Washington and “The Peaceful Transfer of Power”

Prof. Larry Cebula of Northwest History alerted me to this detail of Monday’s inaugural speeches. In his brief remarks, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said:

Last year, at Mount Vernon, a tour guide told me that our first president, George Washington, once posed this question, “What is most important,” Washington asked, “of this grand experiment, the United States?” And then Washington answered his own question in this way: “Not the election of the first president, but the election of its second president. The peaceful transfer of power is what will separate our country from every other country in the world.”

That quotation appears on the Mount Vernon website, but on the page about “Spurious Quotations” wrongly attributed to the first President.

That page begins:

The following represents a list of spurious quotations attributed to George Washington that have been sent for verification or questioning to the Mount Vernon library in recent years. This list will continue to grow as research staff at Mount Vernon become aware of other misattributed or false statements that have been attributed to Washington.

Evidently not all the Mount Vernon staff are equally aware.

Google Books doesn’t locate the words that Alexander read in any book, suggesting that the coinage is very recent. In fact, I don’t see web uses before this week.

We should recall that Washington had witnessed a “peaceful transfer of power” in many governments during his lifetime: when a monarch died and his heir took over, when the ministry in London shifted hands, when the independent American states elected new governors and legislatures during the Confederation, and when the new Constitution brought him to power nationally. He actually didn’t survive to see the shift of power from one party (his and John Adams’s Federalists) to another (Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans), which was much more divisive.

Since Washington’s time, of course, many nations have enjoyed peaceful transfers of power. We Americans like to think of ourselves as exceptional, but that quality doesn’t separate the U.S. of A. from “every other country,” then or now.

Reviewing Henry and the Cannons

I quoted the October 1775 inventory of Continental artillery ordnance yesterday because it bears on my review in the latest issue of The Horn Book.

I looked at Henry and the Cannons by Don Brown, officially published today. This is a picture-book retelling of Henry Knox’s trek to Lake Champlain to collect cannon and mortars for the Continental Army around Boston.

As an artist Brown has a somewhat “cartoony” style that’s lively and often funny, but he doesn’t turn his illustrations into cartoons. (With one exception: his picture of the firing from Dorchester Heights leaves out the stretch of water between there and Boston, which is kind of important.) He depicts Knox’s draft animals all as oxen; most were horses, but these oxen have such long-suffering expressions that I thought they were cute.

Brown’s text errs in following previous retellings that said Gen. George Washington’s army had no cannon until Knox got involved. That was the main flaw I saw in the book, which is otherwise grounded in period sources (particularly Knox’s diary) and well written for its target age group.

Back in 2008, Brown addressed the start of the siege of Boston with Let It Begin Here!: April 19, 1775: The Day the American Revolution Began, which I also reviewed for The Horn Book. It has a more complex history to tell, so Brown used more text and smaller pictures. I saw a few glitches in that book, but overall I thought it was quite solid.

How Many Cannon Did Washington Have in 1775?

On 20 Oct 1775, Col. Richard Gridley of the Continental artillery regiment presented his commander-in-chief, George Washington, with an “Inventory of Ordnance and Stores necessary for the present Army, supposing it to consist of twenty thousand Men.”

At the bottom of that sheet was a section headed “Ordnance, Shot, and Shells, now in Camp.” That listed:

Cannon:
24 pounders, 5; shot, 449.
18 pounders, 6; shot, 260.
12 pounders, 2; shot, 149.
9 pounders, 3; shot, 1,175.
8 pounder, 1.
6 pounders, 2.
5 1/4 pounders, 4; shot, 1,134.
4 pounders, 7; shot, 1,475.
3 pounders, 9; shot, 3,079.
2 1/2 pounders, 2; shot, 1,009.

Total number of cannon, 41.
Total number of shot, 8,730.
Carriages, ladles, rammers and sponges, &c., complete.

Mortars:
10 inch mortars, 3; shells, 374.
8 inch mortars 2; 8 inch howitzers, 3; shells, 452.
7 inch brass mortars, 2; shells, 641.

Total number of mortars, 10.
Total number of shells, 1,467.
With beds, carriages, and implements, complet.

That was more than a month before Capt. John Manley captured the British ordnance ship Nancy with brass cannon and mortars aboard, and three months before Col. Henry Knox, Gridley’s successor, returned from Lake Champlain with more heavy cannon.

I quote this inventory to refute the common idea that Washington’s army had no artillery until Knox came back. It had dozens of cannon, including some that shot balls as large as any from Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga. Of course, like any good general, Washington wanted more.

The Non-Fatal Battle of Golden Hill

Yesterday was the anniversary of what New York historians later called “The Battle of Golden Hill.” That’s a mighty name for what was really the biggest of a series of brawls between British soldiers stationed in the city and local men over the first Liberty Pole.

Some accounts of the fighting 19 Jan 1770 say that it produced “the first blood of the Revolutionary War.” Others even say it included the first death. New York historians were pleased to find an event that predated the killing of Christopher Seider and the Boston Massacre (which also got a mighty name).

There was surely some bloodletting in the fight, but there had been blood shed earlier as well. The first violent death of the conflict might have been the killing of Lt. Henry Panton at sea in April 1769, or we might interpret that as part of sailors’ ongoing resistance to Royal Navy impressment, with no direct link to the Revolutionary argument.

As for fatalities, there were indeed early reports that a citizen was killed in the fighting on 19 Jan 1770. For example, a letter dated 22 January and published in the St. James Chronicle stated, “One sailor got run through the body who has since died, &c.”

