to Christianity or Judaism.

No wonder. The new states in the 1790s already exhibited exceptional religious diversity—at least twenty-five different versions of Christianity, plus Judaism and Islam—and Americans seemed more fascinated than worried about religious diversity. In 1784 Hannah Adams of Medfield, Massachusetts, found a huge audience for her book “Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects which have Appeared in the World from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day.”

That book is available online here. It’s mostly about Christian divisions and subdivisions, but Adams (shown above) discusses “the Mohammedans” in her Appendix, starting here and proceeding for thirteen pages.

Following John Singleton Copley Through the Years

The 18th-Century American Women blog has posted several entries on John Singleton Copley, colonial Boston’s self-made portrait artist. Among them is half a biography covering the first part of his career, in America.

Copley went to Europe to study shortly after his frustrated attempts to mediate the tea crisis for his in-laws, the Clarkes. He was therefore outside America when the Revolutionary War began, and there he remained. As an Anglican, a luxury craftsman, and the relative of a tea consignee, Copley’s interests all pulled him toward Britain instead of America (though he did leave his mother behind).

Copley reinvented himself in London as a history painter, breaking free of the portraits that nearly all his Americans clients had wanted. He produced some monumental images, but tended to work slowly. In America, Copley was the biggest fish in a small pond; in London, he faced much more competition, and more changes in artistic fashion.

Because Copley had left Massachusetts before the war, the state didn’t confiscate his large estate on the southwest part of Beacon Hill when it seized other absentees’ property. Some biographies suggest he lost that land as a Loyalist, but in fact he sold it to some Boston men in 1795, only to learn that the area was being developed and he might have gotten a better price.

The painter sent his oldest son, who had entered the law, to argue that the family should get the land back so he could sell it again. That went nowhere. John, Jr. (1772-1863), was more successful back in London, eventually becoming Baron Lyndhurst.

Back to the 18th-Century American Women blog. Other postings show how Copley used English engravings as models for his portraits, or borrowed clothing from such a print, or used the same dress and pose for three women in the same family. Examples like these remind us that Copley’s portraits aren’t photographs of exactly how people looked and dressed in colonial America, as lifelike as they may look; they were artistic creations, manipulated to create certain impressions.

Best Footnote of the Month

Number 14 on page 305 of Braddock’s March, by Thomas Crocker:

The first-hand accounts are conflicting and confusing as to where the flying column spent the night of July 1. Despite recent research on this phase of the march (see, e.g., Frank A. Cassell and Elizabeth W. Cassell, A Tour of Braddock’s Road from Fort Necessity to Braddock’s Field (Westmoreland Heritage) and article by Steeley, J. in Westmoreland History 7, no. 2, September 2002), historians and geographers will no doubt debate the exact location of the route of march and related encampments during the first days of July for years to come. For purposes of this narrative, however, it is sufficient to say that the army was in the middle of nowhere.

My thanks to the loyal Boston 1775 reader who alerted me to this paragraph.

Researching the Black Patriots of Rhode Island, 27 Oct.

The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University is hosting a lunchtime colloquium on Wednesday, 27 October, with Prof. Louis Wilson of Smith College on his research project, “Black Patriots in the American Revolutionary War from Rhode Island.”

He describes his project this way:

My project will attempt to reconstruct the personal history of many of the approximately eight hundred previously neglected African Americans and Native Americans who fought in various Rhode Island army units from 1775 to 1783. Using only primary documents, first, I am attempting to identify who these men were, and second to reconstruct many of the men’s personal histories before, during and after the conflict.

Ethnically the men are divided into essentially two groups—Native Americans (Indians) and African Americans (Black, Negro, Mulatto, Mustee and colored). Each served in various Rhode Island army units—local militia, state regiments and the Rhode Island Continental regiments.

I have collected information, often extensive personal information, on many of these men, including birth dates, places of birth, occupations, height, family status, wills, if they were enslaved or free at the time they enlisted, and if their discharge papers were signed by General George Washington.

This event will take place from noon to 1:30 P.M. in the Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street in Cambridge. A question-and-answer period will follow Wilson’s lecture, and attendees can feel free to bring a lunch.

The picture above shows a black soldier in the Rhode Island regiment, wearing the unit’s distinct uniform and cap, as painted by Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Verger (1762-1851) during the siege of Yorktown. Wilson aims to dig beyond such representations of a type to uncover the individual Rhode Islanders.

CHAViC Conference on Historical Prints, 12-13 Nov 2010

On 12-13 November, the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester is hosting a conference on “Historical Prints—Fact and Fiction”.

