The 2013 Desk Calendar Contest

If you didn’t win last week’s wall calendar contest, don’t despair! I also have an extra Colonial Williamsburg desk calendar for the coming year. It’s spiral-bound, about 9 inches wide by 8 tall, with a page for each month and each week, all facing color photographs of Williamsburg sights. And I’m going to give this one away, too.

I’ve written capsule descriptions of eleven men linked to the American Revolution, broadly defined. Some of them were named John Robinson. Some of them were named William Smith. One of them was named neither John Robinson nor William Smith. The challenge is to identify the Robinsons and Smiths and name the odd man out.

1) Member of Parliament and Secretary of the Treasury in London from 1770 to 1782, he was Lord North’s principal political fixer.

2) Aide-de-camp to Gen. John Sullivan, Gen. Lafayette, and finally Gen. George Washington, he served as a diplomat and a Congressman, and became an in-law to John Adams.

3) An officer in the Westford militia company in 1775, he took part in the provincials’ advance toward the North Bridge without his men. Eleven years later he returned to Concord to help close the county courts during the Shays’ Rebellion.

4) Appointed a Commissioner of Customs, he went into hiding after a coffee-house brawl and sailed secretly to London with a set of pro-Crown reports about the Boston Massacre.

5) A historian of colonial New York, he railed against the idea of an Anglican bishop for America and sought compromises between Patriots and the Crown. He served as Chief Justice of both New York and Québec/Lower Canada.

6) Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he spent the entire Revolutionary War as an attorney in England. Back in America, he was elected to the first five Congresses under the new Constitution.

7) Invited to America by Benjamin Franklin, he helped to set up both the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University. He lobbied for an Anglican bishop for America and was driven from Philadelphia as a suspected Loyalist.

8) By training a carpenter, he had to leave Cambridge, Massachusetts, after the “Powder Alarm.” After convincing the Crown to support a settlement at Penobscot Bay in Maine, where he owned land, he endured a siege by Massachusetts forces.

9) He’s one of America’s leading historians on the poor in the late colonial and early national period, particularly in Philadelphia.

10) He died in office after serving for many years as both Speaker of the House of Burgesses and Treasurer in Virginia, and the government discovered he’d embezzled large sums of money.

11) Theologically liberal minister of the town of Weymouth, Massachusetts, he became an in-law to John Adams.

Some of these William Smiths and John Robinsons had middle names as well, but the descriptions are all straightforward. All research resources are allowed and encouraged.

Instead of challenging individuals to identify all the men at once, I’m inviting you folks to “crowdsource” the answers. If you can name one or more of the numbered men, do so in a comment with a confirming link or reference. (For example, if you think number 7 was the odd man out and named Dr. Samuel Gardner, your comment could say that and include a link to a webpage about him or cite a book that mentions him.) Make sure your comment has a name or unique pseudonym attached.

I’ll run the complete set of correct identifications next Saturday. And I’ll choose a Boston 1775 reader who contributed to the answer to receive the desk calendar. Happy searching!

The Wall Calendar Contest Answers!

Last Sunday I announced a quiz on early American politicians with the prize of a Colonial Williamsburg wall calendar. The deadline for entries was last night, so now I can reveal the answers.

The most useful key to my trivia questions is that I fancy myself a tricky bastard. So what look like obvious answers are usually wrong. To put it another way, I like questions based around facts that caught me by surprise when I first read them.

1) What office(s) in the government of the United States of America did John Hancock hold and when?

I tried to write this question to restrict the period to after the states adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1781, thus forming a permanent government of the U.S. of A. That would eliminate Hancock’s stretch as chairman of the Second Continental Congress from May 1775 to October 1777. By the time the Articles were ratified, he was home as Massachusetts’s most popular politician.

Hancock declined to run for reelection as governor at the end of 1784, citing poor health, and then put his name in as a delegate to the national Congress. When he came back to Philadelphia in late 1785, members of the Congress voted him chairman again for old times’ sake. The legislature barely met for the next few months and Hancock hardly did anything, but he got to sit out the Shays’ Rebellion and the controversial measures to suppress it. Hancock made a triumphant return to the governorship, popularity intact, in May 1787. Best political instincts of his generation, I say!

Thus, in the government of the U.S. of A., Hancock held the office of President of the United States in Congress Assembled (or President of the Congress) from November 1785 to June 1786. No points off for mentioning his earlier term, but a correct answer should include that later tenure.

The closest to the correct answer to this question came from Nathan C. Traylor of The History Tavern.

2) Gouverneur Morris was never a governor, alas, but he was a member of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate. From where?

Morris (pictured above) represented New York in the Continental Congress, but then moved to Philadelphia in 1779. He represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention, but then moved back to New York in 1788. He represented New York in the U.S. Senate in 1800-1803.

Ben answered this question exactly.

3) In 1789 Alexander Hamilton took office as the first Secretary of the Treasury, but he was ineligible to be President. Why?

It’s often said that the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that the President be an American citizen from birth would have kept—perhaps was even written to keep—Hamilton from holding that office. He was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. But in fact the Constitution says the President must be “a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” No one’s met the second qualification for a long time, but Hamilton did.

So why wasn’t Hamilton eligible to be President in 1789? He was too young. He was born in 1755, making him only thirty-four in that year. Indeed, when Hamilton first came to New York, he told people that he’d been born in 1757, perhaps to make himself seem even more precocious than he was.

This question stumped everyone. The force of myth is strong. Not to mention tricky bastards.

4) What Pennsylvanian did George Washington appoint as Postmaster General?

Again, there’s a first-thing-that-comes-to-mind answer: Benjamin Franklin, famous as our first Postmaster and famous Pennsylvanian! But he was appointed Postmaster by the Continental Congress back in July 1775. (He had also held the post under the Crown.)

President Washington appointed three men as Postmaster General: Samuel Osgood, Timothy Pickering, and Joseph Habersham. Which one was Pennsylvanian? Pickering (shown here).

But wait! Wasn’t this the same Timothy Pickering who commanded the Salem militia during the Battle of Lexington and Concord? The same who served as Secretary of War under Washington and Secretary of State under Washington and John Adams? Yes!

In 1786, after business reversals, Pickering moved from Massachusetts to northeastern Pennsylvania to make a new start. He was living there when he secured the appointment as Postmaster General. Eventually he moved back to Massachusetts in time for Adams to accuse him of being part of the mythical “Essex Junto.”

