Getting Ready for the 2013 Reenactment Season

There’s slush on the ground, but already New England Revolutionary War reenactors are preparing for the upcoming season. That’s where the Hive comes in: an organization of dedicated expert reenactors sharing their knowledge with others to improve the experience for both participants and spectators.

The first Hive session of 2013 will take place this Sunday afternoon, 20 January, at Minuteman Vocational Technical High School. It’s all about authentic clothing. The main lecture is “The Process of Putting Together a Great Kit” and breakout sessions cover:

• Newbie Clinic for Women.
• Kit Tune up for Men—Fixing Baggie Breeches & Wobbly Waistcoats.
• Converting Your Center-Front Closing Gown into a Stomacher/Robings Gown.
• Darning a Sock.
• Hand Sewing 101.
• Finishing Your Shift.

These events are free of charge and open to all Minute Man National Historical Park Volunteers and members of the living history community. Visit the Hive website for more details and a link for registration. Two more Hive sessions follow later in the winter.

In addition, on 23 February the Second New England Reenactors’ Swap Meet will take place at the Sturbridge Host Hotel from 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. Groups and vendors focused on many periods, from the mid-1700s through World War 2 at least, will be displaying goods and signing up new members. Admission for adults is $4.

I Can Haz Mezzotints

Two Nerdy History Girls alerted me to this engraving by James McArdell after the artist Philippe Mercier, which the Yale Center for British Art estimates to have been published in Britain in 1756.

Its caption is “Love Me, Love My Cat.”

Which shows that people were forcing their friends to look at pictures of cats long before the internet. We’ve just gotten more sophisticated at it.

A New John Adams Note?

The Warwick (Rhode Island) Beacon reports that today in North Kingston auctioneer William Spicer will sell a short, ragged John Adams letter—really more of a note. I don’t believe this document is mentioned in the published Papers of John Adams.

The letter is dated “Boston Decr. 26 1772” and addressed to an “old Friend” named William Elliot. The newspaper’s transcription reads:

We are all in a fury here about the Dependency of the governor and the Dependency of the Judges, the Commission for trying the Rhode Islanders for Burning the Gaspee. I wonder how your Colony happens to sleep so securely in a whole skin, when her sisters are so worried and tormented! . . .

[Postscript:] The Fools call it the Independency of the Govr, Judges etc

The letter comments on two political issues. One was the royal inquiry into the destruction of the Royal Navy ship Gaspee, which was disrupting Adams’s court schedule because it required the attention of some judicial figures.

The other was the Crown’s move to pay salaries to royal governors, judges, and other colonial appointees from the tea tax rather than leave it up to the local legislatures to pay those salaries (or delay doing so). The Crown salaries made those officials more independent of local opinion, more dependent on royal favor—hence the semantic debate within the letter.

“Bringing up curiosities from the sunken wreck”

Yesterday I described the sinking of the Royal Navy ship Hussar in the Hell-Gate portion of New York harbor in 1780.

In August 1814, the American Weekly Messenger reported that “The gentlemen who manage the diving bell…last summer were daily bringing up curiosities from the sunken wreck of the British frigate Hussar.” However, they had moved on to another sunken warship, the Mercury. (At the time, notably, the U.S. of A. was once again at war with Britain.)

Then a rumor began to circulate that the Hussar had gone down with the British military payroll in gold and silver. The warship had certainly brought that specie to America in 1780. The ship had also carried American prisoners across the ocean for exchange, and another rumor started to circulate, saying they had gone down with the ship and that their skeletons remained at the bottom, still in chains. With New York recently agitated about the prison ship dead, that possibility brought new attention to the Hussar. Why, it was practically a patriotic duty to search for the ship and bring up those brave martyrs’ remains! (Along with whatever gold and silver one might find along the way.)

In October 1818, the New Monthly Magazine reported that a “company of adventurers” had hired the diving bell to revisit the Hussar and search for gold. An 1819 letter said that expedition succeeded in bringing up “most of the guns from her upper deck,” but no gold.

Reports of that expedition evidently prompted a letter to the Edinburgh Observer in 1827. Former petty officer Fletcher Yetts recalled helping to offload the specie to the army paymasters two days before the wreck. He mentioned the loss of seamen on the ship, but no prisoners, so those Americans had gone ashore as well.

