Peirce Family Anecdotes about Henry Knox

In 1849 Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review published an obituary of a descendant of Joseph and Ann Peirce, apparently based on information from the family or even written by a member of the family. That article turns out to contain interesting information about Henry Knox that I’d never seen before and that doesn’t appear in any Knox biography I know of. Whether it’s reliable information is another question.

Joseph Peirce founded Boston’s militia grenadier company in 1772 with Henry Knox as his lieutenant. The two men kept up a correspondence after the war when both invested heavily in Maine land. And some traditions about Knox came down in the Peirce family and made their way into that magazine:

Mr. Joseph Peirce, although a merchant of Boston, had, prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, organized a company of grenadiers, which he continued to command with Henry Knox, afterward Gen. Knox, as lieutenant, down to the day on which the tea was cast into Boston harbor. The grenadier corps was one of the finest in the colonies, and being drawn up in State, then King-street, to receive the new Governor [Thomas] Gage, on his arrival from England, elicited from that officer the remark that “he did not know his Majesty had any troops in America”—a compliment to the soldierly appearance of the corps long cherished by its officers even when patriotism had led them to oppose the king’s troops. Capt. Peirce was in charge of the tea ships as guard on the night previous to the appearance of those world-renowned “Indians,” of whom his brother John was one. That event brought about the dissolution of the corps; but the friendship then formed between Gen. Knox and Mr. Peirce existed uninterruptedly to the death of the former, in 1806.

There are two interesting anecdotes in that passage, and unfortunately they’re contradictory. If the grenadier company had dissolved soon after the Tea Party in December 1773, it could not have greeted Gen. Gage when he arrived in Boston in May 1774. Furthermore, Gage was commander-in-chief of the British army in North America and knew exactly how many troops his Majesty had there.

Gage’s alleged praise for the grenadiers echoes a story that evidently circulated in Maine about a British officer seeing the grenadiers and saying, “that “a country that produced such boy soldiers, cannot long be held in subjection.” I doubt either version of the story is wholly reliable, but they might have had a common source in a real event.

I haven’t seen any contemporaneous mention of the grenadier company dissolving shortly after the Tea Party. Rather, Boston’s specialized militia companies appear to have broken up in late 1774 as the political divide widened: the Company of Cadets in August after Gage dismissed their commander, John Hancock, and the artillery train in mid-September after its cannon vanished. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, not officially part of the militia, went into abeyance late in the year. It would make sense for the grenadiers to do so as well.

The obituary went on to provide this anecdote about Henry and Lucy Knox’s departure from Boston:

When Lieut. Knox, impelled by his glowing patriotism, sought to join the army of Washington, then at Cambridge, preparatory to the fight at Bunker’s Hill, he had some difficulty in escaping from Boston, but he was enabled to do so through a permit obtained by Mr. Peirce for a chaise to pass the lines on Boston Neck. As he took leave of the future general, the latter remarked, “My sword-blade is thrust through the cushions on which we sit, and Lucy (his wife) has the hilt in her pocket.”

Again, whoever wrote this story had difficulty with chronology. The Knoxes appear to have been out of Boston by 14 May 1775. Gen. George Washington didn’t arrive in Cambridge until July.

Another version of the Peirce lore appeared in print the year before, in a review of J. T. Headley’s Washington and His Generals in the United States Democratic Review. The reviewer identified himself (or herself) as someone who had Joseph Peirce as a “maternal grandfather,” and told readers, “we have often listened with delight to the anecdotes of Knox, told by his octogenarian commander.” About the Knoxes’ departure:

[Headley’s] memoir remarks that Knox had some difficulty in escaping from Boston when the war broke out, and that his wife accompanied him, concealing his sword beneath her dress. This is not strictly correct. The lines as they were called, were on “the Neck,” and Knox’s former commander in the grenadiers having been to the lines to procure the passage of a chaise containing a nurse and child that had been in the country for its health, on his return, met Knox riding out of town. The future General remarked, “I have at last got clear, I think. My sword blade is thrust through the cushions on which we sat, and Lucy has the hilt in her pocket.”

In this version, Peirce didn’t secure the pass that the Knoxes used; he simply met Henry after he’d exited the gates. But the quotation is the same.

The Peirce story overlaps with one recorded by Knox’s first biographer, Francis S. Drake, in 1873: that Lucy smuggled out Henry’s sword “quilted into the lining of her cloak.” Hiding it in the cushions seems more effective. But really, swords weren’t what the provincial army needed.

Henry Knox and the Boston Tea Party

An email from a Boston 1775 reader after yesterday’s posting made me look into Henry Knox’s actions during the tea crisis of 1773. That political event occurred between when Knox badly injured his hand in a shooting accident and when he paid his doctors, both attached to the royal military. [Unlike two of his fingers, which weren’t attached to anything anymore.]

When the tea meeting called for volunteers to patrol the docks and ensure that no tea was unloaded, among the first to sign up was “Joseph Peirce, Jr.” You can see the notes of that meeting here, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

That was Joseph Peirce (1745-1828, shown here about 1800), commander of the Boston militia regiment’s grenadier company. In 1771 Peirce married Ann Dawes, daughter of Thomas Dawes, a politically active housewright and at one point commander of the entire regiment.

According to family tradition set down in The Pickering Genealogy (1897), Peirce was “never a robust man,” and “his hair was as white at twenty as it was at eighty.” Would a frail man really be the best candidate to lead a company of grenadiers? Perhaps that part of the tradition was tinged by memories of Peirce late in life; perhaps the family played it up to excuse him not fighting in the Revolutionary War.