Nathan, Ben, and Phillip Blancher all picked out Pickering.

5) Of the first seven Presidents of the United States, which men had publicly acknowledged biological sons as heirs when they were in office?

George Washington, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson had no biological children; they helped to raise stepchildren and adopted children. Thomas Jefferson had several children, but his only son by his wife died as an infant and he didn’t acknowledge his likely sons by Sally Hemings. Likewise, James Monroe’s only son died young, leaving him with two daughters.

John Adams had three adult sons when he was President (two when he left office). John Quincy Adams also had three. It’s notable that one of John Adams’s sons became President, and one of John Quincy Adams’s became a U.S. Representative and top diplomat.

So for a country that eschewed hereditary political power, America did accept a sort of dynasty from the only early Presidents for whom that was biologically possible. If the other early Presidents had had sons as heirs, would we have had more Presidents named Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson?

Ben and GSGreatEscaper correctly named the brace of Adamses. Mike Barresi named those two but also guessed Monroe.

Well played, all! No one had all correct answers (that slippery Hamilton question!), and everyone got some points. By a nose, the winner of the wall calendar is…Ben!

(Send me a comment or email with a mailing address, Ben, and I’ll mail the calendar this week.)

TOMORROW: And you thought this was over.

Wall Calendar Contest Reminder

The cut-off for answers to the 2013 Wall Calendar Contest is tonight at 8:00, Boston time. All research methods allowed.

William Cunningham Enters Stage Left

Boston 1775 isn’t the only website discussing William Cunningham this week. Lora Innes has introduced him into her historical romance comic, The Dreamer. One of the heroes of that story is Connecticut hero Nathan Hale, and his real encounter with Cunningham didn’t end well for him.

Fans responded to the debunking of Cunningham’s “Dying Confesssion” this way:

• Caera: “Please don’t tell me he got off after all the crap he put everyone though, to say nothing of our dearest Nathan!”
• Susan: “Wait he wasn’t hanged? WHY DID THE INTERNET LIE TO ME!!!!!!!!!!”
• David: “I smell a conspiracy here. SOMETHING kept the British authorities from doing the right thing and removing Cunningham from his position.”

And people say that modern audiences can’t get passionate about a story from the Revolutionary era.

There are now two paperback volumes of The Dreamer published, as well as several digital short stories at the comic’s webstore. And since it began as a webcomic, you can start reading the story from the beginning for free.

William Cunningham, Son of Liberty

Historians of British prison reform and genealogists seem to be doing a good job at filling in the details of William Cunningham’s life after he served as provost martial (or marshal) for the Crown forces throughout the war. Which leaves his life before the war as the big mystery.

The Loyalist judge Thomas Jones (1731-1792) used his exile in Britain in the 1780s to write a History of New York During the Revolutionary War. In it he called Cunningham “a Son of Liberty who had become disaffected.” That manuscript was published by the New-York Historical Society in 1879.

In the meantime, Henry B. Dawson’s Reminiscences of the City of New York (1855) also described Cunningham as a Son of Liberty before becoming a Crown supporter by 1775. In narrating the brawls between royal soldiers and New Yorkers over the Liberty Pole in early 1770, Ferdinand S. Bartram’s Retrographs (1888) said:

Two members of the Sons of Liberty, John Lamb and William Cunningham, the latter afterward known as the notorious Marshal Cunningham of the Revolution, were appointed to purchase a plot of land, which they selected, adjoining the common, where, upon the 6th [Mar 1770], the pole was raised in the presence of about four thousand spectators. It was of immense proportions, banded with iron hoops and braced with rods, imbedded in the earth between rocks, and secured with masonry. Thus was the fifth pole raised by the Liberty Boys.

Unfortunately, those books don’t cite any documentary sources for their statements about Cunningham.

Exactly five years after that fifth pole was erected, on 6 Mar 1775, Cunningham and a man named John Hill got into a fight with Patriots near Liberty Pole. The crowd roughed up both men badly. Newspapers published conflicting stories of what happened, depending on which side of the political divide they stood. The only thing clear was that Cunningham was now on the side of the Crown.

Indeed, the royal government was soon employing Cunningham, if it didn’t already. Authorities sent him to arrest the Patriot activist Isaac Sears the next month, and a crowd assaulted Cunningham again.

When the war broke out, Cunningham and Hill took off for Boston. Hill was eventually an assistant to Crean Brush, a Loyalist given a job by the military authorities. Cunningham became provost martial and held that position again in New York, Philadelphia during the winter of 1777-78, and New York until the end of the war. I’ve found a hint of romance between Hill’s daughter Mary and Cunningham’s son Ralph, but I’ll save that gossip for later.

I don’t know the historical sources in New York, and perhaps there’s more documentation of Cunningham’s life before the war. We do know that the 1792 “Dying Confession” ascribed to him is unreliable. But was he born in America or an immigrant (which seems more likely)? What caused him to join the Sons of Liberty in 1770 and to turn against them by 1775?

(The sketch above is Pierre Eugène du Simitière’s sketch of one of New York’s Liberty Poles in 1770, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Did John Binns Meet Provost William Cunningham?

One of the mysteries of Provost William Cunningham’s career has been the description of him that John Binns (1772-1860) left in his memoirs, published in 1854.

During the Revolutionary War, Binns was still a lad—not to mention three thousand miles away in Ireland. As a young man, Binns was a radical journalist, part of the United Irishmen movement. In mid-1799 the British government confined him to the Gloucestershire jail at Littledean.

Binns later wrote:

I was received at the gate of the jail by the governor; that is the title bestowed upon the principal keeper of the prison. His name was Cunningham, a retired half-pay officer in the army of his Britannic Majesty. He was well known in Philadelphia in 1777, while it was in possession of the British army. At that time, and in that service, Cunningham was Provost Marshal at Walnut Street prison. He married an American lady. She was an intelligent, good-looking, well-bred woman, younger than he was some years. She was living with him in the governor’s apartments, at the time I was confined.

He was, at the period at which I am writing, about fifty years of age, five feet seven inches high, well made and well mannered. So long as I was in the prison, which was until February, 1801, I never had an angry word with him, nor any reasonable cause of complaint against him.

The histories of the Gloucester jail that I cited yesterday show that Binns was mistaken. The governor he met was not a “Provost Marshal” during the Revolutionary War—that was William Cunningham. The governor at Gloucester in that period was William’s son Thomas.