Still, there was another expedition to find the Hussar in 1856, and a group from Worcester planned to try again in 1876. That same year the Army Corps of Engineers tamed the Hell-Gate by blowing it up with dynamite, obliterating whatever was on the bottom. Nonetheless, another man got government permission to try for the wreck in the 1890s; he called off his attempt when research in British archives indicated that there would be no treasure to be found.

Robert Apuzzo recounts this history in detail in The Endless Search for the H.M.S. Hussar: New York’s Legendary Treasure Shipwreck. Landfill has since covered the likely area of the wreck. The cannon given to Central Park in the 1860s—and the recently discovered gunpowder, ball and wadding inside—may be what little is left of the Hussar.

(The thumbnail above shows Thomas Kitchin’s 1777 map of New York harbor and Hell-Gate, courtesy of antique maps dealer Barry Lawrence Ruderman.)

The Secrets of H.M.S. Hussar

Many news outlets are carrying the story, first reported by the local C.B.S. station and then spread by the Associated Press, of New York’s Central Park Conservancy finding that one of the park’s monuments had contained a loaded cannon.

The cannon was donated to Central Park about the time of the U.S. Civil War and remained on display, its mouth plugged with cement, until 1996. Then it was removed for preservation. Conservators who started to work on the gun recently discovered that underneath the plug was cotton wadding, iron ball, and 800 grams of black powder. A New York police explosives unit took over the job and removed the dangerous material with no harm to anyone.

Now Boston 1775 dives deeper for more of the story.

That cannon, the news outlets reported, came from H.M.S. Hussar, commissioned in 1763. The Hussar was part of Adm. George Rodney’s fleet in New York harbor in 1780. On 23 November, Capt. Charles Morice Pole sailed the ship out of the East River to Long Island, where the admiral had ordered the fleet to anchor. Crossing the difficult Hell-Gate narrows, the Hussar hit a landmark called “Pot Rock” and sank in sixteen fathoms of water.

An 1827 letter in the Edinburgh Observer from one of the ship’s officers said the wreck claimed “107 brave fellows, part of her crew.” A 1780 article in the Boston Gazette said eighty people survived. That sudden sinking during a move when French ships were known to be hanging about New York is probably why the cannon was loaded when it went down.

But the Hussar also had an afterlife.

TOMORROW: Rumors of treasure and skeletons in chains.

The Antigua Conspiracy of 1736—Who Was Really Conspiring?

Mike Dash at the Smithsonian Magazine blog examines the evidence about a revolt of people enslaved on Antigua in 1736:

According to David Barry Gaspar, who has written in more detail on the subject than anybody else, Klaas was one of the masterminds behind an elaborate plot, hatched late in 1735, to overthrow white rule on Antigua. The conspiracy allegedly involved slaves on a number of large plantations, and was built around an audacious effort to destroy the island’s planters in a single spectacular explosion. . . .

In the eyes of the Antiguan government, Prince Klaas’s planned rebellion was well evidenced. A stream of witnesses testified that the plot existed; Klaas himself, together with his chief lieutenant—a creole (that is, a slave born on the island) known as Tomboy, whose job it would have been to plant the powder—eventually confessed to it. . . .

Yet—confessions aside—little physical evidence of a conspiracy was ever produced. The “10-gallon barrel of powder” that Tomboy was to have used to blow up the ball was not recovered; nor, despite extensive searches, were any weapons caches found.

All this has led researchers such as Jason Sharples and Kwasi Konadu to direct renewed attention to the slaves’ own testimonies. And here, it must be acknowledged, there is good reason to doubt that the confessions obtained by Arbuthnot were wholly reliable. Konadu persuasively argues that Klaas’s “dance” was probably a familiar Ashanti ceremony acclaiming a newly chosen leader, and not a declaration of war.

Sharples demonstrates that Arbuthnot’s prisoners would have found it easy to exchange information and discuss what the captors wished to hear, and adds that they must have known that a confession—and the betrayal of as many of their fellow Africans as possible—was their one hope of saving themselves. He also supplies an especially revealing detail: that one slave, known as “Langford’s Billy,” who “escaped with his life by furnishing evidence against at least fourteen suspects” and was merely banished in consequence, turned up in New York four years later, heavily implicated in another suspected slave plot that many researchers now concede was merely a product of hysteria.

