Letters from a Jamaican Slaveowner

Christer Petley, Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton, recently announced the launch of a website called Slavery and Revolution, “for research about Jamaica and Atlantic slavery in the Age of Revolution.”

It showcases the letters of slave-labor plantation owner Simon Taylor (1738-1813), who lived on the island through the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. Taylor made only one brief trip to Britain after 1760. The site says:

He died at Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1813, at the age of seventy-four. At his death he was one of the wealthiest men in the British empire, and his massive personal fortune was built on the backs of the enslaved men, women, and children who laboured on the sugar estates and other properties that he owned or managed. He ‘owned’ over 2,000 slaves when he died.

On 16 Jan 1783, as peace negotiations proceeded in Paris, Taylor wrote to a fellow Jamaican planter who was living in England and soon to enter politics there:

God almighty out of his infinite mercy grant we may have a peace. if we have[,] America may still be ours as soon as the present rancour subsides and their spirits are not kept inflamed that Britain wants to make them slaves and destroy them, Peace would soften their minds, let the moderate men come in play disband their army, and then their zealots would be obliged to seek some other employment than they had lately had and show them the mad part they had been acting for these two or three years past, when more has been offered them than they at first asked. Cursed be the damned politicks that would not at first hear their petitions. They will be mad if they do not give Ireland what she wants, as well as Scotland, why are one sett of subjects to be less free than another, the place where the helm of government is will always attract the principal subjects to make that place their residence and spend their incomes there which is a very considerable benefit.

The recipient of that letter was named Chaloner Arcedeckne, which seems unlikely on its face, but he has a Wikipedia page and everything. Arcedeckne appears to be Welsh for “archbishop” while Chaloner was a medieval term for someone who made and sold blankets.

The Joys of French Cooking, Pre-British Conquest

Some links recently led me to Carolyn Smith-Kizer’s Eighteenth-Century Cuisine blog, which offers this invitation:

Explore with me 18thC French cuisine as a habitante in Nouvelle France may have cooked. After the F&I War, and again after the Revolutionary War, habitantes were surrounded and overrun by Anglo and other American influences. By the end of the 18thC, new foods and new methods of cooking would change her culture forever.

As one example of her offerings, Smith-Kizer shared this recipe from a 1651 French cookbook, translated:

Farts of whore.
Make your fritter paste stronger than usual [thicker than one would use for including items such as apples, vegetables, marrow, etc.], by the means of an increase in flour & eggs, then stretch [drop from a spoon or use a syringe] the dough [into] large or thin [pieces], & as soon as they will be cooked [deep-fried] serve hot with sugar, & water of scent [flower water–orange, violet, etc.].
*****
40. Pets de putain.
Faites votre paste de beignets plus forte qu'à l'ordinaire, par le moyen d'augmentation de farine & d'œufs, puis les tirez fort menus, & lors qu'ils seront cuits servez les chauds avec sucre, & eau de senteur.

Hungry yet?

“This Retreating, Raged Starved, lousey, thevish, Pockey Army”

Sometime in the past week, Blogger tells me, Boston 1775 surpassed 1,000,000 page views. I believe those include visits by search engines, with no actual eyeballs involved, but it’s the only yardstick I got. I’m grateful to all the folks who’ve peeked in, whether one time or every day.

That news prompted me to look back at the first week of postings, from May 2006. I found poor Lt. Col. Jeduthan Baldwin, working as a military engineer with the disintegrating American army that had come down from Canada into northern New York.

On 16 July Baldwin woke up to find that someone had sneaked into his tent and stolen his chest, including a lot of genteel clothing and surveying tools. The next day he wrote in his journal:

in the Morning a part of my Compass was found break to pieces & soon after the rest of it except the Needle. this Day I wrote to Genl. [John] Sullivan to remind him of the request I had made of a discharge from the Army, desiring him to use his intrest in my behalf while at the Congress, as I am heartily tired of this Retreating, Raged Starved, lousey, thevish, Pockey Army in this unhealthy Country.

But Baldwin stuck around. Which, like the page views, shows the value of just showing up every day.

Back in 2006, Baldwin’s diary was available only in an edition printed by a society in Maine a century before, and reprinted in a small quantity by Arno Press and the New York Times in 1971. I’d happened to find a copy in my local library. Now that edition is readable through Google Books, and the Massachusetts Historical Society is sharing portions of the original. Quite a change.

In July 1776, Baldwin was planning out the Continental fortifications on Mount Independence in Vermont. The engineer’s diary is a major source of Stephen Zeoli’s Mount Independence: The Enduring Legacy of a Unique Historic Place, a little book about that historic site published last year by the Mount Independence Coalition and sold at historic sites and bookstores in the region.

I see there’s a lot of activity coming up around Mount Independence, including an archeology hike tomorrow, living history next weekend, and a memorial ceremony at Hubbardton on 11 September.

