Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree

Another periodical on my recent reading list was the Autumn 2012 issue of Colonial Williamsburg, featuring its usual mix of articles. One that caught my eye was Mary Miley Theobald’s “Thomas Jefferson and the Sugar Maple Scheme”.

I first read about this episode in the early republic in William Cooper’s Town, by Alan Taylor. The founding patriarch of Cooperstown, New York, sent maple sugar down the Susquehanna River to Philadelphia. The idea was that by switching to domestic sugar from cane sugar made in the Caribbean, Americans could:

• keep their money inside the country. (Canada hadn’t yet developed its strategic reserve of maple syrup.)
• avoid supporting a particular brutal form of slavery on the sugar plantations.

Theobald writes of Jefferson:

On his return from France in 1789 to serve as the country’s first secretary of state, he joined [Dr. Benjamin] Rush’s Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree, and proposed a plan. Yeoman farmers of America, he said, could produce enough maple sugar to supply the country’s needs and then some. With little effort, they could export to half the world and put the British sugar producers out of business.

The maple sugar scheme combined Jefferson’s love of botany with his antislavery sentiments, his desire for his country to achieve economic independence, his dislike of the British, and his vision of the yeoman farmer as the backbone of the American republic. “What a blessing,” he wrote a friend in 1790, “to substitute a sugar which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of the blacks necessary.”

Of course, Jefferson was also living off the labor of black children.

The Monticello website has a long page, based on the work by Lucia Stanton, about Jefferson’s maple effort, with quotations from his letters. Unfortunately, although the American sugar scheme earned press coverage for Cooper on both sides of the Atlantic, it didn’t stick.

“A Negro servant Man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers”

There’s an old joke in academic science that the authors of a paper believe the theory it puts forward but know the data is really crap. In contrast, all their colleagues believe the data and think the theory is crap.

I was reminded of that knee-slapper while reading the third of the three eighteenth-century papers in the 2012 issue of the Massachusetts Historical Review: Antonio T. Bly’s “A Prince Among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonial New England Revisited.”

Prof. Bly recently published a compendium of newspaper advertisements titled Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England. That’s part of a larger project he calls the Inter-Colonial Runaway Slave Database, based on about 5,000 ads printed from Massachusetts to South Carolina between 1700 and 1789.

His paper includes some of the data from that study, and the findings are quite interesting. He can chart when people were most likely to flee slavery in Massachusetts, peaking in summer and in their twenties. He can document the rise of “Country born” and “Mulatto” escapees in the second half of the century. He can show that runaways in Massachusetts were more likely to be described as speaking English well than people in Pennsylvania, and far more than people in Virginia and South Carolina. Many more female escapees appeared in ads from South Carolina. There was a spike in Pennsylvania ads relative to the enslaved population during the 1760s.

But this paper starts with the nominal goal of deducing more about a particular man who escaped from New Hampshire in 1760, an effort that gets off on the wrong foot and never recovers. That man is described in a notice in the 28 Apr 1760 Boston Post-Boy signed by James Rogers which began like this:

RAN-away from the Widow Rogers of Rumford, in New-Hampshire, about a Month ago, a Negro servant Man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers, named Prince, of a middling Stature, about 30 Years of Age, has had the Small-Pox, looks very serious and grave, and pretends to a great deal of Religion.—

Since his Departure, he has sold most of his Cloaths, and now is but meanly dressed; he was in the Service the last Year, and has offer’d to inlist sundry Times, pretending himself to be a Free-man: He was lately taken up, but by his insinuating Discourse made his Escape again.

There’s a lot to be picked out there, but I think the paper sails right past the crucial starting-point. Bly writes of Prince, “In all likelihood, he fought alongside his master, who had been an officer in the militia. Had he seen Major Rogers fall in battle?”

No, he hadn’t, because Maj. Robert Rogers of New Hampshire was the founder of the famous Rogers’ Rangers, later the captor of Nathan Hale and a Loyalist exile until his death in 1795. His life is quite well documented. At the time this advertisement was placed, Maj. Rogers was commanding soldiers at Crown Point, New York, and his younger brother James, a captain, was recruiting more men. That’s why, even though the major was Prince’s master, his relatives were handling the search for him.

It might be possible to find the will of Rogers’s father James to determine if he had owned Prince years before. It does seem likely that Prince accompanied Rogers in the previous year when the major’s men destroyed the Abenaki town of St. Francis. We also know that Rogers and his eventually estranged wife Elizabeth had enslaved servants when they lived in Portsmouth in the later 1760s, including a youth captured at St. Francis.

We even have another data point about Prince. In the 22 Nov 1762 Boston Post-Boy James Rogers ran another ad:

RAN away from me the Subscriber at Londonderry, in the Province of New Hampshire, on the 18th of September, a Negro Man Servant named Prince about 40 Years of Age, about 5 feet 5 inches high, speaks good English, had on when he went away a green Coat, blue plush Breeches, diaper Jacket, several pair of thread Stockings with him; he looks very serious and grave, and pretends to be very religious: He is the property of Major Rogers and has been several Years to the Westward, and pretends to be free.

Aside from aging ten years in two, this appears to be exactly the same man, returned and gone again. (There’s supplemental data about black soldiers in Rogers’s company in yet another ad, in the 30 July 1759 New-York Mercury, describing an African man named Jacob who claimed to have earned his freedom by serving for three years. Did Prince feel he was entitled to the same status?)

Instead of spotting that clue and following it up, Bly theorizes based on little evidence. He treats the widow Rogers as the author of this ad even though James Rogers signed it and his mother was hundreds of miles away. One paragraph says that Prince left “with nothing but an additional suit of clothes,” and the next that he had “gone off with quite a bit of clothing”; the ad isn’t specific either way. Bly suggests that Prince was “a gifted orator,” but that’s a different skill from “insinuating Discourse.” He concludes that Prince’s ability to move within New England society meant he must have been born here, but there are examples of Africa-born captives learning to maneuver well.

Almost a full page of the essay and two pages of notes are devoted to the idea that Prince’s parents might have been inspired to give him that name by the “Election Day” celebrations documented in New England from about eleven years after his birth. But I see no evidence that Prince was born in America, that his parents raised him, that they saw such a celebration, that they had the freedom to name him, that the term “prince” was linked to those festivities, &c.

The paper even acknowledges another escapee named Prince, from Watertown’s John Hunt in 1774. Prince was, in fact, a fairly common name among New England slaves, probably chosen by white owners with the same sarcasm that inspired them to name so many other baby boys Caesar, Pompey, and Scipio. (A study by Gary Nash shows that African-Americans in Philadelphia swiftly dropped those names in the generation after emancipation.)

After those four pages of conjecture, Bly’s paper settles down to a much more solid examination of the information to be found in runaway-slave advertisements. There are still occasional odd glitches, like citing a 1675 law about periwigs in the context of an ad from 1767, when fashions in hairdressing had completely changed. One detail I didn’t see discussed is “country marks,” or facial scarring and dental mutilation characteristic of some west African cultures (PDF download). Perhaps those were rare in New England, though Bly quotes a 1714 ad for a man who had “lost his Fore-upper Teeth.”

