Clues to the Constitutional Telegraphe

Yesterday I quoted an obituary from a Boston newspaper titled the Constitutional Telegraphe in 1800. At the time, Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) was a schoolboy in Charlestown. He didn’t invent the telegraph as we know it until 1832. So where, I wondered, did that newspaper get its name? And what did that name signify?

The first clue is that there were other newspapers called the Telegraphe around the same time:

• the American Telegraphe of Newfield (later Bridgeport), Connecticut, which published April 1795 to October 1800.
• the Baltimore Telegraphe of 1795 to 1800, with a special broadside of 1803.
• the Greenfield Gazette, or, Massachusetts and Vermont Telegraphe of 1795-97.
• Massachusetts’s Moral and Political Telegraphe, or, Brookfield Advertiser of Massachusetts, 1795-96.
• the Telegraphe of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, also 1795-96.
• the Telegraphe, and Charleston Daily Advertiser from South Carolina, known for a single week of publication in 1795.

All those newspapers were founded and published in a very brief period—from George Washington’s second term as President through the 1800 Presidential race.

The second clue is that most of those papers appear to have leaned toward the Jeffersonian party. In fact, in the mid-1800s Joseph T. Buckingham wrote about how Dr. Samuel Stillman Parker, son of a physician and Baptist minister out in Harvard, founded Boston’s Constitutional Telegraphe:

Common rumor said that the editor was instigated to the enterprize by a belief that the [Independent] Chronicle did not quite satisfy the wishes and expectations of some of the most ultra of the republican party. . . .

[Printer] Jonathan S. Copp…was a native of New-London, and though he served his apprenticeship with a decided federal printer, he was a bitter reviler of every thing that had the odor of federalism.

At the end of the first volume, September 27, 1800, Parker gave notice that he had “sold out his proprietorship” to John S. Lillie, “who had agreed to carry it on in support of the republican interest, for which it was sincerely instituted.”

Lillie was a dry-goods merchant, educated in the Boston public schools in the 1770s. Buckingham wrote:

He was an invincible disciple of the Jeffersonian school of politics, and endured the reproaches of his federal contemporaries with a firmness and perseverance, which his most inveterate opponents could not but admire. . . .

Mr. Lillie began his editorial career with a pledge to conduct the Telegraphe on the principles adopted by his predecessor, and a promise that nothing should be admitted, in opposition to the equal rights of man. The political paragraphs were more numerous, and more severe in their tone, and as the presidential election soon after terminated in favor of Mr. Jefferson, the writers in the Telegraphe assumed a more triumphant and defiant style towards their political opponents.

In September 1800, Lillie even named a son after Thomas Jefferson. (The Columbian Minerva of Dedham reported that alongside the baptism of another child named after John Adams.)

COMING UP: The Federalists strike back.

BUT FIRST: Yeah, yeah, what does this all have to do with a “telegraphe”?

A Schoolmaster During the Siege

I’ve shared reminiscences from Benjamin Russell and Harrison Gray Otis of how their Boston public schools closed in April 1775 with the outbreak of war (and how their stories got intertwined). That was the end of town-sponsored education in Boston until after the British military left the next March. Families probably kept up lessons for little kids, teaching them to read—which had always been a private responsibility. But I didn’t think anyone was teaching the handwriting, business math, or Latin and Greek of the public schools.

Then I found a mention of Elias Dupee in Zechariah Whitman’s 1842 history of the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company. That eventually led me to this sentence in Caleb Snow’s 1828 History of Boston:

During the siege, the town schools were suspended: a few children attended the instructions of Mr. Elias Dupee, who remained in Boston, and gratuitously devoted himself to his employment of a teacher, in which he took peculiar delight.

A number of other books repeat that statement, sometimes in different words but without additional details. Oliver A. Roberts’s later history of the Ancients & Honorables says that Dupee was a Freemason and held several town offices, including tax collector and constable. From 1764 to 1769 he regularly advertised in Boston newspapers that he was selling goods in a “New Auction-Room,” which moved around a bit; in February 1769 he was “over Mr. John Dupee, Mathematical Instrument Maker’s Shop.”

Poking around for more information about Dupee’s pedagogical career, I found that on 9 Apr 1776 private-school teacher John Leach wrote from Boston to one of the public-school masters, John Tileston, then staying at Windham, Connecticut:

The Selectmen have been so busy that I have not had opportunity to see them in a Body. The people are flocking into Town very fast, and there are great Numbers already Come in. I see Mr. Webb, and Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Parker, and several of our Friends, and they are all of opinion that you had better return to your school as soon as you can. . . . Martin [Master? Samuel] Hunt is in Town, and Dupee still continues at your Schoole

So during the siege Dupee used the North Writing School, owned by the town. The selectmen voted to reopen the public schools on 5 June. Tileston was back by then, and the records don’t mention Dupee.

At some point Dupee set up his own school in the Sandemanian meeting-house off Middle Street (now Hanover) in the North End. The Sandemanians were a Christian sect out of Scotland that had won over some locals in the decade before the Revolution. Many left with the British troops. On 5 Oct 1785, selectmen Moses Grant and John Andrews became “a Committee to treat with Mr. [Isaac] Winslow respecting a Schoolhouse lately improved by Mr. [Elias] Dupe known by the Name of Sandemons Meeting house.”

Within a month, the selectmen and Winslow on behalf of the Sandemanians agreed to a rent of £20 per year, minus what “three indifferent Persons” judged to be the fair cost of the town’s repairs “to the Wood House & Necessarys.” That suggests Dupee may not have been teaching in that building very recently; he was the latest user, but perhaps not a recent one.

That building became known as the Middle Street Writing School and was assigned to Master Samuel Cheney. Tileston was still at the North Writing School, so it looks like the North End’s youth population was growing enough to require two schools in that part of town. In 1789 Boston undertook a big education reform, and the next year the town gave up the lease and built new schools for itself. Elias Dupee never became one of Boston’s public schoolmasters.

The 27 Dec 1800 Constitutional Telegraphe of Boston reported at the top of its list of deaths: “Suddenly, on Wednesday last at Dedham Mr. Elias Dupee, formerly a Schoolmaster in this town, Aged 74.” Dedham town records say he died “of old Age” at the house of Daniel Baldwin, where he was boarding, and was aged 76. Some sources say Dupee had been born in 1716, and was thus 84.

TOMORROW: The Constitutional Telegraphe?!