Knox had helped Peirce launch that grenadier company in 1772 and became its second-in-command with the rank of lieutenant. Unlike Peirce, however, Knox doesn’t appear on any of the surviving lists of volunteers to patrol the docks. The first biography of him, published in 1873, states that the company’s “members, Knox included, had volunteered as a guard over the tea ships.” That book cites no source for that information, but its author had access to early-1800s reminiscences from people who had known or served with Knox.

The Pickering Genealogy further says of Peirce:

He is said to have been one of those in charge of the tea ship, as guard, on the night before the appearance of the “Indians,” of whom his brother John was one.

Actually, I can’t find any list of Tea Party participants that includes John Peirce (or Pierce). I’ve found a source for that statement from 1849, but it comes with its own problems; I’ll discuss that tomorrow.

Recollections from Ebenezer Stevens and his family offer some confirmation that by December 1773 the dock patrols were being recruited from militia companies. Volunteers from the artillery company in which Stevens served happened to be on patrol when the tea was destroyed.

So I think it’s plausible that Peirce, Knox, and others from the grenadier company participated in patrolling the docks, perhaps taking the previous night’s shift. But the only person I can reliably document as volunteering for that duty is Peirce.

TOMORROW: The end of the grenadier company?

Henry Knox’s Thank-You Letter

On 10 Feb 1774, a young Boston bookseller wrote this florid thank-you letter:

Sir:

The mariner, when the danger is past, looks back with pleasure and surprize on the quicksands and rocks he has escaped, and if perchance it was owing to the skillfulness of the pilot or great activity of some brother seaman on board, the first ebullitions of his gratitude are violent but afterwards settle to a firm respect and esteem for the means of his existence. So, Sir, gratitude obliges me to tender you my most sincere thanks for the attention and care you took of me in a late unlucky accident.

The readiness with which you attended, your skill to observe and humanity in executing, are written upon my heart in indelible characters. Believe me, Sir, while memory faithfully performs her office the name of Doct. White will be retained with the most pleasing sensations. Accept then, Sir, the annex’d as the smallest token of respect from him who is with the greatest pleasure your much obliged and most obd’t H’ble Servant,

Henry Knox

Knox sent this letter with three guineas (a coin used mostly by gentlemen) “To Doctor White of the King’s Hospital, Boston.” He sent a similar letter with five guineas “To Doctor Peterson of the ship ‘Captain’ and Surgeon to his Excellency Admiral [John] Montague, Boston.”

It appears that the “late unhappy accident” Knox alluded to was when he blew off some fingers on his left hand while hunting birds on a Boston harbor island on 24 July 1773, according to his earliest biographer. Gen. Henry Burbeck recalled the event this way: “the fusee accidentally bursting in his hand occasioned the loss I think of two or three of his fingers and otherwise mutilating his hand.” (This is of course a widely published example of a gun accident in the founding era.)

It’s notable that the two doctors who attended Knox were attached to the British military. The “King’s Hospital” had been set up to treat the soldiers at Castle William, and Peterson arrived with the navy. Those men may simply have been the nearest physicians, but Knox sought care from British military surgeons instead of the town’s notable Whig doctors. As I’ve written before, I think contemporaneous evidence shows Knox trying to find middle ground in pre-war politics rather than, as later biographers said, being a well-known Whig.

Update #3: Mysteries of the Elizabeth Bull Wedding Gown

Last November I attended an event at the Bostonian Society about one of its prize artifacts, the Elizabeth Bull wedding dress, which was about to be sent off for study and conservation. I’m no expert in fashion, either eighteenth-century or twenty-first-century, but I know some folks who are, and I’m interested in how stories get passed down.

The Smithsonian Institution is sometimes called the nation’s attic, and the Bostonian Society could be considered Boston’s attic. But the Bostonian Society wasn’t founded until 1881, when citizens decided to restore the Old State House and turn it into a museum. That means the museum’s collections contain lots of historic things, but not so significant that they weren’t already owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, Harvard University, Museum of Fine Arts, or other older institutions. It also means that the stories behind many of its colonial artifacts are based in family lore passed down for over a century and thus liable to evolution.

The Elizabeth Bull wedding dress is one of those treasures. As I understand the situation, its documentation was created in 1910 when descendants of Elizabeth (Bull) Price donated the garment to the society. They reported their understanding that:

• Elizabeth Bull began to embroider the silk gown with flowers while she was a schoolgirl in 1731.
• She wore the dress at her wedding to the Rev. Roger Price in 1735.
• Her daughter wore it to George III’s coronation in 1760.

However, as the museum’s photograph of an anonymous model wearing the dress shows, the dress doesn’t have an eighteenth-century silhouette. The skirt was taken in above the knees, in some places by cutting and seaming through the original embroidery. The resulting shape is most appropriate for the 1820s or ’30s. Conservator Katherine Tarleton reported that these alterations were “really finely stitched,” not slapdash for a single occasion as she’s seen in other altered garments. Later the gown’s bodice was remade with nineteenth-century fabric, but this time less skillfully, and that section hasn’t held up well.

The Bull gown was on display in the Old State House for most of the first half of the twentieth century, according to newspaper reports. (The museum’s internal records don’t preserve such detail.) Such long display, perhaps with exposure to some sunlight or drips, has left the backs of the sleeves “shattered” and the skirt stained. These days, conservators told us, the professional rule of thumb is to display a costume for four months and then to keep it in storage for four years.