So in the end I had strongly mixed feelings about this paper. I was impressed by the data and would have been happier with much less theorizing. I hope Bly uses the Robert Rogers lead to draw a more grounded profile of the man named Prince.

Reviewing the Review

The Massachusetts Historical Review is the Massachusetts Historical Society’s annual journal. It usually contains about four scholarly papers and some book reviews. Copies go to members and subscribers, and people with access to J-STOR can see the articles individually.

Volume 14, published at the end of last year, has three articles on eighteenth-century New England history, which made it particularly interesting for me. (Some issues focus on the U.S. Civil War, industrialization, and other minor topics.) There’s also a review by Chernoh M. Sesay of both Vincent Carretta’s biography Phillis Wheatley (discussed back here) and the essay collection Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom.

The issue’s first paper is “Boston’s Historic Smallpox Epidemic,” by Amalie M. Kass. It recounts the dispute over the new smallpox inoculation in 1721-22. The Rev. Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston favored the new technique. Dr. William Douglass and the young printer James Franklin were the loudest voices against it. In the end, the numbers showed its value—one of the earliest uses of epidemiological statistics to settle a scientific question.

There have been many studies of that event over the years because the principal figures helpfully wrote a lot about it. This webpage from Harvard offers links to their original back-and-forth pamphlets and a bibliography of later studies. Here’s a PDF download of one more article from John Hopkins, another from Illinois Wesleyan, and a recent undergraduate thesis at William & Mary.

I found Kass’s article to be a solid and thorough narration of events without many surprises. One thing that did intrigue me was that Mather had stumbled onto the germ theory of disease:

The Animals that are much more than Thousands of times Less than the finest Grain of Sand, have their Motions; and so, their Muscles, their Tendons, their Fibres, their Blood, and the Eggs wherein their Propagation is carried on. The Eggs of these Insects (and why not the living Insects too!) may insinuate themselves by the Air, and with our Ailments, yea, thro’ the Pores of our skin; and soon gett into the Juices of our Bodies.

The minister’s microscopes weren’t good enough to really see germs, much less the smallpox virus, and this passage from his book The Angel of Bethesda wasn’t published until the 20th century. So he was very lucky to hit on the right idea without strong evidence and quite unlucky not to be able to publish his work and get credit for it.

The next paper is Douglas L. Winiarski’s “The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion and Deception in New England’s Era of Great Awakenings.” Winiarski is writing a study of changing New England Congregationalism in the 1700s, to be titled Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. As I reconstruct events, that research included cataloguing “prayer bills,” or short handwritten notes seeking prayer that congregants handed to ministers or left at meetinghouses to be read during services. And that led Winiarski to one such prayer bill, preserved at the Historical Society of Old Newbury and published in Joshua Coffin’s 1845 local history (with modernized spelling and capitalization).

That handwritten document purports to be a prayer by the Rev. Christopher Toppan of Newbury himself, worried about the devil causing his horse to throw him. Winiarski examines it against scores of other prayer bills, finding it unusually long and detailed, as well as oddly spelled and not from Toppan’s own hand. (It’s also inconsistent in its use of the long S, a detail not noted in the paper.)

Winiarski describes the furor of what was later called the “First Great Awakening,” in which Toppan first welcomed and then opposed the preaching of the Rev. George Whitefield. The paper concludes that this document was written and posted to lampoon Toppan and not, as first published, a sincere (if “deranged”) prayer by him. There’s no clue pointing to the real culprit, however. The great value of Winiarski’s paper is its look at New England religious practices in the 1740s. That one curious document can be a peephole into the New Light/Old Light debate.

TOMORROW: A study of one runaway slave, or many.

“Our Telegraphe much news relates”

Yesterday I quoted the introductory lines of the verse for 1 Jan 1799 printed for the subscribers to the American Telegraphe in Newfield (later Bridgeport), Connecticut. In the voice of the newspaper carrier Polly, the wife or perhaps the stepdaughter of printer Lazarus Beach, that poem asked readers to “excuse what you cannot commend” in the rest of the broadside. But what might need excusing?

Those verses that followed were a poetic review of the year 1798, and they emphasized political controversies. For example:

Of Frenchmen’s “Diplomatic skill,”
Which many a Telegraphe did fill,—
Of X, Y, Z, and Talleyrand,
And ladies too, a chosen band,
Who undertook t’extort a fee,
From nations sovereign and free,
And after we had crouch’d and feed ’em,
To make us swallow Gallic freedom…

That’s a reference to the XYZ Affair (lampooned above), in which French officials had demanded bribes from American diplomats. With the facts gradually coming out, the nascent American political parties maneuvered for advantages and openings to blame the other side.

At home—of these United States,
Our Telegraphe much news relates:
How French-Americans are bang’d,
Yet Doctor L——n goes unhang’d.
How B——w a long letter wrote,
In right French stile and Gallic note:
For showing which, the Vermont L—n
The cold stone doublet has to try on.

“Doctor L——n” was Dr. George Logan, a Jeffersonian who had tried to effect peace between the U.S. of A. and France through informal contacts. Federalists denounced him as a traitor and passed a law making such unofficial diplomacy illegal.

“B——w” was the American diplomat Joel Barlow, who sent a long, one-sided letter from Paris to his brother-in-law Rep. Abraham Baldwin on 1 Mar 1798 about the friction between America and France. Rep. Matthew Lyon (the “Vermont L—n”) printed that letter and went to jail for that and other offenses under the Sedition Act. The American Telegraphe celebrated rather than condemned that attempt to limit the free press.

How Kentucke and the old Dominion,
(Akin by nature and opinion)
Are ’bout resolving, all at once,
To act the madman and the dunce.
But Carolina and Georgia too,
Are honest, Fed’ral, firm and true,
What then can poor Virginians do?
Why after they’ve cut all their flashes,
Repent in sackcloth, dust and ashes.

That refers to the conflict over the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, challenges to the central government drafted by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.

There were also some ethnic insults aimed at the French:

Great Buonaparte with his war dogs,
Has gone to Egypt after frogs…

In sum, the bulk of this broadside was Federalist invective. The American Telegraphe was one of the few newspapers to adopt that name which didn’t support the Jeffersonian party. And even at New Year’s, the paper’s employees were spreading its politics. The carrier delivering the verse was therefore in the potentially difficult position of asking for generous contributions while insulting a portion of the public.

But it could have been worse. In The Revolution of American Conservatism, David Hackett Fischer classified the American Telegraphe as “moderately Federalist in 1798.” In The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, Donald H. Stewart called it “Independently Federalist.” Imagine what those verses would have sounded like if the paper had been strongly Federalist.

“For Carriers must sing, whether female or male”

Each New Year’s season Boston 1775 has shared an example of a newspaper carrier’s verse—topical lines printed, sung, and sold for the benefit of the apprentices who delivered newspapers in colonial and early federal America. The carriers got to keep the tips they collected on New Year’s, as other apprentices collected tips in their workshops around the same time.

