“I gave them our standard talk about Paul Revere…”

From Episcopal Café, the Rev. Stephen T. Ayres of Old North Church shares his side of the Sarah Palin/Paul Revere kerfuffle. After all, he showed the former governor and her family through the church shortly before she told television cameras what she’d take away from her visit to Boston.

I gave them our standard talk about Paul Revere and the two men who hung the lanterns in the steeple, Robert Newman and John Pulling. I added a bit about the debate between John Hancock and Sam Adams after they received the warning from Revere . . . I did mention that Revere was arrested by British troops and led back to Lexington, warning those British troops that the minutemen had been alerted.

After the introductory talk, we climbed up to the bell ringing chamber, where I talked about how Paul Revere how founded our bell ringing guild in 1750 as a teenager. Governor Palin was particularly interested to see a copy of the original bell ringing contract between Paul Revere and his friends and the rector of Old North, Dr. [Timothy] Cutler. The contract portrays a group of teenagers using democratic principles to organize their bell ringing guild.

Ha! I guessed that Revere’s adolescent bell-ringing had something to do with it.

I was surprised and bemused when the video of Governor Palin's impromptu history quiz went viral the next day. I knew where all the factoids she cited came from and take responsibility for putting them in her head. I will not take the blame for the odd order those factoids came out. Perhaps it was too much information in too short a period of time to digest properly. Maybe if we climbed to the top of the steeple and viewed the lanterns, the governor wouldn't have focused on the bells. Who knows? . . .

I am somewhat saddened by what passes for news and for fact these days. We can laugh at Governor Palin, who may not have gotten all her facts wrong, but certainly didn't get them all straight. But what does this story, with its incredible legs, say about the rest of us? Why was such a large media contingent following the governor in the first place, particularly when many of them were publicly complaining that the trip was not newsworthy?

Part of the answer is the power of celebrity, of course. The same social force that got Palin and her family a special tour of Old North by the minister himself after the National Park Service had brought over security dogs, as Ayres describes at the start of his essay. (Rep. Earl Blumenauer has queried that public expense.) The same force that gave rise to a Palin impersonator outside. It’s a weird phenomenon, but one that acts on nearly all of us.

Another part of the answer is the modern American right’s attempt to claim exclusive ownership of the country’s founding period and legacy. A lot of people get the details of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution mixed up. But when Herman Cain does so while standing for the Republican nomination for President, and while acting more-knowledgeable-and-patriotic-than-thou, that flub is bound to mean more to the public.

“Secure some advantageous Posts near Boston”

On 13 June 1775, the New Hampshire Committee of Safety, meeting in Exeter, sent this message to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety in Cambridge:

Gent’n—

By a Gent’n of undoubted veracity (who left Boston last Friday & who had frequent oppor’s of conversing with ye principle officers in Gen’l [Thomas] Gage’s army) we are informed that there is a great probability that when the expected reinforcement arrives from Europe that Gen’l Gage will secure some advantageous Posts near Boston, viz. Dorchester & Charlestown. We are unacquainted with the importance of those posts, but if this hint sho’d be in any degree usefull it will give us pleasure.

That is often taken as the spur that led the Massachusetts committee to order troops into Charlestown ahead of the British, bringing on the Battle of Bunker Hill. But it was probably one of many indications that the British, now reinforced with three more generals and many more soldiers, were about to make an aggressive move.

Furthermore, the Massachusetts leaders already knew about the strategic importance of the Dorchester and Charlestown peninsulas. They had been hearing warnings that the Gage and his officers wanted those posts for over a month. Most of the inhabitants of Charlestown had evacuated, fearing a fight. (The Dorchester peninsula was less populated to begin with.)

The main question was when the British might move. On some occasions, such as the march on Salem in February, the army had acted on a Sunday, when so many New Englanders were in church. The next Sunday was 18 June.

Sarah Palin’s Last Word on Paul Revere

For several days last week, much of America seemed consumed by the vital issue of whether former half-term governor Sarah Palin misspoke about the history of Paul Revere, or whether her comments referred to one particular moment in the early hours of 19 April 1775.

As we recall, during her visit to Boston’s North End, Palin told television cameras that Revere was: “He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells…”

Law professor William A. Jacobson, who started a blog in large part because he dislikes criticism of Palin, then pointed out that when Maj. Edward Mitchell detained Revere at pistol point in Lincoln, the silversmith told him all about alarming the countryside. (Boston artist Dan Mazur has shared a comic-book version of this episode drawn by Alex Toth.)

That episode could be interpreted, historians conceded, as warning the British. It wasn’t the purpose or most important moment of Revere’s ride, however. And he certainly didn’t warn Mitchell “by ringin’ those bells.”

So did Palin share a correct and uncommonly knowledgeable interpretation of Revere’s ride? Or was she correct only in the way that a stopped clock is correct if you look at it in exactly the right way and ignore it a second later?

That argument might have raged forever, but then someone came along and made it impossible to maintain that Palin enjoys a detailed, accurate understanding of the start of the Revolutionary War. That person was Sarah Palin.

