“Turtius Bass and wife are parted.”

Who was the Braintree man that Abigail Adams called “Tertias Bass” in 1776? I was ready to give up that quest when I came across a letter that Abigail’s older sister Mary Cranch sent to her in 1785:

Turtius Bass and wife are parted. He has sold the House and land which his Sons liv’d in and divided his Estate into four parts, given his wife one fourth part, one half to his two Sons. The remainder he has taken to support himself and Nell Underwood in their Perigrinations to the Eastward [i.e., Maine] whither he is going he says to settle.

And as he is going into a new country, tis proper he should take a young person to help People it, and her abbillity to do it She has given ample proof off by presenting somebody (she swore them upon Leonard Clevverly [1758-1828]) with a pair of Twins last winter. She liv’d in Mr. Bass’s Family—but as they both dy’d she was at Liberty to pursue her Business as Housekeeper in some distant part of the State as well as at Braintree, and who would be Maid when they might be mistress?

Mr. Bass was so generious to the Girl, that he keept her in his house to lay in, and gave Mr. [Royall] Tyler a handsome Fee as Counsel for her in case Mr. Cleaverly should deny the charge which he did most solemnly. In this case the woman has the advantage in law. He was oblig’d to enter into Bonds, but the children dying, and Mr. Tyler not appearing, he took up his bonds and Mr. Bass was oblig’d to bear all the charges.

Mrs. Bass is in great trouble. Seth is mov’d into the House with her, and the other Son with his wife and child are mov’d seventy mile into the country out of all the noise of it—so much for Scandle.

This letter tells us that in 1785 “Turtius Bass” had a wife and two sons, at least one of them married with a child and the other named Seth. Page 55 of this 1835 genealogy indicates that “Turtius” was most likely the Samuel Bass born in 1737, son of Seth and Eunice Bass. He married Alice Spear in 1758 and had sons Jeriah in 1760 and Seth in 1761. That book says nothing of Nell Underwood. It also says nothing about when this Samuel Bass died, indicating that his relatives in Braintree had lost track, or chosen to lose track, of him.

But this biographical directory from 1897 suggests that Samuel Bass settled in Wilton, Maine, and his son Jeriah eventually brought his family there, too. After another century, their descendant George H. Bass was a leading local shoe manufacturer.

As for Alice Bass, neighbors John and Abigail Adams bought some of her land in 1788.

The Mystery of Tertias Bass

As I quoted yesterday, Abigail Adams wrote that in the spring of 1776 the only person in Braintree making saltpetre was “Mr. Tertias Bass as he is calld.” But no such name appears on the town records. Later she wrote that “Tertias Bass” was serving as lieutenant in a militia company, but no such name appears on militia records.

The answer to this mystery starts with the arrival of Deacon Samuel Bass in Braintree around 1640, one of the town’s earliest settlers. He had a lot of sons, and they had a lot of sons, and as a result a century later the town had a lot of men named Bass. When John Adams went to Philadelphia in 1775, for example, he hired a neighbor named Joseph Bass as a personal servant. The colonel in charge of Lt. Bass’s regiment was Col. Jonathan Bass.

The prevalence of that surname was especially problematic when families paired it with a common first name, and colonial New England families chose from a smaller pool of given names than we use today. One particularly popular given name was Samuel.

In that situation, the custom of the time was to distinguish the two men by:

• profession, which also carried legal weight. Thus, in 1704 the town’s tithingmen included “Samuel Bass[,] Carpenter” and “Samuel Bass[,] Cooper.”
• militia rank or other professional achievement. Braintree’s 1792 tax list included both “Ensign Samuel Bass” and “Lieutenant Samuel Bass.”
• suffixes such as “Senior,” “Junior,” and “tertius,” or third.