[The thumbnail above shows the historical marker for the site of teacher John Tileston’s house in the North End, courtesy of Leo Reynolds’s Flickr stream under a Creative Commons license.]

What Upset Deborah Putnam?

After Gen. George Washington organized the Continental Army into brigades in late July 1775, Gen. Israel Putnam moved into the Ralph Inman mansion in east Cambridge. He had already stationed his son Daniel there with instructions to see that Elizabeth (Murray Campbell Smith) Inman wasn’t harassed.

Soon, however, Inman moved to the estate she had inherited in Milton, and the army finished filling her Cambridge farm with barracks and fortifications. At some point Gen. Putnam’s wife Deborah joined him, as shown by some letters he exchanged with the Cambridge committee of safety in 1776.

After leaving Massachusetts, on 22 May Putnam sent back a letter that “remonstrated against the treatment that Mrs. Putnam had received from an agent of this committee.” The only surviving excerpt, probably with its spelling and punctuation cleaned up, offers a sense of that letter’s tone:

Pray did not I labor and toil night and day, through wet and cold, and venture my life in the high places of the field, for the safety of my country, and the town of Cambridge in particular? For it was thought we could never hold Cambridge, and that we had better quit it, and go back and fortify on the heights of Brookline. I always told them we must hold Cambridge; and pray did not I take possession of Prospect Hill the very night after the fight on Bunker Hill, without having any orders from any person? And was not I the only general officer that tarried there? The taking of said hill I never could obtain leave for before, which is allowed by the best judges was the salvation of Cambridge, if not of the country.

On 18 June the committee replied that Putnam’s conduct

while in Cambridge, in every respect, and more especially as a general, (without having it set forth,) we hold in the highest veneration, and ever shall. . . .

Nothing was ever aimed at treating you or yours unbecoming the many obligations that we are under for the extraordinary services you have done to this town, which must always be acknowledged with the highest gratitude, not only by us, but by rising generations.

Richard Frothingham quoted from those letters in his History of the Siege of Boston, thanking “J. Harlow, Esq.” for a look at the original documents. As a historian he was mostly interested in the question of what role Putnam played in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Frothingham avoided stating why the general had complained to the committee about “the treatment that Mrs. Putnam had received.”

The best evidence we have about the root of that conflict, and it’s a tradition without a cited source, appears in Old Cambridge and New by local historian Thomas C. Amory, published in 1871. He wrote that:

Mrs. Putnam took her airings in the [Inman] family coach. The Cambridge selectmen, provoked at this by them unwarranted appropriation of confiscated property, had the presumption, when she was some distance from home, to compel her to alight. The general was not of a temper to submit very meekly to such an affront, and his indignation was expressed with sufficient force to have become historical.

That appears to be based on local memory rather than documents. It mixes up the selectmen and the committee of safety (though they probably overlapped). But the fact that Frothingham saw letters referring to a dispute means something serious must have happened.

It’s conceivable that Deborah Putnam tried to take the coach not for “airings” but for her journey south at the end of the siege. That could explain why the general wrote back to the committee rather than storm into their meeting-place and cuss them out, which would be more his style. It also fits the legal issues involved: Patriot committees were happy to let the army use local Loyalists’ property during the siege but didn’t want it permanently removed or damaged without legal authorization.

Exploring the World of Assassin’s Creed 3

One of the big videogames of the season is Assassin’s Creed 3 from UbiSoft. The Los Angeles Times review was mixed, finding the game play limited but the mise-en-scène amazing:

Set largely in the period during the American Revolution, “Assassins Creed 3” (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) is an action-adventure at its most expertly researched, and it is the all-too-rare title to prominently explore Native American culture. Colonial cities such as Boston are constructed via 18th century maps, and Ubisoft hired a Mohawk community consultant for language accuracy. It’s perhaps the only game released in 2012 that could be more fun to experience as a historical fact-checker than a player.

I already did that, based on a preview video of the game, and you can hear the interview here. Since I’m not a gamer, I can’t speak to the elaborate backstory, the character movement, the narrative options, and the like. But the visual recreation of colonial Boston looks great.

I’ve seen some articles describe the game’s version of Boston as “one-third scale,” which means the characters should be peering over the tops of houses. I think that’s a confused reference to the designers recreating about a third of the town. I know characters can jump around the Town House (now Old State House) and the docks, but they may not be able to make it down to Pleasant Street or all the way out to the Mill Pond.

Slate called the result “the most accessible reconstruction of the Revolutionary War era that’s ever been made.”

Walking the cobblestone streets of Boston means maneuvering around pigs, dogs, and street urchins, down lanes and alleys that are unrecognizable even to a longtime Boston resident like me. Town criers belt out news of shots fired in anger in other cities and of troop movements, first by the French and later, as the revolution sets in, by the British. There are bonnets and britches and tricorn hats, and most of the small talk and bickering you overhear doesn’t come with Boston’s infamous accent but in slang and jabs imported from England, Germany, and the rest of the Old World.

If this sounds a little unpleasant, that's because it is. Colonial Boston is boldly, fascinatingly ugly. It’s relentlessly brown—the docks are brown, as are the fences, the wood-sided buildings, and the clothes on most passersby. “The irony is that the game you see is far less brown than it was,” Hutchinson says. “We spent a lot of time telling the art director, ‘Everything’s brown,’ and he would say, ‘But everything was brown.’”

Assassin’s Creed 3 was developed by a French company with a big office in Montreal and developers all over the world. At the launch party this fall, I heard all sorts of accents. That national diversity meant the developers could contemplate the Revolutionary conflict from many angles, not bound consciously or unconsciously to America’s heroic origin story.

The game’s main hero, Connor, is of Irish and Mohawk origin (as well as somehow related to assassins in the medieval and Renaissance versions of the game—the details escape me). He may not feel complete allegiance to one side—there were men of Irish and Mohawk descent on both sides of the war, after all. According to this L.A. Times story, the game’s writers chose that hero to be “someone who would be coming into Colonial society for the very first time,” like the game’s players. And he seems to voice a modern sensibility:

For example, at one point in the game, Connor meets with Samuel Adams. As the two walk through the streets of late 18th century Boston, Connor criticizes the Founding Father’s position on slavery. Though Adams personally opposes slavery and abolished the practice in his own household, he does not use his pulpit to speak publicly on the issue — a decision that Connor finds incongruous with the patriots’ cause.

Which is a fair question—but one usually brought up by Loyalists in Revolutionary Massachusetts.