In addition to the pieces of the gown shown in the photo, there are some matching bits. One is an eighteenth-century underskirt that’s in better shape than the overskirt, not having been exposed to light or spills. It also has a wider circumference, suggesting the dimensions of the original gown. There are also pieces of an old bodice, perhaps the original top of the gown or perhaps a part that was never completed and attached.

Those bodice pieces are marked with drawings of flowers for someone to embroider. So did Elizabeth Bull wear this gown at her wedding even though it obviously wasn’t finished? Was there originally a plain bodice that’s been discarded? Or were the unsewn flowers drawn on later because someone wanted more embellishment, but no one ever finished embroidering them?

Elizabeth and Roger Price moved to England in the mid-1700s. Their daughter reportedly attended a coronation in this gown—still apparently unfinished. She and her brother moved back to Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War, when celebrating George III was no longer a popular activity. Might the family memory of the gown have then morphed from a coronation gown to the gown their ancestor wore at her Boston wedding? Did the daughter, who lived until 1826, have the gown altered, or was that a relative’s decision?

I doubt we’ll ever know the full story of this garment, but the conservation will preserve the mystery for another generation.

New Reading from Williamsburg

The book reviews from the January 2013 issue of the William & Mary Quarterly are now online, readable in P.D.F. form through this webpage. Those reviews include Edward G. Gray’s roundup of three recent books on Loyalism headlined “Liberty’s Losers” because, as Gray points out, British society didn’t actually suffer that much damage from the war:

Less than a decade after the conclusive battle at Yorktown, ordinary Britons could point to few lingering consequences of the war. Americans who had traveled to London for culture and knowledge before the war were coming again. Prewar trading patterns had been more or less restored. Dynastic tensions with France and Spain remained largely unchanged; they neither improved nor worsened, although in 1790 they did nearly erupt into a war over the remote Nootka Sound. In Ireland little changed as a result of the war, despite the seemingly bold 1782 repeal of Poyning’s Law, granting the Irish Parliament a measure of legislative independence. Whatever fears Britons had about the spread of American-style revolution on their side of the Atlantic—and those fears appear to have been minimal—quickly dissipated. Before the appearance of the second part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in 1792, republicanism showed no real sign of departing from its moderate Whig roots. Similarly, aside from a very brief Whig ascendency in 1782 and 1783, the overall cast of British politics changed very little as a result of the war. The opposition remained more or less as it had been before the war, and the government of William Pitt the Younger essentially sustained the constitutional order that had prevailed before and during the war.

In contrast, the Loyalists who left the area that became the new U.S. of A.—the largest number of war refugees created by any of the West’s late-eighteenth-century wars—had to rebuild their lives in new homes. But that didn’t mean they shared the same experience, outlook, or values. Gray writes of the “frustratingly elusive quality of loyalism,” and concludes that much of the best material in the books he reviews focuses on particular communities.

Also online now are articles from the latest issue of the Colonial Williamsburg Journal, including items on George Washington’s wealth, George Wythe’s murder, and archeology at Jamestown.

Benjamin Carp’s essay “Separated by a Common History” considers how American authors came to emphasize differences between the North and South that really didn’t play a big role in the colonial and Revolutionary periods. Ben gets off this line:

Colonial American leaders primarily looked in four directions: eastward for goods, westward for land, upward for God, and down their noses at everyone else.

I’m also represented in this issue of the Journal. On page 9, the Correction says: “Two readers wrote that the magazine misspelled the first name of the father of gerrymandering…” I’m one of those two. So proud.

Update #2: Best American Revolution Book of 2012

Last fall I devoted a few postings to Reporting the Revolutionary War, Todd Andrlik’s history of the Revolution through contemporary newspapers. I’m one of the book’s many contributors. Todd recruited me and Prof. Bob Allison, another contributor, for a panel discussion of journalism in the Revolutionary period archived at C-SPAN.

All my hyping must have paid off since The New York Revolutionary War Round Table just gave the book its annual prize for the best book on the American Revolution published in the previous year.

In announcing the honor the organization said: “Seldom, if ever, have we welcomed a book with more power to carry us back to the days of 1776 with such compelling authenticity.” That’s because all the book’s essays on significant events of the Revolution are accompanied by images from the newspapers that reported those events.

Barnes & Noble got behind the book early by commissioning a special edition with some reproductions of Revolutionary newspaper pages. That’s still on sale through the chain for a very special price. You don’t have to take my word about this book’s quality—you can listen to the New York Revolutionary War Round Table.

Update #1: Remembering Al Young

Last fall I sadly noted the death of Alfred F. Young, a historian of Revolutionary America.

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, publisher of the William & Mary Quarterly, has assembled a collection of tributes to Al.

Purely through the magic of alphabetical order, my remarks come right after the biographical introduction from Gary B. Nash. I recommend skipping over my words (which already appeared here) and sampling the reminiscences of the many students, colleagues, and collaborators who follow.

In particular, Terry J. Fife recalled working with Al as a graduate student and then co-curator of a major exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society:

Al appreciated the power of visual thinking and learning long before computers and PowerPoint presentations were commonplace in classrooms. He introduced thousands of students to the power of seeing history, encouraging them to view historical images and artifacts as primary sources and evidence, not simply illustrations. For those who were history majors and those lucky enough to have been graduate students at NIU during his tenure, Al invested his energies in developing and teaching those courses where he guided students about the ways, means, and methods of doing history.