To make it more confusing, however, those suffixes weren’t permanent and they weren’t necessarily indications of a father-son relationship. “Samuel Bass, Jr.” was simply the younger of the two Samuel Basses doing business in town at the time. When the older one died, he became “Samuel Bass,” or “Samuel Bass, Sr.” if there were others younger than him. So the same man could be designated in different ways on documents only a few years apart.

This genealogy page reports a 1761 will witnessed by “Samuel Bass (tertius).” In 1785 Braintree chose “Mr. Samuel Bass, 3rd” as a selectman. Were those the same man, twenty-four years apart, or had the “tertius/3rd” designation been passed down from one man to another? I’m not sure. But I didn’t find any other Braintree Basses using that suffix.

It’s striking that Abigail Adams’s letters from 1776 indicate that one local Bass was known to his neighbors by the suffix “Tertius” as if that were his given name. Presumably he had been the third-oldest Samuel Bass in town at birth and grew up behind two others for so long that people got used to calling him “Tertius.” (Or “Tertias” in Adams’s spelling.)

There’s a very early published genealogy of the Bass family from 1835 listing multiple Samuels alive in 1776, and local and family historians have added more. Was “Tertius” the Samuel Bass reportedly held prisoner by the British military? The Samuel Bass who helped found Braintree, Vermont?

I was ready to give up on nailing down “Tertias Bass” until I stumbled across a piece of juicy gossip from Abigail Adams’s sister.

TOMORROW: Hmm. Should I share that?

Saltpetre in Braintree

John Adams was one of the Continental Congress delegates most enthusiastic about the war effort, and therefore eager to see Americans producing saltpetre to make into gunpowder. I doubt he’d ever tried that process himself, but in March 1776 he asked his wife Abigail to do so back home in Braintree.

Abigail wrote back to John in Philadelphia:

You inquire of whether I am making Salt peter. I have not yet attempted it, but after Soap making believe I shall make the experiment. I find as much as I can do to manufacture cloathing for my family which would else be Naked.

I know of but one person in this part of the Town who has made any, that is Mr. Tertias Bass as he is calld who has got very near an hundred weight which has been found to be very good. I have heard of some others in the other parishes. Mr. Reed of Weymouth has been applied to, to go to Andover to the mills which are now at work, and has gone. I have lately seen a small Manuscrip describing the proportions for the various sorts of powder, fit for cannon, small arms and pistols. If it would be of any Service your way I will get it transcribed and send it to you.

As the folks at the Massachusetts Historical Society showed us on Tuesday, this passage comes toward the end of a letter best known for Abigail’s plea to “Remember the Ladies” in designing the new republic, probably a plea for more equal property laws in a marriage. Considering how she was volunteering to send John military information, one might think his reply would have been more respectful.

Be that as it may, on 29 September Abigail told John about a new military development: “Nathl. Belcher goes Capt. and Tertias Bass Lieut. from this Town. They March tomorrow.” Lt. Bass was away from home for a while, so that was the end of his saltpetre production—unless his wife took over.

I’m not sure where those troops were marching or why. Nathaniel Belcher (1732-1786?) captained a company in Col. Jonathan Bass’s Massachusetts militia regiment for much of the war. Pattee’s History of Old Braintree and Quincy includes a list of men who served in Belcher’s company for four days in June 1776, but doesn’t mention another deployment until 1777. And in June that company didn’t have a lieutenant named Bass.

TOMORROW: What kind of name is “Tertias Bass”?

How Not to Make Saltpetre

Prof. David Hsiung’s “Making Saltpetre” seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society last night was quite interesting, and I probably missed the most interesting part because I was in a committee meeting upstairs for the first half.

David’s paper collected eight sets of instructions for extracting saltpetre from soil promulgated in newspapers, pamphlets, and letters in 1775-76. Everyone at the seminar also got a copy of a ninth method published in Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine in August 1774, with the above engraving by Paul Revere as illustration (courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society).

