Stones in My Passway

Earlier this month, the Boston Globe reported that the cobblestone circle set out to mark the site of the Boston Massacre (shown here in a Globe file photo) had been removed for roadwork and eventual replacement. Boston 1775 friend Charles Bahne wrote into the paper with a historic perspective, and has graciously offered his full letter for posting here.

As a historian and tour guide, I regularly point out the circle of stones marking the Boston Massacre site in front of the Old State House. I was shocked to see the stones missing a few days ago, and I thank the Globe for printing an explanation.

This will not be the first time that subway construction has required the stones’ relocation. They were originally placed in the street pavement in 1887 near the corner of State and Exchange Streets, much closer to the present site of 60 State Street. (Exchange Street is now gone, but it roughly corresponded with the southbound lanes of Congress Street.)

In 1904 they were removed to allow construction of the subway to East Boston, and replaced in a new site right in the middle of the intersection, near where James Caldwell had died.

Again in the 1960s, when urban renewal caused reconfiguration of the streets, the circle of stones was moved to its most recent site, apparently chosen simply because that’s where the city wanted to place a traffic island.

All this means that the circle of stones no longer represents the spot “where Crispus Attucks fell.” To stand on that site, you'd have to go back to the 1887 location of the stones, and you’d probably get hit by a truck as soon as the traffic signal changed.

I’ve long marveled at how research located the Massacre exactly where city planners saw the need for a traffic island. Now I understand how the process of historic revision continually updates the accuracy of that siting, reflecting the changing present’s priorities and interests.

“British Troops barricade Boston harbor against the Beast from the Unknown”

An historic-style print by “European artist Franz Xaver Habermann” available through Etsy.

The same shop also offers an engraving of John Trumbull’s “Signing of the Declaration of Independence,” with carefully researched portraits of the notables “John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Metallo the Mechanical Man, Charles Thompson, and John Hancock (seated).”

(Hat tip to Benjamin Carp.)

Hold-Up at Barrett’s Farm

The National Parks Conservation Association is the non-profit group that advocates for the U.S. of A.’s National Park System. In the group’s Spring/Summer 2011 newsletter, Northeast Regional Director Alexander R. Brash’s “What Would Sam Adams Say?” sounds the alarm about a delay in funding an important expansion of Minute Man National Historical Park.

The essay includes some historical errors. Paul Revere didn’t originally intend to ride to Concord, for instance, and he never made it that far. The skirmish at the North Bridge wasn’t “for the possession” of James Barrett’s farm; the militia companies massed on the rise above that bridge let three companies of regulars march off in that direction. They advanced on the three additional companies assigned to hold that bridge because they were alarmed at the sight of smoke from the center of town.

But Brash is right on target when he writes about the importance of Barrett’s farm on 19 Apr 1775. That was the end goal of the British army march. It was the top item on Gen. Thomas Gage’s list of places for his troops to search. Barrett, a militia colonel, had indeed been hiding weapons for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress there.

A few years ago the group Save Our Heritage began work to preserve the site and make it available to the Park Service. In April 2009 Congress authorized the park to expand and incorporate that site. Yet Barrett’s farm is still not part of the Minute Man park.

Brash writes:

There is a grim irony that in Washington D.C., the very people who brand their efforts with the iconic patriotic emblems of the American Revolution now thwart their preservation for posterity. . . .

Since the Revolution, Colonel Barrett’s house and farm has been owned by only two families, and today the fragile structure stands much as it did then. The current owners have been holding on, just waiting to close a deal so that the last piece of the story’s puzzle can be placed safely, and for posterity, inside Minuteman National Park. The owners are more than willing sellers, and not a soul for miles around would stand in the way of the farm house’s inclusion in the park.

But with the recent turmoil in Congress, the National Park Service has been prevented from advancing its efforts to purchase this site. The site was included within the park’s boundaries several years ago, the sellers are willing, yet funding has been tied up for over a year by Congressional turmoil. All that remains is for money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to be freed up so that the National Park Service can close the deal.

That fund, according to its website, “receives money mostly from fees paid by companies drilling offshore for oil and gas,” up to $900 million per year. Congress has never authorized spending that full amount, and according to American Trails and the National Resources Defense Council, the current Republican-controlled House of Representatives started the year with a budget bill (H.R. 1) that cut $393 million from the previous year’s L.W.C.F. outlay, leaving only $58 million to cover the whole country. That budget has no chance of becoming law, but until the Interior Department does have a budget the fund can’t buy the Barrett property.

The Younger Samuel Dana

I’ve been tracing the Revolutionary experiences of the Rev. Samuel Dana of Groton, from comfortably ensconced minister to reviled Loyalist who nonetheless declined to leave town, to Presbyterian preacher, and finally to respected jurist in New Hampshire.

The former minister’s younger son, also named Samuel, was only eight years old when his father lost his pulpit. He continued growing up in Groton, went to Harvard, and in 1789 returned to his home town. This Samuel Dana became a prominent attorney, a representative in the state legislature and in Congress, and a judge. As a result, nineteenth-century Groton historians couldn’t say too many bad things about his father.