Al brought his own high standards and his ethos of doing history to the many professional relationships he nurtured. Consider your subjects and your sources carefully, he would counsel. Look in creative places and in history’s many corners and crevices for your evidence and then interrogate the hell out of it. Tease out your interpretation of the past while you grapple with the nuances and contradictions—all the “delicious details”—Al so appreciated. “Getting it right” was a phrase Al used often as he considered his own work and the work of others. And those of us who learned to be historians under his tutelage will forever and always consider the importance of thinking about deference in historical context.

Terry also spoke at Al’s memorial service about being a grad student under Al. She had a child during that time, and for some employers an infant was still cause for worry rather than celebration. Al was most concerned—back in the 1980s—with finding a place where Terry could nurse her baby.

Terry Fife is now principal at History Works, a private historical-research consultancy. The Chicago Historical Society exhibit produced the book We the People, which is out of print but well worth seeking out in libraries or used-book dealers.

“He was an awful sight as I ever saw.”

Here are some more reports of gun accidents from the Revolutionary War. I found these through the advanced research method of searching Google Books for the words “accidental,” “shot,” and “Revolutionary.” I’m sure there are more incidents to be found.

From the diary of Capt. Thomas Rodney, spending 4 Jan 1777 in Pluckemin, New Jersey:

Here Sergeant McKnatt was accidentally shot through the arm by one of our own people, who fired off his musket to light a fire and as there was not one surgeon in the whole army I was forced to dress it myself and the next day got one of the prisoners to do it.

Asa Fitch wrote home to his father from Ticonderoga on 23 June 1777:

There was one man shot himself accidentally as he stood talking with his brother, and had the gun before him leaning his chin on it, she accidentally went off, and the ball, together with the whole charge of powder went into his head and tore it all to bits. He was an awful sight as I ever saw.

Here’s the 23 Aug 1779 entry from the journals of Lt. Col. Henry Dearborn:

a Soldier very accidentally discharg’d a musket charged with a ball & several buckshot, 3 of which unfortunately struck Capt. Kimbal of Colo. Cilleys Regt. Who was standing at some distance in a tent with several other officers, in such a manner that he expired within 10 or 15 minutes. . . . one of the shot wounded a soldier in the leg who was setting at some distance from the tent Capt. Kimball was in.

Away from the front, there’s the 9 Jan 1779 incident involving Benjamin Andrews, Benjamin Hichborn, and a pair of pistols, told back here.

Out on the early American frontier, more men used guns for their subsistence, but that didn’t mean they avoided firearms accidents. One of the earliest memories of Davy Crockett (1786-1836) was the aftermath of his uncle Joseph Hawkins shooting a neighbor while hunting. George Hunter wounded himself in the hand and face during an expedition for President Thomas Jefferson on 22 Nov 1804. Meriwether Lewis was shot while hunting during a similar expedition on 11 Aug 1806, as narrated here. Three years later, of course, Lewis apparently shot himself to death.

Gun Accidents in the Founding Era

According to Chris Rodda at Free Thought Blogs, in a recent sit-down with television entertainer Glenn Beck, the debunked author David Barton stated:

I have searched and in the founding era I think I’ve only ever found two gun accidents and everybody was hauling guns back then. You took your guns to church, you were required by state law in some states to take your guns to church. We didn’t have accidents because everyone was familiar with how to use them.

It’s not clear what “law in some states” about taking guns to church Barton had in mind. Clayton Cramer’s Armed America notes laws in colonial South Carolina in 1724 and 1739 requiring white men to bring their weapons to church because of fear of slave rebellions, but those were exceptions. If it had already been usual for “everybody” to go to church armed, the colony wouldn’t have needed new laws to require the practice.

It is clear that Barton’s search for “gun accidents” in the “founding era” was inadequate and produced findings that match his political preferences, not the historical record.

The Boston News-Letter carried this report on 15 Sept 1774:

On Monday last, another very melancholy Accident happened at the same Place [Roxbury].—Mr. Henry Wilson, Baker, in the 32d Year of his Age, having just finished making Bread, spoke to a small Lad, who was standing by him, in Mr. Howe’s Bake house, and told him to take a Gun, and he would learn him the Exercise; the Lad accordingly took a Gun, not knowing it was loaded, and placed it upon his Shoulder,—Mr. Wilson then gave the Words of Command, when he came to the Word Fire,—the Lad instantly pulled the Trigger, and to his inexpressible Grief, shot Mr. Wilson (through the Head) dead on the Spot. The Jury of Inquest returned their Verdict, accidental Death.

That was just when the Massachusetts populace was strengthening its military organization. Was the trained American army free from firearms accidents? Not according to the the diary of Pvt. Samuel Bixby of Sutton:

21st [July]. Friday. A man of Col. Reed’s Regt. was accidentally shot. . . .

7th [Sept]. Thurs:—A Lieut. in Col. Cotting’s Regt. was accidentally shot in the side.

In between those events came this one on 16 August, from the diary of Pvt. Caleb Haskell of Newburyport:

To-day the sentries fired at each other all day; an express came from Cape Ann for men; a number of riflemen marched off; one of the riflemen was shot through the back by accident, but not mortally wounded.

On 16 September, a year and a day after the Boston New-Letter reported the death of baker Henry Wilson, Pvt. Aaron Wright, a Pennsylvania rifleman at the siege of Boston, wrote:

One of the musketmen killed another by accident.

So that’s five “gun accidents” in a little over a year, at least two fatal, all in eastern Massachusetts. And all reported in sources published several decades ago.