Washington “holding aloft a large stone”?

On the night of 29-30 Aug 1776, the Continental Army evacuated almost all of its troops from Long Island to Manhattan Island as the bigger and stronger British military closed in.

Some authors continue to treat the success of this evacuation as a sign of Providence looking out for the American cause. Of course, Providence hadn’t seen fit to give the Continentals a victory in the preceding Battle of Brooklyn, and wouldn’t offer many more victories for quite a while. In 1776 the evacuation was seen mostly as a desperate and ignominious retreat.

Among the anecdotes of the evacuation is this about Gen. George Washington, from Henry Stiles’s History of the City of Brooklyn, published in 1867:

It is related, on the authority of Col. Fish, one of Washington’s aids, Judge Daggett of New Haven, and others, that the crowd and confusion among the troops who were, at this juncture, huddled on the beach, was extreme, and bordered on a panic; and that Washington, annoyed and alarmed at its probable consequences, sprang to the side of a boat into which the men were crowding, and, holding aloft a large stone with both hands, ordered them, with an impassioned oath, to leave the boat instanter, or he would “sink it to hell.” It is needless to say that the towering figure and wrathful eye of their revered general restored the scared troops to their senses, and the embarkation proceeded with more order than before.

That dramatic story shows up in many subsequent histories of the event, including recent ones. But is it reliable? Would Gen. Washington have risked either a precious boat or his even more precious credibility in case his threat didn’t succeed? Was he so upset as to lose his temper in front of his men?

As his first authority, Stiles cited “Col. Fish, one of Washington’s aids.” The commander didn’t have any aides de camp named Fish, but Nicholas Fish (1758-1833, shown above, courtesy of the New York Society Library) was part of the Continental Army administration later in the war.

However, when Fish died, the Knickerbocker, or New York Magazine, stated:

Colonel Fish was Aid-de-Camp to Brig. Gen. John Morin Scott, and he and his corps went into service, “as six months’ men,” on the 21st Nov. 1776…

Thus, according to his obituary Fish wasn’t in the American army until almost three months after the evacuation from Brooklyn.

Stiles’s second authority is “Judge Daggett of New Haven.” I think that’s David Daggett (1764-1851), a Connecticut jurist and Congressman. Daggett was only eleven years old during the Battle of Brooklyn. He was growing up in Attleboro, and never served in the Continental Army.

Stiles said Fish, Daggett, and “others” told the same story, so the anecdote was evidently widespread. However, none of the many men who were supposedly present at the moment appears to have left a firsthand account.

Don Hagist on Redcoats at Fort Montgomery, 13 Sept.

Don Hagist of the British Soldiers, American Revolution blog will speak at Fort Montgomery, New York, on Thursday, 13 September. He’ll track the career of one soldier in the 57th Regiment of Foot who participated in the British attack on that location in 1777.

The lecture description says about Pvt. James Simpson:

From the time he enlisted to the time he left the army over ten years later, he participated in military campaigns all over the eastern seaboard. The audience will hear some remarkable information about him that turned up years later.

Seating is limited to the first fifty people to make reservations. Call 845-446-2134 and leave your name, phone number, and number of people in your party if you want to attend.

For those who can’t make it, Don just posted a profile of another British soldier involved in the same operation, Cpl. John Russell. In 1781 the New York Gazette ran this advertisement:

John Russell, some time a corporal in the grenadier company of his Majesty’s late 26th regiment of foot, is desired to apply as soon as possible to James Inglis, vendue master, in New York, who has letters and instructions for him respecting a valuable freehold, and other estate fallen to him by the death of his father Mr. — Russell, of West Craigs, between Glasgow and Falkirk, in Scotland. . . .

Cpl. Russell had been a prisoner of the Americans early in the war and later a corporal in two different companies. But in 1781 the army evidently didn’t know where to find him. Might probate records from Scotland offer information on who actually inherited the late Mr. Russell’s estate? Or were there too many Russells living between Glasgow and Falkirk (which are by no means neighboring cities)?

The photo above comes courtesy of New York History’s description of the reenactment of the battle at Fort Montgomery and Fort Clinton in 2010, and must show an earlier reenactment.

The Sudden Death of Frantizek Kotzwara

At Writing Women’s History, Jen Newby laid out the facts of the death of the Czech composer Frantizek Kotzwara (also Kotzwarra and Koczwara) in London in 1791.

Kotzwara was a patron of prostitutes, a type of masochist (a term not coined until 1886), and a fan of erotic asphyxiation—which turned out to be a very bad idea for the sexagenarian artist and for prostitute Susannah Hill.

Newby writes:

Susannah was tried for Kotzwara’s murder at the Old Bailey. The victim being foreign and sexually peculiar, the jury sympathised with the traumatised young harlot and acquitted her. The court records on the case were allegedly suppressed, and, as I discovered, they are not to be found in the Old Bailey records.