This debate over the Antiguan revolt mirrors similar debates over other slave revolts throughout North America. Were there actual conspiracies nipped in the bud, or did paranoid white authorities torture and threaten false confessions out of people they had enslaved? Complicating the question is how slave rebellions can be appealing, if tragic, stories of people seeking liberty that we don’t want to give up. And we would be left with stories of hundreds of innocent victims—88 in this one Antiguan episode alone—being tortured and executed over their enslavers’ groundless fear.

“He had taken a Cold and became sick”

From the memoir of Pvt. Daniel Granger of Andover, published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1930:

My first services in the Revolution were on Winter Hill in the Fall and Winter of 1775. I at the age of 13 years. In the Month of December, News came up, that my Brother was sick and unable to do Duty, he was very thinly clad, as most of the Soldiers were at the time; he had taken a Cold and became sick. My parents said that I must take the Horse and go down and bring him home. But if the Officers would receive me in his sted, (and he being able to ride alone) I might stay in his room: I went down, & found him, he went with me to the Officers, to offer my services and to obtain a Furlow for himself: they questioned me a little and finally said that I might stay in his room if I thought that I could do the duty of a Soldier, & I gave my Consent, my Brother took the Horse & went home, & I took his Accoutrements and went in his Mess. The Barracks were then building, but were not finished. The Weather was extremely cold.

It looks like Daniel’s older brother was named Jacob and born about 1758. (All the other brothers whom that genealogy site lists were even younger than Daniel.) According to Sarah Loring Bailey’s Historical Sketches of Andover, in late 1777 Jacob marched north with a town militia company to defend against Gen. John Burgoyne’s thrust from Canada. The following spring Daniel, still only a teenager, served three months as a militia drummer at West Point.

My sinuses are feeling a bit like Jacob’s today, but—alas—I don’t have a thirteen-year-old brother to stand in for me.

The Maps of Christopher Colles

The John Carter Brown Library’s website is highlighting the efforts of Christopher Colles to publish a map of the young U.S. of A.’s roads:

As early as 1789, Christopher Colles had published his Survey of the Roads of the United States. His Survey consisted of 83 strip maps of roads covering the area from Albany to Annapolis. Each section covered twelve miles of road at a scale of 1 to 4/7 inch of a mile. Precise notation of distance was made possible by Colles’s use of a perambulator that measured mileage by revolutions of a wheel attached to the back of a carriage. Each section looked remarkably like a page from AAA’s master idea [the Triptik].

Christopher Colles was an Irish-born engineer and surveyor and man of constant ideas, one of which was the idea of mapping roads in the early United States in great detail. Unfortunately he was forced to bring his strip map road map project to an end in 1792 after he failed to find enough subscriptions to carry on the work. He did manage to map about 1000 miles, however, and those maps are very interesting for understanding the developing road systems in the developing nation of the United States.

The library also shares a wonderful quote from Colles on the failure of his business: “Had I been brought up a hatter, people would have come into the world without heads.” An edition of his cartography is still on sale, though.

Washington’s “Dishy Letter” about L’Enfant

Last month the Washington Post reported that local real estate developer Albert H. Small had bought what it called “George Washington’s dishy letter about Pierre Charles L’Enfant” at a Christie’s auction. Small plans to donate his entire collection about the first President, including this letter, to George Washington University.

That’s appropriate since Washington and L’Enfant worked together on developing a new national capital. Today we remember L’Enfant as that city’s principal planner. But in fact Washington lost faith in the Frenchman early in the project, which for a long time was a mess. Unfortunately, when it comes to unabashed gossip this letter is more disappointing than “dishy.”

In January 1792 the President had written: “The conduct of Majr. L’Enfant and those employed under him, astonishes me beyond measure! and something more than even appears, must be meant by them!” Bob Arnebeck, author of Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800, suggests that part of Washington’s discomfort might have been due to L’Enfant being gay; more about that here.