TOMORROW: And later in the war?

More Upcoming History Seminars

Last week I noted an upcoming session in the Boston Early American History Seminar. The Massachusetts Historical Society sponsors other seminar series that sometimes touch on the period and issues of the American Revolution.

On Thursday, 7 February, at 5:30 P.M. in the series on the History of Women and Gender Jennifer Morgan of New York University will present “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery.” Linda Heywood of Boston University will comment on the paper, and then the discussion will be open to all attendees.

This conversation will take place at the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge (shown above, courtesy of renovation architects Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates). Morgan’s essay is circulated in advance to subscribers and will be available on paper at the meeting. Afterwards there will be a light buffet supper. To reserve a space, email the M.H.S. seminars office.

The Boston Environmental History Seminar will meet at the M.H.S. on Boylston Street on Tuesday, 12 February, at 5:15 P.M. Ben Cronin of the University of Michigan will share his paper “‘To clear the herring brook’: Fluvial Control, Common Rights, and Commercial Development in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1660-1860.” William F. Hanna III, author of A History of Taunton, Massachusetts, will comment. This paper is described as follows:

By examining towns of Plymouth County, particularly Pembroke and Middleboro, this project shows how political, economic, and at times military power flowed from effective control of the waterways. The shift in what might be called “water regimes” was a crucial location of what Charles Sellers has called the Market Revolution.

Again, the society asks people to email the M.H.S. seminars office to reserve a space so they know how many are coming.

Finally, on Tuesday, 19 February, at 5:15 P.M., the Early American History Seminar has rescheduled a session with Daniel R. Mandell of Truman State University on his paper “Revolutionary Ideologies and Wartime Economic Regulation.” Brendan McConville of Boston University will comment, which should ensure a lively conversation. Again, email the M.H.S. seminars office to reserve a seat at the seminar and supper table.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

Last week I noted Melvin Bernstein’s esay on the change of government in Worcester on 6 Sept 1774. For folks interested in hearing more, check out the video of this TEDxEureka talk by Ray Raphael titled “Revolution: A Success Story.” Ray taught high school before becoming a full-time historian and author, so he’s a very engaging speaker.

If you’re looking for more than nine minutes on one episode, you can go to Open Yale Courses and take in Prof. Joanne Freeman’s “American Revolution”. There are twenty-five lectures, each about fifty minutes long, including:

• “Freeman’s Top Five Tips for Studying the Revolution.”
• “Resistance or Rebellion? (Or, What the Heck is Happening in Boston?)”
• “Citizens and Choices: Experiencing the Revolution in New Haven.”

One of my big regrets is that I never studied early American history in college. There were just too many courses on The Divine Comedy, Russian novels, and probability competing for my attention. Now I can catch up.

School Vacation with the Reveres

February in Massachusetts means February school vacation, which means having to find new unusual reasons to get the kids out of the house. The Paul Revere House is offering family programs in which children (and their accompanying adults) will make and take home samples of typical work done by Paul and Rachel Revere.

“The Revere Family at Work”
Wednesday, 20 February, and Friday, 22 February
10:30 to 12:00 A.M.

Both Paul Revere and his wife Rachel worked hard to keep their large family fed, clothed, and healthy. During this program discover what kinds of chores the Reveres (adults and children) completed in each room in their house. Then try your hand at engraving metal as Revere did in his silversmith shop and make an herbal remedy Rachel may have used to treat her children’s headaches. Participants will take home both an engraved piece of copper and a small cloth bag of dried herbs.

Each presentation is limited to 20 people. The fee is $4.50 for children ages 7-11 and accompanying adults. Price includes admission to the Revere House. Reservations are required and may be made by calling the Revere House at 617-523-2338.

Somewhere Sarah Revere (Paul’s first wife) is wondering why she’s not getting any attention. But we don’t have nearly as much information about her as about Rachel, nor any portraits.

Exploring Mehetabel Coit’s Diary, 6 Feb.

If it’s sounding like there are lots of historical events in greater Boston at the beginning of February, that’s because there are. I guess we like to take advantage of the good weather. Here’s another.

On Wednesday, 6 February, at 6:00 P.M., the New England Historic Genealogical Society will host a talk by Michelle Marchetti Coughlin on her new book, One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit, published by the University of Massachusetts Press:

Mehetabel Coit (1673-1758) is the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, Mehetabel began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently until she was well into her seventies.

A previously overlooked resource, the diary contains entries on a broad range of topics as well as poems, recipes, folk and herbal medical remedies, religious meditations, and financial accounts. An extensive collection of letters by Mehetabel and her female relatives has also survived, shedding further light on her experiences. Mehetabel’s long life covered an eventful period in American history, and this book explores the numerous—and sometimes surprising—ways in which her personal history was linked to broader social and political developments.

The lecture will be followed by a book signing for a total of about ninety minutes. This event is free and open to the public. The N.E.H.G.S. is at 99-101 Newbury Street in Boston.

The website for Coughlin’s book lists a number of other venues where she’s speaking in the upcoming weeks and months.

For people especially interested in women’s experiences and how they related them, I’ll add a pointer to In the Words of Women, a blog based on a recent book of the same name by Louise V. North, Janet M. Wedge, and Landa M. Freeman. Every entry is about a diary, letter, or other writing by a woman during America’s Revolutionary era.

“Rum and Revolution” in Lexington, 8 Feb.