This year’s example comes from the American Telegraphe of Newfield (later Bridgeport), Connecticut, as printed at the end of 1798:

ADDRESS of the Carrier of the American Telegraphe to its PATRONS.
January 1, 1799.

Ye friends of good order, ye men of reflection,
(On whom the press rests for support and protection)
Whose judgments are candid, whose censures well founded,
Who never revenge, although injured and wounded,
Who claim no perfection, while on earth you may live.
Who, seeing your own faults, can a neighbour forgive;
To you, generous PATRONS, see Polly appear,
To congratulate you on the birth of a Year.
A Song—a mixture of humour and folly,
At a season like this, is expected from Polly;
For Carriers must sing, whether female or male,
On a New-Year’s-Day morn, or their purses will fail.—
Here then I present it—and I shall depend
That you will excuse where you cannot commend.
If a line does not please you, why skip it and say,
“This does not please me, but others it may.”
You’ll doubtless find something to pay for your treasure,
So please—give—you know what—and read at your leisure.

Two things are notable about this verse. First, the carrier was a (gulp) girl. Or perhaps a woman. Either way, she was definitely a “female” named Polly.

The printer of the American Telegraphe was Lazarus Beach (1760-1816). In August 1797 he married Polly Hall, born Thompson (1764-1824), widow of Dr. Charles Hall. As 1799 began, Polly Beach was probably raising the three surviving children of her first marriage and mourning the loss, at the end of November 1798, of a stillborn son.

It looks like Polly Beach was also delivering her husband’s newspapers and asking its readers for a little cash. Alternatively, her daughter Maria Hall (1784-1849) could have been nicknamed “Polly” and handling the delivery chores for her stepfather. To confuse matters further, the poet later refers to “we children” and writes of retiring from the job of “Post-boy” in favor of someone else.

Another striking quality of this carrier verse is how apologetic it was.

TOMORROW: What was Polly apologizing for?

Thomas Jefferson Reviews Phillis Wheatley

I’ll turn from my own book reviews to one by Thomas Jefferson, a small part of his Notes on the State of Virginia.

By 1782, when Jefferson reworked that manuscript into book form, emancipation advocates like Dr. Benjamin Rush and Voltaire were using Phillis Wheatley’s poetry to argue that people of African descent had shown they were capable enough to deserve freedom.

Jefferson disagreed with that aesthetic judgment about Wheatley’s work, at least in part because he disliked the conclusion it led to. While he continued to aver that slavery was wrong, he used that book to argue that whites were biologically and intellectually superior to blacks. That included literary talent, Jefferson wrote:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination.

Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem.

Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head.

Ignatius Sancho (1729?-1780) was a British man of African ancestry who served in the household of the Duke of Montagu, kept a shop, and published books on music. He supported the Crown during the Revolutionary War. Sancho’s letters were collected and published in London two years after his death—so Jefferson must have pronounced upon them quickly when he “somewhat corrected and enlarged [his Notes] in the winter of 1782.”

Jefferson’s comments betrayed some confusion in his mind as he sought reasons to dismiss the evidence of Wheatley’s talent. On the one hand, he hinted that she didn’t actually write the “compositions published under her name.” On the other, he claimed that their poor quality reflected on her intellect, which meant she had to have written them. Either way, of course, he could derogate her.

Even as Jefferson insisted that blacks’ love “kindles the senses only, not the imagination,” he used the word oestrum, meaning a “period of sexual readiness,” to refer to a poet’s inspiration—a rather sensual image. He praised love poetry but chose Pope’s spiteful satirical Dunciad as his yardstick.

As for Sancho’s letters doing “more honour to the heart than the head,” when Jefferson wrote his dialogue of “my Head & my Heart” in a letter to Maria Cosway as he tried to seduce her in 1786, he ended up favoring his own heart.

A Modern Claim of Privilege

I’m departing from the Revolutionary era to talk about a book on another period because it raises important issues about the value of historical study within our constitutional system. Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets was written by Barry Siegel and published in 2008. It’s about the Supreme Court case known as United States v. Reynolds, or just Reynolds.

In 1948 a U.S. Air Force B-29 Superfortress crashed in Waycross, Georgia. Nine people died, three of them civilians working on new radar equipment that the plane was supposed to test. Those three civilians’ widows sued for negligence, asking that the government turn over its accident report. [When I was growing up, my parents were colleagues of one of those widows, though nobody talked to me about her past.]

The Air Force argued in court that it shouldn’t have to turn over the accident report, eventually invoking “state secrets.” Though its lawyers would not lay out the details, they implied that the report would reveal important information about the equipment being tested or the capacities of the B-29, information that would benefit the nation’s enemies.

Judges had been dealing with sensitive material for centuries. They usually examined the documents privately to determine if they were really relevant to the case. If so, they could limit discussion of those documents in camera, or in a closed court. Judges could also appoint independent experts to examine the material. But the Air Force didn’t want the court to try any of those methods.

The original trial judge and the appeals court both ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying that the government had to default on the case if it refused to turn over the pertinent documents. But the U.S. Supreme Court, which was dealing with the Rosenberg spy case at the same time, decided in 1953 by a vote of 6-3 that the government’s claim of the importance of secrecy trumped everything else.

In essence, the Reynolds case ruled that if the federal government declared that certain material was important for national security, the judge had to accept that privilege and not penalize the government as it would another party to a lawsuit. The logic for this decision rested on the belief that the government would not lie about the importance of any documents simply to avoid embarrassment or liability.

But in the Reynolds case the Air Force’s lawyers lied. In 2000, as Siegel recounts in Claim of Privilege, the government declassified the accident report. The document that the Air Force insisted had to remain completely secret turned out to say almost nothing about the experimental equipment the dead men had been hoping to test; that equipment wasn’t involved in the fatal accident. Instead, that report listed several problems with the airplane, the pilots’ choices, and the safety training—issues central to the widows’ negligence lawsuit.

The result is a breakdown between historical fact and legal doctrine. In law, the Reynolds case provides the basis of the U.S. government’s expanded claims for secrecy privileges over the last sixty years. It turns certain “state secrets” claims into legally unquestionable facts.

In history, however, the Reynolds case shows that government officials did use a false claim of national security to protect themselves from embarrassment. That’s an obvious historical fact. The actual events show we should be more skeptical about government claims of privilege, not more deferential.

National security obviously requires that the government be able to keep some secrets for a limited time. But in this test the Supreme Court, choosing to work blind and trust the military, drew the line in the wrong place. Unfortunately, history can’t overturn law; only more law, driven by public opinion, can. And the Reynolds precedent, having been built on in other cases, has become more entrenched.

Siegel’s book is part mystery investigation, part courtroom drama. It’s not always exciting, but it’s a thought-provoking and ultimately frustrating read.

The Value of Spying in America

Michael J. Sulick was the chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2002 to 2004 and director of its National Clandestine Service from 2007 to 2010. He wrote Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War to create “one compact volume” that includes case studies from several periods of American history, something he felt was missing from the market or the classroom.