The federal government fired L’Enfant in February 1792, and months passed without much progress. On 30 November the President wrote this recently purchased letter to David Stuart, one of the government’s three commissioners overseeing the new city:

You will consider what I am now about to say as a private communication; the object of which is only to express more freely than I did in my last letter to the Commissioners, the idea that is entertained of the necessity of appointing a Superintendant of the execution of the plans & measures which shall be resolved upon by the Commissioners of the Federal City—one who shall always reside there—and being a man of skill & judgment—of industry & integrity, would from having a view of the business constantly before his eyes be enabled to conduct it to greater advantage than the Commissioners can possibly do unless they were to devote their whole time to it. . . .

But where, you may ask, is the character to be found who possesses these qualifications? I frankly answer I know not! Major L’Enfant (who it is said is performing wonders at the new town of Patterson [New Jersey]) if he could have been restrained within proper bounds and his temper was less untoward, is the only person with whose turn to matters of this sort I am acquainted, that I think fit for it. There may, notwithstanding, be many others although they are unknown to me, equally so.

Mr. [Samuel] Blodget seems to be the person on whom many eyes are turned, & among others who look that way, are some of the Proprietors. He has travelled, I am told, a good deal in Europe, & has turned his attention (according to his account) to architecture & matters of this kind. He has staked much on the issue of the Law establishing the permanent residence; and is certainly a projecting genius, with a pretty general acquaintance. To which may be added, if he has any influence in this country, it must be in a quarter where it is most needed; and where, indeed, an antidote is necessary to the poison which Mr. F———s C——t is spreading, by insinuations, that the accomplishment of the Plan is no more to be expected than the fabric of a vision, & will vanish in like manner.

In addition, Washington wrote, Thomas Jefferson “has a high opinion of Mr [Étienne Sulpice] Hallet, but whether Mr Hallet has qualities, & is sufficiently known to fit him for a general Superintendency I cannot pretend even to give an opinion upon.” Both Blodget and Hallet ended up working on the federal capital, and both ran into trouble doing so. L’Enfant ended up suing for back pay.

As for “Mr. F———s C——t,” that was Francis Cabot, a merchant from Boston who had moved to Philadelphia in the 1790s. He was somehow involved in developing the federal city. In February and March 1792, Washington and Stuart wrote each other letters warning of rumors that Cabot had bribed his way into the business and was skimming off government contracts. A man named Samuel Davidson later testified that in 1793 Cabot had charge of L’Enfant’s trunks and “the first plan exhibited of the city of Washington, by Gen. Washington.” Was Cabot the man of that name born in Salem in 1757 and dying in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1832?

Founding Boys, Before It Disappears

Founding Boys was a webcomic that ran from December 2010 to June 2012. It’s a mashup of Revolutionary American history, Japanese manga, British boarding-school stories, and the musical 1776.

Here, for instance, is a discussion between John Adams, who’s the allegorical school’s overly intense scholar, and Benjamin Franklin, who appears to be the grumpy teacher secretly in sympathy with the rebellious students.

Founding Boys ends abruptly as George Washington, the school’s big silent jock, steps over a spill of Delaware milk. But it’s still an impressive run considering the pseudonymous cartoonist was a high-school student all that time. A student who also won a national award for best high-school newspaper comic strip. And people say kids don’t care about history anymore.

Playing Assassin’s Creed III as an Early American Historian

Last week at The Junto blog, Michael D. Hattem reviewed the Assassin’s Creed III videogame as a scholar of early America:

What drew me to the game, as an early Americanist, was the historically accurate renderings of the colonial and revolutionary settings. Also, throughout the game you interact with actual historical figures and play important roles in the most important events of the period. What early Americanist wouldn’t want the chance to walk around Boston in 1754, a Mohawk village, Valley Forge, and, especially for me, New York in 1776? Or participate in the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Battle of Monmouth? . . .

I am not ashamed to admit that I found it quite exciting to walk into the Green Dragon Tavern to interact with Samuel Adams and to subsequently board the Dartmouth to take part in the Tea Party. At one point, your character has to ride his horse from Boston all the way out to Lexington on a snowy evening, the rendering of which was stunning. During the Battles of Lexington and Concord, you ride along with Paul Revere and end up commanding the Minutemen charged with holding the North Bridge. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, you are tasked with swimming out into the harbor and destroying the cannon on one of the ships bombarding Breed’s Hill. To do so, you have to run down through Charlestown while buildings, including the church steeple, collapse in front of you due to cannon fire. . . .