Within the friendly confines of her employer, Palin made a follow-up statement that—even with cramming and preparation—contained so many errors that it confirmed her historical ignorance. She said:

I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere. Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming, and they were going to try to take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of our ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn’t take it. But remember that the British had already been there, many soldiers for seven years in that area. And part of Paul Revere’s ride — and it wasn’t just one ride — he was a courier, he was a messenger — part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British. And in a shout-out, gotcha type of question that was asked of me, I answered candidly. And I know my American history.

Let’s take those points one by one.

“He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming…”

Previously, we recall, Palin said the opposite: “He who warned, uh, the…the British…” But this elaboration started with acknowledging Americans’ basic shared understanding of what Revere did.

In doing so, Palin echoed the cliché phrase, “The British are coming!” Historians have pointed out for years that the American colonists of 1775 still thought of themselves as British subjects fighting for British rights. Therefore, Revere wouldn’t have used that language. In retrospect, however, it’s useful to write about “the British government” or “the British army” to distinguish those from the provincial or American equivalents. And perhaps that’s what Palin was doing here.

(Back here Boston 1775 discussed what might be the earliest appearance of the phrase “The British are coming” in stories of that event.)

“…and they were going to try to take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of our ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn’t take it.”

Palin probably meant “storing up” instead of “shoring up,” which is what one does with the levee. The plural of “ammunition” is usually just “ammunition.” The antecedent of “it” should be singular, not two plurals.

But the historical issue here is the word “firearms,” which refers especially to rifles, pistols, and other weapons people carry. Gen. Thomas Gage sent soldiers to Concord to look for cannon. The most advanced battlefield weapons of the day.

“But remember that the British had already been there, many soldiers for seven years in that area.”

What might Palin have meant by “that area”? There were never British soldiers stationed in Lincoln, where Revere was detained. British regiments did come to Boston in 1768, seven years before Revere’s ride. But then they pulled out of the town in 1770. One regiment remained in a fort on an island in the harbor. If we charitably concede that Palin’s “that area” could mean anywhere in eastern Massachusetts, then this would be technically correct. But historically Bostonians experienced a significant decrease in the military presence from 1770 to 1774.

“And part of Paul Revere’s ride — and it wasn’t just one ride — he was a courier, he was a messenger.”

It’s hard to see how Revere’s other rides support Palin’s point, or indeed are relevant. Is it possible that she just threw out that fact because it was something she remembered hearing about Paul Revere and thought might sound impressive?

“part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms.”

For most English speakers, the phrase “was to” indicates purpose—i.e., that Revere undertook his ride in order to warn the British. But Revere worked very hard at avoiding British military personnel on the night of 18-19 April.

If Revere had intended to pass a message to a British officer, he could have done so back in Boston. He could have caught the attention of sailors on the Somerset. He could have stopped to chat with the mounted officers who chased him toward Medford. But he didn’t, because the last thing he wanted to do was talk to the royal authorities.

Only after Revere had been captured—an event he didn’t want to happen—did he speak to a British officer. At that point, his ride was over. He wasn’t operating according to his original intent. Palin’s second statement about Revere’s warning to the British was thus more erroneous than her first.

“You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have.”

Here Palin showed her true colors, badly misstating history as she blew a dog whistle to America’s far right. The colonial militia was not an “individual, private militia.” It was an arm of the government, and of society. Militia service was required and regulated by law, and militia units were organized on a provincial, county, and town basis.

Capt. John Parker was not in an “individual, private militia.” Timothy McVeigh was. It’s an important distinction.

“And in a shout-out, gotcha type of question that was asked of me, I answered candidly.”

The “gotcha type of question” was: “What have you seen so far today, and what are you going to take away from your visit?” Palin misstated the history of a few days before, let alone centuries back.

As for “candidly,” it would have been candid for Palin to say, “I misspoke. I should have said that ‘Paul Revere warned about the British,’ or that ‘Paul Revere’s ride is a warning to anyone who wants to take away Americans’ right to defend ourselves.’” But that would have required admitting a minor error.

“And I know my American history.”

No, she really doesn’t. And worse than that, she doesn’t know how to admit to being even a little wrong.

William Russell’s Writing

Last month the Seth Kaller auction house alerted me to this collection of the Revolutionary War documents of William Russell (1748-1784), a Tea Party participant, charter member of Col. Thomas Crafts’s militia artillery regiment after the war began, privateer crewman under Capt. John Manley, and twice prisoner of war.

The collection includes a note from Crafts and several letters written home while Russell was in captivity in Britain or New York harbor. I see mentions of Benjamin Edes and James Brewer. Some of the material has been published in The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, by Ralph D. Paine.

According to Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves, Russell was “sometime usher in Master Griffiths’ school, on Hanover Street, below the Orange Tree.” John Griffith was a private schoolteacher, rather than one employed by the town. I’ve long wondered how he had enough students to hire an usher, or assistant teacher.

Handwriting was a major part of the colonial curriculum, and Russell’s ability to write clearly was a big part of his military career. As sergeant major of Crafts’s regiment, he wrote out the first list of recruits. Later he was the regiment’s adjutant, or administrative officer, during an attempt to drive the British military from Newport.

On board Manley’s ship, Russell was a clerk. The captain was reportedly barely literate, so a clerk would have been a good thing. During his first stint as a prisoner, in the Mill Prison in England, Russell kept a detailed diary, which I believe is now at the Peabody Essex Museum. Someday I’ll quote from the published version.