On Friday, 8 February, the Lexington Historical Society will do something a little different for its annual Neil Cronin Lecture by hosting “Rum and Revolution,” an evening of music, history, and rum punch. The performers will be Jeremy Bell and Lawrence Young with the society’s own Colonial Singers.

Bell and Young portray taverngoers Abijah Toddy and Tobias Tripp:

Between musical selections sung and played on period instruments, they bring to life the manners and mannerisms of the age with actual 18th century jokes and more than a few little known truths about how rum and helped to start the Revolution. This fascinating story centers on Paul Revere’s Liberty Bowl and involves Ben Franklin drinking Hellfire Punch! Guests may gain insights into the times by sampling a cup of Old Rum punch for themselves. Attendees will hear the tale of John Hancock’s “Madeira riots” of 1768, find out what the Liberty Song was (and why did the British hated it) and learn about how a tavern song became our national anthem.

The facial hair appears to be a special guest from either the seventeenth or nineteenth century.

“Rum and Revolution” starts at 8:00 P.M. at the Lexington Depot. It’s open to people over 21 years old only, for obvious reasons. Admission is $10. Reserve seats by calling the Lexington History Society at 781-862-1703 during business hours.

The Worcester Revolt and the American Revolution Round Table

The Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution has published Melvin H. Bernstein’s essay “Setting the Record Straight: The Worcester Revolt of September 6, 1774” on its website. A shorter version appeared last month in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

This essay discusses the organized uprising to close the Worcester County courts before their September 1774 session, effectively ending royal government in the region seven months before the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The local populace demanded that men holding royal commissions refuse to act under them as long as Parliament’s Coercive Acts remained in effect.

Bernstein advocates a regional commemoration of the 1774 uprising next year on its 240th anniversary:

Taking note of the odd revolutionary historical vacuum that persists in Worcester, a local initiative was launched in 2012 to organize a commemorative day for September 6, 1774, to be held on that date in 2014. The initiative encompasses the following core group of revolutionary, historical and cultural organizations: Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, Worcester Daughters of the American Revolution, Preservation Worcester, and the Worcester Historical Museum.

Cambridge could likewise commemorate the massive uprising four days earlier, later named the “Powder Alarm.” That came to a head on Cambridge common and at the house of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver on the Watertown road. Worcester County men were also part of that event, though it doesn’t show up in the essay. That militia mobilization warned Gen. Thomas Gage that the rural population was largely united against him, prompting him to rescind his optimistic call for new legislative elections. Together those and similar demonstrations elsewhere in Massachusetts produced a largely peaceful de facto change in government leading to the Provincial Congress.

Bernstein’s essay grew out of discussions of Ray Raphael’s book The First American Revolution as part of the American Revolution Round Table, which he chairs. Another meeting of that group is coming up on at 7:00 P.M. on Monday, 4 February, in Lincoln. The topic will be Samuel A. Forman’s biography, Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, with the author on hand to discuss his work. Seating is limited, so anyone hoping to attend should contact Melvin Bernstein about the possibility of reserving a place.

Panel on Slavery and Religion, Old State House, 5 Feb.

On Tuesday, 5 February, at 5:15 P.M., the Old State House in Boston will host a meeting of the Boston Area Early American History Seminars sponsored and normally hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Another change from the seminar series’ usual format is that it will be a panel discussion of two papers rather than a discussion of one. The panelists will be:

• Richard Boles, George Washington University.
• Jared Hardesty, Boston College.
• Linford Fisher, Brown University, commenter.

Boles’s paper, “African American and Indian Church Affiliation: Reevaluating Race and Religion in the North, 1730-1776,” explores black and Indian participation in the region’s meetinghouses and how those congregants might have influenced theology and church practices. Hardesty’s “A World of Deference and Dependence: Slavery and Unfreedom in Eighteenth-Century Boston” challenges the slave/free dichotomy that most authors on colonial New England use.

This seminar is free and open to the public. Copies of the papers will be available at the event, but the authors won’t read them aloud. There will be a light buffet supper afterward, and the M.H.S. asks people to reserve a space by email.

The Old State House’s Representatives Hall is accessible only by a pretty, and pretty daunting, circular staircase. Photo of that staircase above by JoeyBLS Photography via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

“When the senate should have had an opportunity to act”

Joseph Story was only a boy in Marblehead when the Constitution was written. However, he became a Supreme Court justice and a Harvard law professor and thus a very influential commenter on that document. This is how he interpreted the recess appointment clause in 1833:

the president should be authorized to make temporary appointments during the recess, which should expire, when the senate should have had an opportunity to act on the subject. . . . [This course] combines convenience, promptitude of action, and general security.

The appointments so made, by the very language of the constitution, expire at the next session of the senate; and the commissions given by him have the same duration. When the senate is assembled, if the president nominates the same officer to the office, this is to all intents and purposes a new nomination to office; and, if approved by the senate, the appointment is a new appointment, and not a mere continuation of the old appointment.

Story clearly believed that a recess appointment “should expire, when the senate should have had an opportunity to act on the subject.” He even wrote that such appointments “expire at the next session” of the Senate, not “at the End of their next Session,” which is the Constitution’s language (with my emphasis).

Story wrote only a few years after a conflict over appointments between President Andrew Jackson and the Senate. During an 1829 Senate recess, Jackson named many political supporters to federal offices, particularly newspaper editors. The Senate eventually got to vote on those men and rejected at least nine. Though the administration later renominated those supporters or found new posts for them, that conflict appears to fit within Justice Story’s interpretation of the recess appointments clause: such appointments should last only until the Senate has a chance to vote on them.