Unfortunately, the Americans of 1775-76 weren’t simply wrestling with a shortage of saltpetre, and thus of gunpowder. They were also dealing with a very incomplete knowledge of chemistry. Joseph Priestley had just isolated oxygen, but Antoine Lavoisier and Humphrey Davy hadn’t isolated and named nitrogen and postassium yet. People did recognize nitre as the precursor to saltpetre, and that soil rich in nitre could produce saltpetre, so that was at least a start.

Unfortunately, none of the nine methods of finding nitre and turning it into saltpetre agreed with another. In fact, the instructions differed on fundamental questions like whether one should start with soil that’s been exposed to a lot of urine or not. The Royal American Magazine told its readers:

it has been often found by experiments made in England, that the mortar of old walls, moistened with urine, and exposed to the northeast wind, in a covered shed, will, in a few weeks, afford a considerable quantity of nitre.

But a report recommended by the Continental Congress and printed by Benjamin Edes in Watertown in 1775 recommended against starting with soil from “stables, and all other places, where the earths were impregnated with ruinous and excrementicious salts.”

Hsiung presented modern chemistry to show that bringing water close to a boil strongly increases the solubility of saltpetre without affecting the solubility of other mineral salts so much—so the hotter the water, the more saltpetre it will yield relative to undesired compounds. Yet some methods from 1775-76 say nothing about heating water, meaning they’re inefficient at best.

Early American saltpetre production was hampered by successful longtime makers’ reluctance to share their secrets, ignorance of which variables in different conditions really mattered, and the tendency of confident men (like Dr. Benjamin Rush) to drown out others whether or not they were correct.

Eventually the Continental authorities realized it was much more efficient just to smuggle in finished gunpowder from French, Dutch, and other territories, and the saltpetre instructions stopped appearing in print. But in 1775-76 making lots of people were working hard at making saltpetre—without a whole lot to show for that effort.

TOMORROW: Saltpetre and the Adams family.

A Hard Case

This is the case I chose for my iPhone 4 last year. It shows Boston during the siege of 1775-76, from a nineteenth-century map based on precursors by Henry Pelham and others, and comes on a smooth, solid, padded plastic case. It’s available through the wallarts store at Zazzle.

I wouldn’t have mentioned such a modern product, even though I use it and like it, but the folks at Declaration Clothing got in touch with me about their offerings.

I thought their “Join or Die” skin for the iPhone 5 also looked handsome. This design doesn’t provide all the protection of the case (it sticks onto the back instead of wrapping around the edges), but it’s real wood with a real eighteenth-century image etched onto it.

Declaration Clothing also offers a variety of T-shirts condemning the Stamp Act, celebrating John Paul Jones, and the like. Some of the designs are striking.

[This isn’t a paid advertisement for either product or dealer; I just thought some members of the Revolutionary War fandom might like to browse the offerings on those sites.]

The Unicorn All Around the Town

The unicorn, already a rare species in modern New England, will get even harder to spot this fall.

A carved unicorn stood atop the east façade of Boston’s Town House, part of the royal arms. After the public reading of the Declaration of Independence on 18 July 1776, the crowd pulled down that pageantry and burned it.

Replicas of the unicorn and its leonine partner were reinstalled when that building, by then called the Old State House, was made into a museum in the late 1800s. (Folks are welcome to ponder the significance of elite Bostonians’ renewed fondness for British royal symbols in the urban America of that time.)

In October the unicorn will be taken down again to be refurbished. After work by Skylight Studios of Woburn, it will be regilded and re-palladiumed inside the museum before being sent back up to the roof.

This work will be supported by a gift from Boston Duck Tours, and celebrates the 300th anniversary of the Old State House building.

What Were British Children Reading in the 1700s?

Earlier this month McGill University in Montreal shared an interview with Prof. Matthew Grenby of Newcastle University on children’s books of eighteenth-century Britain. Some of those made their way to New England, first as imports and later (especially after independence) as models to be pirated.