Spying in America doesn’t try to be comprehensive or to break new ground in discussing espionage in America. And it doesn’t. It leans heavily on secondary sources, most of them more than a generation old, such as the books by John and Katherine Bakeless. Other sources cited in the chapters about the Revolution include an article in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Thomas B. Allen’s George Washington, Spymaster for young readers, and the websites of the C.I.A. and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In fact, Spying in America relies so much on secondary sources that chapter epigraphs from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and other well-documented historical figures aren’t credited to the original letters but to other books that have previously quoted those letters.

The Revolutionary War section starts with a short introductory chapter. Unfortunately, it contains basic errors. Page 16, for example, mischaracterizes the American Whigs’ preferred political solution to the conflict (not representation in Parliament but more autonomy for their colonial legislatures) and misapplies the John Adams quotation about a third of Americans opposing the Revolution (citing Howard Zinn). The next page misstates the reasons behind the British march to Concord in April 1775 and says Paul Revere’s fellow observers “were dubbed the Mechanics,” as if that were a formal name rather than the generic term for their class in society.

Three long-studied case studies follow, again with unfortunate errors. In retelling the treachery of Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., the book displays Revere’s engraving of the doctor’s namesake ancestor as if it were a portrait of the traitor himself. This chapter also states that Church was at the Boston Tea Party, but an anonymous Crown source—i.e., just the sort of informer a book about espionage might highlight—placed him inside the Old South Meeting-House instead. (I can’t knock Sulick for not including my findings about Church’s mistress, published just this year in the big Washington study.)

The study of spying in the American delegation to Paris highlights the role of secretary Edward Bancroft, but then indulges in the wish-fulfilling suggestion that Franklin was onto the man all along. We Americans not only forgive Franklin his known tricks but happily believe he was up to more than he probably was. This chapter mentions Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir, a gentleman who came to America in late 1775 as an unofficial emissary from the French court; it doesn’t note that Bonvouloir was in Massachusetts early in that year or that British agents had filed reports on him during the months in between.

To retell the story of Benedict Arnold’s treachery, Sulick relies most on Willard Wallace’s 1954 biography, which repeats a lot of dubious legends about the man’s boyhood. James Kirby Martin’s 1997 biography, Dave R. Palmer’s George Washington and Benedict Arnold, and other recent books seem more reliable, and also offer more detail about Peggy Arnold’s role in the affair.

Spying in America jumps right from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, leaving out the highest placed known foreign agent ever to serve in the U.S. government: Revolutionary War veteran Gen. James Wilkinson, for more than ten years the top American general and also a paid agent of Spain.

I sense an unstated, perhaps unrecognized, purpose in this compilation. Sulick focuses on espionage against the U.S. during major conflicts while skipping successful intelligence-gathering and aggressive covert action by Americans (except against the Confederacy). These stories are thus all about Americans discovering spies in our midst. The book’s message is clear in the title of its introduction: “The Peril of Disbelief.” Readers must never let their guard down or doubt the need for vigorous government counterintelligence.

Yet Sulick notes that the U.S. had no coordinated counterintelligence effort until 1939, though the country had grown tremendously during the preceding century and a half. I wouldn’t argue that the greater threats of the mid-20th century and today, with faster communications and weapons delivery and more complex systems, require vigilance. But since the world has changed so greatly, how much useful information can we really learn from thin versions of the tales of Church, Bancroft, and Arnold? Those stories seem to be included for their “Founders’ Chic” value: even Washington and Franklin had to deal with spies!

Georgetown University Press could have served this book better during editing. For instance, page 5 tells us that in 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned responsibility for counterespionage to the F.B.I., and then page 6 tells us the same thing.

On the other hand, the publisher provided a great exterior design by Tim Green of Faceout Studio. The image above doesn’t do it justice. The dust jacket is a translucent vellum with a triangular cutout for the all-seeing eye of the dollar bill’s Great Seal—looking out for us or starting out on us?

(Review based on copy provided by the publisher.)

The Voices of British Soldiers

Folks might recognize Don Hagist’s name from the British Soldiers, American Revolution blog. He digs out details about the enlisted men who were part of the British government’s effort to hold onto those thirteen rebellious North American colonies. His research can turn some faceless redcoats into individual people.

Often that task involves paging through muster rolls, pension grants, court-martial records, and other British military documents now stored at the National Archives at Kew. Unfortunately, there’s no British equivalent to the American pension application system, which (in lieu of systematic record-keeping during the war) required veterans to provide detailed narratives of their service. That means most British soldiers are preserved as names on a few documents without a line connecting those dots.

A few redcoats left detailed personal narratives. One of Don’s earlier books was an edition of Sgt. Roger Lamb’s postwar writing that collected all his first-hand military experiences in one volume. Don’s new book, British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution, reprints nine shorter narratives of service in the king’s army (as well as the samples of the work of two military poets, including John Hawthorn). The narratives include the information taken down by the pension office, a letter written during the war to a potential patron, a convict’s dying words, and several published memoirs.

In each case, Don has checked and filled out the soldier’s own account with contemporaneous documentation, where available. Thus, the book includes the autobiographical “Dying Speech” of Pvt. Valentine Duckett, executed for desertion on Boston Common in 1774, and the record of his court-martial. Another court-martial fills out the story of Pvt. Thomas Watson, who survived to settle in Bolton, Massachusetts.

In some chapters Don describes other British soldiers whose careers parallel the main subject. For example, chapter 9, “The Aspiring Soldier,” is about William Burke of the 45th Regiment, who deserted to the Americans for more social and economic opportunity. That chapter also mentions Pvt. Thomas Machin of the 23rd, who did the same in July 1775 and eventually became Capt. Thomas Machin of the Continental Artillery. (I also discuss Machin in the big Washington study.)

You’ve probably spotted a significant pattern in these narratives: most of the memoirists ended up becoming American. Of the nine men profiled in the book, only two retired from the British army in good standing. Six deserted to the Americans or, in the case of Ebenezer Fox of Roxbury, deserted back to the Americans. Their recollections got published because in America those men became honored relics of our War for Independence.

British society simply wasn’t that eager to read the experiences of enlisted men. That may have been due to how societies don’t like to be reminded of wars they lose. But I think it reflects the aristocratic values of Georgian Britain. We see the pattern already right after the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Massachusetts authorities published broadsides naming all the local men killed and wounded, regardless of rank. Gen. Thomas Gage sent home reports listing the officers killed but not the enlisted men. (Granted, that would have been a much longer list.) American culture valued ordinary individuals more.

Given the social stratification in Britain, it’s no surprise that several of these redcoats saw more opportunity on the other side of the conflict. One chapter of British Soldiers, American War documents how the army encouraged soldiers to learn to read and write, valuable skills in any large organization. But even an educated enlisted man was very unlikely to rise above sergeant.

As memoirists and as defectors, most of the men who left behind recollections for British Soldiers, American War were atypical. But of course all memoirists are atypical (at least until this era of self-publishing). And these men offer a rare peek into the daily lives of British recruits. Alongside Don’s research on recruitment patterns, demographic data, &c., the book is a top-notch source on the king’s soldiers during the Revolutionary War, “ordinary” men caught up in historical change.