However, no New York newspaper ever published the name of that dead man, and the local Whigs would surely have made a public martyr of him. We know from the Boston Massacre that activists publicized the names of all the dead and then some. Paul Revere’s print of the shooting says Christopher Monk and John Clark had been wounded “mortally,” but both apprentices lived for years. I think that sailor fell into the same category, dead enough to complain about but not really dead.

A special supplement to the New-York Journal on 1 Mar 1770 printed a long, detailed account of the fighting dated 31 January. Though signed “An Impartial Observer,” the writer clearly leaned toward the local side of the conflict. And that account stated there were no fatalities, though only by luck. Here’s a sample of that blow-by-blow between soldiers wielding bayonets, swords, and clubs and locals wielding, well, swords and clubs:

Those few that had the sticks maintained their ground in the narrow passage in which they stood, and defended their defenceless fellow citizens, for some time, against the furious and unmanly attacks of armed soldiers, until one of them missing his aim, in a stroke made at one of the assailants, lost his stick, which obliged the former to retreat, to look for some instrument of defence; the soldiers pursued him down to the main street; one of them made a stroke, with a cutlass at Mr. Francis Field, one of the people called Quakers, standing in an inoffensive posture in Mr. Field’s door, at the corner; and cut him on the right cheek, and if the corner had not broke the stroke, it would have probably killed him.

This party that came down to the main street cut a tea-water man driving his cart, and a fisherman’s finger; in short they madly attacked every person that they could reach: And their companions on Golden-Hill were more inhuman; for, besides cuting a sailor’s head and finger, that was defended himself against them, they stabbed another with a bayonet, going about his business, so badly, that his life was thought in danger.

Not satiated with all this cruelty, two of them followed a boy going for sugar, into Mr. Elsworth’s house, one of them cut him on the head with a cutlass, and the other made a lung[e] with a bayonet at the woman in the entry, that answered the child. Capt. Richardson was violently attacked by two of the soldiers, with swords, and expected to have been cut to pieces; but was so fortunate as to defend himself with a stick for a considerable time, ’till a halbert was put into his hands, with which he could have killed several of them; but he made no other use of it, than to defend himself, and his naked fellow-citizens.—

Mr. John Targe, hearing from his house, the cry of murder, went out unarmed, to see the occasion of it, and when he came in view of the soldiers, three of them pursued him to his house, with their arms drawn, from whence he took a halbert, with which he defended himself against their attacks (with sticks of wood, which they took from a heap that lay in the street, and threw at his legs, as they could not reach his body with their arms) and obliged them to retire to their companions; in which time their lives were in his power, had he been disposed to have taken them.

And so on. I suspect the man whose “life was thought in danger” was the sailor earlier rumored to have died.

Most modern accounts agree with me and say the “Battle of Golden Hill” produced no deaths, but every so often a chronicler repeats the claim that it was the first fatal confrontation of the Revolution.

(The image above is Charles Lefferts’s painting of “The Battle of Golden Hill,” completed about 1920 and now at the New-York Historical Society.)

Understanding the Twenty-Seventh Amendment

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has a curious history. It was part of the earliest discussion in the 1780s of what should be fixed in that document, but it wasn’t actually enacted until 1992. And now some of our current Congress, in the same week that body had one of its televised readings of (most of) the Constitution, is moving to violate the amendment.

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment is quite simple:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

In other words, Congressmen couldn’t vote to change their own pay; they could change pay only for the people whom voters approved in the next election. James Madison drafted those words in 1789, the second of nineteen amendments he proposed and the second of twelve that the whole Congress approved and sent to the states for ratification.

(Incidentally, that shows the fallacy of arguing that Madison and his colleagues saw the First Amendment or Second Amendment as so important that they put them at the top of the list. They listed the amendments to match the order of the constitutional articles they amended. New rules about administering Congress came first, then limits on what laws that legislature could pass, and so on.)

Within a few months, enough states had ratified ten of the first Congress’s twelve amendments that they became part of the Constitution. (Some states skipped the vote after it seemed unnecessary.) But only seven states ratified the Twenty-Seventh, and nobody even seems to have noticed Kentucky’s vote. Ohio approved the amendment in 1873, Wyoming in 1978, and then a concerted push in the 1980s amassed the required supermajority of states.

By that time members of Congress were already cannily delaying pay increases until after the next election or linking them to the cost of living, thus making the Twenty-Seventh Amendment practically moot.

However, a recent proposal from the U.S. House runs counter to the amendment’s language. Madison, a smart lawyer with a broad knowledge of political practices, composed the text to forbid any law “varying the compensation” for members of Congress. He didn’t restrict that prohibition only to laws raising pay or benefits, or even lowering them for that matter. Such language was easily available from the article about the President’s pay, which “shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected.”

Madison knew that colonial legislatures, including the Massachusetts General Court in the 1760s, delayed paying mandated salaries to royal appointees as a form of leverage over those officials. Parliament enacted the Townshend duties in part to collect revenue that the imperial government could use to pay those officials, thus insulating them from public pressure. We should therefore interpret Madison’s general phrase “varying the compensation” to cover timing as well as amount.

Leaders of the U.S. House are now pushing a proposal to hold back pay from members of Congress (i.e., the U.S. Senate) until their body passes a budget—a provision they call “No Budget, No Pay.” But the Twenty-Seventh Amendment renders such a law unconstitutional.

Furthermore, in their reading of the Constitution, Representatives might have noticed that it does not require Congress to pass a budget. The word “budget” never appears in the document. The Constitution does give Congress the “Power To lay and collect Taxes,” “To borrow money on the credit of the United States,” and “To coin Money, [and] regulate the Value thereof.” It requires that “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” But our modern annual budgeting process dates to 1921.

The “No Budget, No Pay” proposal thus elevates the annual budget, which isn’t part of the Constitution, while setting aside the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, which is.

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.