Some extracts from Prof. Grenby:

…children’s books from the eighteenth century became so rare that often the collectors didn’t have much choice, and had to acquire copies that children had torn, written on, coloured in, sometimes almost worn out. For the book historian, these are more valuable. They give real insight into the way that children used their books and what they thought of them in the period when children’s literature was being invented.

For instance, sometimes a book’s user pencilled marks into the margins to record their progress though the book. From these we can calculate how long it took a child to read a story, or to complete the tasks in a geography textbook (if indeed they did). Other kinds of ‘marginalia’ give children’s comments on the books they were reading – or record what they were planning to do that afternoon, or what they thought of their teacher or classmates. . . .

A lot of the books also have inscriptions: the owner asserting (sometime very menacingly) his or her ownership of the book.

I’ve seen such inscriptions in copies of the textbooks used in Boston’s Latin Schools. Often a boy wrote out a warning against theft—in Latin. Since I doubt there was really a wave of Latin-reading book thieves, I think those inscriptions signal pride in owning both the book itself and a knowledge of Latin.

What we now know is that, in the first years of children’s literature, more girls owned books than boys, books penetrated all social classes and religions, and that ownership was spread widely in geographical terms. . . .

Morality, and piety, was an important element in eighteenth-century British children’s books. They could be surprisingly relaxed about religious conformity though. A book might talk about how important it was, on Sunday, to go to church, but the author could give the alternatives of chapel, or the Quaker meeting house. Sometimes we have evidence of parents who reacted angrily to this ecumenicalism, crossing out ‘chapel’ and ‘meeting house’ to keep their children orthodox.

The most reprinted book in eighteenth-century New England was almost certainly The New England Primer, a schoolbook for children learning to read. And the reason it had the New England name is that it was tailored for the region’s dominant Puritan faith. A typical edition included a picture of a Protestant martyr being killed in front of his children (example above courtesy of Stanford) and the shorter Westminster catechism. I doubt books suggesting Catholic chapels or Quaker meetings would have been popular here, but perhaps the culture opened up after independence.

We now tend to think of reading as quite a private, personal experience. But in the eighteenth century this probably wasn’t always the case, particularly for children. Children’s books were generally supposed to be read aloud and in company. They were supposed to form the basis of conversation. That’s not just chat, but rather ‘conversation’ understood as a distinct and systematic educational practice. It was imagined that parents or teachers would read the book first, then select certain parts for the child to read over him or herself, probably aloud, followed by carefully directed discussion.

Whether this actually happened much in real life is debateable.

Proper parenting can be exhausting, after all.

Freemasons and Furniture in Newport Next Month

The Newport Historical Society has two lectures on intriguing eighteenth-century historical topics scheduled for next month.

On Thursday, 11 April, at 5:30 the society will host Samuel Biagetti as he speaks on “Rupture in the Temple: The Rise and Fall of Freemasonry in Colonial Rhode Island, 1749-1772.”

After a brief period of success and prestige in the 1750s, the lodges in Newport and Providence imploded in the Stamp Act crisis. In the years of political turmoil that followed, many Rhode Island Masons fled in the Loyalist exodus. Mr. Biagetti will explain how the story of Freemasonry in Rhode Island underscores the importance of ritual, symbolism, and emotion in forging Masonic bonds—and the power of politics to challenge or even destroy those same bonds.

A graduate of Brown, Biagetti is now working on his Ph.D. at Columbia, and this topic is part of his thesis.

On Wednesday, 24 April, at 5:30 the society will welcome Jennifer Anderson, author of Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America, as she speaks on “From Rainforest to Parlor: The Mahogany Trade in Colonial Rhode Island.”

By the 1760s, imported mahogany was all the rage for fine furniture in colonial America. Many examples of these elegant pieces were made in Newport. . . .