British Soldiers, American War is handsomely designed (though, reflecting what Georgian artists were commissioned to paint, the cover art shows British officers instead of enlisted men). The profiles include images of some of their documentary sources. Eric H. Schnitzer’s drawings and detailed captions discuss the soldiers’ likely garments, which should increase the value of the book for reenactors. Thorough notes and index round out a fine volume.

“His verses are the fruits of simple nature.”

Yesterday I took note of John Hawthorn, poet and private in His Majesty’s 6th and then probably 20th Regiment of Dragoons in 1778-79. During his service Hawthorn actually published a slim book of poetry.

The July 1779 Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, took notice of Hawthorn’s work with a, well, critical review:

His verses are the fruits of simple nature. He appears to be a total stranger to all the rules of grammar; yet in some of his pieces there are strokes of imagination, which seldom appear in the productions of illiterate versifiers.

The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal in October 1779 had less praise but more pity:

Of honest John Hawthorn’s poetical attainments the Reader will form his own judgment from the following extract, which is given, not as the most favourable specimen of his abilities, but merely that, by pointing out the Writer’s situation and circumstances, the humane may be induced to become purchasers of his book.

It is not many months ago, since I
Enjoy’d my freedom and my liberty,
Before I e’er took up a haversack,
Or bullying serjeant to rattan my back,
When on my stockings there might be a spot;
No matter if my shoes were black or not:
Then, calmly I could lie, and take my rest,
No powder’d hair, or ruffles at my breast:
When at my ease I liv’d in a warm cot,
And had of land a fertile handsome spot:
What though my roof no tiles or slates sustain,
The well pack’d thatch kept out the driving rain;
A chearful fire glanced through my floor;
My wife could milk her own cow at my door;
Each day, a dinner dress’d by my good dame,
And chearing smells from boiling beef-pots came:
My horse was sure to know me at first sight;
Nay more, my dog would know my feet at night:
Oft’ I would walk in a fair evening tide.
And muse in quiet by a river’s side;
Where oziers green were nodding o’er the waves,
And water lilies spread their moisten’d leaves;
Then home return with calm and serene breast;
Return my thanks to God, and go to rest.
Thus did I live but in a low degree;
If some liv’d better, some liv’d worse than me:
Till trading bad, and loss of different kind,
Made me enlist, and leave them all behind.

It’s not certain that those lines from “The Drill” are strictly autobiographical; Hawthorn may have adopted the persona of a rustic yeoman. (He identified himself elsewhere as a trained linen weaver.) If so, Britain’s literati offered sympathy but not much respect.

Hawthorn’s poetry appears to have been rediscovered in the late 20th century as an unusual voice from Britain’s eighteenth-century laboring class. The poems he wrote about his army experience are also rare in providing a first-hand description of the everyday life of a British soldier during the period of the Revolutionary War.

Hawthorn’s “On His Writing Verses,” other lines from “The Drill,” and “Advice to a Recruit” appear in Don N. Hagist’s new book, British Soldiers, American Revolution. Tomorrow I’ll say more about that book, and for the rest of the week I plan to share news and opinions about some other recent books of Revolutionary history. I’ll try to be kinder than The Critical Review.

Pvt. John Hawthorn: “Yet I must be a bard”

John Hawthorn was a linen weaver from County Down, Ireland, who enlisted in the 6th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Dragoons in 1778. (Dragoons, we recall, were soldiers mounted on horseback.) That unit was stationed in Salisbury from May 1778 through the end of the following year.

According to an 1847 regimental history, Britain was then beefing up its army in response to France entering the American War. As a result:

one hundred men and horses were added to the Inniskilling dragoons; but the scene of conflict [i.e., North America] was so little adapted for cavalry, that the heavy dragoon regiments were not called upon to quit the United Kingdom.

Hawthorn was actually a light dragoon, and the same regimental history says that “In April, 1779, the men [of the 6th Dragoons] equipped as light cavalry were incorporated” into the new 20th Light Dragoons, along with some companies from other horse regiments. But that regiment didn’t go to America, either.

So what makes Pvt. John Hawthorn worthy of note here? Because at heart he was a poet! He was probably writing verses as an apprentice and continued that activity as a horse soldier.

It was all very well for a wealthy officer like Gen. John Burgoyne to indulge his literary habit, but an enlisted man like Hawthorn face harder challenges, as one of his compositions describes:

On His Writing Verses

Well may they write, that sit in parlours fine,
To raise their spirits can quaff luscious wine,
To keep out noise, the parlour door is shut,
The servants scarce dare speak, or budge a foot;
Under no fear, no terror, and no task,
But coolly can sit at a writing desk;
How different with me the time is spent,
Inclos’d with dragoons in a little tent;
Some darning stockings, others blacking shoes;
Some singing, others telling jests and news;
Their different sounds do ill confound my writing;
One should be solitary, when inditing,
Yet I must be a bard, nought less will do me,
And so write as nature dictates to me.

Despite those obstacles, Hawthorn completed enough work and saved enough money to have a small book of poetry printed in Salisbury in 1779: Poems, by John Hawthorn, Light Dragoon in the Inniskilling Regiment.

TOMORROW: The reviews come in.

“Four Dollars at Christmas” for Philip Bateman

In early 1773, Philip Bateman (also spelled Bottiman) arrived at Mount Vernon as a gardener. As that historic site’s online encyclopedia says, in March George Washington recorded paying a man to bring Bateman from Leeds, now Leedstown. He had “bought” the gardener for £35 from a Mr. Hodge.

Bateman was apparently an indentured servant, not a slave. He continued to work at Mount Vernon after serving whatever time he had left in his contract. In 1786 Bateman received £20 as a year’s wages, but he enjoyed other benefits.

Three years earlier, plantation manager Lund Washington (1737-1796) wrote to his cousin, the general:

As to Bateman (the old gardener) I have no expectation of his ever seeking Another home—indulge him but in getg Drunk now and then, and he will be happy—he is the best Kitchen gardener to be met with.

In April 1787, the estate formalized that indulgence. Someone wrote a contract for the gardener, referring to him as “Bater.” The gardener promised:

to serve the sd. George Washington, for the term of one year, as a Gardner, and that he will, during said time, conduct himself soberly, diligently and honestly, that he will faithfully and industriously perform all, and every part of his duty as a Gardner, to the best of his knowledge and abilities, and that he will not, at any time, suffer himself to be disguised with liquor, except on the times hereafter mentioned.

In Consideration of these things being well and truly performed on the part of the sd. Philip Bater, the said George Washington doth agree to allow him (the sd. Philip) the same kind and quantity of provisions as he has heretofore had; and likewise, annually, a decent suit of clothes befitting a man in his station; to consist of a Coat, Vest and breeches; a working Jacket and breeches, of homespun, besides; two white Shirts; three Check Do; two pair of yarn Stockings; two pair of Thread Do; two linnen Pocket handkerchiefs; two pair linnen overalls; as many pair of Shoes as are actually necessary for him; four Dollars at Christmas, with which he may be drunk 4 days and 4 nights; two Dollars at Easter to effect the same purpose; two Dollars also at Whitsontide, to be drunk two days; A Dram in the morning, and a drink of Grog at Dinner or at Noon.