In 1791 a London publisher claimed to use Hill’s statements as material for the pamphlet Modern Propensities, subtitled “an essay on the art of strangling, &c. Illustrated with several anecdotes. With Memoirs of Susannah Hill, and a summary of her trial at the Old-Bailey, on Friday, September 16, 1791, on the charge of hanging Francis Kotzwarra, At her Lodgings in Vine Street, on September 2nd.”

What’s the connection to Boston (as if we needed one)? Wikipedia says (citation needed, but evidently this webpage) that “A 2005 radio competition organised by the Radio Prague station led a listener to reveal that these court records had in fact not been destroyed, and somehow found their way to the Francis Countway Library of Medicine in Boston.” I can’t confirm that with a look at the library’s website or Harvard’s larger library catalogue. Any inside information, anyone?

Kotzwara’s “Battle of Prague” was a popular musical piece for a century after that 1757 event. There are eighteenth-century prints that could illustrate Kotzwara and Hill’s encounter (Newby shares one from 1752), but I’m showing an American edition of Kotzwara’s “Prague” composition that featured a portrait of George Washington. Though I doubt he’d be pleased at the association.

Seeking a Mass Grave in Brooklyn

In other news tied to the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, the New York Times reported on Sunday about local historian Bob Furman’s attempts to locate the grave(s) of the 200+ Maryland soldiers who died resisting the British advance.

However, one recurring theme of that article is skepticism from other historians about the feasibility or importance of that quest, given how much Brooklyn has changed over the centuries:

The Marylanders’ story is among the more underappreciated chapters of the Revolutionary War. Vastly outnumbered, they launched a series of counterattacks that stymied rapidly advancing British forces, enabling thousands of American soldiers to evade encirclement and certain death or capture. Had the British not been checked, it is possible that the Continental Army would have been smashed, forcing Washington to surrender and effectively bringing the war to an abrupt, inglorious end. “These soldiers saved the Revolution,” Mr. Furman maintains.

Other experts don’t go as far but agree that many historians have shortchanged the Marylanders. . . . As many as 256 Maryland soldiers, almost two-thirds of the regiment, were killed. According to several accounts, the British forced local civilians to gather the bodies shortly after the battle and bury them at a site near what was then Gowanus Creek.

The mass grave has long been a source of fascination for amateur archaeologists and Revolutionary War enthusiasts. In the 1940s and ’50s, city officials considered mounting a comprehensive search, and Robert Moses even drew up plans for a memorial park. Ultimately, the park never materialized because of a lack of money, and the one dig undertaken, in 1957, found no remains.

Various archaeologists say geography is the main reason the grave’s location has remained a secret. In 1776 the area featured marshland and millponds surrounding Gowanus Creek. Only a few dots of high ground would have been suitable for a grave.

The area was transformed beginning in the mid-19th century. The canal itself was dug in the 1860s, followed by industrialization along its banks. The neighborhood was made level, and both sides of the canal were lined with landfill. “Historically speaking, it’s like night and day,” said Alyssa Loorya, owner of Chrysalis Archeological Consultants Inc., which has surveyed the area.

Grave hunters’ attention in recent decades has focused on a stretch of Third Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets, because Revolutionary War-era maps show hills in the area. Written reminiscences, compiled mostly in the 1950s but dating as far back as the 1890s, also tell of bones being found when basements were dug.

Many archaeologists are skeptical.

New mapping software, ground-penetrating radar, and other technology may turn up things where older techniques failed. Then again, this might be a reminder that we’re much more concerned about preserving ordinary graves than most people of past centuries have been.

The photo above, from mikkime via Flickr under a Creative Commons license, shows one of the existing, weathered memorials to the Maryland soldiers. There are other signs in the borough, but it’s not clear how close they are to any identifiable graves.

“A good way to check in on the invading force”

At the Awl, Robert Sullivan is sharing a series of discursive articles on “how the trail of the Battle of Brooklyn would pass across modern-day New York.”

For example, the British military’s crossing from Staten Island to Long Island:

A good way to check in on the invading force from your apartment right now—which assuming the time-space continuum allowed it—would be to watch the MTA’s live bridge cams, specifically the ones set up on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which are spotty and always under repair (like the bridge itself) but eventually would give you some idea of how things were going, invasion-wise. . . .

On August 24, 1776, the Constitutional Gazette would report that the “ministerial troops” had landed “between New-Utrecht and Gravesend on Long Island to the number of 7000 men.” A later report noted that there were a little over 12,000 British “on the Shore by 11 o’Clock.” As far as military logistics go, Brooklyn was a good place to invade; the farms in Brooklyn could feed an army, and the Dutch settlers in the area do not have a political dog in the fight. It was a big landing. The statistic that is invariably mentioned in post-World War II accounts of the 1776 British invasion is this: it was the largest invasion by military forces until D-Day.