Russell’s name appeared on the first published list of Tea Party members, in the back of Traits of the Tea Party (1835). One of Russell’s sons, John, had grown up to be an apprentice at the Massachusetts/Columbian Centinel; I’ve theorized that that newspaper’s publisher, Benjamin Russell, was the source of that first Tea Party list.

The same year that book came out, as the Boston Tea Party became famous, John Russell gave a lecture about the event in Salem, and of course he invoked his father’s name. I should note, however, that John Russell was born in 1779, so he had no first-hand knowledge of what happened in 1773. He was also only five years old when his father died, so he probably couldn’t sort out what he’d heard his father say from what he’d heard from other relatives. Still, Russell’s connections to Crafts and other activists make it likely that he did help to destroy the tea.

Tristram Shandy and the American Generals

Yesterday Boston 1775 shared a glimpse of one spread from Tristram Shandy, a publishing sensation two and a half centuries ago. It made its author, the Rev. Laurence Sterne (shown here), into a celebrity.

Among the novel’s fans in America was Nathanael Greene. He made allusions to the book in his letters, and he imitated characters. According to Greene’s grandson and biographer:

his brothers, to the day of their death, could never mention Tristram Shandy without dilating upon the exquisite comicality of his impersonation of Dr. Slop.

In July 1775, Greene was made a brigadier general in the Continental Army and then assigned to serve under the major general Charles Lee.

Reading sources from that year, I sense that a lot of people saw Lee as larger than life. He was considered one of the greatest experts on military affairs in North America. He had been wounded once in battle and twice in duels. He had traveled west far enough to lead the first British expedition on Lake Erie, and east far enough to have seen the Russians fight the Turks.

Lee had told off George III for not granting him a regimental command. He had met the king of Poland, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. He was friends was Isaac Barré, Catherine Macaulay, the Earl of Shelburne, Edmund Burke, and other leading British opposition figures. Lee’s own political writing was widely reprinted in America in 1774-75.

And Lee was a good friend of Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. The two men had even published verse together. Imagine getting a new boss like that.

“Throw down the book at once”

Sunday’s Boston Globe alerted me to this year’s 250th anniversary of the third volume of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, and its Marbled Page. Actually, I hadn’t thought of the Marbled Page in capitalized terms before.

Sterne and his narrator introduce that page by saying:

I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once, for without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

Since the facing page was originally created with hand-marbled paper, each edition was different. The fact that the effects of marbling aren’t entirely under the craftsperson’s control added another layer of randomness. So, yes, that meaning could be difficult to penetrate. Unless the meaning was randomness itself.

Of course, by the time I read Tristram Shandy as a Penguin paperback, this page had been thinned out to a uniform grayscale image of a single piece of marbled paper, probably chosen by the publisher decades before. Still, it was fun to see Sterne playing with the book form.

This fall the Laurence Sterne Trust, which maintains the author’s home Shandy Hall, will host an exhibit celebrating this anniversary called “The Emblem of My Work”. The exhibit has its own website, naturally. Different artists have been invited to interpret the marbled Marbled Page.

This exhibit follows a similar celebration two years ago of Volume 1’s all-black page (“the black one”), which signaled a character’s death. That exhibit, too, had a website. I have to say, though, that a lot of those Black Pages aren’t very black.

TOMORROW: Tristram Shandy and the American generals.

“We begin to simplify experience into myth”

In a review of recent books about World War 2 in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic editor Adam Kirsch closes with some thoughts about historical myth-making, debunking, and revision:

It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth — because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a “good war,” and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat.

The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past. Indeed, its most important lesson may be that the awareness of ambiguity must not lead to detachment and paralysis. . . . The fact that we can still be instructed by the war, that we are still proud of our forefathers’ virtues and pained by their sufferings and sins, is the best proof that World War II is still living history.

I think the same words apply to the Revolutionary War, or any other conflict that folks study with lively accuracy.

The image above is “Washington & Lincoln (Apotheosis)”, created about 1865, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Origin of “Live Free or Die”

Back in February, I wrote about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s reverence for the Founding Fathers, and how trying to reconcile that conviction with modern values led her into stating historical nonsense.

In March, Bachmann told people in New Hampshire, “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.“ When corrected, she posted on Facebook: “It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!” Note the scurrilous implication about states besides New Hampshire.

Last month Bachmann campaigned in New Hampshire again, and, according to the Boston Globe:

She cited the idealism of Abraham Lincoln, and of General John Stark of New Hampshire who coined the phrase that is the state motto “Live Free or Die.”

And this time I must note that Bachmann (or her speechwriters) got it right.

In 1822, John Farmer and Jacob Bailey Moore printed the first volume of their Collections, Topographical, Historical and Biographical, Relating Principally to New-Hampshire. It included a “Biographical Sketch of General John Stark” quoting some of his letters.

In 1809, a committee from Vermont invited Stark to a dinner commemorating “the action commonly called the Bennington Battle.” On 31 July, Stark wrote back from his home in Derryfield, declining the invitation on account of his age; “You say you wish your young men to see me. But you who have seen me, can tell them that I was never worth much for a show, and certainly cannot be worth their seeing now.”