Bateman’s name remained in the Mount Vernon accounts until 1789.

It’s not clear who wrote that Bateman could “be drunk 4 days and 4 nights…at Christmas.” The general’s nephew and manager George Augustine Washington (1759-1793) wrote out the contract. The general’s secretary Tobias Lear witnessed it and may have had more leeway to be frank. (Incidentally, after G. A. Washington’s death, his widow married Lear.) But George Washington himself usually gets the credit for approving the terms.

Newspapers on the Television on the Web

Yesterday evening C-SPAN’s BookTV aired its recording of the Reporting the Revolutionary War event at the Old State House early this month.

First, main author Todd Andrlik talked about Revolutionary-era newspapers and collecting them, as he also discusses at Rag Linen and BeforeHistory.com. One story he didn’t tell in this presentation, but which I heard at dinner afterward, was about coming across a one-page supplement to a newspaper that hadn’t been documented before. Todd arranged for that to go into the Library of Congress collection so it will be available to scholars.

After Todd’s talk, he sat down with me and Prof. Robert Allison of Suffolk University for a discussion of colonial news reporting and questions from the audience. Good questions and a lively interchange.

It doesn’t look possible to download this video or watch it on the C-SPAN site yet. There are only snatches of an automated transcript that says things like: “INTERESTEDLY IN THE MIDDLE MINOLTA WERE SOLD UPON A FEW LONDON, POOLS TO REPORT GEORGE WASHINGTON HAD DIED IN BATTLE. NORMALLY THESE ARE ALSO KIND OF...” I think that was Todd talking.

This show appears to be scheduled to run again on 1 January at 1:00 A.M.

(Benjamin Park had nice things to say about Reporting the Revolutionary War on the new Junto blog.)

The Earliest Appearance of “No Taxation without Representation” (so far)

In March 1766, Parliament repealed its Stamp Act for North America but passed the Declaratory Act, meant to establish that it had the power to pass laws governing those colonies—including, implicitly, new tax laws.

One of the few voices against the Declaratory Act was Charles Pratt, first Baron Camden, soon to be Lord Chancellor of England. He argued, as he’d done when the Stamp Act was proposed, that since the colonists didn’t have any representatives in Parliament, by British tradition Parliament shouldn’t have the power to tax them.

Very few Members of Parliament agreed. Camden’s political ally William Pitt actually wrote the Declaratory Act. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, said Camden was mistaken. Only four other Lords voted against the bill.

That debate occurred just before London printers made a routine of reporting Parliament‘s proceedings in detail. But a few months later someone sent the text of Camden’s speech to printer John Almon (1737-1805), who included it in his Political Register for 1767. The text appeared in a gingerly form, perhaps as a thin guard against accusations of sedition: all the proper names were removed, so it recorded “L— C——” speaking to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.”

Camden had said:

My position is this—I repeat it—I will maintain it to my last hour,—taxation and representation are inseparable;—this position is founded on the laws of nature; it is more, it is itself an eternal law of nature; for whatever is a man’s own, is absolutely his own; no man hath a right to take it from him without his consent, either expressed by himself or representative; whoever attempts to do it, attempts an injury; whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery. Taxation and representation are coeval with and essential to this constitution. . . .

In short, my lords, from the whole of our history, from the earliest period, you will find that taxation and representation were always united; so true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. [John] Locke.

As you can see, Camden’s argument was based on the linkage of taxation and representation. But nowhere in the speech did the baron use the phrase “taxation without representation.”

The Scots Magazine reprinted Camden’s speech in 1767. The London Magazine, or Gentlemen’s Monthly Intelligencer ran the text on two pages the following February. That magazine’s running head for the first page was “L— C——’s Speech.” The second page, as preserved by Google Books, was summed up this way:

And that page, published in February 1768, is the earliest appearance of the phrase “[No] Taxation without Representation” that I’ve found. It debuted in big letters at the top of a page of a widely circulated magazine. I suspect that pithy, rhyming summary of the argument below stuck in many readers’ minds and became the slogan for the American cause.

Thus, I posit that the person who coined the deathless phrase “taxation without representation” wasn’t James Otis, Jr., or the Rev. John Joachim Zubly or even Lord Camden. It was John Almon or an anonymous editor or printer in his shop, looking for a way to headline a couple of columns of text in a limited number of characters.

Irish Roots for “Taxation without Representation”?

Digging for the origin of the phrase “[no] taxation without representation,” I keep coming across some claims that haven’t held up:

• that James Otis, Jr., coined those words in arguing against writs of assistance before the Massachusetts high court in 1761. Surviving texts of that speech don’t include the phrase. Otis’s pamphlets in the next few years discuss the linkage of taxation and representation, but they don’t use that phrase. Otis’s biographer William Tudor did use that phrase while discussing the speech, and as a result it’s been grafted onto Otis.
• that the phrase appeared in an unidentified sermon by the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew of Boston in 1750. This claim appeared on Wikipedia on 2005. I knocked it down in 2009, but it still survives some places.
• that it was a common slogan in Ireland decades before the Americans adopted it.

David McCullough’s John Adams made that last statement in 2001. However, the book didn’t cite any example or source. And all the Irish examples I’ve found appear after the American Revolution, some of them explicitly pointing to that earlier conflict across the ocean.

The “Address from the Society of the United Irishmen of Dublin” dated 23 Nov 1792 stated:

Three millions—we repeat it—three millions taxed without being represented, bound by laws to which they had net given consent, and politically dead in their native land. The apathy of the Catholic mind changed into sympathy, and that begot an energy of sentiment and action. They had eyes, and they read. They had ears, and they listened. They had hearts, and they felt.

They said—“Give us our rights as you value your own. Give us a share of civil and political liberty, the elective franchise, and the trial by jury. Treat us as men, and we shall treat you as brothers. Is taxation without representation a grievance to three millions across the Atlantic, and no grievance to three millions at your doors? Throw down that pale of persecution which still keeps up civil war in Ireland, and make us one people. We shall then stand, supporting and supported, in the assertion of that liberty which is due to all, and which all should unite to attain.”

Arguing in the Irish Parliament to extend the franchise to Catholics on 22 Feb 1793, Henry Grattan (1746-1820, shown above) said:

I see no reason why the church [of England] should be more in danger from the catholics than from the presbyterians, who, in Ireland, are the majority of the protestants. If the church is in danger, it is from the times, not from the catholics; and I know of nothing so likely to encrease that danger as an opposition on the part of the church to the liberty of three parts of the island. To insist on a system of taxation, without representation, in order to secure a system of tithe, without consolation, would be to hazard both; but to make the latter in a time of some speculation on the subject of church emoluments, the best policy is to make those emoluments reconcileable to other interests and passions.

By that point the phrase had appeared in American political writing and then histories of the American war for twenty years. So I think these Irish activists picked up the words from the Americans. If anyone has found earlier examples of the phrase from Ireland, I’d be pleased to see them. (I’m not looking for previous examples of the argument, just the phrase.)