And the day of the battle approaches:

The city itself, the rocks of it, are, grossly put, a combination of two big geologic stories—one that is a vertical story as you look down at the map (see the northeast trending valleys that create the East River the Harlem and Bronx rivers or the Palisades along the Hudson) and one that is a horizontal story: see the glacial moraine as it runs through Brooklyn and Queens, a miniature two-borough mountain range, usually invisible unless, say, you go to Ridgewood Reservoir in the fall and take in the amazing view of Manhattan on the one side, most of Long Island on the other. The vertical geology is the result of stresses and fractures that are related to the very old Appalachian Mountains; the horizontal geology is related to the not-as-old Wisconsin glacier, which pushed a lot of junk to New York from elsewhere and left the forward hills as if marking how far it had gone. . . .

In the days between the first British landing on Brooklyn and the face off itself, Washington and his staff could only make guesses as to what the British were thinking, as to whether the war would be fought in the glacial landscape, you might say, or the Appalachian one. Washington seems to have thought maybe the British were faking a Brooklyn battle, getting ready to swing in on the East River, or the Hudson. He had did not yet realize that there were upwards of 32,000 Redcoats preparing to march against his 10,000 poorly trained, gunshot-happy men. The Americans had built forts all along the moraine; the idea was to hold the Redcoats back at the passes, the cuts in the glacial hills.

Today’s the anniversary of the big battle, so check in on the sites of the fighting.

Sullivan appears to have taken a similar approach in his new book, My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78. (Unaccountably its marketing copy begins, “Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians…” Don’t people know the Virginians were working for us?)

TOMORROW: Another attempt to rediscover the landscape of the Battle of Brooklyn.

“The NEH folks are our guys”?

Ira Stoll, a recent biographer of Samuel Adams, published an essay at Reason questioning Mitt Romney’s campaign promise to “eliminate” the National Endowment for the Humanities. It strikes me, too, as unlikely that Romney thought through that program’s costs and benefits as opposed to, say, just tossing out a name he thought his audience at that moment would like to hear and wouldn’t get too upset about.

Stoll argues for a deeper consideration of the N.E.H. because, well, it funds programs he likes. And he thinks that other people who invoke the Founders for their political ideas should, logically, like them, too.

• “Well, to start with, at least for those of us on the center-right of the political spectrum, the NEH folks are our guys. The list of NEH Jefferson Lecturers looks like the bylines in Commentary or on the Wall Street Journal editorial page:…”
• “With the possible exception of the National Park Service, no federal agency has done more to raise consciousness of the American Revolution than the National Endowment for the Humanities. . . . NEH grants have financed weeklong workshops run by the Massachusetts Historical Society that teach schoolteachers about the battles of Lexington and Concord. NEH grants help fund Colonial Williamsburg, financed a PBS program on Alexander Hamilton, and underwrite the projects to publish the papers of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in comprehensive and careful modern scholarly editions.”

Check the comments on the essay to see how well that argument went over with the Reason crowd.

Reflections on Mahogany

Yesterday’s New York Times Design column featured Jennifer L. Anderson’s new book Mahogany: The Cost of Luxury in Early America:

In a recent interview Ms. Anderson emphasized that she did not want readers to begin recoiling in horror from mahogany antiques, despite the material’s origins in cruelty. Her goal, she said, was to reveal the human dramas and real estate battles behind the objects.

She researched the subject at former mahogany plantations, piecing together how whites and blacks had coexisted and sometimes formed blended families. The Rhode Island-born merchant Jonathan Card ended up on an island in Belize, secretly married to Dorothy Taylor, his former housekeeper, who was black. His brother James joined him in the mahogany trade, supplying carpenters in Newport, R.I., whose work sells for millions of dollars today.

Slave rebellions and unrest sometimes delayed timber harvests. The business eventually failed, and James Card’s paltry estate after his death included two mahogany tables. “Such were the vagaries of frontier life,” Ms. Anderson writes.

George Washington decided to grow his own grove of this desirable crop, and had 48 seeds planted at Mount Vernon. When the saplings shriveled away, Ms. Anderson writes, “Washington did a lot of hand-wringing and blamed his horticultural losses on his slaves’ failure to water enough.”

This book grew out of Anderson’s doctoral thesis, which won the Society of American Historians’ 2007 Allan Nevins Prize for best written dissertation. Anderson is now a professor at S.U.N.Y.–Stony Brook.

That’s Some Green Beret

From the NEREV email list I learned of the comic book Tod Holton, Super Green Beret! This magazine, published by Lightning Comics, lasted all of two issues in 1967. But those issues are preserved in full on Ethan Persoff’s website.

They include the story “Dawn of American Freedom,” which starts with young Tod at the local “teen canteen,” the Stomp and Chomp (also called the Chomp and Stomp, and for some reason having its name painted on its window so it reads backward from the outside). Tod recalls that he has to prepare a report on the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Instead of cracking a book, however, Tod dons his special green beret—the one which allows him to turn into an adult soldier with untold superpowers. It may not be a surprise that Super Green Beret was co-created by Otto Binder, who a quarter-century before had provided the origin of Captain Marvel.