Most of the other details Binns recalled about the governor—the pension from army service, the American wife, even the lack of anger toward printers disliked by the government—match what the record says about Thomas Cunningham. He apparently looked older than he really was; he was only in his early forties, about the same age as his wife, when Binns knew him.

After being released from Cunningham’s house of correction, Binns emigrated to the U.S. of A. Eventually he settled in Philadelphia and became a significant newspaper publisher on the political left. And in that city he must have talked with people who remembered provost martial Cunningham as a villain. Binns assumed they were speaking about the same man he’d met in Littledean Jail, but he was one generation off.

Thomas Cunningham’s wife Rachel died in Philadelphia in 1814, according to her family’s genealogy. Did she cross paths with Binns again in America?

TOMORROW: A remaining mystery about William Cunningham.

(The thumbnail above shows an engraving of the Declaration of Independence that Binns published in 1819, courtesy of Monticello. Read the story of its publication here.)

Provost William Cunningham and the Family Business

Yesterday I reintroduced the figure of William Cunningham, the British military’s provost martial in Boston and then New York. He was in charge of policing the streets and housing prisoners, including prisoners of war. Americans came to hate him for what they saw as cruel treatment. The young U.S. of A. was cheered by a newspaper account of his hanging back in Britain in 1792, but later historians found no basis for that report.

What really became of William Cunningham after the evacuation of New York in 1783? Following a tip from a Boston 1775 commenter known only as Mike, last fall I went to the British Library and looked up two books by J. R. S. Whiting: Prison Reform in Gloucestershire, 1776-1820 (1975) and A House of Correction (1979). [Do I know how to enjoy a vacation or what?]

The hero of these books is Gloucestershire baronet named Sir George Onesiphorus Paul (1746–1820), who sought to reform prisons. Until then, British governments generally locked up sane people only for debt, while awaiting trial, or for short times on minor offenses. Paul felt that longer sentences were more effective against more serious crimes than corporal punishment, but also that current buildings were unhealthy. He put some of the fortune he’d inherited from his father’s woolen manufacturing behind building “houses of correction” for the county, starting with one at Littledean in 1788.

The British Dictionary of National Biography says that prison

had a chapel, a dispensary, two infirmaries, and a foul-ward in the upper story; workrooms were provided for debtors, and those who were unable to obtain work from outside were given it on application to a manufacturer, and were allowed to retain two-thirds of what they earned.

Later there was a treadwheel large enough for adults that operated through the late 1800s, according to a report of a prisoner’s death at the wheel in a magazine called The Interior. (Shown above, the building is now a tourist attraction.)

In 1789 Paul addressed the autumn sessions of the local court, saying that Gloucestershire’s new house of correction needed a governor or keeper who was “honest, sober, humane, and patient,” in Whiting’s words. The magistrates appointed William Cunningham to that post in the summer of 1790 with a salary of £200 per year. His experience as provost martial during the war was undoubtedly a plus.

Within a few years, however, Paul lost confidence in Cunningham. The new keeper was recovering from being “confined for a long time as the result of an accident.” More important, Paul had definite ideas about how to run a penal institution, and he felt that Cunningham was issuing rules too uncertainly. In other words, the notorious Provost Cunningham was not strict enough. Paul wrote that Cunningham suffered from “doubt in himself,” though the real problem may have been doubts about the baronet and his system.

At the start of 1792, William Cunningham’s son Thomas became keeper of a smaller house of correction at Horsley with a salary of £50/year. The older man fell ill that fall, and in October Thomas took over his job temporarily. Soon Paul and the other county magistrates made that switch permanent.

Thomas Cunningham carried out Paul’s system more thoroughly. In 1793 prisoners “tied a scurrilous written paper against him to the neck collar of a Dog” as a protest. But Sir George had his back, and he remained on the job for decades, receiving a £100 raise in 1797. In 1809 Thomas Cunningham was secure enough to object to having state prisoners in his county jail, saying it was “making the county of that prison a party in the war with printers, in which it has no peculiar concern.”

In 1797, William Cunningham was replaced as keeper at Horsley. This time his successor was his other son, Ralph. A couple of years before, Ralph had filled in for his father while his father had filled in for Thomas. In sum, running prisons had become the Cunningham family business. (A Loyalist officer named Ralph Cunningham was killed in 1780; I’m not sure how he might have been related to this clan.)

Father William apparently retired in 1797. I see genealogists stating on the web that he married a woman named Dorinda Robinett that year and died in Killaderry, Ireland, two years later at the age of sixty-three. However, I don’t see any sources being cited for that information.

In 1836 The Gentlemen’s Magazine reported that Thomas Cunningham had died at age seventy-seven (meaning he was born around 1759) after forty-five years of service in the Gloucester jail. His will describes him additionally as “Lieutenant on the Half Pay of De Lancey’s British American Rangers.” He had married Rachel Sayre, oldest daughter of an Anglican minister in Fairfield, Connecticut, who had resettled in New Brunswick. Curiously, the family genealogy says she died in 1814 in Philadelphia.

TOMORROW: Making sense of John Binns’s testimony about Provost Cunningham.

Nathan Hale’s Provost

Periodically Boston 1775 likes to note new Revolutionary-era comics. And here comes Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy, written and drawn by Nathan Hale, and also narrated by Nathan Hale—a semi-fictional Nathan Hale based on the real Nathan Hale. The first Nathan Hale in that sentence is not a relative of the others.

Just to confuse matters, the writer-artist Nathan Hale also did the art for a couple of terrific tall tales written by Shannon and Dean Hale, who are related by marriage, but not related to Nathan Hale.

Anyhow, here’s how star librarian Elizabeth Bird explains the premise of the first volume of Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales:

In One Dead Spy our hero Nathan Hale stands at the gallows alongside a hangman and a British Provost Marshal mere moments before he is to be hanged by the neck until dead. Suddenly he is eaten! Eaten by a big book of American history no less. After being spit out he now knows the entirety of American history and is willing to tell everything he knows. The first story that needs to be told, however, is the tale of Nathan Hale himself. And if along the way he happens to tell the stories of folks like Ethan Allen, Henry Knox, and other big and colorful characters all the better. Like a Colonial Scheherazade, Hale is spared by the childish and endearing hangman and the blowhard Provost Marshal, just so long as he keeps weaving together new tales.