One thing chronicler Caleb Butler did write about the son was:

In the latter part of his life there seemed to be a want of fixedness of purpose in Judge Dana’s pursuits. . . . He was occasionally subject to undue elevations and depressions of spirit, which caused instability in his undertakings and pursuits.

That sounds an awful lot like what we’d call manic-depressive or bipolar disorder. Perhaps both Samuel Danas had the condition, and it was a factor in how the father defied his community’s political and religious unity.

(The picture above comes from the Find-a-Grave page for the younger Samuel Dana. I don’t know the source, and the hairstyle, clothing, and pose seem more appropriate for a man of his father’s generation.)

“Should Forget and Forgive Every Thing of a Political Nature”

Despite being voted out of the pulpit and reportedly shot at, the Rev. Samuel Dana never moved out of Groton during the Revolutionary War. He apparently accepted the political changes that followed. But he didn’t keep quiet on religious matters. In 1778 Dana even wrote a letter to the Groton church objecting to the ordination of Daniel Chaplin as his successor. There was also the issue of a bequest:

At a church meeting, July 5, 1782, the four deacons Farwell, Stone, Farnsworth, and Bancroft, with Israel Robert, Esq., were chosen trustees of the twenty pounds given by Jonathan Lawrence for the benefit of the ordained minister or ministers of Groton, with power to take and receive the same of Samuel Dana, the late pastor; if need be, to sue him upon his bond given therefor. Also to offer the same to Rev. Daniel Chaplin, if he will receive it, otherwise put it out upon interest, and pay over to said Chaplin the interest thereon.

The church records don’t mention that money again, suggesting that Dana turned it over as asked.

Later that year, a deeper dispute erupted. Josiah Sartell, who back in 1775 had been a member of the committee of correspondence who met with Dana, helped to found what the majority Congregationalists called “an irregular society.” Sartell and a number of other citizens had become…Presbyterians.

Presbyterianism seems to have spread to Groton from Londonderry, New Hampshire. Some adherents went over the state border for services, but Sartell and others asked Dana to preach to them in Groton. He reportedly did so for about a year and a half.

Caleb Butler’s history of Groton states:

In December, 1785, the Rev. Samuel Dana asked a dismission [as a member] from the church in Groton, and a recommendation to the church in Amherst, New Hampshire. He also communicated a letter addressed to the church in Groton, from the Presbyterian churches in Boston, Peterboro’ and others, informing, that they had taken the Presbyterian church in Groton under their care.

Whereupon, the church chose a committee to consider the application of Mr. Dana, and said letter, and also to consider what measures should be taken with other members of this church, who had partaken of the ordinances with Presbyterians. This committee afterwards reported in substance, that the church should forget and forgive every thing of a political nature where Mr. Dana had offended, while their pastor; but that his conduct since his dismission, in preaching and administering the ordinances to the Presbyterians, they could not forgive; but recommend, that a committee be chosen to confer with him on the subject, whenever he should come to Groton. Accordingly, a committee of ten were chosen for that purpose.

By then Dana was already settled in Amherst. Reportedly he was named executor for the will of a lawyer, took that man’s books into his house, and started studying. Soon he was practicing law himself. Eventually Dana became a probate judge for Hillsborough County, a state legislator, and a master in the local Freemasons lodge. When he died in 1798, Dana was buried with full Masonic honors, attended by members from Groton as well as other towns.

TOMORROW: The minister’s second son.

“To Preserve Him and His Family and Substance from Injury and Abuse”

At the top of New England rural society were a town’s wealthy landowners and professionals, its selectmen, its militia officers, and—once political turmoil reached its boiling point in 1774-75—its local committee of correspondence. Those groups overlapped a lot, and they and their children tended to intermarry.

Usually the town minister was part of that class, but in Groton in 1775 the Rev. Samuel Dana was siding with the Crown, and therefore unpopular. Even so, his genteel neighbors didn’t want to see a mob hurt harm him, for several overlapping reasons: class solidarity, dislike of disorder, a wish to preserve the town’s reputation, &c.

In early May 1775, a committee of local bigwigs met with Dana and brought the following report to the town meeting:

This memorandum witnesseth, that at a conference between Dr. Oliver Prescott, Capt. Josiah Sartell, Dea. Isaac Farnsworth and Benjamin Bancroft, Ensign Moses Child and Mr. Jona. Clark Lewis, on the one side, and the Rev. Samuel Dana, on the other side, it was proposed and agreed to by all parties, that the pastoral relation between the said Samuel Dana and the inhabitants of Groton, should be dissolved, on conditions, the town when properly met shall judge it expedient, and at the same time will restore the said Samuel Dana to the usual privileges and advantages of society and neighborhood, and use their influence to preserve him and his family and substance from injury and abuse, either from the inhabitants of this, or any of the neighboring towns. The said Samuel Dana, at the same time, giving the town the reasonable assurance in his power, that he will not only not oppose their political measures, but will unite with them agreeable to the advice of the Continental and Provincial Congresses, and the votes of the town.