In this version of Boston in 1775, the first people Tod meets are two men driving a wagon full of gunpowder out of town—without, however, going through the army fortifications at the Neck. So right away you might wonder if the storytellers were making a priority of historical accuracy.

The comic’s depiction of the Bunker Hill battle continues along those lines, with:

• easy entrances and exits from Boston for rebel raiders. 
• Gen. Israel Putnam commanding the entire American army instead of Gen. Artemas Ward. 
• a British officer wearing checkered underpants at a time when men’s long shirts were their usual underwear.
• no long British cannonade onto Breed’s Hill.
• Putnam expecting Washington to arrive soon when news of his appointment hadn’t reached Massachusetts.

But the best moment is when the Super Green Beret volunteers to serve as a gun carriage.

He shouldn’t have been able to do that, of course—Super Green Beret turns back into young Tod Holton whenever he takes off his beret.

Why Are Some Founders Forgotten?

At the Imaginative Conservative, Daniel L. Dreisbach shared an essay (originally published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) on “Founders Famous and Forgotten,” exploring why we remember some politicians and military men from the Revolutionary period but not others.

Consider the political career of Roger Sherman of Connecticut (1721-1793), a largely self-taught man, devout Calvinist, and lifelong public servant. He was one of only two men who signed all three of the great documents of American organic law: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He was a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses. He was a member of the five-man committee formed to draft the Declaration of Independence and a member of the committee of thirteen formed to frame the Articles of Confederation. At the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 he delivered more speeches than all but three delegates and was a driving force behind the Great (Connecticut) Compromise. He was a member of the first U.S. House of Representatives (1789-1791) and later of the U.S. Senate (1791-1793), where he played key roles in deliberations on the Bill of Rights and the creation of a national bank. If any man merits the mantle of “founding father,” surely it is Roger Sherman.

Yet few Americans recall, let alone mention, Sherman’s name when enumerating the founding fathers; even among those familiar with his name, most would be hard pressed to describe his role in the founding. Why is it that a man of such prodigious contributions to our country is today an all but forgotten figure? The same question could be asked about many other patriots—John Dickinson, Elbridge Gerry, John Jay, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, Charles Pinckney, Benjamin Rush, John Rutledge, James Wilson, and John Witherspoon, just to name a few—who labored diligently to establish an independent American republic.

Examining six undoubtedly famous Founders, Dreisbach notes some commonalities:

• “strong, memorable, and (with the possible exception of Madison) colorful personalities.”
• homes in “influential power centers in the new nation.”
• “a voluminous paper trail of public and private documents.”

Yet some other men shared some or all of those qualities. Dreisbach suggests they’ve been forgotten because they:

• retired or died before becoming involved in the federal government.
• focused their energies on state and local governments.
• were on the losing side of debates over the Declaration or Constitution.
• left few papers about their American statesmanship.
• developed an unsavory personal reputation by nineteenth-century standards.

Finally, being a conservative, Dreisbach claims that modern academics are uncomfortable with the piety of some Founders. Indeed, the last section of his essay is basically an argument that recent jurisprudence and legislation (not historiography) pays too little heed to most traditionally religious of the Founders. Of course, some of those men aren’t mentioned in the essay for any significance but their religiosity.

Is “devout Calvinism” really why we don’t remember Roger Sherman as well as John Adams? I doubt it. I think it was the Adams family’s massive paper trail and national offices. Plus, the limited capacity of the human brain to remember everyone and everything, even if experts in the field want them to.

Stories from Old Homes

This month the Boston Globe published a couple of articles in its local sections that might be of wider interest for folks interested in eighteenth-century history.

From Plymouth came word of an archeological dig that might include evidence about the lives of enslaved people of African descent:

An excavation this summer in a small shed and nearby grounds on North Street has yielded more than 30,000 artifacts dating back 1,000 years. But the prized finds have been the bits and pieces that “might point to an African origin and [dwellers’] desire to maintain a physical, spiritual, and [m]ental connection with their origins,” said archeologist Craig Chartier. . . .

The project began in April, with a $15,000 Community Preservation Fund grant spurred by historian Rose T. Briggs’s typewritten reference to Colonel George Watson’s slave house in a 1967 Massachusetts Historical Inventory Form that she submitted on behalf of the Pilgrim Society. . . .

In addition to slaves named Cuffee and Esack, the household had Quassia, said to be “full of fun and drollery.” His owner, Judge Peter Oliver of Middleborough, had been driven out of town by residents for his Tory sympathies, according to a passage in Thomas Weston’s “History of the Town of Middleborough,” written in 1906.

From the western suburbs came a story about people living in historic houses as caretakers, to maintain them and their furnishings.