And here’s the Provost, carefully labeled “semi-fictional,” and some of the remarks surrounding him fit that category.

As the art says, “There was a provost, just not him.” The real provost involved in Nathan Hale’s execution was a man named William Cunningham. In 2007 I wrote about a false report of Cunningham’s execution after the war.

TOMORROW: The truth about Cunningham’s prison career.

The 2013 Wall Calendar Contest

I find myself with an extra Colonial Williamsburg wall calendar for 2013. It’s about 8 inches by 11, with a color photograph for each month and notations of major holidays and events at the museum. (Colonial Williamsburg sells a larger wall calendar; I think this one is printed as a promotion.)

Back in 2010, I ran a contest to give away an extra copy of a book, so I decided to do the same with this wall calendar.

Since we’re finishing an election year, here are five questions about early American politics.

1) What office(s) in the government of the United States of America did John Hancock hold and when?

2) Gouverneur Morris was never a governor, alas, but he was a member of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate. From where?

3) In 1789 Alexander Hamilton took office as the first Secretary of the Treasury, but he was ineligible to be President. Why?

4) What Pennsylvanian did George Washington appoint as Postmaster General?

5) Of the first seven Presidents of the United States, which men had publicly acknowledged biological sons as heirs when they were in office?

If you want to play along, put your best answers in a comment on this posting by Friday, 7 December, at 8:00 P.M., Boston time. I’ll screen all those Blogspot/Blogger comments so they’ll remain hidden until. Include a name or unique pseudonym with your answers. (If you comment on Facebook, your answers will be visible to some people—but I still don’t understand how to make Facebook work.)

Since we’re in the age of Wikipedia and Google, I won’t be surprised to see more than one Boston 1775 reader respond with a complete set of correct answers. In that case, I’ll number all the comments that contain the correct answers and pick one winner randomly. After posting the answers here on Saturday, I’ll contact that winner by email to get a surface-mail address for the calendar. Hey, it worked once before!

“Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.”

On Sunday, 3 Sept 1769, John Adams wrote in his diary about which sermons he had attended and then:

Spent the Remainder of the Evening and supped with Mr. [James] Otis, in Company with Mr. [Samuel] Adams, Mr. Wm. Davis, and Mr. Jno. Gill. The Evening spent in preparing for the Next Days Newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.—working the political Engine!

The Boston Gazette, published by Gill and Benjamin Edes, appeared on Mondays. This is one of our rare glimpses of how it was actually put together, with political writers “cooking up” content for the printers. One detail I find particularly interesting is that that writing took place on a Sunday evening, still supposed to be part of the Sabbath.

And speaking of Sunday evenings and the news, I’ll be part of a panel discussion on Revolutionary-era newspapers with Todd Andrlik of Rag Linen and Prof. Robert Allison of Suffolk University. This event is to spread the word about Reporting the American Revolution, the new book that Todd assembled and Bob and I contributed to. We’ll speak at the Old State House in Boston starting at 5:30 and sign books at the end. The event is free, but the Bostonian Society asks people to reserve seats through this webpage. C-SPAN’s BookTV will cover the event, so even though it’s a Sunday I must remember to shave.

“Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed?”

Until I read this week’s New York Times article on Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, I didn’t realize how that book treats the work of Annette Gordon-Reed.

As I wrote yesterday, Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy sparked the recent boom in books about the third President’s conflicted attitudes toward slavery. Her The Hemingses of Monticello, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is a major study of American slavery, not just slavery at Monticello.

So how does Wiencek discuss Gordon-Reed’s work? Master of the Mountain mentions her books only three times. Two endnotes mention (but don’t quote) transcription errors in the first edition of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Those are undoubtedly sensitive spots for Gordon-Reed since a Jefferson descendant who disliked that book tried to use those errors to have her fired from New York University in July 2001. The Times reports:

David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’”

Wiencek told the newspaper “that the transcription errors were minor,” but his endnotes don’t leave that impression.

The third reference to Gordon-Reed’s work is this passage:

Many writers on slavery today have emphasized the “agency” of the enslaved people, insisting that we pay heed to the efforts of the slaves to resist their condition and assert their humanity under a dehumanizing system. But as slaves gain “agency” in historical analyses, the masters seem to lose it. As the slaves become heroic figures, triumphing over their condition, slave owners recede as historical actors and are replaced by a faceless system of “context” and “forces.” So we end up with slavery somehow afloat in a world in which nobody is responsible.

One historian writes about Monticello’s slaves as if they had no master: “There is every indication that they grasped the baleful situation they had been born into, and knew that forces were actively working to keep them down.”

And there’s an endnote pointing to page 405 of Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello. That sentence comes from a paragraph about how Sally Hemings’s son Madison learned to read. The same paragraph refers to Jefferson by name and calls his grandchildren Madison’s “white nieces and nephews, who were his age and going to a school that he knew he could never attend, but wanted to.” That’s not a picture of a “faceless system”—it puts specific faces on the system and tells us exactly who was “responsible” for Madison Hemings’s oppression and who benefited from it.

That’s why Prof. Jan Lewis of Rutgers told the Times, “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them. Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I suspect that treatment was a big reason why Gordon-Reed and Lewis published their critical assessments of Master of the Mountain so quickly after its publication, and in online venues (Slate and The Daily Beast) where those reviews could run immediately. Ordinarily the wheels of scholarship grind slow. But this was personal.*

Reading Wiencek’s response to those critical reviews on the Smithsonian website, I think he further mischaracterized Gordon-Reed’s work:

I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson’s “plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory.”

If Master of the Mountain had “systematically” addressed Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson, it really should have cited her work more than three times. And this is the actual passage from The Hemingses of Monticello that Wiencek partially quoted in his riposte:

Building the nation was Jefferson’s true obsession [as President], not the end of slavery and definitely not the racial question.

As he retreated from the antislavery rhetoric of his youth, and grew comfortable in his role as the champion of the common man (the common white man), Jefferson, like others of his type, began to accommodate himself to the institution of slavery. As was discussed earlier, Lucia Stanton has detailed his plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory. He also brought in overseers who eschewed violence in favor of incentives as a way of motivating enslaved worked; for unexplained reasons, however, the men did not remain in his service. Jefferson was again, in all of this, ahead of his time—on the leading edge of adopting the sort of paternalism that would in the coming decades turn his white grandchildren’s generation into full-throated apologists for the peculiar institution.