In 1884 and afterwards, however, the U.S. courts ruled that the Senate could not remove an official named by recess appointment from office. Those decisions have their roots in Justice Department documents from the Jackson administration back in 1830, but they disagree with Story’s understanding and, I suspect, the Constitutional Convention’s expectations.

Since then, Presidents of both parties have expanded the use of the recess appointment. They have filled positions not just between formal Senate sessions but also in shorter recesses during those sessions. Presidents have argued that such appointments become necessary as the Senate increasingly refuses to vote on nominees, even when a majority is ready to; such filibusters also seem like a distortion of what the Constitutional Convention imagined, and unproductive for the country as well.

Nevertheless, our legal system isn’t based just on what Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1788 or Joseph Story wrote in 1833, but on the whole line of precedents. Courts have considered many aspects of recess appointments and generally found the practice constitutional. This week a U.S. Circuit Court panel ruled the other way, saying President Barack Obama overstepped that authority and imposing limits not applied to recent past Presidents. The issue seems headed for the Supreme Court.

The Birth of the Recess Appointment

Article Two of the U.S. Constitution includes this clause, proposed by Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina:

The President shall have power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

This language was modeled after a clause in the North Carolina constitution. It wasn’t part of the first draft of the new federal document, but the men of the Constitutional Convention—many of whom probably expected to be Senators—knew they wouldn’t want to spend all their time at the capital just in case an important position should become vacant.

No one dissented on this clause, and therefore there was no formal debate about its meaning. The Constitution doesn’t define the parameters of the Senate’s “recess” or “session” except to say that it can’t “adjourn for more than three days” without the House of Representatives’ consent or meet somewhere away from the House. The founders at the Constitutional Convention shared a basic understanding of how legislatures worked, so they didn’t think it worthwhile to spell that all out.

The 67th installment of The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, explained that clause this way:

The ordinary power of appointment is confined to the President and Senate jointly, and can therefore only be exercised during the session of the Senate; but as it would have been improper to oblige this body to be continually in session for the appointment of officers and as vacancies might happen in their recess, which it might be necessary for the public service to fill without delay, the succeeding clause is evidently intended to authorize the President, singly, to make temporary appointments “during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.”

Hamilton’s main goal in that essay, context makes clear, was to assure readers that the President could not appoint Senators, as some critics of the Constitution had evidently claimed. The actual workings of the recess appointment were only a minor consideration for him.

The first President to make a recess appointment was the first President, George Washington. He named officials in the very first break of the first Congress. Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison (also kind of an expert on the Constitution) also used this power. Jefferson, in fact, delayed his nomination of Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury so he could make a recess appointment; he didn’t submit Gallatin’s name to the Senate until almost eight months later in January 1802, when there was a Republican majority.

In fact, most of those early recess appointments were later confirmed by the Senate, or at least not rejected. But there was a notable exception. In June 1795 Washington named John Rutledge of South Carolina to be Chief Justice while the Senate was in recess. Less than three weeks later, Rutledge made a speech against the Jay Treaty negotiated by his predecessor, saying that he hoped Washington would die rather than sign it. This reduced his popularity within the administration.

Nevertheless, Rutledge presided over some court sessions that fall, and the President formalized his nomination in December 1795. By then, however, people were speaking openly about the new Chief Justice’s alcoholism, depressions, and failing mind. The Senate rejected the nomination, keeping its debate off the record. Rutledge went home to Charleston and attempted suicide. That didn’t work out, either.

Two days later, Rutledge wrote to Washington, resigning his commission as Chief Justice. Under the literal language of the Constitution, that commission was due to expire at the end of the Senate’s current session, or about five months later. Because Rutledge resigned, however, the country didn’t test the question of whether his commission should have ended as soon as the Senate had considered and rejected his appointment.

TOMORROW: Justice Joseph Story’s interpretation.

America’s Anti-Catholic Turnaround

I think it was Prof. John Fea who recently alerted me to these Belief.net articles by Steven Waldman from 2008:

• “How Anti-Catholicism Helped Fuel the American Revolution”
• “Why George Washington Should Be the Pope’s Hero”

Anti-Catholicism defined British polity in the eighteenth century after the ouster of James II in 1688’s “Glorious Revolution” and Parliament’s choice to skip his heirs in favor of the Protestant George I. Anti-Catholicism was even stronger in Puritan-rooted New England and tinged the rhetoric of the pre-Revolutionary arguments, as Waldman wrote:

During the lead up to revolution, rebels seeking to stoke hatred of Great Britain routinely equated the practices of the Church of England with that of the Catholic Church. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, colonists celebrated anti-Pope Days, an anti-Catholic festival derived from the English Guy Fawkes day (named for a Catholic who attempted to assassinated King James I). . . .

Roger Sherman and other members of Continental Congress wanted to prohibit Catholics from serving in the Continental Army.

In 1774, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, taking the enlightened position that the Catholic Church could remain the official church of Quebec. This appalled and terrified many colonists, who assumed this to be a British attempt to subjugate them religiously by allowing the loathsome Catholics to expand into the colonies. Colonial newspapers railed against the Popish threat. . . . In Rhode Island, every single issue of the Newport Mercury from October 2, 1774 to March 20, 1775 contained “at least one invidious reference to the Catholic religion of the Canadians,” according to historian Charles Metzger.

At top is Paul Revere’s cartoon “The Mitred Minuet,” engraved for Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine. It’s another example of American anti-Catholic (and anti-Québec and anti-Scottish) propaganda.