Groton’s official committee of correspondence, which consisted of Prescott, Sartell, Farnsworth, and Child, as well as James Prescott, presented that agreement to the town meeting on 15 May. (That meeting probably took place in the town church, which doubled as the public meeting-house.) The committee also apparently offered a text that Dana would have to sign:

I, The Subscriber, being deeply affected with the Miseries bro’t on this Country, by a horrid Thirst for ill-got Wealth and unconstitutional Power—and lamenting my Unhappiness, in being left to adopt Principles in Politics different from the Generality of my Countrymen; and thence to conduct in a Manner that has but too justly excited the Jealousy and Resentment of the true Sons of Liberty against me, earnestly desirous, at the same Time, to give them all the Satisfaction in my Power do hereby sincerely ask Forgiveness of all such for whatever I have said or done, that had the least Tendency to the Injury of my Country, assuring them that it is my full Purpose, in my proper Sphere, to unite with them, in all those laudable and fit Measures, that have been recommended by the Continental and Provincial Congresses, for the Salvation of this Country, hoping my future Conversation and Conduct will fully prove the Uprightness of my present Professions.

According to the town’s records of that meeting:

the Rev. Samuel Dana came into the meeting, and after some conference with the town, and the memorandum above being read and duly considered, he, the said Dana, desired the town would grant him a dismission from his pastoral relation and office, in the said town; whereupon, the town voted nem. contract, that the said Samuel Dana be dismissed from his pastoral relation and office aforesaid, and he is hereby finally discharged therefrom accordingly.

But that consensus among the gentlemen and yeomen wealthy enough to vote in town meeting didn’t put an end to the troubles. Part of the problem might have been that Dana didn’t sign the document right away.

Around 20 May, Jason Russell and John Tarbell of Mason, New Hampshire, went into a pasture Dana owned in that town and “took from thence a three year heifer, and killed and converted it to their own use.” The Mason committee summoned the men and “required of the offenders full satisfaction therefor.” The two men refused. The Mason leaders called in the committees from New Ipswich and Temple. But Russell and Tarbell, the committeemen reported, “not only neglected to make their appearance before us, but, as we learn, have fled to the Army.”

Ordinary people in and around Groton might have been signaling Dana and his genteel protectors that his property was fair game, and that he might be, too. That in turn might have been enough to make him sign the town’s document on 22 May. It was printed in the New-England Chronicle the following month along with the committee’s report. 

Finally, the Groton church met on 29 May, after a summons by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, and voted, “that what Mr. Samuel Dana has offered to the public for satisfaction, for his conduct in political matters, is by no means satisfactory to this church, as a brother.” The congregation formally dismissed Dana from their pulpit.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Samuel Dana?

Groton Seeks a New Minister

By April 1775, as described yesterday, the Patriot majority in Groton and their Loyalist minister, the Rev. Samuel Dana, were at a stalemate. Dana refused to call a meeting of the church members, where they could dismiss him. The congregation apparently felt they couldn’t call a meeting on their own authority, at least in part because Dana said he wouldn’t show up.

According to historian Caleb Butler, local tradition held that at some point, probably after war began at Lexington and Concord, “the inhabitants were so enraged, that they shot bullets into Mr. Dana’s house, to the great danger of his life and the lives of his family.” Nevertheless, the minister didn’t leave town and seek the protection of the British army in Boston.

Groton’s town leaders sought a replacement. On 5 May, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper (shown here), a Patriot who had slipped out of Boston to Weston just before the war, received a visit from Dr. Oliver Prescott of Groton. The physician “propos’d my Supplying their Pulpit.”

Cooper was apparently reluctant, perhaps because Groton was far from the political action in Watertown and Cambridge. He suggested that his host, the Rev. Samuel Woodward, should handle the Groton job while he filled in for Woodward. But the Weston minister didn’t agree.

As I discussed back here, on Saturday, 13 May, Cooper heard that Concord’s minister, the Rev. William Emerson, “was to supply Groton,” so he promised to preach the next day at Concord, no doubt happy to escape the long trip. Instead, both men showed up at Concord’s meeting-house, and the Groton congregation was presumably left waiting.

On 21 May, Cooper wrote that he preached at Concord and “Mr. Emerson for me at Groton,” indicating that he felt some responsibility to serve that town. On Saturday, 27 May, he finally set out “in my Chaise for Groton,” stopping along the way at Acton, Littleton, and the house of a man named Rogers for coffee. The next day, Cooper wrote, he:

Pch’d all day at Groton; spoke with Mr. Dana after Service a.m. din’d at Dr. Prescot’s baptiz’d a child P. M. Slept and Horse kept at Dr. Prescot’s.

The Groton church record notes that Cooper did something else as well:

Rev. Dr. Cooper, of Boston, preached, and was desired by the deacons and some of the brethren of the church to appoint a church meeting, to be held at the public meeting-house on the next Monday.

Cooper issued that call for a meeting, breaking the stalemate. Between then and 18 October, he preached in Groton on six Sundays, and received £60 Old Tenor. The congregation might have thought that money well spent because they got to fix their Dana problem.