Gordon-Reed published that book in 2008, during the sunset of George W. Bush’s Presidency. How can anyone think that she used the phrase “kinder, gentler” without irony? Wiencek appears to have missed not only that sentence’s tone but also how it expresses Jefferson’s perception, not Gordon-Reed’s: “his plans for his version…”

Where is the “approval” that Wiencek perceives from Gordon-Reed? Where is her portrayal of Jefferson as a “kindly master”? The only time The Hemingses of Monticello uses the word “kindly” for Jefferson is in describing how his acknowledged grandchildren perceived him. And that paragraph ends, “Kindly, doting grandfathers can be sexual beings, too…” Gordon-Reed assesses the master of Monticello like this:

It may be difficult from our vantage point to believe that Jefferson had an internal sense of justice and fairness, depending as he did on a labor system that was constitutively unjust and unfair. By holding upward of two hundred “souls,” as he called them, in bondage, he worked injustice and unfairness in their lives every single day. . . . But Jefferson did have his own sense of fairness within the confines of his inhumane way of life…

It appears that Wiencek perceives any attempt to understand Jefferson’s thinking instead of simply calling him monstrous as “approval.” For fifteen years Gordon-Reed has been attacked by reactionary critics who felt she was out to denigrate Jefferson when she studied his contradictions. Now Wiencek brands that same work as the most prominent attempt to gloss over Jefferson’s racism.

* Speaking of personal, I should say that I’ve chatted with Gordon-Reed after a couple of her talks over the past decade and exchanged a few emails with Wiencek years back, but I’m not a friend or colleague of either.

Academic History, Popular History, and Jefferson’s Slaveholding

A more salient element of the debate over Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves than differing interpretations is the divide between popular and academic history.

Wiencek is an “independent scholar,” not an academic. And more power to him. He’s written two books on American slavery and its legacy, The Hairstons and An Imperfect God, that received good reviews from in and outside academia.

Master of the Mountain’s loudest critics have come from inside the academy. Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of history and law at Harvard. Jan E. Lewis is a professor of history at Rutgers. David Waldstreicher, also quoted in the recent New York Times article about the controversy, is a professor at Temple. Another researcher who raised her voice on their side, Lucia Stanton, recently retired as historian at Monticello.

But there’s no real enmity between scholarly and popular historians. There’s even some overlap, with some professors publishing through commercial presses that don’t use peer review and some popular writers winning research fellowships. It may well be more of a system of mutual envy from both sides of the fence. Independent scholars might wish for the regular salaries, library access, and prestige of professors. Academic authors might wish they had no teaching responsibilities and could reap big advances by retelling great stories that break no new historiographical ground. But that situation has been in place for years; it inspires more bemusement than passion.

Book marketing might be a source of more friction. Basically, all history books these days have to be promoted as “the untold story.” Even if a book is about a topic that dozens of people have already covered, its publisher wants to be able to announce that it offers important new information. And academic and popular historians have different yardsticks for what’s new. For a professor, the innovation might lie in a research finding, interpretation, or methodology. In contrast, popularizers often define what’s “new” as what overturns the understandings of the general public, which can lag the scholarly discussion by decades.

In writing about Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Wiencek certainly isn’t traversing unexplored territory. The last fifteen years of Jefferson historiography have been largely consumed with assessing the man’s attitude toward slavery, with particular regard to the strong evidence that he had children with his slave Sally Hemings. Though there were important antecedents, that trend picked up after Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy was vindicated by D.N.A. findings in 1998. Lots of books followed, including some by scholars who had previously dismissed the Hemings evidence and were catching up.

Furthermore, that sea change in interpreting the Jefferson-Hemings relationship made the newspapers. It prompted new depictions of the third President in popular entertainment. Today Americans are probably more sensitive than ever before to how Jefferson exploited enslaved people. To be sure, there are diehard Jefferson “defenders,” just as there are a few examples of what Wiencek refers to as “slavery’s retrospective apologists.” But there really aren’t enough of those folks to make the case that it’s “new” to reveal Jefferson as a slaveholder.

Master of the Mountain strives for novelty in arguing that Thomas Jefferson was a harsher slaveholder than previous authors have described. In some respects it does this by presenting new arguments. The book is the first to make much of two documents I noted yesterday: Jefferson’s 1793 letter about the growth of slave economies and the 1801 letter about whipping boys in the nail factory. Wiencek’s depiction of Jefferson committing himself to lifelong slaveholding in the early 1790s is new—and debated. But such interpretations aren’t what’s got the academics so upset.

Rather, Master of the Mountain increases its claim to novelty by complaining that previous writing on Jefferson (all of it? a lot? too much?) has minimized or excused the man’s slaveholding. Among those titles Wiencek includes not just older works but some of the groundbreaking academic books of recent years. And some of the arguments in his book appear “new” only in that they don’t acknowledge similar arguments in recent studies.

For example, Wiencek discusses how Jefferson handled Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s bequest suggesting that he free some of his slaves. Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Hodges were exploring that episode back in 2007. They published a book on the topic: Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull. As far as I can tell, Master of the Mountain doesn’t mention their work at all.

But even that, I don’t think, is what’s fueling the current critique. For decades academic authors have watched popularizers write books that are twenty years behind scholarly findings and take those “new” stories onto the bestseller lists. Something else is happening in this case.

TOMORROW: How Master of the Mountain treats Gordon-Reed’s work.

Debate over Master of the Mountain

The debate over Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves merited a long article in the New York Times yesterday. To review, this book is a highly critical look at Jefferson’s slaveholding that prompted:

• a Smithsonian article, highlighted here.
• widely divergent reviews from lay reviewers and Jefferson scholars, as discussed here.

Wiencek responded to the critical reviews through the Smithsonian site, and another historian from the same circle answered with a letter she had sent to a Virginia magazine.

On the surface this conflict is about different views of the importance of a few documents. For example, Wiencek feels that Jefferson’s 1793 letter to George Washington about the growth of slaves’ economic value reflected and influenced his personal thinking, turning him decisively against the idea of ending slavery for rest of his life. The other authors agree that Jefferson never stopped exploiting and depending on other people’s forced labor, but also feel that he continued to wrestle with the conflict between that lifestyle and his stated ideals.

Another issue involves this letter to Jefferson about the harsh treatment of enslaved boys working at his nail-making forge. Edwin M. Betts didn’t quote that letter in Jefferson’s Farm Book (1953). Wiencek’s Smithsonian article states that Betts “decided that the image of children being beaten at Monticello had to be suppressed.” Certainly evidence of forced child labor conflicted with Betts’s picture of Monticello as an “ideal rural community.”