UbiSoft’s developers were even able to take their first downloadable add-on somewhere that past American authors would have found anathema: a post-Revolutionary America where George Washington has become a tyrannical king and must, presumably, be assassinated. I doubt the next downloadable add-on invites players to leave the army and return peacefully to a farm.

If anyone has played through Assassin’s Creed 3 and has strong impressions of the game and its depiction of history, you’re welcome to share your thoughts here.

Crossing the Delaware by Air?

If you’ve long felt that the only problem with the American War for Independence is that it didn’t have enough airships, then you should check out the Kickstarter campaign for Steam Patriots.

Steam Patriots is a “transmedia interactive project” from Noble Beast Books, publisher of speculative fiction in print, digital, and audio forms. Its past titles include Steampunk Holmes.

The image above is a detail of Patrick Arrasmith’s scratchboard illustration “George Washington with Airships.” See the full image at the Steam Patriots site. It “will be included in the interactive iPad edition and will be sold separately as a poster.”

I first heard about this project some months ago, but apparently a necessary part of launching a Kickstarter campaign these days is to create video promotions and previews. That seem circular to me, but then I’m old enough to remember when videos were harder to produce than manuscripts, photographs, and drawings.

Gen. Lee on the New England Regiments

What did Gen. Charles Lee think of the regiments he discovered in along the siege lines outside Boston? Here are his comments to Dr. Benjamin Rush on 20 July 1775:

Upon my Soul the materials here (I mean the private men) are [admira]ble—had they proper uniforms, arms, and proper officers, their zeal, youth, bodily strength, good humour [and dext]erity, must make em an invincible army.

The Rhode [Islanders] are well off in the article of officers and the young [officers of] the other Provinces are willing, and with a little time will do very well—but from the old big wigs[—libera] nos Domine [God save us]—the abilities of their Engineers are not [evi?]dant—I really believe not a single man of ’em is [capable] of constructing an Oven

And to Robert Morris on 27 July:

Our miserable defect of Engineers imposes upon me eternal work in a department to which I am rather a stranger—the undoing what we found done gives us more trouble than doing what was left undone—however we have contrived to make ourselves pretty secure—the Enemy seem to aim at the same object—Upon the whole they act and I believe will act upon the defensive unless they turn to a piratical war [i.e., Royal Navy operations] . . .

This announces at least a lowness of pulse. If I were General [George] Washington however I should jump at the offer of your third Battalion [of] Riflemen—indeed I should demand some entire Battalion from your Province—and should propose disbanding the same number of Battalions of Massachusetts—Not but the Private men are admirable and the young officers tolerable but they have in fact engaged for more than they can perform, Eight Thousand are full as much as they can compleat. Connecticut, N. Hampshire could furnish many more than is settled by the Congress.

Lee had told Morris something similar at the start of the month. But he spoke less favorably about the Connecticut troops that fall.

The Vassalls’ Pension and Tonight’s Lecture in Medford

On 17 June 1858, an anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Massachusetts Historical Society held a special meeting at the house of member Henry W. Longfellow. Members shared some documents about the first owner of that house, John Vassall.

Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw recalled a case from early in his legal career that started when the state confiscated that property because Vassall was an absent Loyalist:

The estate having been confiscated by the Government because its owner was a Tory, when the commissioners were putting it up for sale, an old colored man, a slave, who had long served in the Vassal family, stepped forth, and said, that HE was no Tory, but a friend of liberty; and having lived on the estate all his life, he did not see any reason why he should be deprived of his dwelling. On petitioning the General Court, a resolve was framed, granting Tony a stipend of twelve pounds annually.

About 1810 (after Tony’s death), Cuba, his widow, went to the State Treasurer to get her stipend; but it was found that the resolve did not include herself. Mr. Shaw, then a member of the House, presented her petition for the continuance of the grant. It met with favor, and the annual sum was voted to Cuba during her natural life.

Shaw’s extemporaneous recollection wasn’t completely accurate, and reflects the dismissive racism of his time (referring to Tony and Cuba Vassall only by their first names), but it’s impressively close. The Massachusetts legislature responded to Tony Vassall’s petition by voting to pay “the sum of twelve pounds in specie, or a sum in bills of credit equivalent, to the said Anthony” each year.

Tony Vassall died in 1811, receiving obituaries in the Boston Repertory and Columbian Centinel. His widow Cuba petitioned for the pension to continue, and on 28 Feb 1812 the legislature granted her $40 per year. But she died only a few months later.

Tonight I’ll discuss the lives of Cuba Vassall and her mistress Penelope (Royall) Vassall at their first home in Massachusetts, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford. Later they lived on “Tory Row” in Cambridge; Penelope was John Vassall’s aunt and neighbor, and in the early 1770s Cuba was his property. I’ll discuss how the Revolution disrupted those old relationships and sent both women off on new paths. That talk starts at 7:30. Admission is free for members, $5 for non-members.

“General Fry, that wonderful man”

Back on Friday, I listed all the New England generals whom Gen. George Washington found along the siege lines when he arrived in Massachusetts in July 1775. The next few postings have detailed what happened to all those men—except one.

Joseph Frye (1712-1794), appointed a Massachusetts general on 21 June, was working closely with Gen. Artemas Ward when they learned of the Continental Congress’s choice of generals. That list didn’t include Frye. Ward personally went out to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Watertown to talk to its leaders about sending a full list of its appointees to Philadelphia. At least that’s how Frye recalled the situation the following spring.

Frye agreed to stay on the job until his promotion came through. When Ward moved to Roxbury in late July to oversee the southern wing of the army, Frye went with him. In August, some Continental Congress delegates visited Ward’s divisional headquarters. Frye asked what happened to his commission.

The visitors answered that “in the letter sent to them in regard to him and others, his Christian name was not mentioned, and…they could not satisfy themselves it was he.” Was there any other military man in Massachusetts named Frye? Certainly not such a prominent one. Whatever the excuse, there was still no Continental appointment. Frye gave the delegates his résumé and stayed on.

Occasionally that summer, Washington’s general orders referred to “Frye’s brigade,” but officially he was still just the senior colonel, not a brigadier general. Washington did want another brigadier. He just didn’t particularly want Frye. That’s clear in a 31 August letter to the Congress in which he mentioned two candidates for that rank.

The first was an old colleague from the French & Indian War, Col. John Armstrong: “his general military Conduct, & Spirit much approved by all who served with him; besides which, his Character was distinguished by an Enterprize against the Indians, which he plann’d with great Judgment, & executed with equal Courage, & Success.”