Stark’s letter didn’t include the words, “Live free or die.” But the following year, the Vermont committee wrote again (in a letter published in 1860 in Memoir and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark) to say:

In your patriotic address to us last year, we regret that you tell us that the oil is almost extinguished in the lamp, and that age has rendered it impossible for you to attend, although we are again pressed by our fellow-citizens to give you an invitation to come and join in the festivities of the day. The toast, sir, which you sent us in 1809, will continue to vibrate with unceasing pleasure in our ears: “Live free, or die—Death is not the worst of evils.”

The Collections volume also printed that saying (without the comma), with the statement: “Accompanying this letter, the General forwarded as his volunteer this sentiment.” That appears to be a rare use of the word volunteer to mean a voluntary gift. So it appears that Stark sent that toast on a separate piece of paper, which was lost or else its full text would be reprinted, but the information on that paper was preserved by the second letter.

Now let’s savor the irony that New Hampshire’s motto was invented for, and preserved by, folks in Vermont. (Of course, the “Bennington Battle” actually took place in New York. See, it doesn’t pay to suggest that only Americans from one state are special.)

Kudos to Peter and Jane Montague Benes

The Mass Humanities conference “Off the Record: Telling Lives of People Hidden in Plain Sight” is taking place today at Holy Cross. I’m sorry not to be there because the topic looks very interesting, but I’m at my keyboard finishing up a big writing project.

I especially wish I could attend to clap for Peter and Jane Montague Benes, recipients of this year’s Bay State Legacy Award. As the conference program says:

Peter and Jane Montague Benes are synonymous with the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. As founders of this more than 30-year series of conferences and publications, they have helped professional and avocational historians alike explore an extraordinary range of subjects in the everyday life, work, and culture of the Commonwealth and the region. In dozens of co-edited volumes, and publications from the 1977 Masks of Orthodoxy to the forthcoming Meetinghouses of Early New England, the breadth and depth of Peter and Jane's contributions to Massachusetts History are unequalled.

I’m one of the “avocational” historians who’ve benefited from Peter and Jane’s work in organizing symposia and preparing publications, and from their friendship and enthusiasm for New England history from the bottom up.

Later this month, 24-26 June, the 2011 Dublin Seminar will tackle the topic of “Beyond the Battlefield: New England and the Civil War.” Even though that’s the wrong civil war for me, I’m looking forward to another full program of new research on the daily lives of ordinary and extraordinary New Englanders.

The Real Paul Revere in Newton, 7 June

On Tuesday, 7 June, Robert Martello will speak at the Newton library on his book Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn: Paul Revere and the Growth of American Enterprise.

This book is part biography of Revere, part history of the climate for new business and technology in the early republic. Revere was an entrepreneur, but then so was nearly everybody in an economy based on family workshops and farms. Revere stood out as a pioneer in moving from his North End to large metalworking factory compounds—in his case, casting bronze pieces like church bells and cannon and rolling copper sheets for ships and buildings.

Martello is a professor of the history of science and technology at Olin College. I heard him speak at Lexington earlier in the year, and he packs a lot into one talk. (Which means he speaks even faster than I do.) His talk begins at 7:30 P.M., and he’ll sign books afterward.

Also, via BoingBoing and Judy Cataldo, here’s a Photoshop artist’s rendition of how Revere might have responded to recent news.

Sarah Palin Meets Paul Revere

Yesterday former half-term governor Sarah Palin’s made-for-television bus tour of historic sites ran into a pothole when she spoke on camera about Paul Revere. As transcribed by The Selling of the President 1968 author Joe McGinniss, Palin said Revere was:

He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.

Needless to say, Revere didn’t ride to warn the British. He rode to warn provincial militia officers and the Continental Congress delegates Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were on the march.

One could make the argument that Revere’s actions led to a massive popular response that served as a warning to British officials about the people’s determination to protect their traditional liberties—I’m just not convinced that Palin could make that argument, at least without coaching.

Furthermore, her comment about “takin’ away our arms” connotes that the royal forces were after personal weapons like muskets and pistols. The goal of the British march was artillery which the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had collected using diverted taxes for a military force independent of the royal government. That’s an important distinction, I think.

It sounds like Palin got an accurate description of Revere, the Lexington alarm, and his adolescent bell-ringing at Old North Church during her travels, but that history got garbled in her attempt to spin it into modern right-wing talking points (“Put the government on warning!” “We need our arms!”). The result was her typical stew of folksy phrases without logical or grammatical connections.

However, some of the websites critiquing Palin’s remark made historical errors of their own. Mediaite said of Revere:

He had to be quiet to not let the British know that he knew (sorry, but no bells either) they were coming– to seize weapons stores, actually…

And McGinniss elaborated on that:

the whole point of Revere’s ride from Boston to Lexington (his destination was Concord, but he didn’t make it) was that it was secret. Because the Middlesex County countryside was rife with British supporters, Revere virtually whispered his warnings that the King’s forces were crossing the Charles River on the night of April 18-19, 1775 to launch an attack upon the American rebels.

There weren’t many “British supporters,” or Crown supporters to be scrupulous, in Middlesex County by April 1775. The most prominent had been chased into Boston, or cowed into silence. Revere had to leave Boston secretly, but once he was outside town his only worry was being stopped by British army officers sent to patrol the roads ahead of the march. They nearly caught him in Charlestown, and did catch him in Lincoln.