But, Wiencek’s critics point out, Betts didn’t present his book as a complete set of documents about Monticello. He published plenty of details about the hard work at the nailery. And anyone who’s read about either slavery or childhood in eighteenth-century America already knows that beatings were common and accepted. (They were also more accepted in 1953 than now.) If Betts had highlighted that letter about beating young boys, it indeed would have undercut his image of Monticello. But is that enough evidence to warrant writing Betts “decided that…had to be suppressed”?

To some extent, these are philosophical questions. Wiencek expresses a rather Manichean view, seeing Jefferson decisively choosing the evil of slavery and Betts as deliberately deceiving his readers. Wiencek’s critics see more room for conflicted minds and well-intentioned folly. I think there’s value in having both interpretations to consider.

But that’s not enough to explain the fervor of this debate. Historians disagree about the importance of documents and how to interpret them all the time. There are a couple of other conflicts going on here.

TOMORROW: Academic historians and “popular” historians.

A Housewright’s Workshop in Duxbury

Last week a regional edition of the Boston Globe reported on a discovery in Duxbury, “a largely intact woodworking shop dating from the latter half of the 18th century.”

The small building is on land of the Berrybrook School for little ones, and had been used for storage. In the late 1700s that same land was owned by Luther Sampson (1760-1847), a housewright and joiner who had fought several years in the Revolutionary War.

There are no tools remaining in the shed, but the room’s fixtures show how Sampson and his workers operated:

Framed in original sills, joists, and pineboard walls, the shop’s interior reveals two original work benches, one pitted with marks from hand tools. The second was a “planing bench,” lacking gouges or other tool scars because skilled millwork with wood planes was performed there. The wall above the bench has shelving to hold the planes.

The planing bench also reveals a groove added later to allow craftsmen to install a treadle lathe for turning wood, powered by a foot pedal.

The shop also has its original tool racks for chisels, awls, and brace (hand drill) bits, and a rack near the ceiling for handsaws. Holes in the wall board above the joinery bench and to the right of the window show where awls were stuck to keep them close at hand.

Sketches and hash marks on another wall preserve the living sense of a place where woodworkers spend long hours. Someone painted a sketch of a man standing with his back against a wall, one knee lifted, a hand extended. Much of the outline remains, the colors dulled but visible.

Sketches in pencil appear on another wall, including the outline of a bird probably sketched for a weather vane. Cross-hatchings over a door show the tallying of some quantity. Supplies? Boards? Wainscoting panels completed?

Cuts in the wall board reveal the location and shape of the shop’s fireplace, probably removed in the 19th century in favor of a woodstove.

Painted in black on a joist in the shop’s small storeroom, large digits spell out a date, “1789.” It may be a construction date, but Burrey says some construction techniques suggest an earlier date.

There has been a formal request for Duxbury to designate some of its Community Preservation Act funds for preserving the building and doing some archeological work on the site.

The photo above, by Barry Chin for the Globe, shows the bracket for drill bits attached to one wall. (Hat tip to Emily Murphy for the alert about this article.)

Reporting on Reporting the Revolutionary War

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition just reported on Reporting the Revolutionary War, the new journalism-based overview of the Revolution assembled by Todd Andrlik of Rag Linen. From that story:

There’s a lot more in those old newspapers than in your high school and college textbooks, he adds. “The Boston Tea Party, it was not universally celebrated in America. The ‘Shot Heard Round the World,’ well, it came very close to happening four months earlier, in New Hampshire. Benedict Arnold, he actually revitalized the American Revolution. The fact that Paul Revere was one of thousands of people caught up in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and that he really wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers of the period because they didn’t want to let out how they had alerted the countryside.”

I’ll proudly add that it’s one of my two essays in this book that points out how Revere didn’t make the news in 1775.

Here’s an Associated Press dispatch on the book, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, and Kirkus’s review of Reporting the Revolutionary War. I understand that Barnes & Noble will have its special edition on sale through today, and Amazon can match the price but not the extras.

Which brings me to Sunday, 2 December. At 5:30, Prof. Robert J. Allison of Suffolk University and I will join Todd for a panel discussion about the book at the Old State House in Boston. Earlier that day, at 2:00 P.M., Todd will sign books at the Harvard Coop. For more signings and talks, see the book’s events page.

Call for New Papers on “Foodways in the Northeast”

The days after Thanksgiving are always a good time to consider traditional New England cuisine. And how much better the Massachusetts settlers’ banquets would have had if their cookbooks had included well-made Peking ravioli.

In fact, the term “Peking ravioli” is another element of New England foodways, invented by restaurateur Joyce Chen in the mid-20th century. Other folks call those dumplings potstickers, jiaozi, or just dumplings.

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will examine that whole range of New England culinary culture at its next conference. Back in 1984, the seminar published a collection of papers titled Foodways in the Northeast. It examined such topics as “Food Theft and Domestic Conflict in Seventeenth-Century Essex County,” “The Fireplace at Memorial Hall, Deerfield, Massachusetts,” and “The Archeology of Urban Foodways in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.” Those papers focused mainly on the colonial period and its portrayal.

On 21-23 June 2013, the seminar will return to Historic Deerfield for “Foodways in the Northeast II: A Second Helping.” Plans are to publish a selection of that conference’s papers in a new volume. But first we have to get the scholarship on the table. Here’s the call for proposals for that conference:

The Seminar is now accepting proposals for papers, tours, and presentations on New England’s culinary history—food-preparation, cooking, and eating—in the period from 1600 to the present.

Addressing the larger concepts of food sustainability, geography, and ethnicity; food reform and hygiene; and the memory and language of food, the conference hopes to consider new scholarly developments in a subject explored by the Seminar thirty years ago in Deerfield in 1982. Possible topics include changes in diet over time, food as medicine, food preservation, table settings and presentations, cooking and eating utensils, and period cookbooks and family-centered recipe books.

The conference could also consider specialty New England items such as maple sugaring, lobsters, and oyster houses as well as the role of county fairs, state farms, and food exhibitions. Other topics might include the commodification or “branding” of food, the impact of weather, food shortages and surpluses, food markets and distribution, the evolution of the kitchen and built-in domestic spaces, children’s food, ships’ provisioning, food diplomacy, food as a social divider, food and religion, “slow food” and “local food” movements, and hybridization.