As for Joseph Frye:

He entered into the Service as early as 1745, & rose thro’ the different military Ranks in the succeeding Wars, to that of Colonel, untill last June, when he was appointed a Major General by the Congress of this Province. From these Circumstances together with the favourable report made to me of him I presume he sustained the Character of a good Officer—Tho’ I do not find it distinguished by any peculiar Service.

The Congress got the message and commissioned Armstrong, but he served in the south.

On 12 October, Frye heard that headquarters didn’t expect to receive a new brigadier appointment in the near future. He left for his home in Maine, where he was laying out what would become Fryeburg. (Above is his surveyor’s compass, courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Surveying.)

Once the old colonel was a safe distance away, Washington wrote to Philadelphia on 2 November: “I must beg leave to recall the attention of the Congress to the Appointment of a Brigadier General—an Officer as necessary to a Brigade as a Colonel is to a Regiment, and will be exceedingly wanted in the new Arrangement.” The next month he passed on the name of Henry Babcock of Rhode Island. (That was before Babcock went mad.)

In January the Congress finally decided to make Joseph Frye a brigadier in the army at Boston. That news took a while to reach Maine. Frye arrived back at the siege lines on 15 February, and Washington gave Frye his commission the next day. On the 24th, he sent Frye a short note about chaplains. And that’s the only message to the man in the commander-in-chief’s correspondence.

Which is not to say that Washington didn’t write about him. On 7 March he told his former secretary, Joseph Reed, that Frye “keeps his room, and talks learnedly of emetics, cathartics, &c. For my own part, I see nothing but a declining life that matters [to] him.”

The day after the last British ship sailed from Boston, Frye sent in his resignation from the army, effective 11 April. Washington wrote to Charles Lee about that detail: “the choice of the day became a matter of great speculation, and remained profoundly mysterious till he exhibited his account, when there appeared neither more nor less in it, than the completion of three calender months.” In other words, Frye wanted to be paid for a full quarter of the year.

On 1 April, Washington told Reed:

General Fry, that wonderful man, has made a most wonderful hand of it. . . . He has drawn three hundred and seventy-five dollars, never done one day’s duty, scarce been three times out of his house, discovered that he was too old and too infirm for a moving camp, but remembers that he has been young, active, and very capable of doing what is now out of his power to accomplish; and therefore has left Congress to find out another man capable of making, if possible, a more brilliant figure than he has done

Washington was rarely that free with his opinions in official correspondence.

To be sure, Frye was more than two decades older than Washington. He had served in King George’s War and the French & Indian War, writing the standard account of the siege of Fort William Henry. He may have been better off staying retired. Still, he was healthy enough to live another eighteen years to the age of eighty-two.

Gen. Washington’s “three Grand Divisions”

The day before Gen. George Washington wrote his letter asking Gen. John Thomas to stay with the Continental Army, he announced a new organization for those troops outside Boston. This was the first time the new commander-in-chief had changed how those forces operated, thus the first major exercise of his new authority.

Washington faced two short-term problems: the Boston and Charlestown Necks. Since the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British military controlled both those towns, well protected on their peninsulas. Washington feared that at any time the royal troops could charge out either isthmus, breaking through the Continentals’ lines. As soon as he and Gen. Charles Lee arrived in Massachusetts in early July 1775, their first priority was strengthening the fortifications at the base of those two necks.

Gen. Washington’s longer-term problem was strengthening the Continental Army as an institution. He wanted his soldiers, both officers and men, to think of themselves as protecting the united colonies, not as men from separate colonies committed only to officers they knew. Washington was also trying to soothe the hurt feelings that came from how the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had ranked the generals.

The 22 July reorganization of the American army into “three Grand Divisions,” each containing two brigades, addressed all those problems. Washington didn’t explain his thinking at length, so I can’t even say for sure what his purpose was or whether this was all his idea. But this is the effect of the change.

On his northern wing at Winter Hill and Prospect Hill, facing off against the British troops in Charlestown, Washington placed Maj. Gen. Lee, Brig. Gen. John Sullivan of New Hampshire, and Brig. Gen. Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Lee was the most experienced military man in the Continental forces, so he could bring along those young brigadiers, neither of whom had ever been in a war.

On the southern wing in Roxbury and Dorchester, protecting against a charge off the Boston Neck, Washington placed Maj. Gen. Artemas Ward, Brig. Gen. Thomas, and Brig. Gen. Joseph Spencer of Connecticut. Those officers were all war veterans, and Ward and Thomas had been the top New England commanders before Washington arrived, so he could trust them to handle whatever came up on the far side of the Charles River.

Finally, in the center at east Cambridge, Washington placed Maj. Gen. Israel Putnam, Brig. Gen. William Heath, and a brigadier to be named later. This division was to function as “also a Corps-de-Reserve, for the defence of the several posts, north of Roxbury, not already named.” Creating it had the added benefit of ensuring that Putnam didn’t oversee Spencer, who had objected to his former subordinate’s new rank, and Heath and Thomas needn’t have awkward discussions of their relative seniority.

As part of this reorganization, Washington assigned some of the many Massachusetts regiments to the northern wing even though it had no Massachusetts general. Soon he would mix in the new companies of riflemen from the south, assigning them to different brigades as needed. That was the start of Gen. Washington’s effort to meld regiments from different colonies/states into a single, national force.

TOMORROW: One last detail—does anyone remember Gen. Frye?

“Your Country will do ample Justice to your Merits”

Gen. George Washington was displeased that Gen. Joseph Spencer stormed home to Connecticut in July 1775 in a snit over rank, but he probably didn’t worry too much about losing the man. The real threat was that Gen. John Thomas of Plymouth, Massachusetts (shown here, courtesy of Find a Grave), might do the same.

Since April, Thomas had been second-in-command of the provincial troops, leading the forces massed in Roxbury against a British advance down Boston Neck. There are some signs that Thomas operated almost independently of Gen. Artemas Ward in Cambridge. Observers such as James Warren of the Massachusetts government thought Thomas was the better commander. Yet the Continental Congress ranked him low on its list of brigadiers—below Gen. William Heath, who had actually been reporting to him.

Fortunately, Warren saw a solution on that same list. On 4 July he and Joseph Hawley of Northampton wrote to Washington:

As [first-ranked brigadier Seth] Pomroy is now Absent, and at the distance of an hundred miles from the Army, if it can be consistent with your Excellencys Trust and the Service to retain his Commission untill you shall receive Advice from the Continental Congress, and we shall be able to prevail with Heath to make a concession Honourable to himself, and advantageous to the publick, We humbly conceive the way would be open to do Justice to Thomas.