Until now, the earliest example of the phrase “taxation without representation” that I found was from the Rev. John Joachim Zubly of Georgia, published in 1769.

TOMORROW: The origin in 1768?

“Any other individual than Rigby would have been disconcerted”

Recently I ran across a lively passage in Nathaniel Wraxhall’s memoirs of the debate in Parliament on 4 Mar 1782, as opponents of Lord North’s government pressed for an end to the American War.

M.P. Richard Rigby rose to speak. Wraxhall recalled:

Never could he have appeared more opportunely on the Scene, or at a Moment when his Exertions were more necessary to re-invigorate the ministerial Ranks. His very Figure and Aspect, unblushing, fearless, confident, as if formed to stem the Torrent of Opposition even when most violent, powerfully aided the Effect of his Oratory.

Rigby spoke with what Wraxhall described as “blunt, not to say contemptuous, Levity.” However, he defended the government’s ministers without continuing to endorse their American policy.

Rigby made a slip as he acknowledged that he had been paymaster of the British army since 1768, meaning he supplied the specie used to pay the soldiers and accumulated a steady profit from doing so. Wraxhall wrote:

Rigby having, in the Progress of his Speech, said rather unadvisedly, that “he was tired of the American War, though as Paymaster of the Forces, he was by no Means tired of receiving Cash;” which singular Expression he however qualified by adding, that “he could nevertheless speak his Opinion honestly, uninfluenced by his Place;” Mr. [William] Pitt remarked with great Severity on the Words. He observed, that “if the Right Honorable Gentleman was not tired of receiving, the Nation was weary of paying, Cash to a Person, who profited more by the War than any four Members of that Assembly.”

Almost any other Individual than Rigby, would have been disconcerted by so invidious a Comment, coming too from such a Quarter. But, he, far from shrinking back, or exhibiting the slightest Mark of Discomposure, stood up; and directing his Looks, as well as his Reply, to Pitt and [Charles James] Fox, who sate very near each other on the Opposition Side of the House, almost under the Gallery, “I will just venture to remark,” said he, “that however lucrative my Office may be, it has been held by the Fathers of the two Honorable Members who spoke last; and I make little Doubt that whenever I may be compelled to quit it, those Gentlemen themselves may have an Eye to getting Hold of it. I repeat, I am not at all tired of receiving Money; but I am not to be told, because I receive the Emoluments of my Place, that I am therefore the Author of my Country’s Ruin.”

Neither Fox nor Pitt attempted any Retort.

Squelch.

Still, Lord North resigned before the month was out. Fox and Pitt would vie to be prime minister. Rigby’s successors as paymaster would be two other opposition politicians, Edmund Burke and Isaac Barré. Elections had consequences.

[The thumbnail above is a sketch of Rigby from “series of small, whole length caricature portraits of prominent members of the Whig Coalition and opponents of the American War,” offered by Michael Finney Antique Books & Prints.]

“More Moving Parts to This Machine”

The public discussion of Thomas Jefferson and slavery continued this month as The Atlantic Monthly’s Ta-Nehisi Coates posted an essay about a comment that the third President was caught in an “economic system of which no alternative was readily available.” That appears to be a quotation from a commenter, but Coates didn’t single out the author. It has been, as he wrote, a rather common claim.

Coates noted how Jefferson had counterexamples within his own circle, genteel planters who freed their slaves in different ways: President George Washington, his own cousin John Randolph, young correspondent Edward Coles, and the religiously-minded Robert Carter III. As I’ve written someplace before, the idea of emancipation was definitely in the marketplace of ideas during Jefferson’s career. He chose not to buy into that idea because ultimately he found the price too high.

Jefferson made his choice despite what Coates called his extraordinarily eloquent condemnation of slavery. In past decades authors glossed over the mismatch between the third President’s rhetoric and behavior, but that topic appears at the heart of many recent books. However, earlier portrayals of Jefferson as a champion of liberty for all still influence popular conceptions. That means complaining against the received image of Jefferson depends on what one has actually read.

In his next posting, Coates addressed the controversy over Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s will. He also wrote:

There's a temptation here to rage against a man who preached the evils of slavery in public, actually tried to talk others into continuing to hold slaves in private, and then refused to act on his own words, even when it would have cost him nothing. I think this instinct only works if you understand slavery strictly as an economic system. But as we've discussed before, slavery was the foundation of antebellum society. . . .

It seems clear to me that one can salute the ideas of a founding father, and at the same time condemn his cowardice when it came to putting them in practice. In other words, Jefferson can be both the intellectual father of this country and a notorious violator of the very ideas he put forth.

This fall the Kosciuszko will has been one item of dispute between Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain, and Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello. A commenter said Coates’s summary of the issue was too simple, and he agreed.

But then Coates went on to quote Gordon-Reed’s critique of Wiencek as a “defense of Jefferson” that “implicitly assumes that Jefferson bears no moral culpability, that Kosciuzko is ultimately (and seemingly totally) at fault.” I think that was also simplistic, seeing a “defense” in a reminder that the situation was more complicated than described in the book she was reviewing.

Gordon-Reed sent a reply, which Coates featured in yet another post. It noted racist statements even from emancipator Edward Coles and concluded:

Many today do not want to face the fact that white supremacy was as much a part of the founding ideology as republicanism. Beating up on TJ, as if he were some singular case, is part of the denial

That prompted more discussion, which Gordon-Reed, Coates, and Wiencek all joined. This might have been the most interesting discourse of the series.

Coates and some of his commenters argue that it’s valid to criticize Jefferson more harshly than other slaveholders of his time because he wrote so well about the harms of slaveholding. As commenter “abk1985” wrote to Gordon-Reed:

The difference here on this blog from what you do is that we are much more likely to make moral evaluations rather than simply attempt to understand historical personages. So there's a kind of built in conflict here.

Gordon-Reed’s reply:

Writing history is for me a moral enterprise, but there are different ways to show that. I don't think anyone who has read my books and articles about TJ would think I have not been critical of him when appropriate, witheringly critical at times. My point in writing this post was to make it clear that there were more moving parts to this machine than have been described. As I said in another post, I've existed in this strange position where some people are absolutely convinced that all I want to do is destroy Jefferson and others are absolutely convinced that all I want to do is to protect him. I don't approach TJ, or the founders, with any notion that my goal is to hold them to a standard. I don't "expect more". I don't expect anything beyond what my knowledge about them, gleaned from my study of them, suggests they are capable of doing at any given point of their lives, and what their society would have allowed them to do.

Colin Nicolson on Gov. Francis Bernard, 20 Dec.

On Thursday, 20 December, at 3:00 P.M., the Colonial Society of Massachusetts will host a talk by Colin Nicolson, Lecturer in History and Politics at the University of Stirling in Scotland. The topic will be “Negotiating British Imperialism: Gov. Francis Bernard and the Stamp Act Crisis 1764-67.”

Nicolson wrote a biography of Bernard called The “Infamas Govener”, which no doubt confuses search engines. He’s editing the governor’s correspondence, being published in five volumes.