TOMORROW: Class conflict over dealing with Dana.

Rev. Samuel Dana: “not allowed to enter the meeting-house”

In early 1775, the Rev. Samuel Dana (1739-1798) had been the minister in Groton for nearly fourteen years. But in his thinking he was a Loyalist. Caleb Butler’s 1848 town history states:

On a Sabbath in March, 1775, he preached a sermon which gave great offence to the people, who were generally inclined to unwavering resistance. . . . This was called the windy sermon, from the circumstance that it was on a very windy day, and while being delivered one of the horse stables was blown down.

As a result, according to Butler, Dana “was not allowed to enter the meeting-house on the next Sabbath.”

On 21 March the Groton church members met “to transact any matters they may judge proper, to put an end to the unhappy differences subsisting among us.” However, according to the official record—set down by Dana—they adjourned “after a few hours spent in saying but little, and doing nothing.” On the 27th, he wrote:

Church met, had a long conference, but they refusing to make any formal charges against the pastor, and the pastor refusing to make any confessions, till he should first know what would be satisfactory; the meeting was finally dissolved without any vote being called, except to try their minds with regard to deferring the sacrament for the present, and dissolve the meeting, both which passed in the affirmative.

The record was then taken over by someone else, who reported:

After the church meeting, on the 27th of March, 1775, was dissolved, they could not obtain another meeting by the appointment of their late pastor, notwithstanding they had informed him of a great many of their grievances, and repeatedly desired him to call a church meeting, both by verbal and written requests, one of which was signed by a great majority of said church, but received for answer, that he would not call a church meeting, nor attend one of their calling; saying, You may do as you please; I must do as I can.

That spring Groton’s Patriot leaders tried to get every householder in town to pledge not to import goods from Britain or have anything to do with anyone who did. As of 12 April, Dana and three other men were the only inhabitants who refused to sign.

That was the stalemate in Groton when the war began.

TOMORROW: And of course a war makes it so much easier to resolve disagreements peacefully.

(Photograph of Groton’s 1755 meetinghouse as it looks today by James Walsh, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.)

When Did Henry Knox Leave Boston?

One of the historical questions I’ve puzzled over is when Henry and Lucy Knox left Boston, making a break with her Loyalist father, Thomas Flucker, whom they never saw again. The family papers offer little clue.

Knox’s earliest biographer, Samuel A. Drake, wrote in 1873:

Just one year from the day of his marriage [on 16 June 1774] Knox quitted Boston in disguise (his departure having been interdicted by [Gen. Thomas] Gage), accompanied by his wife, who had quilted into the lining of her cloak the sword with which her husband was to carve out a successful military career.

Drake offered no source for that probably overdramatic sentence, but it was the earliest statement I’d found. Noah Brooks’s 1900 biography said the Knoxes left Boston on 19 April, again without support, and that book is unreliable on other matters. So my best guess was still Drake’s June date.

But I recently spotted a clue in the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper’s diary for 14 May 1775. The day before, he wrote, he had gone to Concord and found the Rev. William Emerson absent. Cooper “engag’d to p[rea]ch for him on the Morrow, while he was to supply Groton.” So on Sunday the Rev. Mr. Cooper

Went to Concord with [daughter] Nabby. put my Horse at Mr [Ebenezer] Hubbard’s, found to my Surprize Mr. Emerson at the Meeting House Door. He pray’d I pch’d a.m. f’m, the Consolation of Israel. We din’d at Mr Emerson’s, with Mr. Knox and Wife of Boston. I pray’d Mr Emerson pch’d p.m. we drank Coffee at Mr Hubbards. slept at Mr. [Samuel P.] Savages. Horse at [Joseph] Russell’s.

There were a few other men named Knox in and around Boston in 1775, but Henry was the most prominent. So it appears the Knoxes were out of Boston and heading west by 14 May. Emerson’s more spotty diaries say nothing about them, but of course he didn’t know they would be famous.

TOMORROW: So who preached at Groton?

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 3

The teen-aged Benjamin Thompson was clearly excited to be working in Boston in 1769, not in his home town of Woburn or even the smaller port of Salem. He sketched his master Hopestill Capen’s building in his notebook, marking the shop where he worked and the dormer attic room where he lived.

Benjamin signed up for private lessons in French and “the Back-Sword” from a Scottish army veteran named Donald McAlpine, and drew fencers in his notebook. Then he ended up skipping half the French lessons.

Meanwhile, Benjamin was supposed to be working in Capen’s dry-goods shop. But according to an 1837 profile in The American Journal of Science and Arts:

Mr. Capen once told his [Benjamin’s] mother, that “he oftener found her son under the counter, with gimblets, knife, and saw, constructing some little machine, or looking over some book of science, than behind it, arranging the cloths or waiting upon customers.”

According to his home-town friend Loammi Baldwin, Benjamin was already working on a perpetual-motion machine, and that’s bound to take up all of one’s time.

By the spring of 1770, Benjamin Thompson was back at his mother’s house in Woburn, having shown he was thoroughly unsuited for work as an apprentice. But he was on his way to becoming Count Rumford, one of the greatest scientists of his age.