It is an arrangement played out in historic houses across the state, one that can benefit both caretakers, who pay little or no rent, and the groups that own the properties but have little money to pay for upkeep.

In Milton’s Suffolk Resolves House, Steve Kluskens walks past a letter from Thomas Hutchinson, a Colonial-era governor of Massachusetts, on his way to the kitchen every morning. When he types on his Macintosh laptop, it sits on a 200-year-old table, near an 1823 Springfield musket propped up against a wall.

As caretakers, Kluskens and his wife, Sheila Frazier, eat at a table beside a display of delicate dishes that were ordered from China in 1775. The house also holds a 1641 Bible written in classical Greek, a Jacobean oak chest more than 300 years old, and assorted dour portraits of prominent, but deceased, Milton residents.

Kluskens and Frazier, like other caretakers in historic houses, cannot change the house to fit their lives. They don’t remodel or paint or add media rooms. They must adapt themselves to fit in the house.

“It gives you a unique perspective on how short a life span is,” said Kluskens, who is also curator. “We’re just passing through this house.”

The Suffolk Resolves House, owned by Daniel Vose in 1774, is shown above.

“A Gentleman lately sent to Philadelphia”

Among the published manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth is the summary of a letter from Brigadier General James Robertson, datelined 13 June 1775 in Boston. It described the situation in the besieged town and enclosed another note: “A Gentleman lately sent to Philadelphia brought me the inclosed, which I consider as the best Intelligence he brought.”

That enclosure was dated 25 May and said to be written in Philadelphia. The published collection summarizes it as follows:

The affair at Lexington has given such ideas of New England prowess that the Americans will listen to no terms but such as they themselves shall dictate. Delegates from the New England colonies declare openly against any Law of Parliament binding them in any respect. Congress proceedings. “It was said, and I believe truly, that Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin came out as an agent from Lord Chatham, to propose certain Terms, which he would push at home . . . We fear Lord Chatham: he is for having the supremacy acknowledged. . . . Lord North’s Motion would be slavery.” The taking of Ticonderoga has given great spirit to the Americans. New York has out-heroded Herod; its delegates are still the ablest in Congress. They hate the New Englanders. Strange and fabulous stories told of the provincials and the troops.

Who sent this intelligence?

My first thought was Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., who was “A Gentleman lately sent to Philadelphia” by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in May 1775. But the timing doesn’t quite seem to fit. He left Massachusetts on 20 May and evidently returned after 16 June, which makes him unlikely to have arrived in Philadelphia in time to gather intelligence and write the letter by 25 May, or to have “brought” it to Robertson by 13 June.

Furthermore, the phrase “sent to Philadelphia” probably refers to someone the Crown authorities sent there.

Simeon Lyman’s Sunday Shirt—and a Crazy Man

In the summer of 1775, Simeon Lyman of Sharon, Connecticut, was part of a company sent to guard the colony’s coast. Here’s his diary entry for Sunday, 20 August:

Sunday morning we got ready for to go to meeting, and the officers came and said that we must not go to meeting without breeches, and it was so hot that I could not bear to wear them, and I did not go meeting in the forenoon. I went to see a crazy man and there was a man that he knew him, and he got mad, and I think I never saw such a sight in my life. He was chained and he would spring at us and hallo at us. There was one stout man that said that he never saw a man that he was afraid of before. In the afternoon I went to meeting.

Presumably Lyman and his friends wanted to attend meeting only in their shirts. Those garments would have been long enough for modesty—as long as there were no wind gusts. Shirts were usually people’s first and only layer of underwear.

Incidentally, Lyman writes about washing his clothes more than any other Continental soldier that I remember. Not that he does it a lot, but it matters to him more than his fellow soldiers. Or maybe, at age twenty-one, he was expecting to share his diary with his mother when he got home.

Two Looks at Rhode Island’s Continental Soldiers

On Wednesday, 29 August, the African Meeting House on Nantucket will host a talk by Louis Wilson on “Rhode Island’s Black Patriots in the Revolutionary War.” This is the Museum of African American History’s annual Frank and Bette Spriggs Lecture. Wilson is Professor of African and African American History at Smith College; he studies African-Americans in the Revolutionary War and free blacks in ante-bellum Rhode Island.

The museum’s event description says:

The American Revolution was a defining moment in the formation of what became the United States of America. The men and women who fought in that conflict have, for the most part, been memorialized. Unfortunately, this history gives little account of the many black soldiers who fought in the war. Through his research, Dr. Louis Wilson, has captured the names of over 800 men who served in Revolutionary War army units from Rhode Island. In his talk, Dr. Wilson will share the personal stories of these men who fought to liberate their country from tyranny while their own personal freedom was not guaranteed.

Prof. Wilson’s talk begins at 2:00 P.M., and is free and open to the public. The African Meeting House is at 29 York Street in Nantucket.