Bernard was royal governor of New Jersey for two and a half years and then of Massachusetts for nine years, August 1760 to August 1769. He had been gone from North America for half a decade by the time the Revolutionary War began. Yet he was probably one of the British Crown officials most involved in bringing it on.

When Bernard arrived in Massachusetts, he appears to have tried to work with local politicians. He put his sons in local schools instead of sending them home to Britain and invested in local land. (Indeed, he might have been too eager for local land.) But Bernard had the misfortune of following Gov. Thomas Pownall, who had become popular with the Boston merchants. His arrival corresponded with a shift at the Boston Customs office, making officials stricter about collecting duties.

Then Bernard decided to appoint Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson as Chief Justice of Massachusetts, setting aside Pownall’s promise to give James Otis, Sr., the next seat on the high court. Otis’s son James quit his royal appointments and allied with the Boston merchants to challenge Customs officers’ power to search for smuggled goods through writs of assistance.

Over the next few years Bernard tried to help enforce the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and Townshend duties, and otherwise promote the London government’s powers and priorities. When those laws produced violent protests, he recommended bringing troops to the town in 1768. He vetoed several opposition politicians’ seats on the Council, only to see towns elect many of them to the House instead. He demanded that the General Court rescind its letter of protest to other colonies and then dissolved the legislature when it refused.

But what really made Bernard infamous came in 1769, when someone in London leaked selections of his correspondence to government superiors. Those letters complained about Boston’s politicians, merchants, and mobs, and recommended changes to the Massachusetts charter that would have strengthened his hand. For New England Whigs, Bernard’s letters confirmed their suspicion that he was conspiring against their traditional rights. When he sailed away in August 1769, Boston celebrated. Nonetheless, the name of Bernardston, incorporated in 1762, still honors him.

Nicolson’s talk addresses the middle of Bernard’s Massachusetts career. The Stamp Act wasn’t his idea, but he did what he could to enforce the law and then to respond to the violent protests against it. Could any other royal appointee have done better? Or did Bernard’s personal choices and style exacerbate the situation?

The Colonial Society’s headquarters is at 87 Mount Vernon Street on Beacon Hill. This is a free event, with limited seating.

What Changed Terrorism Since the 1700s?

What shifted the label of “terrorism” from mob rule, as I described on Friday, to today’s image of it as sneak attacks on civilians by relatively small shadowy groups?

One major factor, I think, was the shift to democratic governance. When America’s Sons of Liberty used mob violence against royal Customs officials, they had little other power over those appointees. Colonists couldn’t vote on those men or their salaries, and they couldn’t vote for the men in London who appointed those men. For all of Boston’s reputation for lawlessness, the pre-Revolutionary period saw no attacks on the town’s elected officials or employees (except by British army officers who resented watchmen’s claims of authority).

In democracies the majority can express its desires through elections and therefore rarely sees a need for violence (with some exceptions, such as the race riots of the 1800s and early 1900s). That has generally left domestic political violence for smaller groups who feel they have no other way to affect the political system. Sometimes those are substantial ethnic or religious minorities who feel oppressed. Sometimes they’re small political minorities who justified in their cause, such as radical abolitionist John Brown in the 1850s or diehard segregationists a century later. Sometimes terrorism is a form of warfare between countries, of course, but even in those cases the terrorists often feel that their targets have oppressed them and occupied their land.

Alongside the change in political structures around the world came change in technology. Scientists like Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and other new explosives. Gunmakers produced machines that shot lots of bullets in a very short time. And we have more control over deadlier poisons, like sarin gas. That means individuals and small groups can produce as much destruction in a short time as an eighteenth-century mob.

When Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators wanted to blow up King James I and Parliament in 1605, they reportedly assembled thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in a cellar beneath the building. That took months. The first supply of powder decayed and had to be replaced. Eventually people noticed.

It took a Boston crowd all night to ruin Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s house in 1765, and the structure remained standing. Destroying the East India Company tea in 1773 required scores of men and boys working for hours and the collusion of hundreds of onlookers.

Similarly, at the Boston Massacre in 1770, seven threatened soldiers killed five people and wounded six. They did so by double-loading their muskets and in most cases firing straight into a densely packed crowd. But after all the soldiers but one had pulled their triggers, they had to reload before another shot. If the crowd hadn’t been too stunned to counterattack, the soldiers’ bayonets would have been their only defenses.

When a sailor named Samuel Dyer tried to shoot two Royal Artillery officers in Boston in October 1774, his pistols misfired, and he ended up chasing them around with one of their swords before running away.

Today’s guns are more efficient at shooting bullets. As last week’s news reminded us, a single person can shoot dozens of people in minutes. We worry that a single individual can conceal enough explosive to kill a bunch of people in a body cavity. Technology has made mass murder, and thus terrorism, much easier.

The eighteenth century provided only one way for an individual or small group to destroy a lot of property at once: arson. Of course, the spread of a fire depended on weather conditions and often wasn’t fast enough to kill people. But it could cause tremendous property damage and disrupt whole communities. Fire was what Americans feared when they traded rumors that rebellious slaves or British troops were “burning the town.”

On 21 Sept 1776 a fire destroyed five hundred buildings in New York City, just captured by the British military. That night, royal authorities arrested Nathan Hale as a rebel agent, and the next day they hanged him. Historians debate whether Hale had helped to set those fires, but the British probably suspected he had.

Fire is how James Aitken, alias John the Painter, attacked British shipyards and other sites as a secret and fairly freelance American agent during the war. Jessica Warner’s study of Aitken is titled The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist, but the little damage he produced shows how much more dangerous a small band of modern terrorists can be.

“An “Impartial Observer” at the Tea Party

Yesterday, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Globe published an essay by Todd Andrlik of RagLinen and me about how newspapers reported on the Revolution. With limited accuracy and pronounced biases, actually. For example:

One of the first accounts of the Tea Party, published in several New England newspapers, shows clear signs of these political biases. Though the piece was signed “An Impartial Observer,” it was carefully written to portray the rioters as scrupulous about other people’s property. They broke a padlock on one ship, the dispatch acknowledged, but quickly replaced it. One man tried to pocket tea for himself, but others seized and pummeled him. Did “An Impartial Observer” recognize any of the men carrying out what became known as the Boston Tea Party? If so, he (or she) didn’t see that information as fit to print.

You can read a transcript of that account, carefully framed as coming from someone who just happened to be visiting Boston at the time, here.

Despite its technological and cultural limits, the British Empire’s press was one of the freest and most far-flung networks of news people had yet developed. And a great source for understanding the period.

Todd and I wrote that essay in connection to Reporting the Revolutionary War, published this season. For additional essays and videos on the topic of the Revolutionary press, visit BeforeHistory.com.

Yesterday’s Globe also included a fabulous picture of Paul Revere as a bearded, pistol-carrying rough rider in a coonskin cap. That image came from opposite page 479 in James Henry Stark’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts, which I happened to cite last Friday. Just to remind us that books can be as inaccurate and biased as old newspapers.