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 2

Yesterday I described how as a teenager Benjamin Thompson left his first apprenticeship in Salem at age sixteen and sought work in the Boston shop of Hopestill Capen, at the “Sign of the Cornfields.” His old master, John Appleton, evidently agreed to the equivalent of selling the indenture contract. On 19 Oct 1769 Benjamin wrote back with thanks:

I take this oppertunity to inform you that I am Come to Live with Mr Hopestill Capen. I like him and his Family very well as yet. I am Greatly obliged to you for your kind Recommendation of me to Mr. Capen, and shall always retain a Gratefull Sense of the many other Kindness’s I always Recd Whilest I remained with you.

Never shall I Live at a place again that I delighted so much as at your house nor with a Kinder Master. My Guardian says he will Come to Salem and pay you some money very soon, which he expects dayly. Sir I would beg of you not to Give yourself any Concern or Trouble about it as you may depend upon having the Money Very soon.

And he had just a few favors to ask.

Sir if you would Give yourself the Trouble to send Round my things that remain at your house I shall Be obliged to you, and if you will send down the two trunks which I improved [i.e., used] whilest at your house and Charge them to me I will send you the money; please to put up all my small things you can find, vizt scates, hautboy, some Blue paper, a box of Crayons, or dry Colours, some Books, Together with all my Things remaining at your house. Please to stow them in the Trunk that stands in the Kitchen Chamber and please to put that, that stands in the Garret on Board Mr West with it and desire him to Bring them down the first oppertunity. I shall Come to Salem the first opportunity that I can be Spared.

Meanwhile, Capen was probably teaching young Benjamin (who was obviously a boy of many talents) how to serve customers in his shop.

TOMORROW: And how did that work out?

Benjamin Thompson: Worst Apprentice in the World, part 1

In 1766, at the age of thirteen, Benjamin Thompson of Woburn was indentured to John Appleton, a Salem merchant. He was a bright and ambitious lad, and had apparently sought extra lessons from a minister in town.

Benjamin did not, however, throw himself into the clerical work Appleton probably assigned to him.

Three years later, well before his indenture was to expire, Benjamin showed up at the Boston dry-goods shop of Hopestill Capen (in the building that now houses the Union Oyster Shop, shown here) and asked for a position there.

Capen wrote to Appleton on 11 Oct 1769:

I understand that you have had a young Ladd, not long since, that live with you, named Benja. Thompson. He now offers himself to live with me, saying that he was sick was the Occasion of his comeing from you, and that now Business is Dull, you dont want him.

I should be greatly oblig’d to you if you will Inform me by the first oppertunity If he be clear with you or not; if he is, please to give me his True Character, as to his Honesty, Temper and Qualifications as a Shop Keeper. Such a lad will suit me if he can be well Recommended, and as he is a stranger to me I know of no body else that can be so good a Judge of him as you.

Benjamin had indeed left Appleton to go home to Woburn and recuperate, but not because he’d been “sick.” He had injured himself making fireworks.

Appleton apparently sent Capen a letter recommending young Benjamin. Perhaps he wanted to get rid of the lad.

TOMORROW (assuming Blogger will cooperate): Benjamin has a message for his old master.

Marblehead Samplers Lecture, 19 May

The Marblehead Museum is hosting a lecture on "The Singular Style of Marblehead Samplers" on Thursday, 19 May, by curator Karen MacInnis. The museum's press release says:

The collection of samplers and needlework at the Marblehead Museum is exceptional. Made by young girls and women, these works have much to tell the viewer about their makers' skills and the life and times in which they were made.

MacInnis has studied these and other needlework pieces, and is knowledgeable about their importance. She has consulted at the Lynn Museum, the Wenham Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, and has contributed to needlework surveys. She is Vice President of the Board at the Bellingham Cary House, and a Trustee of the Salisbury Library.

The talk will start at 7:30 P.M. at the museum, 170 Washington Street in Marblehead. Admission is $10 for museum members and $15 for others. Reservations are recommended; call 781-631-1768.

Finding Washington’s “Welch Mountains”

Boston 1775 readers come through again! Last week I wrote about my frustrated quest to locate “the Welch Mountains,” which Joseph Reed’s notes of a July 1775 council of war stated would be the Continental Army’s rendezvous point if the British forces overwhelmed the siege lines around Boston.

Authors linked to west Cambridge/Arlington felt that those Welch mountains must be in (surprise!) west Cambridge/Arlington. Local historians would of course be in the best position to know local geographic terms, but they’d also be the most eager to claim that their local sites were historically significant. The Arlington authors had to acknowledge that they couldn’t find anyone who recognized that term for the Arlington hills. I couldn’t find any use of it not traceable back to Reed’s notes.