In related news, the Rhode Island Society of the Sons of the American Revolution has published Bruce C. MacGunnigle’s transcription of the Regimental Book, First Rhode Island Regiment for 1781 &c. That document preserves the names, origins, and physical descriptions of the men in the regiment in that year.

In 1778 the 1st Rhode Island enlisted a large number of men of African and Native American ancestry, including slaves—a controversial move. For a while more than half the regiment’s soldiers were men of color, and the racially segregated companies left people with the impression of a “Black Regiment.” By 1781, however, the 1st Rhode Island was recruiting white men and no longer separated its recruits by race. This book therefore lists an unusually varied set of Revolutionary American soldiers. Here’s a P.D.F. file of a brochure about the book and order form.

Debate Over the Proper Role of Government

In his first address to Congress, on 8 Dec 1801, President Thomas Jefferson stated:

Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the 4 pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Protection from casual embarrassments, however, may sometimes be seasonably interposed. If in the course of your observations or inquiries they should appear to need any aid within the limits of our constitutional powers, your sense of their importance is a sufficient assurance they will occupy your attention.

Jefferson was quite vague on specifics, but his attitude toward government intervention in economic matters was clear: he didn’t think it was wise or proper, and implied that there were only a few exceptional circumstances.

The President’s rival in George Washington’s cabinet, Alexander Hamilton, replied to that message with a pamphlet that included this passage:

In France, England, and other parts of Europe, institutions exist supported by public contributions, which eminently promote agriculture and the arts; such institutions merit imitation by our government; they are of the number of those which directly and sensibly recompense labor for what it lends to their agency.

To suggestions of the last kind, the adepts of the new school have a ready answer: Industry will succeed and prosper in proportion as it is left to the exertions of individual enterprise. This favorite dogma, when taken as a general rule, is true; but as an exclusive one, it is false, and leads to error in the administration of public affairs. In matters of industry, human enterprise ought, doubtless, to be left free in the main; not fettered by too much regulation; but practical politicians know that it may be beneficially stimulated by prudent aids and encouragements on the part of the government. This is proved by numerous examples too tedious to be cited; examples which will be neglected only by indolent and temporizing rulers, who love to loll in the lap of epicurean ease, and seem to imagine that to govern well, is to amuse the wondering multitude with sagacious aphorisms and oracular sayings.

While nodding to the free-market ideal, Hamilton argued there were far more occasions, and far more opportunities, for the national government to “beneficially stimulate” business than Jefferson (an “indolent and temporizing ruler”?) believed in.

Within a few years, Jefferson’s embargo policy showed he was ready to intervene quite strongly in the economy—though to shut down trade he thought was dangerous rather than to aid industries or enterprises. By then Hamilton was dead. But his vision for the economy of the U.S. of A. ultimately proved more accurate, or perhaps more self-fulfilling, than Jefferson’s arcadian ideal.

Québec Act Conference Planned for Oct. 2013

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Groupe d’histoire de l’Atlantique français, with the support of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, are organizing a conference on the 1774 Québec Act in Montréal on 3-5 Oct 2013. Here’s the call for papers:

Widely remembered in United States history as one of the “Intolerable Acts” [see posting on that term] that led to the American Revolution, the Québec Act outraged British mainland colonists for two reasons. First, the measure granted civil liberties to Catholic French Canadians. Even more galling, the legislation linked the Ohio Valley to the now British province of Québec, an arrangement that gave the Americans’ former enemies access to the very territories for which they had so recently waged a long and bitter war.

In Canada, colonial authorities saw the Québec Act as a pragmatic solution to the problems of governance. Despite the vocal objections of certain Anglophone merchants, it was obvious the British government would need the support of Francophone residents if it was to endure. Although the new political alliances forged by the constitutional provisions of the Act make it appear to have arisen from a local context, it was in reality the first of many inherently unstable compromises that were imposed to permit the Franco-Catholic population to develop under British institutions. In practice the Québec Act emerged as the initial manifestation within colonial society of the major religious, social, ethnic, and political tensions that would define the history of Québec in the centuries to follow.

From Great Britain’s imperial perspective, the Québec Act marked the first time that a Protestant empire had granted its French Catholic population civil privileges. More than another half century would pass before Parliament enacted Catholic emancipation in the United Kingdom, a statute it never fully implemented in Ireland. However selectively realized, was the Québec Act a first step toward the formulation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology and policy? Did it envision, however dimly, an empire that was multiethnic and potentially universal rather than Protestant and Anglo?

Initially, the Québec Act appeared to offer North America’s indigenous population a more promising future by pledging that Britain would defend the Ohio Valley and its Native inhabitants from encroachment by settlers pushing westward from the seaboard colonies. Policies such as removing the sovereignty of the Ohio Valley from individual colonial governments and placing it firmly in control of Québec’s British imperial authorities were designed to strengthen commercial and cultural ties between the peoples of the Ohio and St. Lawrence valleys. Although the emptiness of this promise had become painfully obvious twenty-five years later, the possibilities first raised by the Québec Act—objectives pursued on the ground through continued Native warfare supported by British authorities—remain a fruitful site of exploration.