In sum, if we slip Thomas into Pomeroy’s top slot, then he’ll once again outrank all the other Massachusetts generals but Ward. The only man moved ahead of Thomas would then be Israel Putnam. Washington didn’t have the authority to make that change, but the suggestion made its way to Philadelphia.

For weeks Thomas stewed in Roxbury, making noises about resigning and going home. On 23 July, both Washington and the celebrated Gen. Charles Lee wrote to him about the matter. Washington said:

For the Sake of your bleeding Country, your devoted Province, your Charter rights, & by the Memory of those brave Men who have already fell in this great Cause, I conjure you to banish from your Mind every Suggestion of Anger and Disappointment: your Country will do ample Justice to your Merits—they already do it, by the Sorrow & Regret expressed on the Occasion and the Sacrifice you are called to make, will in the Judgment of every good Man, & lover of his Country, do you more real Honour than the most distinguished Victory.

Characteristically, Lee was both more expansive and more egocentric:

You think yourself not justly dealt with in the appointments of the Continental Congress. I am quite of the same opinion, but is this a time Sir, when the liberties of your country, the fate of posterity, the rights of mankind are at stake, to indulge our resentments for any ill treatment we may have received as individuals? I have myself, Sir, full as great, perhaps greater reason to complain than yourself. I have passed through the highest ranks, in some of the most respectable services in Europe. According then to modern etiquette notions of a soldier’s honor and delicacy, I ought to consider at least the preferment given to General Ward over me as the highest indignity, but I thought it my duty as a citizen and asserter of liberty, to waive every consideration.

On this principle, although a Major General of five years standing [a largely honorary rank from the king of Poland], and not a native of America, I consented to serve under General Ward, because I was taught to think that the concession would be grateful to his countrymen, and flatter myself that the concession has done me credit in the eye of the world; and can you, Sir, born in this very country, which a banditti of ministerial assassins are now attempting utterly to destroy with sword, fire and famine, abandon the defence of her, because you have been personally ill used?

Four days before, the Congress had voted to make Thomas the senior brigadier general. A backdated commission was rushed up to Massachusetts, and on 4 August the commander-in-chief was able to report, “General Thomas has accepted his Commission and I have heard nothing of his retirement since, so that I hope he is satisfied.”

TOMORROW: Dealing the generals into three piles.

“Better…to lose four Spencers than half a Putnam”

As I described yesterday, the biggest managerial challenge Gen. George Washington faced when he arrived in Cambridge on 2 July 1775 was sorting out the generals who would serve under him. The Continental Congress had made a list of major and brigadier generals, but its ranking didn’t match the set of commanders Washington found in Massachusetts or how they had organized themselves.

Fortunately, the commander-in-chief had some help in solving the problem. The nearby colonial governments did their part. After Nathaniel Folsom saw that the Congress had chosen John Sullivan to be the one general from New Hampshire (based on the enthusiastic recommendation of Congress delegate John Sullivan), he went home. And New Hampshire put him in charge of its militia.

Similarly, the Massachusetts government saved face for John Whitcomb, who hadn’t been that enthusiastic about serving in the army, by electing him to its Council. During a Continental Army inquiry in late July witnesses still called him “General Whitcomb,” but the official record referred to him as “Colonel John Whitcomb, who is styled by the foregoing deponents General.”

Joseph Spencer had stormed off to Hartford, Connecticut, to complain that the Congress had promoted Israel Putnam over him. He brought a letter signed by many Connecticut officers supporting him. But that action hurt his cause by making him look selfish and unprofessional.

On 11 July young officer Samuel Blachley Webb wrote to his stepfather, Congress delegate Silas Deane:

I have since been to Roxbury, and find the officers, many of them, heartily sick of what they have done, in particular, Maj. [Return Jonathan] Meiggs,—who says he was forced to sign what the others did—to keep peace; and says he had rather serve under Putnam than Spencer. You’ll find Generals Washington and [Charles] Lee, are vastly more fond, and think higher of Putnam, than any man in the army. . . . Better is it for us to lose four Spencers than half a Putnam.

In Philadelphia, Deane and his colleague Eliphalet Dyer were so embarrassed they agreed not to seek any promotion for Spencer from the Congress.

Back in Hartford the colony’s Committee of Safety handled the matter:

Samuel Huntington and William Williams were desired to wait on General Spencer, at Gray’s, the tavern where he was just arrived, and confer with him on the subject-matter of his dissatisfaction, &c., and endeavour to remove, &c., and reconcile him cheerfully to pursue the service; which they did accordingly.

Spencer rode back to the siege lines, arriving on 19 July. In later years, Washington probably wouldn’t have accepted Spencer’s behavior, but on that date the commander-in-chief had been on the job less than three weeks. Spencer was almost two decades older and had served in King George’s War and the Seven Years’ War. His name was on that official Continental Army commission. It was easier for Washington to overlook Spencer’s hissyfit than to make an issue of it.

Nevertheless, Gen. Washington probably didn’t harbor warm feelings about this brigadier. And Gen. Spencer made no particular contribution to the siege. Later in the war he commanded one campaign, an aborted attack on British positions at Newport, and then served in a single session of the Continental Congress.

[The image above comes courtesy of the Colonel Spencer Inn in Campton, New Hampshire. I have no idea if it’s an accurate portrait of the man.]

TOMORROW: Saving Gen. Thomas.

The Generals in Cambridge: “Uneasiness among us”

When Nathaniel Folsom, newly appointed general of the New Hampshire troops, arrived at the siege of Boston in late June 1775, he found this chain of command:

Mr. [Artemas] Ward [shown here] is Capt. General, Mr. [John] Thomas Lieut. General, and the other Generals are Major Generals.

Those others included William Heath, Joseph Frye, and John Whitcomb of Massachusetts; Joseph Spencer and Israel Putnam of Connecticut; and Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, as well as Folsom himself.

I wrote about Folsom’s difficulty asserting his authority over Col. John Stark back here. One week after the New Hampshire officers had worked out their differences, Gen. George Washington arrived in Cambridge and upset the whole arrangement.

There doesn’t seem to have been any resistance to the Virginian becoming the Continental Congress’s new commander-in-chief. Rather, he also brought along the Congress’s commissions for subordinate generals, and they didn’t match the situation on the ground. Ward had already written to John Hancock that the new appointments might “create Uneasiness among us; which we ought, at this critical Time, to be extremely careful to avoid.”