In the end, barring a time machine, this game is as close as one can get to a dynamic visual experience of colonial and revolutionary settings. For the non-historian, the game will also bring home the violent nature of the Revolution, something often downplayed in popular history and oft-ignored even in the scholarship. Being an early Americanist, the game has led me to consider more the nature of the settings in which the historical subjects about whom I write lived. But, most of all, it proved to be just a whole lot of fun.

Hattem reported that there’s a setting to turn down the gore, making the many attacks more bloodless, and that his six-year-old son enjoyed the game. The younger Hattem had been somewhat prepared for the storyline by episodes of Liberty’s Kids, one of those television cartoons that will never die.

This Junto review included a helpful video with clips of the action, and those made me pause. And rewind and look again to be sure of what I was seeing:

• Lots of non-eighteenth-century facial hair, on such figures as Capt. John Parker.
• British soldiers attacking the Tea Party. There weren’t any redcoats in central Boston in 1773. Royal officials didn’t dare interfere with that action.
• Provincial militiamen defending the North Bridge at Concord from advancing British soldiers rather than the other way around.

So for all the care the game makers took with the settings, for all the details they included (William Molineux memorialized in a videogame? Amazing!), Assassin’s Creed III promotes some fundamentally mistaken notions about important Revolutionary events. Those might grow from misconceptions or compromises to make the play more exciting. But through lifelike images and sheer ubiquity this game will probably help to shape how a generation pictures the Revolution.

Reviewing Jefferson the Politician

The Jefferson tussles continue with Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain, assessing Jon Meacham’s political biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power in The New Republic:

Meacham has read the scholarly literature on Jefferson—some of it critical—but doesn’t let enough of this debate intrude on the storytelling, which nearly always puts Jefferson in the best possible light. . . .

In his notes, Meacham concedes that “a vapor of duplicity,” as Charles Francis Adams wrote, beclouds this founder. But Meacham hastens to reassure us that Jefferson would never tell a lie. If his language seemed to deceive, the deception must be in the ear of the listener: “He hated arguing face-to-face, preferring to smooth out the rough edges of conversation …” Thus, Jefferson gets a pass for lying to [George] Washington when he sought to deceive the president about his deep involvement in the propaganda wars raging in the newspaper: “Jefferson had been dishonest …preferring to mislead Washington rather than force a confrontation.” This was power politics at its dirtiest—and most fascinating—yet Meacham gives it only cursory attention, perhaps because, as he admits, Jefferson’s financial ties to the propaganda hounds reeked of “the smell of the stables.”

Abigail Adams fell out with Jefferson not just over the 1800 election but over his bald-faced denials that he had anything to do with press attacks on her husband. On 1 July 1804 Abigail wrote to the President of the U.S. of A.:

And now Sir I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former Friendship, and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in. . . .

Until I read [James Thomson] Callenders seventh Letter containing your compliments to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe, that such measures could have been resorted to: to stab the fair fame and upright intentions of one, who to use your own Language “was acting from an honest conviction in his own mind that he was right.” [In other words, her husband.] This Sir I considerd as a personal injury. This was the Sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot, which could not be untied by all the efforts of party Spirit, by rivalship by Jealousy or any other malignant fiend.

Jefferson, of course, denied that he had been supporting Callender when that printer attacked the Adams administration. Abigail Adams didn’t believe him, and rightly so.

As author of a study of Jefferson’s slaveholding, Wiencek naturally considers what Meacham has to say on that topic:

The shadow of the Peculiar Institution looms over this book and, I suspect, is the main reason why Meacham so persistently emphasizes Jefferson’s political “realism” and his refusal to move farther and faster than the law or the public mood allowed. Meacham has no problem with bold presidential moves such as the Louisiana Purchase, which as Meacham admits, was illegal (the Constitution did not provide for its acquisition) and Jefferson’s naval action against the Barbary pirates, which he pursued without Congressional approval (he secured it retroactively). But slavery is always a special case. Slavery was just one of “the complexities of life.” Sally Hemings was not enslaved by Jefferson but by “geography and culture.” When the political issue is slavery, the man who elsewhere seizes control and imposes his will, immediately gives up: “Wounded by the defeats of his progressive efforts on slavery, Jefferson was finally to retreat to a more conventional position.” Meacham does not let Jefferson entirely off the hook, but his rebuke is gentle.