One person even had to ask Revere to keep it down: Sgt. William Munroe, guarding the parsonage in Lexington. According to his recall in 1825:

About midnight, Col. Paul Revere rode up and requested admittance. I told him the family had just retired, and had requested, that they might not be disturbed by any noise about the house. “Noise!” said he, “you’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out.”

“Warnin’ shots and bells” were definitely part of the Massachusetts militia alarm, though not from Revere himself. People in rural towns used church bells and alarm guns to summon their neighbors; many British officers described hearing those signals during the march west. Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould even testified that he heard cannon.

(Caricature above courtesy of The New Yorker.)

Marie-Anne Lavoisier and Her Men

This weekend, the New York Times reports, two Nobel laureates and an art historian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will discuss Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Antoine and Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier at the World Science Festival in New York.

The newspaper gives us this primer on the Lavoisiers:

Born into wealth in 1743, Lavoisier was a powerful aristocrat and politician as well as a scientist and an administrator of the Ferme Généale, a group of often corrupt tax collectors. A measure of Lavoisier’s social and financial position, Dr. [Kathryn] Galitz [the art historian] said, was that he paid more for the portrait of himself and his wife than had the king, Louis XVI, for one of his own.

Lavoisier married Marie-Anne when he was 28 and she 13, but she grew into more than a muse, doing illustrations for his papers and helping with experiments, a partnership emphasized by David’s painting, which shows Lavoisier sitting at a table littered with papers and chemical apparatus, looking up at his wife, who is leaning over him with her hand on his shoulder. “She was as much of a serious chemist as a woman could be,” Dr. Galitz said. “She’s there in the thick of things.”

What’s the Boston 1775 connection here? (Besides the fact that both my parents have doctorates in chemistry.)

Antoine Lavoisier was guillotined for his tax-collecting and political activity in 1794. Ten years later, after a four-year courtship, Marie-Anne remarried. Her new husband was another well-known scientist and government administrator—none other than Woburn’s own Benjamin Thompson, by then known as Count Rumford.

The couple’s relationship quickly deteriorated—neither was really the monogamous or compromising type. Marie-Anne Lavoisier kept her first husband’s surname. She and Rumford separated after about a year, but remained legally married until his death in 1814.

Celebrating Boston Common, 6 June

The Friends of the Public Gardens and a bunch of nearby historic organizations celebrating the history of Boston Common on Monday, 6 June, from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. They’re particularly inviting area schools to this “Making History Day,” honoring America’s “first public park.”

Here are some of the organizations scheduled to be at the event:

• Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers
• Historic New England: Colonial Games and Trades
• Codman Family Farms: Meet an Animal
• Freedom Trail Foundations: Colonial Punishments
• The Commonwealth Vintage Dancers
• Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company
• The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment

Above is a reproduction of Christian Remick’s view of the Common in 1768, looking from modern Tremont Street up the slope toward John Hancock’s mansion and the beacon on Beacon Hill at upper right.

Back to Brockington

I started this series of sweet-potato postings with a descendant’s claim that the “British officer” in John Blake White’s painting of Francis Marion (shown here, courtesy of the U.S. Senate) actually showed Loyalist John Brockington, Jr., coming home after the war.

I still haven’t see the article that presents that claim, but context makes it seem very unlikely to me.

That scenario would mean that Samuel Weaver told of participating in a sweet-potato meal during the war, and the Rev. Mason Weems described such a meal, and many publications reprinted Weems’s description of the meal—yet White chose to paint a similar meal that no one else recorded for decades.

The painting shows Marion welcoming a red-coated gentleman to his table, but the descendant claimed that Brockington had invited Marion to share the food, which doesn’t fit the imagery.

Furthermore, White lived until 1859, long after engravings based on his painting appeared with captions identifying Marion’s guest as a British officer, and he didn’t correct that identification. When the painter’s son Octavius White donated the canvases to the U.S. Capitol in 1899, he described it as “the famous one representing General Marion inviting a British officer to share his meal of sweet potatoes.”

It seems more likely that Brockington’s descendants grew up in South Carolina surrounded by copies of White’s iconic image (it was even on some Confederate currency), and came to interpret it as showing their ancestor meeting Marion. I suspect that was a “Grandmother’s tale,” originally meant for the children in one family but told to the world after those children grew up.

Perhaps Brockington did meet Marion when he returned to South Carolina. But after the war there would have been no need for two gentlemen of considerable fortune (as measured by their human property) to eat sweet potatoes in the woods.

Slicing Open Marion’s Sweet Potatoes

If Jervais Henry Stevens and Samuel Weaver both said they saw Gen. Francis Marion share a meal of roasted sweet potatoes with a British officer, is that enough to validate the legend?

Unfortunately, both Stevens and Weaver were first set down a few years after the Rev. Mason Weems published the story in his biography of Marion. Newspapers and magazines reprinted the tale. Around 1820, apparently, John Blake White painted a picture of it. The sweet-potato dinner became a widely known detail in the story of a regional hero, with a patriotic moral. That meant there was probably value in putting oneself into that story, and little value in casting doubt on it.