The Congress has decided to rank the generals under Washington this way:

• as major generals, Ward, Charles Lee, Philip Schuyler of New York, and Putnam.
• as brigadier generals, Seth Pomeroy of Massachusetts, Richard Montgomery of New York, David Wooster of Connecticut, Heath, Spencer, Thomas, John Sullivan of New Hampshire, Greene, and Horatio Gates.

Schuyler, Montgomery, and Wooster were assigned to the defense of northern New York/invasion of southern Canada.

The New England delegates in the Congress had tried to replicate the seniority of their colonies’ militia officers, and were also swayed by reports of the Battle of Lexington and Concord (which Heath had participated in) and the skirmish over Noddle’s Island (which Putnam had led). The Congress therefore elevated Putnam over Spencer even though Connecticut had ranked Putnam third among its generals. The Congress also made Heath outrank Thomas even though Heath was taking orders from Thomas.

In addition, the Congress hadn’t learned several things. Pomeroy had never accepted his general’s rank in the Massachusetts army (though he had fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill). Frye, Whitcomb, and Folsom were all exercising commands in the army outside Boston. And on 23 June the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had voted to make Col. Richard Gridley of the artillery regiment into another major general.

By the time Washington realized what a mess this was, he had already given Putnam his commission as Continental major general and couldn’t take it back. On 10 July he wrote to Philadelphia:

The great Dissatisfaction expressed on this Subject & the apparent Danger of throwing the whole Army into the utmost Disorder, together with the strong Representations made by the Provincial Congress, have induced me to retain the Commissions in my Hands untill the pleasure of the Congress should be farther known…

In fact, on 5 July, only three days after the new commander reached Cambridge, Spencer had convinced a large number of Connecticut officers to sign a letter to their legislature protesting the Congress’s decision and then set off for Hartford to deliver it himself. Or, as Washington wrote, “General Spencer was so much disgusted at the Preference given to General Puttnam, that he left the Army without visiting me, or making known his Intentions in any Respect.”

And Gen. Thomas was talking about leaving, too.

TOMORROW: Gen. Washington handles his first managerial crisis.

1735 Wedding Dress on Display in Boston, 13 Nov.

On Tuesday, 13 November, the Bostonian Society is hosting a special event focused on this dress, embroidered by Elizabeth Bull before her wedding in 1735. The dress will be on display in the Old State House for that night only, and textile expert Kathryn Tarleton will describe the challenges of researching and conserving it. Then it will go off for treatment under a grant from the Stockman Family Foundation.

The society’s announcement explains:

Miss Bull began designing, sewing, and embroidering her own China silk wedding gown while in school, a project undertaken by young women to practice and perfect the advanced needle arts. She had already been working on the gown for several years when, in 1734, she met Reverend Roger Price at Trinity Church. The gown was still not completed when Miss Bull wore it to their wedding the following year.

The minister was in his late thirties; Elizabeth was still in her teens. Here are some close-ups of the embroidery. That page suggests that the dress was altered to conform to later fashions, as folks who know about sleeves probably already guessed. Here are some of the caps Elizabeth Price sewed for her babies.

The family moved to England in the 1750s when the Rev. Mr. Price sought a better living within the Anglican Church. He died unexpectedly in 1762. Elizabeth lived until 1780. Two of the couple’s children moved back to Massachusetts after the war, settling on property from their mother’s family in Hopkinton. Daughter Elizabeth, known as “Madam Price,” lived until 1826. Presumably she and her brother had brought the gown and other family items back to the United States.

Elizabeth Bull’s gown will be displayed from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. Space is limited, and admission ($5 for Bostonian Society members, $15 for non-members) can be arranged through this Eventbrite page. There will be refreshments, presumably not near the fabric.

Alfred F. Young, a Giant of a Historian

The historian Alfred F. Young died yesterday at the age of 87. He was the author of significant books about the American Revolution, with particular attention to people from Massachusetts:

• The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution.
• Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier.
• Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution.

Perhaps even more important, Al Young edited or coedited some landmark collections of essays and the catalog for a permanent exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society:

• The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism.
• Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism.
• Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding.
• We the People: Voices and Images of the New Nation.
• Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation.

In all his books, Al focused on ordinary people rather than political and military leaders from the elite. He studied men like Ebenezer Mackintosh and events like Pope Night (well, he used the term “Pope’s Day”). Appropriate for a man given the middle name “Fabian,” as in Fabian socialism—and as in Gen. George Washington’s Fabian strategy for patiently winning the war.

Al was also a friend and a mentor. I’m not an academic, and I had no institutional affiliation when I attended my first Omohundro Institute conference on early American history. Al welcomed me and introduced me around. On Sunday morning, as many attendees left early, we had hours of one-on-one conversation about his upcoming work on Deborah Sampson and my research on kids.

Al was always eager to make connections, to bring new folks into the conversation. Though he felt that some of the dominant “consensus” school of American Revolutionary history missed important points by focusing on the top, he didn’t spend his time complaining about those omissions. Instead, as a speaker and writer Al emphasized the good work he saw people doing and tried to ensure more people heard about it.

I helped Al with computer research for his book Liberty Pole, collecting and analyzing newspaper reports about Liberty Trees and Liberty Poles in pre-Revolutionary America. Did they have the same meaning, or were they independent symbols? Earlier this fall I sent Al my experience of a visit to the Boston Tea Party Museum as he planned a new essay.

In late October Ray Raphael told me that Al had fallen ill. I’d just sent him some pages from my George Washington study that I thought he’d like, piecing together the life of a teen-aged girl who worked at the general’s Cambridge headquarters. I ended that letter this way:

Your advice, inspiration, and unflagging encouragement over the past several years have been a great strength for me. You welcomed me into the historical field when I made my first, uncredentialed steps into it, and you’ve given me the confidence to take on greater challenges. I know you’ve done the same for many other researchers, and I’m gratified to have been in that company. Thank you.

There’s no better introduction to Al’s work than The Shoemaker and the Tea Party. It combines an updated an expanded version of his award-winning William & Mary Quarterly paper about George R. T. Hewes with analysis of how we came to celebrate the Tea Party above all the other pre-Revolutionary political action in Boston.

We Need to Fix the Electoral College Again

Late in October 2000, one of my best friends from college raised a possible outcome of the upcoming election: Al Gore might lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College. I replied that that would be bad for the country.