Among the presentations with Revolutionary-era content are:

• Nancy Siegel, Associate Professor of Art History, Towson University, “Savage Conflict: The ‘Indian Princess’ as Aggressor and Aggrieved in 18th-Century Prints”
• Carl Robert Keyes, Assistant Professor of History, Assumption College, “Marketing the New Nation: Patriotic Imperatives in Advertisements for Early American Prints” [a.k.a., using the Revolution to sell stuff!]
• Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Books, American Antiquarian Society, “Where Bravery, History, and Fantasy Meet: Heroic Prints in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Books”
• Allison Stagg, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art, University of London, “‘The first will grumble and the last will laugh:’ An American Audience for British Visual Humor, 1790-1810”
• Aimee E. Newell, Director of Collections, National Heritage Museum, “Educational Exercise, Decoration or Symbol of Brotherhood? The Use of Historical Prints in Early American Masonic Lodges”
• Anne Roth-Reinhardt, Ph.D. Candidate, English, University of Minnesota, “Pirate of Patriot? Representations of John Paul Jones in Melville’s Israel Potter”
• Christopher N. Phillips, Assistant Professor, English, Lafayette College, “How Benjamin West’s Prints Made Art Epic”
• Daniel C. Lewis, Dean of Communications and Humanities, Northern Virginia Community College, “Printmaker Goupil, Leutze’s Washington the Delaware [sic], and the Prints that Made it a National Icon in Nineteenth-Century America”

More details about each paper on the conference website. Registration costs $65, and folks registering after 29 October or walking in must pay $10 extra.

Who can identify the Revolutionary War event shown in the image above? Answer in the comments.

Songs in Lexington (and One Particular Song from Castle Island)

This Friday, 22 October, the Lexington Historical Society will host a reception celebrating the release of a new C.D. from Diane Taraz called Songs of the Revolution. Taraz will be joined by Jonathan Gilbert on vocals, recorder, and mandolin, and by the Lexington Historical Society Colonial Singers. The organization’s announcement says, “Drop in anytime between 7 and 9 pm,” and promises refreshments as well as music.

One song on Taraz’s album is “The Castle Island Song,” so named in Frank Moore’s Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution, published in 1856. Using the tune of “Derry Down,” that song has become a staple of Americana since being widely republished during the Bicentennial. I was already looking into its history when I saw Taraz’s C.D. for sale.

Moore stated:

These verses appeared in a broadside, a short time after the “massacre of the fifth of March,” 1770, as a “new song much in vogue among the friends to arbitrary power, and the soldiery at Castle Island, where it was composed, since the troops have evacuated the town of Boston.”

Loyalists didn’t describe themselves that way, of course; only Whigs would have called them “friends to arbitrary power.” Some historians even say the whole song was composed by Whigs as a provocation. The lyrics certainly are provocative:

You simple Bostonians, I’d have you beware,
Of your liberty Tree, I would have you take care,
For if that we chance to return to the town,
Your houses and stores will come tumbling down,
Derry down, down, hey, derry down.

If you will not agree to Old England’s laws,
I fear that King Hancock will soon get the yaws.
But he need not fear, for I swear we will,
For the want of a doctor, give him a hard pill.

A brave re-inforcement we soon think to get;
Then we will make you, poor pumpkins, to sweat;
Our drums they’ll rattle, and then you will run
To the devil himself, from the sight of a gun.

Our fleet and our army, they soon will arrive,
Then to a bleak island, you shall not us drive.
In every house, you shall have three or four,
And if that will not please you, you shall have half a score.
Derry down, down, hey, derry down.

My questions about this song start with the fact that nobody appears to have found that broadside besides Moore. It’s not mentioned in Broadsides, Ballads, &c. Printed in Massachusetts, 1639-1800 (1922) or Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution (1976). No copies are reproduced in the Archive of Americana or American Memory databases.

I associate the phrase “King Hancock” with the mid-1770s, and the lyrics about “Our fleet and our army” and “In every house” seem to reflect understandings dating from years or decades after 1770. “The Castle Island Song” can be lovely music, but I suspect it really belongs in the category of “remembering the Revolution.”

Ben Carp at the Old South Meetinghouse, 21 Oct.

I’ve mentioned this before, but at 6:30 P.M. on Thursday, 21 October, Prof. Benjamin Carp of Tufts will be speaking at the Old South Meetinghouse about his new book, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America.

Now if you search at Powell’s online bookstore for titles that include the phrase “Making of America,” you get no fewer than 166 hits. But the Boston Tea Party really was a crucial event in the colonies’ break with Britain. And it’s been a celebrated, symbolically laden event ever since the 1830s, when its memory bubbled back up into our national consciousness.

Almost every American has heard about the Tea Party, especially these days. But relatively few of us, I dare say, would be able to explain why Boston Patriots thought it was so very important to prevent that tea from being landed in North America. Defiance of the Patriots discusses the Tea Party’s local, continental, and worldwide causes and ramifications, and assesses the evidence about which men and boys were involved.

Ben’s spoken before many groups as he’s researched and written this book, including one or two previous appearances at Old South, where Bostonians met to protest the tea tax. But I understand he’s figured out a way to do something fresh for this event. It will be an interview rather than a lecture, with Marty Blatt, historian for the Boston National Historical Park, posing questions—including some submitted from the audience.