I’m impressed, however, that Weaver swore that “He has been told by some, that this [meal] has been recorded in the life of Genrl as a dinner, but this was a breakfast.” Weaver indicated that he had not read the printed accounts, and furthermore that he was willing to contradict them in one detail.

Weaver also said Marion’s guest was “a British Officer as he was told [who] came into camp, but for what he does not know.” The veteran obviously wasn’t trying to present himself as important.

I suspect that Weaver had also not seen White’s painting since that shows a servile black man dishing up the potatoes. Weaver said he served the breakfast himself, and as a white in ante-bellum South Carolina would almost certainly not have enjoyed being represented as a black man.

Therefore, even though Weaver told his story about two decades after the tale first appeared in print, it seems to ring true.

In contrast, we don’t have Stevens’s story. Instead, author Alexander Garden appears to have read the Weems version, asked around, and found some old companions of Marion who said it—or something like it—was true. Even then Garden admitted some doubt by writing “It is said” before his final paragraph.

And that paragraph is, I suspect, all Weemsian mythmaking. The preacher may have come across the sweet-potato story from Weaver, or Stevens, or somebody else, and decided to add it to his Marion biography. Since he was writing a “romance,” Weems felt no compunction about making up dramatic dialogue between the American general and the British officer.

Most important, Weems added a moral to the story, which otherwise was just a little episode about American partisans living off the land and a British officer polite enough to share one meal with them. Weems’s version went on to say that Englishman went back to the Crown forces so impressed by Marion’s dedication that he told his commander they had no chance of subduing the Americans. By the time Garden wrote, “It is said,” that officer even resigned his commission.

But how was an American author privy to a private conversation between British officers in British-occupied Georgetown? How could an American author know why a British officer resigned when he clearly doesn’t know that officer’s name or the date of the event? Weems’s ending to the story is a big part of its power, but it’s not nearly as convincing as Samuel Weaver’s simple tale of how he “wiped the ashes off with a dirty handkerchief.”

TOMORROW: Back to the Brockington claim (and away from increasingly strained metaphors about sweet potatoes).

Digging for Marion’s Sweet Potatoes

As quoted back here, in his biography of Gen. Francis Marion, the Rev. Mason Weems described the general treating a British officer to a dinner of roasted sweet potatoes during the Revolutionary War. Weems presented that tale as coming from Marion’s subordinate officer Peter Horry, but Horry repudiated the first edition of the book, and never saw later editions that contained the tale.

So is there any solid basis for this story?

In fact, at least two men stated that they had witnessed or participated in such an event. In Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War in America, published in Charleston in 1822, Alexander Garden introduced the story like this:

An anecdote is related of him, of the authenticity of which, many of his followers can still give testimony. I name one of them, Lieut. J[ervais]. H[enry]. Stevens, of [Hezekiah] Mayham’s regiment, who was an eye witness of the occurrence.

A British officer was sent from the garrison at Georgetown, to negotiate a business interesting to both armies; when this was concluded, and the officer about to return, the general said, “If it suits your convenience sir, to remain for a short period, I shall be glad of your company to dinner.” The mild and dignified simplicity of Marion’s manners, had already produced their effect; and, to prolong so interesting an interview, the invitation was accepted.

The entertainment was served upon pieces of bark, and consisted entirely of roasted potatoes, of which the general eat heartily, requesting his guest to profit by his example, repeating the old adage, that “hunger was an excellent sauce.”

“But surely general,” said the officer, “this cannot be your ordinary fare.”

“Indeed it is sir,” he replied, “and we are fortunate on this occasion, entertaining
company, to have more than than our usual allowance.”

It is said, that on his return to Georgetown, this officer immediately declared his conviction, that men who could without a murmur endure the difficulties and dangers of the field, and contentedly relish such simple and scanty fare, were not to be subdued; and, resigning his commission, immediately retired from the service.

In addition, a veteran named Samuel Weaver (1755-1852), applying for a pension in 1836, swore under oath:

During the time he was with Gen’l Marion, a British Officer as he was told, came to Camp but for what reason he does not know & he was roasting and baking sweet potatoes on the coles—

Gen’l Marion steped up with the British Officer and remarked he believed he would take Breakfast; he felt proud of the request, puled out his potatoes, wiped the ashes off with a dirty handkerchief, placed them on a pine log (which was all the provision they had) and Gen’l Marion and the Brittish Officer partook of them.

He had been told by some that this had been recorded in the log of the Gen’l as dinner but this was breakfast.

There’s a transcription of Weaver’s pension application memoir here.

TOMORROW: Slicing open the evidence.

“Most certainly ’tis not MY history, but YOUR romance.”

The first edition of The Life of Gen. Francis Marion appeared at the end of 1809. As I described yesterday, it was brought to press by the Rev. Mason Weems (shown here), but written in the voice of Peter Horry, one of Marion’s officers.

It took until 4 Feb 1811, over a year after publication, before Horry told Weems what he thought of the book, in a fun-to-read letter later printed in William Gilmore Simms’s Views and Reviews in American Literature:

I requested you would, (if necessary,) so far alter the work as to make it read grammatically, and I gave you leave to embellish the work,—but entertained not the least idea of what has happened—though several of my friends were under such apprehensions, which caused my being urgent on you not to alter as above mentioned.