Instead, as we know, Gore won the popular vote but, through a combination of unforeseen circumstances, inconsistent counting that ignored voter intention, and Supreme Court reversals, lost the Electoral College.

Having considered the opposite possibility a few weeks before, I felt confident that my deep dismay at that outcome wasn’t just because George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in charge of the executive branch but because they were clearly not, as the Declaration of Independence says, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It’s not clear why the Constitutional Convention came up with the Electoral College. The upper-class men gathered there certainly didn’t trust democracy—indeed, they convened in response to popular uprisings like the Shays’ rebellion. They preferred representational democracy in which the people’s preferences were filtered through a series of elected deliberative bodies made up mostly of upper-class men like themselves.

The Convention was also starting from a system with all states enjoying equal (if disproportionate) representation and moving to one with some representation based on population. The Electoral College was the result of a larger compromise. The Constitution assigned each state the same number of Electors as it had Representatives and Senators together, and left the manner of choosing those Electors up to the state. Members of the Convention probably felt that system would adequately reflect “the consent of the governed.”

The resulting system had none of the advantages of representational democracy, however. Electors from different states are not supposed to meet together, so there can be no deliberations or compromises. Some analysts suggest that the Convention expected the Electoral College to produce either strong consensus candidates (e.g., George Washington) or a small number of candidates for the U.S. Congress—the elite of the elite—to choose from.

The Convention didn’t anticipate the rise of political parties even though they had existed in Britain for decades and people were already applying the idea of “the court party” and “country party” to state legislatures. Within ten years, states dominated by one party or with favorite sons in the presidential race were assigning all their Electoral College votes to one candidate regardless of the proportion of votes cast in the state. At that point political leaders had clearly abandoned any notion of the Electoral College representing voters—it was all about partisan advantage.

The problems with this system became apparent as soon as Washington retired. The 1796 election meant President John Adams had his rival Thomas Jefferson as Vice President. The 1800 election had a deadlock in Congress between Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution (official copy shown above) was an attempt to fix the Electoral College. The Founding generation knew they hadn’t gotten that part of the Constitution right.

But that 1804 change didn’t fix all the problems. In 1825, 1877, 1889, and 2001 a President took office even though more Americans had voted for another candidate. (Is it just coincidence that the popular winners kept out of power were all Democrats?) Sometimes the administration that took power without popular support instituted terrible policies. At other times the damage looks small, but those outcomes still undercut the foundation of the U.S. of A. as either democratic or republican (whatever difference people like to assign to those terms). Of all the countries that have taken the U.S. as a model, not one has tried to replicate the Electoral College.

This year pre-election surveys raised the possibility of another split between Americans’ actual vote and the Electoral College. For a while last month some surveys showed Mitt Romney with a lead in national polls but President Barack Obama solidly ahead in most swing states and thus in Electoral College projections. For the first time the Republican Party seriously faces the prospect of winning a popular mandate but not taking office. That split outcome seems less likely as I write, but I hope the fear might galvanize Republicans into helping to reform our flawed system.

The National Popular Vote initiative offers a simple, constitutional way for states to restore “the consent of the governed” to our Presidential elections. Even better would be a new system with run-offs ensuring that the candidate who takes office has received a majority of Americans’ votes. There’s simply no justification for the Electoral College.

“Powder Alarm” Talk in Sudbury Tonight

On the morning of 1 Sept 1774, the Boston merchant John Andrews wrote this in a letter to a relative in Philadelphia:

Yesterday in the afternoon two hundred and eighty men were draughted from the severall regiments in the common, furnish’d with a day’s provision each, to be in readiness to march early in the morning.

Various were the conjectures respecting their destination, but this morning the mystery is unravell’d, for a sufficient number of boats from the Men of War and transports took ’em on board between 4 and 5 o’clock this morning, and proceeding up Mistick river landed them at the back of Bob Temple’s house, from whence they proceeded to the magazine (situated between that town [Charlestown] and Cambridge [now in Somerville and shown here]) conducted by judge Oliver, Sheriff Phips, and Joseph Goldthwait, and are now at this time (8 o’clock) taking away the powder from thence, being near three hundred barrells, belonging to the Province, which they are lodging in Temple’s barn, for conveniency to be transported to the Castle, I suppose.

Andrews was reporting what he’d heard inside Boston, which shows how quickly people were bringing in this news.

Which is not to say those reports were accurate. Andrews’s reference to “judge Oliver” probably meant Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, a Cambridge Loyalist, magistrate, and militia officer. But Oliver’s detailed accounts of what followed say nothing about helping the royal troops collected the gunpowder in that early morning. (The reference could also be to Chief Justice Peter Oliver, but he didn’t live nearby.)

In contrast, Sheriff David Phips (1724-1811) acknowledged helping those British soldiers on their mission, pointing out that he was following the governor’s orders. Joseph Goldthwait (1730-1779) was a former provincial officer appointed commissary to the royal troops in 1768 and barrack master during the siege.

Gen. Thomas Gage’s move to take control of the provincial gunpowder supply, along with two cannon assigned to the Middlesex County militia, set off the reaction known as the “Powder Alarm.” I’ll speak about that important event tonight at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, at the invitation of the Sudbury Minutemen. I’ll light up my slides a little after 8:00 P.M.

I also wrote about the “Powder Alarm” and its newspaper coverage in Reporting the Revolutionary War, the new illustrated book assembled by Todd Andrlik of Rag Linen. Barnes & Noble is selling a special limited edition of that book that comes with reproductions of four front pages of American newspapers published during the war.

The Memory of Jeanne Baret

Earlier this year Live Science reported about the French botanist Jeanne Baré or Baret (1740-1807):

Baret was the live-in companion [officially housekeeper] of Philibert Commerson [Commerçon], a renowned botanist who was tapped to lead scientific work on the [globe-circling 1766] expedition. Commerson was allowed to bring an assistant, but it could not be Baret. Women were forbidden from traveling aboard French naval vessels. . . .

Fast forward to the day of departure, and Baret presented herself at the dock, dressed as a teenage boy, and offered her services as an assistant to Commerson, who, quite conveniently, claimed he’d been unable to find one.

Once on board, the pair were given the captain’s cabin—they had a great deal of scientific equipment. . . .

the crew began to suspect Baret was not what she seemed. The ship was only 100 feet (30 meters) long and 30 feet (9 m) wide, and “the captain of the ship actually interrogated her at one point,” [biographer Glynis] Ridley said, “and she said she was a eunuch.” The only way to verify her claim would have been embarrassing for everyone, and for at least two years, Baret conducted her scientific work with relatively little hassle.