The Seminar encourages papers from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, economics, folkloristics, gastronomy, gender studies, history, sociology, and other fields that reflect original research, especially those based on primary or underused resources such as letters and diaries, recipe books, newspapers, prints and photographs, business records, material culture, archaeological investigations, and autobiographies. Interdisciplinary work is welcomed.

There will be time for about seventeen presentations, each twenty minutes long. If you’re interested in proposing a paper for this conference, send an email with your full contact information and a “one-page prospectus that cites sources” and “a one-page vita or biography” as attachment to seminar director Peter Benes. The due date for proposals is 15 Jan 2013.

The End of the Constitutional Telegraphe

When we left off with John S. Lillie on Tuesday, he was feeling triumphant about the election of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1800. His Constitutional Telegraphe newspaper had strongly supported the Jeffersonian party, though—given how Massachusetts had a favorite son in the race and was already awarding all its Electoral College votes to whoever won the state—that hadn’t actually affected the election.

But Federalists were still in power in New England. And Americans were still working out their understanding of a free press. In February 1801 Chief Justice Francis Dana convinced a jury to indict Lillie for printing an anonymous piece that called him “Lord Chief Justice of the Common Law of England” and cast other aspersions on his integrity. Dana had been trying to apply English libel law in Massachusetts as a way to stamp out “sedition.”

Lillie announced in his 18 February paper that he “prefers to remain for a short time incog.” Too short a time, since state authorities brought him to court in August. Lillie produced the handwritten essay he had published about Dana. People recognized the writing of John Vinal—I suspect this was the man born in 1761 who taught in Boston’s Writing Schools and not his namesake father.

Both Lillie and Vinal were tried in the spring of 1802. For his attorney Lillie had George Blake, who had published essays about the case in the Independent Chronicle and had just been appointed U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. Vinal had Harrison Gray Otis and John Quincy Adams. That team argued that handwriting wasn’t legal evidence—and indeed it wasn’t yet. So Vinal was acquitted for lack of proof.

There was no question, however, that Lillie’s name appeared on the Constitutional Telegraphe’s masthead. And the U.S. hadn’t established our current understanding of protected political speech. So Lillie was convicted of libel and sentenced to three months in jail and a $100 fine. At the end of March 1802, nineteen days into his term, he published an angry account of the proceedings from his cell and announced he was giving up the newspaper.

A printer named John Moseley Dunham took over, soon changing the paper’s title to the Republican Gazetteer. (The fad for Telelgraphe newspapers had passed.) Later it got new owners and became the Democrat. Dunham went into the ink business before moving to Ohio.

On 12 Oct 1803 Lillie wrote to President Jefferson, enclosing a bill for $4.50 for sending him the Constitutional Telegraphe for six months (October 1801 to April 1802). He explained:

When I was Editor of the News Paper called the Constitutional Telegraphe, I sent it on to you, as did Doctr. [Samuel S.] Parker, who was the original Editor of that Paper. I should not at this late period have thought of forwarding my Bill to you, which I have inclosed in this Letter, but for my misfortunes. I have suffered, Sir, very much in consequence of my too ardent zeal in the Republican cause, & am willing, if it should be necessary, still to suffer more, neither the neglect of my Republican friends, nor the contumely or contempt of my federal enemies, will, I trust, ever induce me to alter my political creed. Perhaps my zeal in the Republican cause when I edited the Telegraphe, made me rather imprudent; I certainly meant well, & my concience does not reproach me with an intention, to injure, either directly, or indirectly, the private character of any man. The distress of my family was great during my unfortunate imprisonment for a supposed libel on Judge Dana; at that time, two of my Children lay at the point of Death, particularly, the youngest, who has the honor to bear your name . . .

You no doubt will recollect Sir, that the Constitutl. Telegraphe, was, at one time, the only decided Republican Paper in this State. and if I know my own heart, when I became its Editor, I had no other view, than the good of my native Country, in the promotion of Republicanism in your Election to the Chief magistracy of the nation, and to this single point I exerted with pleasure all the abilities which I possessed, & had the inexpressible satisfaction to find the cause triumphant

Lillie got what look like federal patronage jobs in the U. S. Loan Office and the U.S. Bank. In 1802 he also inherited the “the old Franklin house on Milk Street”—the Benjamin Franklin birthplace—from his uncle. However, he enjoyed that house for only eight years before it burned down. Lillie died at age 76 in 1842.

A Monument to Hot Air

Since some folks are reportedly shopping for holiday gifts today, I’ll just say that I wouldn’t mind receiving this at the end of December.

From the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is a terra cotta model that Clodion (Claude Michel) sculpted in Paris around 1784. He was proposing a large monument to the invention of the balloon. The Met’s webpage offers several more views of the model.

I love the combination of the latest and greatest science of the day with mythological figures. Winged cherubim gather fuel to make the balloon launch, and winged angels trumpet the achievement.

You’d think with all those wings, the cherubs and angels wouldn’t be that impressed by ballooning. “Oh, you can get off the ground now. That’s lovely. Can you decide which direction to go? No? Well, keep working on that. We’ll be over here. Or over here. Or wherever we choose, you see.”

Thanksgiving Memories from John Marston

For the holiday I’ll quote John Marston’s recollection of Thanksgiving in Boston before the Revolution. Marston evidently wrote this letter to Anne Adams about 1830, and it was first published in The Treat Family: A Genealogy of Trott, Tratt, and Treat for Fifteen Generations, and Four Hundred and Fifty Years in England and America in 1893.

Dear Cousin,

This is Thanksgiving day and we have eaten our plum pudding alone, a circumstance I do not remember having occurred before in the course of my life. All anniversaries bring with them solemn reflections and reminders of former days. I have been cogitating on one of the earliest I can remember when I was about ten years old. My father always invited a large party to supper on the evenings of those days, and by carrying you back to one, I may be able to give you some idea of the “olden times” you express a wish to hear about.

The room in which were to be assembled the invited guests was what we call the Drawing room, but in those days it was called the large parlour. At the upper end of which a large mahogany desk and book case. Between the windows hung a large Pier glass with a black and gold frame, and under it, a mahogany round table, covered with the beautiful chintz of that day. Opposite to this was another glass in a gilt frame, and under it a valuable marble slab on a richly covered mahogany frame. The chairs were carved mahogany with black morocco seats.