Do you not recollect my sitting on the ground with you near the Georgetown Printing Office, and urging you again on the subject of no alterations to the work—That you replied, (seemingly out of humour,) that, “When the work came out, you engaged I would be satisfied.” I replied, “That is enough;”—and, I recollect nothing farther passed between us afterwards on the subject.

How great was my surprise on reading these words in your letter: “Knowing the passion of the times for novels, I have endeavoured to throw your ideas and facts about General Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance.” A history of realities turned into a romance! The idea alone, militates against the work. The one as a history of real performance, would be always read with pleasure. The other as a fictitious invention of the brain, once read would suffice. Therefore, I think you injured yourself, notwithstanding the quick sales of your book.

Nor have the public received the real history of General Marion. You have carved and mutilated it with so many erroneous statements, your embellishments, observations and remarks, must necessarily be erroneous as proceeding from false grounds. Most certainly ’tis not MY history, but YOUR romance.

You say the book sells better than [Weems’s book on George] Washington! The price of the one is much less than the other—[that] is the reason. Besides, persons unacquainted with the real history, buy and read your book as authentic. When known to be otherwise, [it] will lie mouldering on the shelves, and no more purchasers [will] be obtained. You have my work; compare [it] with yours, and the difference will appear. Yours is greatly abridged, and the letters contained in mine (which I thought much of,) are excluded from yours.

You say, “you are surprised to hear that I am displeased with your book, particularly as it places Marion and myself in so conspicuous and exalted a light.” Can you suppose I can be pleased with reading particulars (though ever so elevated, by you) of Marion and myself, when I know such never existed.

Your book is out. My dissatisfaction of it is no ways material. You say you want to see me to procure some additional anecdotes for your 2d edition—and that, if I can point out any errors or places where improvement may be made, that you will cheerfully attend to any instructions. Could such improvement be really made, I fear for its fate—to be disregarded as my first performances were.

According to a sketch of Horry in the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, “Horry’s annotated copy is extant and it shows many of Weems’ false statements, but not near all.”

That same article says, “The title page of the first edition credits the alleged biography to Weems, but after Horry’s death [in 1815] new editions falsely assigned it to Weems and Horry, despite Horry’s repeated repudiation of it during his lifetime.”

So it seems far less likely that Horry witnessed the sweet-potato dinner as his narrative voice described. In fact, if my supposition is right, Weems added the episode to the book only after Horry died, when he couldn’t object so vociferously.

TOMORROW: Other eyewitnesses to the sweet potato dinner?

“O that mine enemy would write a book”

For most of the nineteenth century, editions of The Life of Gen. Francis Marion, a Celebrated Partisan Officer in the Revolutionary War, carried this author credit:

By Brig. Gen. P. Horry, of Marion’s Brigade:
and M. L. Weems

The book was written in the voice of Peter Horry (shown here, courtesy of the Horry County Historical Society). For a sample of that voice, the preface began:

“O that mine enemy would write a book.”—This, in former times, passed for as sore an evil as a good man could think of wishing to his worst enemy.—Whether any of my enemies ever wished me so great an evil, I know not. But certain it is, I never dreamed of such a thing as writing a book; and least of all a war book. What, I! a man here under the frozen zone and grand climacteric of my days, with one foot in the grave and the other hard by, to quit my prayer book and crutches, (an old man’s best companion,) and drawing my sword, nourish and fight over again the battles of my youth.

The Lord forbid me such madness! But what can one do when one’s friends are eternally teazing him, as they are me, and calling out at every whipstitch and corner of the streets, “Well, but, sir, where’s Marion? where’s the history of Marion, that we have so long been looking for?”

’Twas in vain that I told them I was no scholar; no historian. “God,” said I, “gentlemen, has made many men of many minds; one for this thing and another for that. But I am morally certain he never made me for a writer. I did indeed once understand something about the use of a broad sword; but as to a pen, gentlemen, that's quite another part of speech. The difference between a broad-sword and a pen, gentlemen, is prodigious; and it is not every officer, let me tell you, gentlemen, who can, like Caesar, fight you a great battle with his sword to-day, and fight it over again with his pen to-morrow.”

Of course, the reason those friends kept asking Horry about his Marion book is that he had collected information for a history of the brigade. But he had trouble getting it published. The Rev. Mason Weems—already a bestselling biographer of George Washington—convinced Horry to send him the manuscript so he could make it saleable.

TOMORROW: Big mistake.

Parson Weems Cooks Up a Dinner for Francis Marion

The Rev. Mason Weems published the first edition of his Life of Gen. Francis Marion in 1809. It followed the hortatory model of the parson’s book on George Washington, issued nine years earlier, but Weems wrote in the voice of Peter Horry, a South Carolina officer who had served under Marion (shown here, courtesy of NNDB.com) and loaned him documents as raw material.

I haven’t found an 1809 edition of Weems’s Marion online, but there are copies of the reprints from 1815-20 and later. That’s also when an incident from the book—the story of Marion and the sweet potatoes—was first reprinted in American periodicals, such as the 1817 volume of the Monthly Magazine, or British Register. That makes me suspect that Weems added the anecdote to his second edition and thus brought it into the public eye.

Weems’s text described Marion dining off sweet potatoes several times, but it highlighted a particular moment when an “Englishman” had brought “a flag from the enemy in George-town, S. C. the object of which was to make some arrangements about the exchange of prisoners.” After that gentleman had concluded that business with Marion:

The officer took up his hat to retire.