This week Stephenson Taylor Clark wrote by email:

The first meeting between [Gen. George] Washington and his council of war is also reported in Charles Martyn’s Life of Artemas Ward, page 165-166 as follows:

“The council unanimously decided to maintain the posts taken under General Ward and also agreed not to attempt ‘to take possession of Dorchester Point nor to oppose the enemy if they should attempt to possess it.’ It estimated that an army of ‘at least 22,000’ was necessary to maintain the siege—5000 more than the existing total enrollment and 7500 more than the number of those returned as ‘fit for duty.’ It directed the commander-in-chief to apply to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for temporary reinforcements [i.e., militia], and ordered a campaign to stimulate recruiting. Weld’s Hill, in the rear of the Roxbury positions, was chosen as a rendezvous in the event of the army being dispersed by a British attack.”

Weld Hills is, according to the maps, in the right location around Jamaica Plains. The original transcribers of Washington’s report (I have not seen the primary document so this is an educated guess) probably got “Welch” for “Weld’s”, an easy mistake. Interpreting Washington’s papers (reading his hand and those of his many secretaries) was and is a monumnetal ongoing task.

With that alert, I was able to find an earlier identification in Francis S. Drake’s history of Roxbury, first published in 1878. It probably influenced Martyn:

It was further agreed that if the troops should be attacked and routed by the enemy, the place of rendezvous should be Weld’s Hill, in the rear of the Roxbury lines. This hill, erroneously called Wales’s Hill, by Mr. [Jared] Sparks and others, is the high eminence on what was the Bussey farm. This point covered the road to Dedham, where the army supplies were stored.

The Jamaica Plain Historical Society says that hill is now “Bussey Hill in the Arboretum,” named after the man who owned the land from 1806 to 1842. The society also has a webpage on the Weld family’s original holdings.

Other parts of the region are named “Weld Hill Street,” “Walk Hill,” and of course the Forest Hills Cemetery. A webpage on the neighborhood’s green spaces from Harvard, which owns the Arboretum, says:

As the names “Weld Hill” and “Walk Hill” imply, the topography is steep. Hills slope upward from Hyde Park Avenue. Outcroppings of Roxbury Puddingstone dot the landscape.

I suspect that the Massachusetts generals in council were thinking of all of those hills, and Reed, a Philadelphian unfamiliar with the area, wrote down with the hopeful term “the Weld Mountains.”

I haven’t found uses of “Weld Mountains” or “Hill(s)” in newspapers from 1775, but the phrase “Weld Hill” has remained in local use to this day.

How the Governor’s Council Was Elected in 1780

The Massachusetts constitution of 1780, drafted largely by John Adams, kept the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court from the colonial charter, and created a new upper house, the state Senate.

But it also kept the original upper house, called the Council, to advise the governor (originally John Hancock, show here) and approve all judicial appointments, Continental military appointments, and emissions of money.

Back in 1780, the Council was chosen in two stages. According to Chapter 1, Section 2, Article 1:

There shall be annually elected [on the first Monday in April], by the freeholders and other inhabitants of this commonwealth, qualified as in this constitution is provided, forty persons to be councillors and senators, for the year ensuing their election…

A later clause restricted voters in that election to “every male inhabitant of twenty-one year of age and upwards, having a freehold estate of the value of sixty pounds.” In contrast, a larger number of men—everyone able to pay the poll tax—could vote for members of the lower house. This reflected Adams’s abiding belief that government was a balance of the One, the Few, and the Many, which in turn reflected his preference for dividing groups by three.

The next step came on the last Wednesday in May. Chapter 2, Section 3, Article 2 says:

Nine councillors shall be annually chosen from among the persons returned for councillors and senators, on the last Wednesday in May, by the joint ballot of the senators and representatives assembled in one room; and in case there shall not be found, upon the first choice, the whole number of nine persons who will accept a seat in the council, the deficiency shall be made up by the electors aforesaid from among the people at large; and the number of senators left shall constitute the senate for the year. The seats of the persons thus elected from the senate, and accepting the trust, shall be vacated in the senate.

In sum, wealthy voters chose men they thought were worthy of being state senators or Council members. The full legislature then chose from among those men which nine should be on the Council. If any of those men refused, preferring to serve in the state senate, the legislature could fill the holes with others. The only restriction was that the Council couldn’t include two people from the same senatorial district. And the trade-off for voters who had a councilor from their district was having one fewer senator that year.

It was possible under this system for a Council member never to have been chosen by the voters—but he would still be put into office by representatives of the voters. That’s somewhat analogous to the Electoral College as originally envisioned (though that institution never worked right under stress).

The 1780 constitution was more progressive than the royal charter that preceded it in several ways. It broadened the franchise for voting for assembly members, made more offices elected rather than appointed, and tried to equalize representation among different towns and districts. The legislature could override the governor’s veto with a two-thirds roll-call vote. In 1783, the state’s top court interpreted the constitution to make slavery unenforceable. Nevertheless, that original constitution was written to limit the power of the voting public, and the Governor’s Council was meant to be made up of the elite of the elite.

In 1855, Massachusetts revised its constitution along more progressive lines, and voters started electing members of the Governor’s Council directly. That small body’s limited power meant that fewer and fewer voters paid attention to its members, even though each represents a much larger district than any state senator. And now the state legislature is considering whether maintaining that body makes sense.