However, Anti-Catholicism is also a clear example of how American Patriots changed their tenets, or at least their policies. At the start of the war they were trying to be more British than the British, and thus more anti-Catholic. But they soon realized they wanted to win over the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, which meant toning down the “evil Papists” talk.

Gen. George Washington, not from New England and skeptical of people’s abilities to discern the ways of providence, was a leading voice for religious acceptance. Waldman wrote, “On September 14, 1775, he banned the practice of burning effigies of the Pope once a year.” I think that’s a reference to Washington’s letter on how to treat the Canadians and accompanying orders to Col. Benedict Arnold. But those documents applied only to Arnold’s small contingent in Canada.

On 5 November, Washington took the bigger step by ordering his own larger body of troops around Boston, most of them New Englanders, not to celebrate Pope Night:

As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope—He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.

At the time, one of the general’s senior aides at headquarters was Stephen Moylan, an Irish immigrant to Pennsylvania whose brother Francis had just become the Roman Catholic bishop of Kerry. Moylan might even have drafted that paragraph for the commander-in-chief’s approval. I don’t think a lot of the New England troops or officers knew about his background, however.

Later the Congress made alliances with France and Spain, only a few years after some of those same American politicians had accused those Catholic powers of conspiring against their British liberties. Soon after the war, even Boston had a Catholic church, and the federal government required itself to be neutral on all religious questions. (Tax support for Congregationalist churches continued in most of New England for decades.) This was one of the biggest turnarounds of the Revolutionary movement, so complete that most of us don’t recognize the religious prejudices it started out with.

The Search for a Usable Gordon Wood

One of the drawbacks of subscribing to a blog through Google Reader is that I see posts early and miss conversations that later erupt in the comments. Luckily, Bill Hogeland’s Twitter feed alerted me to the response to Michael D. Hattem’s posting “Where Have You Gone, Gordon Wood?” at the Junto.

The comments actually helped Hattem clarify the point of his post:

Wood looms large in the field and yet there is a fair number of people who think of him as merely a caricature or as the butt of a joke, which I find somewhat sad because he has made significant contributions to the field. Hence, I wrote the piece because I thought it would help me think through why this was happening.

One of Hattem’s themes is “generational differences between early Americanists,” with Wood being perhaps the last giant of the “republican,” “ideological,” or “consensus” school, followed by a generation that demanded study of the non-elite as well. Hattem, currently a graduate student, sees himself two generations below Wood, thus having perspective not only on him but on the stars of the intervening years.

Paul wrote in response:

It strikes me that as much as historians try to deny it, nevertheless it appears that a certain teleology or more strikingly a whiggishness haunts the profession. There is the understanding that we stand on the shoulders of those who go before us but the fundamental assumption that the previous generations have built an understanding of history that is broken or incomplete and that succeeding generations can right the wrong is inherent in the discipline.

Is there indeed a generational, even oedipal, conflict with the next generation of historians having to overthrow the most prominent of the previous? Is this the Hegelian dialectic at work, with Wood having helped to define a new synthesis only for it to become the new thesis to be challenged? Or is there just something about the human life cycle that takes many people who start by pushing against boundaries and has them end up yelling at kids to get off the lawn?

Roy Rogers commented:

Wood, himself, is responsible to “poisoning the well” of his relationship with the academy as much as anyone. Since the late 1980s (getting worse into the 1990s to present), Wood has been reviewing many race/class/gender paradigm books negatively – often in snarky and (sometimes) disrespectful ways. You can watch this evolution in Wood’s collection of reviews – “The Purpose of the Past.”

I recall that Wood’s review of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes seemed to bend over backwards to find value in what he acknowledged were false notions of the founding.

Hattem’s remarks and the comments also get into the perpetual issue of popular history versus academic history (i.e., Why don’t more people read my book instead of the latest from a former sportswriter?). That’s a tougher fit because for all his talk about communicating to the public Wood doesn’t really qualify as a popular writer; the closest he’s gotten to that mode is The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, and his big books sell because they’re used in classrooms, not because they entertain. Hattem restates a good point:

I tried to make the point that thinking of narrative as the savior of the profession is a bit naive, especially when you consider popular early American history. The majority of readers who devour books by [David] McCullough and [Ron] Chernow…read them not because they are narratives per se but because they are a particular kind of narrative about the founding and the founders.

I had more to say on “narrative history” in 2009.

Thomas J. Gillan wrote:

I think it’s fair to say, as Dan Rodgers did in 1992, that the republican synthesis was a product of its time and place, that it was a response, in Rodgers’s words, “not to evidence” but to the “interpretive problematics” of a particular moment.

That refers to Daniel T. Rodgers’s article “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept” (P.D.F. download). Rodgers is an intellectual historian, and here he looked not at eighteenth-century ideas of the republic but at late-twentieth-century thinking about those ideas. (Rodgers is also my uncle Dan, hence the special link.)

Finally, I’d push Alec Rogers’s questioning whether Hattem’s phrase “the historians’ version of the chitlin circuit” is the right metaphor. The “rubber-chicken circuit” seems like a better analogy since that involves speaking comfortably to the comfortable. Chitlins are pigs’ intestines, eaten by poor people who couldn’t afford to let any protein go to waste, and they gave their name to a string of legally segregated entertainment venues. In contrast, chicken breasts become rubbery when cooked en masse to please a large group of well-off people who don’t want to be surprised by their food.