“Oh no!” said Marion, “it is now about our time of dining, and I hope, sir, you will give us the pleasure of your company to dinner.”

At the mention of the word dinner, the British officer looked around him, but to his great mortification, could see no sign of a pot, pan, or Dutch-oven, or any other cooking utensil that could raise the spirits of a hungry man.

“Well, Tom,” said the general to one of his men, “come, give us our dinner.”

The dinner to which he alluded was no other than a heap of sweet potatoes, that were very snugly roasting under the embers, and which Tom, with his pine-stick poker, soon liberated from their ashy confinement, pinching them every now and then with his fingers, especially the big ones, to see whether they were well done or not. Then, having cleansed them of the ashes, partly by blowing them with his breath, and partly by brushing them with the sleeve of his old cotton shirt, he piled some of the best on a large piece of bark, and placed them between the British officer and Marion, on the trunk of the fallen pine on which they sat.

“I fear sir,” said the general, “our dinner will not prove so palatable to you as I could wish; but it is the best we have.”

The officer, who was a well-bred man, took up one of the potatoes, and affected to feed as if he had found a great dainty; but it was very plain that he ate more from good manners than good appetite. . . .

The Englishman said, “he did not believe it would be an easy matter to reconcile his feelings to a soldier’s life on general Marion’s terms; all fighting, no pay, and no provisions but potatoes.”

“Why, sir,” answered the general, “the heart is all; and when that is once interested, a man can do any thing. Many a youth would think hard to indent himself a slave for fourteen years. But let him be over head and ears in love, and with such a beauteous sweetheart as Rachel, and he will think no more of fourteen years’ servitude than young Jacob did. Well, now this is exactly my case. I am in love; and my sweetheart is LIBERTY.” . . .

I looked at Marion as he uttered these sentiments, and fancied I felt as when I heard the last words of the brave [Baron Johann] De Kalb. The Englishman hung his honest head, and looked, I thought, as if he had seen the upbraiding ghosts of his illustrious countrymen, [Algernon] Sydney and [John] Hampden.

On his return to George-town he was asked by Colonel [John Watson Tadwell] Watson why he looked so serious? “I have cause, sir,” said he, “to look so serious.”—

“What! has General Marion refused to treat [i.e., negotiate]?”

“No, sir.”—

“Well then, has old Washington defeated Sir Henry Clinton, and broke up our army?”

“No. sir, not that neither; but worse.”—

“Ah! what can be worse?”

“Why, sir, I have seen an American general and his officers, without pay, and almost without clothes, living on roots, and drinking water—and all for LIBERTY! What chance have we against such men!”

Weems always liked to draw a heroic little lesson out of his anecdotes, which helped make them popular with magazine and textbook editors. As I noted above, this story began to be reprinted in the late 1810s (punctuation and other small details differing from one publication to another).

When John Blake White painted Marion inviting a red-coated officer to share a meal of sweet potatoes about 1820, he surely had this episode in mind. It was becoming widely known, and it had a moral and patriotic message for the American public. No wonder a version is now hanging in the U.S. Capitol.

In contrast, no publication before 1999 appears to have reported that Marion also shared sweet potatoes with the Loyalist officer John Brockington as he returned home after the war. In fact, why would a planter like Marion be dining on vegetables in the woods once the war was over? And what message and value would that scene have held to the American public?

Of course, that doesn’t mean the scene Weems described ever happened.

TOMORROW: Hearing from Peter Horry.

A Latter-Day Claim to Gen. Marion’s Sweet Potatoes

Last month at Blog, or Die, Michael Aubrecht wrote about John Blake White’s paintings of Francis Marion inviting a British officer to join him in a dinner of roasted sweet potatoes. Longtime Boston 1775 readers might recall that a ceremony about the version of that painting in the U.S. Capitol prompted some postings on the semi-legendary figure of Marion’s enslaved servant Oscar.

The Senate’s webpage on that painting and Aubrecht’s posting both cite an article about the underlying historic incident in the South Carolina Historical Society’s Carologue magazine for 1999. (Both webpages have typos that date the article to 1989, but the former also has the correct citation.) I haven’t found an online version of that article, Nell Weaver Davies’s “New Facts about an Old Story,” but Aubrecht describes its latter-day interpretation of the painting:

James P. Truluck, a descendant of the alleged British Officer,…[stated that] Captain John Brockington, Jr.—a landowner, slave-owner, and Tory sympathizer, who had fought against the “Swamp Fox”—was the legendary officer depicted in the piece. He added that his ancestor had been among the Tories that were banned to Nova Scotia after Continental forces assumed control of South Carolina.

In an effort to regain his land and reputation, Brockington returned to the colonies to refute his Loyalists ways and repay any claims that were made against him. After receiving a pardon, he and his slaves headed home and traveled through the swamps to avoid confrontation. It was while preparing their own camp meal that Truluck states Marion found them (resulting in the painted scene).

I’m baffled by Trulock’s claim, as best I understand it. It seems clear that White, painting around 1820, illustrated a specific episode described in Mason Weems’s Life of Gen. Francis Marion.

TOMORROW: Parson Weems and General Marion.