Yet when the voyage reached the island of Mauritius, off the southeast coast of Africa, the captain unceremoniously booted the couple from the expedition. Commerson died there in 1773, and, because they were not married, Baret was left with nothing. She married a marine and in 1775 returned with him to France, where she died in relative obscurity in 1807.

The couple found more than seventy plant species, some of which were named for Commerson. The commander of the expedition, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, is remembered in the bouganvillea vine. But nothing was named after Baret.

Ridley’s 2010 book The Discovery of Jeanne Baret revived interest in Baret. Some reviewers, such as Gerard Helferich in the Wall Street Journal, criticized the book for speculating too much. But the basic facts of her life are clear. Way back in 1785, the French government acknowledged Baret’s voyage in disguise. The picture above comes from an Italian book published in 1816.

A public radio interview with Ridley caught the ear of biologist Eric J. Tepe, now at the University of Cincinnati. He named “a distant relative of the tomato and potato” that he had identified as Solanum baretiae in Baret’s honor.

The Feed

I spent Friday afternoon at a public discussion of the state of historical interpretation in the National Park Service. Called “Critical Conversations,” this session was prompted by an Organization of American Historians report titled The Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service.

In this region we have many historical parks, an active and activist historian for the Boston National Historical Park and Boston African American National Historic Site in Marty Blatt, and a public-history graduate program at the University of Massachusetts. That combination made it possible to convene a wide-ranging discussion of the report and how people felt its issues affected them, called “Critical Conversations.”

The two sessions of the day were:

• “The Divide” between the Park Service’s official historians and the interpretive staff who actually speak to the public. Are the historians in a “section 106 ghetto,” hemmed in by bureaucracy, paperwork, and jargon like, well, “section 106”? Are the interpreters largely left on their own to develop tours and programs in only a couple of weeks with no time for learning more? Should the Park Service require more specialized background or academic training for interpreters in historical parks?
• “Fixed and Fearful Interpretation”: Does the Park Service present feel-good stories or “this is the way it happened” certainty when the study of history is really a way of thinking about the past that constantly creates new ideas? Do we the public want those unchanging facts and feel-good stories? Are we up for hearing more challenging presentations from folks in U.S. government uniforms? Does the federal system support persistent innovation, or in a time of budget constraints is it just holding on?
  

Throughout the afternoon it was clear that everyone there—almost all N.P.S. employees, retirees, or associates and public historians—wanted historical interpretation to reflect the most advanced, interesting, and occasionally challenging historical thinking. The question might be how to bring people who could allow that to happen into the conversation. And that doesn’t necessarily mean top officials at the agency (some of whom were there). It might mean Congress, or we the people.

I live-tweeted the event since I had little else to contribute. I chose the hashtag #NPScritconv for those tweets, and you can sample the results and discussion here. The session was also videotaped; that record will go on the web soon so folks will be able to see whether my short summaries of people’s points were accurate.

(Incidentally, last month I noticed that the Twitter feed in the left column of this webpage had stopped feeding. Perhaps Twitter and Google no longer chose to let their systems work together. In any event, I removed that widget until I can find one that works.)

The Return of “Parker’s Revenge”

The Boston Globe ran a regional story on Thursday about archeological finds from a part of Hanscom Air Force Base that probably saw fighting on 19 Apr 1775:

In recent years, archeologists have uncovered several musket balls, a shoe buckle, a knife, and other Colonial-era artifacts on land that is part of the Hanscom Air Force Base property. And at a ceremony last month, Hanscom officials officially loaned eight of the items to the neighboring Minute Man National Historical Park, which plans to create a display for its visitors. . . .

Part of the Hanscom property extends near the site of a battle known as “Parker’s Revenge,” which took place hours after the dawn clash on Lexington Green where British regulars killed eight Colonial militiamen. Around 1:30 p.m. that day, Captain John Parker and his Lexington militia unit ambushed the British as they returned to Boston from Concord.

Although the article repeatedly refers to “the Battle of Parker’s Revenge,” that event is usually classified as a skirmish, a small part of the larger Battle of Lexington and Concord.

The term “Parker’s Revenge” appears to be a twentieth-century coinage that provides an inspiring narrative shape for the experiences of Capt. Parker’s Lexington militia company that day: after the devastating shooting on their common at dawn, they picked themselves up and participated in the attack on the British column as it withdrew back through town in the afternoon.

Here’s a report on these artifacts last year. The archeologists seem careful not to tie them directly to the battle since it’s possible they were dropped deposited at some other time. But they certainly reflect eighteenth-century weaponry.

The Friends of Minute Man National Park supports these archeological and preservation efforts.

The Lure of Sensationalism in Boston Magazine

Earlier this month a writer for Boston Magazine contacted me seeking a quick quotation for a story on the city’s historical tourism. She asked: “Would you be able to comment on the ways that Boston sells its history as a draw for tourists? What are the ways we present the city’s history—do we do this through advertising campaigns or other ways?”

I sent back a few observations:

I don’t feel qualified to comment about Boston’s tourism advertisements.

I have noted that the region’s historic sites reflect New England’s old tradition of separatism. The Freedom Trail includes city sites, state sites, federal sites, private non-profit museums, working churches, and a burrito restaurant. Places important in the 1775-76 siege of Boston fall into four separate National Parks (Minute Man, Boston, Boston Harbor Islands, and Longfellow-Washington Nat’l Historic Site) and a multitude of municipal museums and parks. It’s amazing all those organizations work together as well as they do!

I think there’s also a tension between education and entertainment for tourists, students, or anyone else. The new Boston Tea Party Museum seems to take the most entertainment-oriented approach: visitors are constantly moving or watching and hearing a presentation or movie. Contrast that with Old South Meeting House, site of the big tea meetings. There we get to sit in the actual historic space—but of course we’re sitting in wooden pews listening to speeches, and that might just not be as exciting.

Serious historians tend to wrinkle our noses at “ghost tours” and other sensationalism. Yet as far back as the late 1700s visitors to Boston were paying to see bodies of British officers killed at Bunker Hill laid out under the Old North Church. So people have always liked sensationalism.

Not all of that got into the published article here.

The photo above is from Ben Edwards’s coverage of the 2009 reenactment of Boston’s tea meetings inside the Old South Meeting House at Teach History. This year’s reenactment is coming up on Sunday, 16 December, at 4:00 P.M., and is sponsored by both Old South and the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. Tickets are on sale now.