So read up on the Tea Party (last week Ben published this op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal) and bring your questions to the Meetinghouse on Thursday evening.

Because We Must All Be Connected All the Time

Though I like a lot of people on Facebook, I still have no emotional connection to the service itself besides frequent puzzlement. In contrast, I enjoy Twitter and post a lot of little things there. I even came in third in a tweet contest!

Boston 1775 readers might remember that I used to round up my Twitter postings and run them in big long lists when I wanted to take a break from essays had many important links and comments to share. I was using Loudtwitter to collect those postings for me.

Then the gent who’d set up Loudtwitter gratis decided not to maintain it further, and no one else has picked up the ball (yet). I tried another site called Twittinesis, and it seems to be oversubscribed. Meanwhile my time-wasting chatter important links and comments kept growing.

I’ve now added a Twitter feed in the column to the left. I tried three different gadgets, including the official Twitter code, before deciding on this one. It’s not ideal—this set-up takes two clicks and two new tabs/windows to get to the material I’m linking to. But it fits and works better than the other possibilities.

If anyone has recommendations for a better gadget (needs: flexible formatting, direct links outside the little feed window), or for an aggregator that works as Loudtwitter did (or better), please let me know.

Mission US, or My First and Last Post about Videogames

It’s always a printer’s apprentice. Where does Johnny Tremain end up working? At the Boston Observer newspaper. Where do the Liberty’s Kids kids meet? In Benjamin Franklin’s shop, as I recall. Where does the hero of one of my unfinished novels hang out after leaving the ropewalk? At Edes and Gill’s printshop, and then Isaiah Thomas’s.

And here’s Mission US, a new online game from Channel Thirteen in New York. Its introduction says:

Mission US is a multimedia project featuring free interactive adventure games set in different eras of U.S. history. The first game, Mission 1: “For Crown or Colony?,” puts the player in the shoes of Nat Wheeler, a 14-year-old printer’s apprentice in 1770 Boston. As Nat navigates the city and completes tasks, he encounters a spectrum of people living and working there when tensions mount before the Boston Massacre. Ultimately, the player determines Nat’s fate by deciding where his loyalties lie.

Nat works for printer Benjamin Edes, who’s a character in the game. Other real people include Edes’s wife Martha, Phillis Wheatley, Pvt. Hugh White, and Paul Revere. I haven’t tried Mission US myself, but welcome comments from any historically-minded gamers in the target audience.

As for the popularity of printer’s apprentices as protagonists in historical fiction, it’s an easy way to make a young character privy to important information, and to give him (or in some cases her) work that modern readers can understand. Plus, writers feel a natural affinity for other people who work with the printed word. I rather wish I’d figured that out before I plotted my novel around a possible cliché.

Learning about John Adams and Abraham Whipple

On Thursday I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society discussing a chapter from Richard Ryerson’s intellectual biography of John Adams. A former editor of the Adams Papers, Dick is writing this book for Johns Hopkins University Press. He described how he started out focusing on Adams’s formal essays, tracing how the lawyer developed his notions of republicanism. Gradually he’s adding thoughts on how Adams’s life might have affected his political philosophy—which of course makes for much bigger chapters.

Among the topics we attendees discussed was how to handle Adams's vice presidency and presidency. He wrote no major political essays between 1791 and 1801, but he actually got/had to act on his ideas and ideals. I sensed the book getting longer still.

I still feel dubious about any of John Adams’s pronouncements that he was the only man on one side of a particular issue, and/or was brave to hold that position. Specifically, we discussed this remark in his Thoughts on Government from 1776:

A man must be indifferent to the sneers of modern English men, to mention in their company the names of Sidney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly. No small fortitude is necessary to confess that one has read them.

Many of these political writers came from the period of the British Commonwealth, or were invoked to defend that supposedly non-monarchical government. Cromwell’s rule was seen as a mistake in Britain, and no longer openly celebrated even in New England. But to say one needed “No small fortitude” to admit to reading John Locke? Come on, John.

Curiously, on 27 March of that year Adams wrote to William Hooper: “In my early Youth, the Works of Sidney, Harrington, Lock, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, Hoadley, were put into my Hands…” So supposedly those same sneered-at authors—in the same order—were suitable reading for a man in “early Youth.”

The next day I sat in on a talk by Prof. Sheldon S. Cohen on his new biography of Commodore Abraham Whipple of Rhode Island. Like most of the top American naval officers of the Revolutionary War, Whipple had a stormy career. It’s actually pretty remarkable that we remember any naval commanders at all, they went up and down so fast. (It’s even more remarkable that the one we do remember is the tempestuous and unpopular John Paul Jones.)

After the war Whipple tried to retire to a plantation in Rhode Island, but suffered in the 1780s economy. He and his family moved to the new territory of Ohio and helped to settle the city of Marietta. How did a seaman adjust to life in a landlocked state? Cohen explained how Whipple and his fellow settlers built a shipyard on the Ohio River and started to transport goods downstream to New Orleans.