In one corner stood a clock with a blue enameled case, and in the other corner, a “Beau fet,” fashionable in those days, the upper part of which displayed the richest burnt China, enameled [porcelain with underglaze blue decoration and overglaze red and gilding], and the lower part a goodly assortment of silver plate which was more common then than now.

The window curtains were blue, made of a fabric not now in use, composed of worsted and cotton, or may be linen, very handsome. The carpet was humble Scotch and considered at the time a great luxury. The walls were hung over with flowered paper, and covered with elegant prints of the King and Queen, Lord Chatham and some others I do not recollect of a different description. The old fashioned walnut wood fire, must not be omitted, and the brass fire-set. We seldom see now this cheerful accompaniment of a family gathering.

The only children present, were, on that occasion, your aunt Bessie Treat, and myself. We were anxiously looking for the company as they arrived. And first came our dear old grandfather [Nathaniel] Greenwood with the countenance of a saint, his silver locks flowing on his shoulder, his cambrick neckcloth tucked through the button hole of his coat.

And next our venerable grandmother [Elizabeth Greenwood], with a rich brocade, so substantial it might have stood alone; yet, with the address of her sex, she would occasionally raise her dress, so as to discover a scarlet broad cloth skirt with a broad gold lace round the bottom.

Then came my aunt [Eunice] Bowers in a rich dove colored damask dress. I have since seen many Duchesses while in England, who with all their diamonds were vastly her inferiors in beauty and dignity of port and elegance of manners. She was at this time a widow.

Next her sat my good aunt [Anna] Treat, your worthy Grandmother: dressed in a brocade the color of which I have forgotten. There too was her noble husband, my uncle Robert Treat, your Grandfather, dressed in a blue coat, scarlet vest, black small clothes, and white hose. He had the face of Apollo! with the dignity of Mars.

There were also your uncles Nathaniel and Samuel Greenwood in plain suits—their brother Miles was approaching to a Maccaroni—what we now call a dandy. His coat was scarlet with a dash of gold lace. He was naturally fond of dress, but at that time he was secretary to the Governor of Nova Scotia, in which position a young man would wish to appear well dressed.

And last, not not least my beloved father and mother—their portraits are familiar to you. When we recollect, my dear Cousin, our worthy ancestors, who were possessed of high moral worth and most of them of deep and ardent piety, should we not feel proud of our progenitors?

On this occasion my father invited other guests. On this occasion I remember the Rev’d Mr. Allan, an English Patriot, James Otis—well known in the history of the Revolution—Dr. [Thomas] Young and some others.

At nine o’clock the company were ushered into the supper room. The first course was served on highly polished pewter. The second on the finest of china. The knives and forks had silver handles. The candlesticks were of pure silver. The table was of polished oak, and covered with the finest linen damask.

As Caitlin G. D. Hopkins noted when she shared this letter two years ago, Marston expended a great deal of effort on describing furniture and clothing. Even when the meal begins, his words focus on the plates and silverware. No tastes, no smells, no snatches of conversation.

This recollection has been dated to 1766, when Marston was ten years old. However, if “the Rev’d Mr. Allen, an English Patriot,” was John Allen, then it was around 1772 and Marston was sixteen. Allen was a Particular Baptist minister who published “The Spirit of Liberty” in London in 1770 and “An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty” in New England in 1772. According to John Adams (Anne Adams’s father-in-law) in May 1773, “Coll. Otis [the Whig lawyer’s father] reads to large Circles of the common People, Allens Oration on the Beauties of Liberty and recommends it as an excellent Production.”

America’s First Telegraphes and Telegraph

Yesterday I noted how the late 1790s brought a spate of new American newspapers called the Telegraphe, most of which went out of business in Thomas Jefferson’s first term. Which is a little odd considering that most of them were pro-Jefferson. And that Samuel Morse didn’t invent what we know as the telegraph for another three decades.

The key to those puzzles appears in Boston’s Columbian Centinel newspaper for 15 Nov 1794, in an item headlined “THE TELEGRAPHE”:

The plan of the new French instrument for conveying intelligence (the Telegraphe,) is by beacons on heights, at the distance of 12 or 15 miles from each other; in all of which are placed glasses. The words to be conveyed, are exhibited on the first, read, and exhibited by a short process at the second, and so on through the whole line. What the process is for copying the words so expeditiously, and for throwing such a body of light as to make them visible at such a distance, does not yet appear; but it is clear that the experiment has complete success.

Conde surrendered at six o’clock in the morning. At the meeting of the Convention at nine o’clock the same day, it was announced to them by the Telegraphe from Lisle. They instantly changed its name to Nord Libre, and resolved that the Northern army continued to deserve well of their country. These resolutions were ordered to be conveyed to Lisle by the Telegraphe. They were so; and before the Convention separated for dinner, they received the answer that their resolutions had arrived at Lisle, so that the very same day the army received the thanks of the nation for their achievement.

The beacon on Beacon Hill could send only one signal: lighting the tar barrel atop that pole meant Boston was in danger. Claude Chappe and his brothers had developed a much more sophisticated and flexible system, and it remained part of France’s communications infrastructure for half a century. Low-tech Magazine, Boing Boing, and of course Wikipedia have more detail on how it worked.

So to Americans of the 1790s, a “telegraphe“ was:

• the latest, most advanced technology for transmitting news over a distance…
• particularly news about threats to the republic…
• developed in Revolutionary France.

No wonder Jeffersonian printers adopted that term for their newspapers! They spent the last part of George Washington’s Presidency and all of John Adams’s warning about Federalist encroachments on Americans’ rights and lauding the French republic. Once Jefferson won the top office, those newspapers changed their titles (or their proprietors got political jobs).

A few years later, Massachusetts had another sort of “optical telegraph,” invented by Jonathan Grout (1737-1807) of Belcherstown, a Revolutionary War veteran and anti-Federalist who had represented part of Massachusetts in the first federal Congress. In 1801 he built an optical telegraph that sent shipping news from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard via Hull, Scituate, Marshfield, and other towns. Caleb Bingham’s Historical Grammar (Boston: 1802) said Grout’s telegraph

is upon a plan entirely different from, and far superior to, any ever used in Europe. With this Mr. Grout has asked a question, and received an answer from a distance of 90 miles, in ten minutes.

Grout’s system doesn’t appear to have lasted for long after his death, however.