In these and in many other ways the Québec Act proved seminal for the peoples and nations within its ambit. The foremost objective of this conference is to explore, examine, and bring greater clarity to the contexts, meanings, and legacies of the Québec Act as perceived from a multiplicity of national and transnational angles of vision. A variety of historical approaches—political, diplomatic, social, constitutional, cultural, and religious—are encouraged.

Actually, such a long description leaves me wondering how much more there is to say. But I’m sure folks who work in this field are thinking of lots.

The call asks for scholars to submit “a proposal of a one-page description of the paper and a brief c.v. containing telephone and email contact information” via this page. The deadline is 15 Oct 2012.

George Washington on “veterans of earlier wars”?

Boston 1775 reader Peter Ansoff recently asked me about this quotation:

The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by our nation.

The earliest appearance I found on Google Books is from an April 1999 Congressional hearing; the witness who quoted those words said that he didn’t know who had originally coined them.

Within a couple of years, however, authors announced the author of that line: George Washington! Chicken Soup for the Veteran’s Soul, published by Jack Canfield and Mark David Hanson in 2001, credited the quote to the general and first President, and there it’s stuck.

Barack Obama, then a U.S. Senator, used the quotation in a speech to the American Legion on 15 July 2005. John McCain, then and now a U.S. Senator, carried a copy of it in his pocket during the 2008 Presidential campaign to quoted from. The Congressional Record shows that many other legislators and witnesses at hearings have repeated it before and since.

Writers from National Review Online asked editors of the Papers of George Washington where those words appeared in the first President’s writings. In February 2008 the website announced that Washington never said it.

The editor-in-chief of that project, Edward Lengel, listed the quotation among several other spurious quotations and myths in his book Inventing George Washington, noting both the N.R.O. posting and how the misquotation remained widespread.

The thought behind that line isn’t at all surprising. Though the words offer a useful argument for preserving or increasing veterans’ benefits, even people who oppose such actions or oppose wars wouldn’t argue with their logic. The fact that our culture has added Washington’s name to the statement shows how much we desire individual and historical authority.

Here’s a challenge for Boston 1775 readers: Can anyone find an appearance of this quotation (or one very much like it) printed before 1999? Any attribution to Washington before 2001? Any version written by or credited to another individual?

House of Paine

On 19-20 Oct 2012, Iona College in New Rochelle, New York will host the International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies. Its announcement says:

Iona College will host a gathering of national and international scholars for presentations and discussion on the life, legacy and ideas of a long neglected Founding Father of the United States, Thomas Paine. In addition to 34 papers delivered in 12 sessions of scholarly presentations, the conference will feature a keynote speech by Lewis Lapham and a presentation of the play Citizen Paine, as well as receptions at the Thomas Paine National Historical Association Building and the Thomas Paine Cottage. The conference is open to scholars, students, and the general public.

The link above offers more information on the conference, including schedule, possible accommodations, and registration forms.

There’s a meme among Paine scholars and fans that he’s been “long neglected” or “forgotten.” I don’t buy it. There’s been a steady stream of Paine biographies, studies, and collections for decades. Only a handful of Revolutionary figures have more name recognition than Thomas Paine, especially when we consider that he played no major role in the run-up to the Revolution, the military victories, or the federal government.

In the past decade alone, we’ve seen the following books about Paine:

• Kenneth W. Burchell, Thomas Paine and America, 1776-1809 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).
• Joyce Chumbley and Leo Zonneveld, Thomas Paine: In Search of the Common Good (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2009).
• Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2003).
• Paul Collins, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005).
• Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
• Jack Fruchtman, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
• Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006).
• Jane Hodson, Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
• John P. Kaminski, Citizen Paine: Thomas Paine’s Thoughts on Man, Government, Society, and Religion (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
• Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).
• Ronald Frederick King and Elsie Begler, Thomas Paine: Common Sense for the Modern Era (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2007).
• Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Scott Liell, 46 Pages: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to Independence (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2004).
• Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Viking Press, 2006).
• Mark Philp, Thomas Paine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Sophia A. Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
• Vikki J. Vickers, “My pen and my soul have ever gone together”: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Bernard Vincent, The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).

Not to mention a dozen or more titles for young readers.

Let’s compare Paine to, say, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the most influential American political essay before Common Sense. In addition to writing that book and “The Liberty Song,” Dickinson was an important delegate to the Continental Congress, top official of Pennsylvania’s wartime government, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Dickinson was on the losing side of the debate over the Declaration of Independence but on the right side of the debate over slavery.

In the past decade only two new books focused on Dickinson: Jane E. Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and William Murchison, The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson (Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 2012).

So where’s the stronger case for a Founder being “neglected”?