The Roots of the Massachusetts Governor’s Council

The Massachusetts legislature is now considering a bill to do away with the Governor’s Council, which is a sort of third legislative chamber for the state, because of recent embarrassing and unproductive confirmation hearings, as well as long-time questions of what that small body is good for.

As the Boston Globe reported back in February, the Governor’s Council has been “drawing new scrutiny” all year. That seems to be a euphemism for “Is Charles O. Cipollini crazy, bigoted, or a crazy bigot? Or is the standard for members of that board already so low that he fits right in?”

This statement in that February article caught my eye:

The council, as it exists today, is a distant relative of a Colonial council established in 1628 as a political check on the Royal Governor. The state’s original 1780 constitution created an unelected council that helped the governor run the state, and the panel became an elected body in 1855.

That didn’t seem right, given that one of the Patriots’ biggest complaints about the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774 was that it created an unelected Council. Not to mention that back in 1628 the governor of Massachusetts was elected locally; the “royal governors” arrived with the new charter in 1692.

Under the royal charter in force from that year until 1774, each year’s Council was chosen by the outgoing Council members and the House members voting together (i.e., each man had one vote). The appointed governor could then “negative,” or veto, any new Council member.

For the following year the Councilors who survived that process advised the governor, and could block him from taking some actions. The Council was also the upper chamber of the legislature, so the Massachusetts General Court could not pass laws without its consent. (Even after both legislative houses approved a law, the governor or privy council in London could veto it, with no possibility of override.)

Throughout the 1760s the Massachusetts Council sparred with Gov. Francis Bernard. The legislature chided his supporters by not reelecting them to the next year’s Council. He tried to “negative” his worst opponents, only to discover that he was making more. There were leaks and counterleaks. With the Massachusetts Government Act, Parliament replaced the troublesome elected Council with a group of designated Loyalists, as in most other North American colonies.

Because those men were summoned by a writ of mandamus, Massachusetts Patriots called them the “mandamus Councilors” or “new-fangled Councilors.” In the summer of 1774, crowds turned out in the hundreds and thousands to demand that those men resign their appointments. Most did, or moved into army-patrolled Boston. The Council met only a few times between September 1774 and March 1776. Meanwhile, in mid-1775 the rest of the colony elected its own Council under the old rules, with no governor to interfere.

With that conflict so recent, I thought, the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 must have gone back to elected Councilors. So I checked out the original text, drafted mainly by John Adams (shown above). Sure enough, it did stipulate that the Council be elected—though not directly by voters, or with every voter participating. And the governor wasn’t empowered to veto any of them.

TOMORROW: How the Governor’s Council was originally elected.

New Paintings of the Gages

Although John Singleton Copley’s fellow artists praised his portrait of Margaret Gage, her friends didn’t think it did her justice. Or perhaps it just didn’t show her according to the latest English fashion.

In the mid-1770s, the Gage family commissioned two new portraits from the British painter David Martin (1737-1797). He portrayed Margaret and Gen. Thomas Gage at full length, rather than the three-quarters views that Copley supplied, and he posed them against pastoral landscapes.

Martin put more detail into the general’s uniform. He depicted Margaret with fashionably powdered and/or graying hair. Notably, she once again appeared in a loose gown, this time with a flowing red wrap.

Even as he made those changes, Martin borrowed the couple’s basic poses from the Copley paintings, particularly the one of Margaret. It’s hard to lounge languidly while standing up, but in Martin’s painting she’s trying.

The Gages kept all four paintings at the family seat, Firle Place. They remained there until the twentieth century, with few or no reproductions. Nineteenth-century Bostonians therefore had no easy way to know what Massachusetts’s last royal governor had looked like.

Old-timers pointed folks to a local Copley portrait of a man who they said looked like the general. That was, ironically, Samuel Adams.

Ann Edwards: “retained her Eastern habits until her death”

Back in my first posting about John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Margaret Gage, I noted that her father, the New Jersey merchant Peter Kemble, had been born in Smyrna, in the Ottoman Empire. (Shown here in a 1732 print, which Iscra of the Netherlands is selling.) Kemble’s father ran a trading house, and his mother was of Greek ancestry.

Boston 1775 reader John Beasley sent me an email adding that Margaret Gage had an even more direct connection to Turkey:

Margaret’s Greek grandmother had a sister who married the British consul to Smyrna named Edwards. The Kembles were in the trading business, and Mr. Edwards seems to have taken part in the trading business also. He is credited with introducing coffee in England. At some time, under circumstances unknown, the Edwards family died out, except for a daughter, Ann Edwards, six years older than Margaret.

The Kembles invited Ann to leave Turkey and live with them in New Jersey. She spent the rest of her life with the Kembles and [following her death in 1808] is buried in the Kemble family plot at Mount Kemble, N.J. In the Prefatory Notes for Volume II of the Stephen Kemble Papers (pg. xiv), Margaret’s brother (Stephen Kemble) writes: “She was highly educated, spoke Greek, Italian, French, and English.” But more importantly he adds that she was “a complete Greek, and retained her Eastern habits until her death.”