Meacham uses the phrase “geography and culture” when writing of young Sally Hemings in Paris, saying that having previously enslaved her (i.e., she was born to an enslaved mother in British-speaking North America), those circumstances now offered a risky opportunity for freedom. On the same page of the book, Meacham writes that Jefferson had this “beautiful woman at his command” because of “an evil system,” and “he was not a man to deny himself what he wanted.” So it’s not as if Meacham erases Jefferson and his desires from the picture.

In fact, Meacham, unlike most Jefferson biographers before 1998, cites Madison Hemings’s account as the most reliable source on his mother Sally’s life. Seeing a complimentary biographer do that reveals how much the ground has shifted on the consensus picture of Jefferson.

Nevertheless, Wiencek makes an important point. If Meacham’s Jefferson “was not a man to deny himself what he wanted” yet took very few steps toward ending slavery at Monticello, he can’t have wanted emancipation as much as he said he did. At the very least, he wanted other things more.

Pilots of the Revolution

Founders’ Chic is apparently washing up on American television, just a few years after H.B.O.’s John Adams miniseries garnered acclaim. Late last year, Deadline.com reported on two networks starting work on different series set in eighteenth-century America.

N.B.C. is developing George Washington, a drama that David Seidler will adapt from Ron Chernow’s biography of the first President. Barry Levinson is slated to direct the pilot if the project gets that far. That’s two Oscar winners working with Carnival Films & Television, the company behind Downton Abbey. The article states:

George Washington is described as an intimate look at the enigmatic leader who became the father of a nation on one side of the Atlantic and a terrorist on the other, a man to be eliminated at all costs by the British Crown. As episodes move back and forth through the war hero and President’s life and tell the little-known and unlikely story of his survival and triumph, his true character is revealed for the first time. And he is not the man who chopped down the cherry tree.

“There’s George Washington the national icon, gazing out from the dollar bill with his mouthful of supposedly wooden teeth, and then there’s the George Washington who had an adulterous affair with his best friend’s wife,” Seidler said. “The George Washington obsessed with social status, finely-tailored clothes, his image. Not an icon, a very human human-being, who learned how to lead. That’s the man I want to understand.”

That “adulterous affair” is presumably young Washington’s relationship with Sally Fairfax. Historians and biographers debate how far they actually went, but he certainly flirted in letters to her. Chernow actually concluded that Fairfax “rebuffed” Washington’s declaration of love, and that his brief “infatuation” faded quickly. So has Seidler decided that making television drama, or at least promoting it, requires declaring that there definitely was “an adulterous affair”?

Over at A.M.C., the network has expressed interest in a comedy called We Hate Paul Revere. It centers on “two brothers living in Colonial Boston who are not fans of local industrialist and activist Paul Revere.” I don’t think it’s fair to call Revere an “industrialist” until after “Colonial Boston” had given way to Federal Boston, so I have questions about the historical accuracy of this one, too. There’s definitely fodder for comedy in pre-Revolutionary Boston—social friction can always be funny. But getting the history right might give the result even less mass appeal than The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.

Of course, I’m not holding my breath for either of these shows to appear in my cable box. Neither yet appears to be at the pilot stage, much less scheduled to air. Many more movies and television shows go into “development” than come out on screens. Back in 1995, the Los Angeles Times and Variety were reporting that Ben Stiller was about to direct himself and Danny DeVito in Spies and Innkeepers, “a comedy set in the American Revolution” written by Jeff Kahn. That never happened, though Universal still owns the property.

(Picture above from an April 1984 issue of TV Guide showing Mike Wallace interviewing Barry Bostwick as George Washington. Remember that miniseries? Jaclyn Smith played Sally Fairfax, and who wouldn’t be infatuated with her?)

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.