Thus Margaret grew up with a Greek/Turkish cousin living in the same house—a cousin who perhaps regularly wore a Turkish costume. It just might be Ann Edwards’ clothes that Margaret wears in the portrait.

If so, they had probably been altered to be closer to British-American norms, in the same way other aspects of culture get adapted. The “Turkish” style fashionable in late-eighteenth-century Britain apparently had little connection with actual Turkish dress.

Nevertheless, Margaret Gage clearly had more knowledge of and emotional ties to life in the Ottoman Empire than the average British aristocrat, and far more than the average North American lady. She might have chosen to be painted in that fashion as a statement of her heritage as well as her taste. Given how other Copley patrons had their pictures painted in similar dress, it’s also possible that Margaret Gage helped to promote the “turquerie” style in America.

TOMORROW: Remaking Copley’s portraits of the Gages.

The Painting of Margaret Gage

John Singleton Copley traveled to New York in June 1771, eager to find customers among that city’s elite. The first person on his list was Margaret Gage.

Copley had already made a portrait of her husband, Gen. Thomas Gage. Apparently he had started that canvas when the general was in Boston overseeing the arrival of four regiments in 1768, and finished it after Gage had gone home to New York; the uniform isn’t exact in all details.

Margaret Gage came to Copley’s rented New York studio only four days after he arrived in the city, and he went to work. The result was unlike any of Copley’s portraits of Massachusetts ladies. Gage appeared in an exotically styled turban, gown, and pearls, and her pose was almost languorous.

Later that year Copley told his half-brother, Henry Pelham, “it is I think beyand Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever drew.” A fellow artist, Matthew Pratt, said, “every Part and line in it in Butifull.” Copley sent it to the Society of Artists exhibit in London in 1772, and it brought him many more customers in North America.

Some of those subsequent sitters had themselves painted in the same sort of loose “Turkish” gown that Copley showed Margaret Gage wearing. But according to scholar Aileen Ribeiro, the gown in the Gage portrait “seems real, as if it were painted from a studio property modeled by the sitter,” while those in paintings of Mary Hooper and Mary Morris “look like copies of that property.” Neither reclines like Gage, and Hooper even looks a bit self-conscious in the outfit.

Was “that property” the property of Copley, or did it belong to Gage and Copley kept repainting it from sketches? Did it actually exist, or did the artist and sitter choose the outfit from an engraving, as with some of Copley’s other portraits of fashionable ladies? I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. In John Singleton Copley in America, Ribeiro writes (somewhat contradicting the comments quoted above):

It is flattering to her dark curly hair, deep brown eyes, and ruddy complexion; on this ground and because Mrs. Gage would have wanted to follow the English fashion it represented, there is little reason to suggest that she did not own the costume.

Still, Ribeiro says, the gown “would not have been worn in real life and instead represents an artistic convention remotely related to a supposedly Turkish prototype and more closely related to fashionable ‘undress’ gowns worn en déshabillé.” Even that supposed style, however, might have had special meaning for Margaret Gage.

TOMORROW: The Turkish connection.

Playing Dress-Up with Mr. Copley

My posting earlier this week about John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Margaret Gage kicked up some interesting comments and emails, so I’m going back to the topic.

One of the advantages of having your portrait painted by Copley is that he could make you look better than you actually did. Not necessarily in physiognomy—the fashion among Americans at the time was to have their faces rendered accurately rather than idealized. But people asked for improvements in their body shape and their dress.

Comparing Copley’s paintings to English engravings has shown that he copied costumes, poses, and sometimes entire scenes from those sources. For example, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Caroline Russell became, through a mezzotint by James McArdell (below), the model for Copley’s portrait of Mary Bowers (above), down to the position of her hands, the trees in the background, and the little dog in her lap.

Copley used John Faber’s engraving of Thomas Hudson’s painting of Mary Finch, Viscountess Andover, as the basis for portraits of Mary Hubbard, Katherine Amory, and other women.

Ladies might have themselves painted in clothing they never wore, particularly in public. While aristocratic Englishwomen often commissioned portraits in the unusual outfits they might wear to masquerades, North American women had no such opportunities—but had themselves painted in those unreal fashions anyway.

Thus, Copley’s 1756 painting of Ann Tyng shows her as a shepherdess, an approach he probably learned from watching Joseph Blackburn a couple of years before.

He portrayed Hannah Quincy in an antique “Vandyke” outfit, inspired by the clothing in Van Dyck paintings (or paintings that people in England then attributed to Van Dyck).

Copley might have supplied garments for his sitters, possibly pinning or draping them over the women’s usual clothing. We know from a 1768 letter to Benjamin West that he at least considered the possibility of buying “a variety of Dresses” at “a great expence.”

And if all else failed, Copley could just make a dress look better than anything in real life. His portrait of Elizabeth Watson shows a gorgeous pink gown with no seams breaking the expanse of satin.

As a result, we know we mustn’t take all of Copley’s portraits of women as showing them in ordinary dress of the period, or even the ordinary formal dress. Those sitters may never have actually worn those garments. The garments may never have actually existed.

TOMORROW: But what does that mean for the painting of Margaret Gage?