As the coveted mahogany trees were quickly depleted in their native Caribbean range, the mahogany trade became an increasingly risky and competitive business. Nevertheless, many Rhode Island merchants, sea captains, and cabinetmakers—eager to profit from this desirable and luxurious wood—took their chances in this new line of trade. In her talk, Dr. Anderson will discuss the adventures (and misadventures) of some of these participants and their quest to secure this precious material.

Anderson is a professor of history at Stony Brook University. She received the Society of American Historians’ Nevins Prize for Best-Written Dissertation, which is always a good sign.

Both talks will take place at the society’s Colony House, a landmark opened in 1739. Admission is $1 for Newport Historical Society members, $5 for non-members. Phone 401-841-8770 to reserve seats.

Jefferson or Not?

I recently came across the Is This Jefferson? website, devoted to making the case that a portrait apparently painted by Nicholas Benjamin Delapierre in 1785 shows Thomas Jefferson, then ambassador to France.

As this press release acknowledges, no one is on record as thinking this is a painting of Jefferson until its current owner.

Delapierre painted an early printing of De la Caisse d’Escompte on the desk of the man in the portrait. That book was authored principally by Mirabeau, but the man obviously isn’t that jowly count. The book’s other authors included Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (who later settled in Delaware), and Étienne Clavière.

Jefferson knew all four men and admired their book. However, his own book, Notes on the State of Virginia, was published in Paris at the same time, and normally a painter would portray an author with his own work.

The website argues that letters from John Adams’s family hint at an early, previously unidentified Jefferson portrait. I think we can read those letters to indicate that the Adams family picked up Jefferson’s portrait from Boston native Mather Brown in 1786, liked it so much they wanted a copy, and therefore returned it to Brown’s studio for duplication before the end of the year.

Furthermore, I think the portrait looks a lot like Brissot, one of the authors of that book on the desk. The website compares this painting to later portraits of Jefferson, but doesn’t line both up against later portraits of Brissot. What do you think?

“Making Saltpetre” Seminar in Boston, 2 April

On Tuesday, 2 April, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a session of the Boston Area Early American History Seminar starting at 5:15. David Hsiung, professor at Juniata College, will present a paper on “Making Saltpetre for the Continental Army: How Americans Understood the Environment During the War of Independence.” His précis:

This case study focuses on how Americans understood the workings of the natural world as they imperfectly made gunpowder for the Continental Army. It argues that paying attention to the interactions between humans and the natural environment leads to a richer understanding of the war, and that modern American attitudes towards the environment have important roots in the Revolutionary period.

Juniata is known for its environmental study programs, and Prof. Hsiung is working on a history of the siege of Boston through the lens of environmental history.

The expert commenter on this paper will be Rob Martello from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, who wrote a book on Paul Revere as manufacturer. I look forward to another uncommon perspective on the past. The paper is available online to seminar subscribers (in three pieces), and some hard copies might be available for members of the public to read before the discussion that afternoon.

American governments scrambled to promote the manufacture of gunpowder in 1775, but they had actually been trying that off and on for over a century. Back in June 1642, the Massachusetts General Court passed this resolution:

by raising and producing such materials amongst us as will perfect the making of gunpowder, the instrumental meanes that all nations lay hould on for their preservation, &c., do order that every plantation within this Colony shall erect a house in length about 20 or 30 foote, and twenty foote wide within one half year next coming, &c., to make saltpetre from urine of men, beasts, goates, henns, hogs, and horses’ dung, &c.

Urine provided nitrogen, a crucial ingredient of gunpowder. But it’s not hard to think why towns didn’t keep up that part of their local infrastructure.

(Satirical print from 1783 Britain courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Tea, Maps, and Furniture at Historic Deerfield

Historic Deerfield is featuring a new exhibit called “Tea Talk: Ritual and Refinement in Early New England Parlors” in the lobby of its Flynt Center museum. The website says:

Tea and tea drinking arrived in New England by the late 17th century, a time of burgeoning trade and expansion of the British Empire. This stimulating brew from China was first touted as a cure for a variety of illnesses such as colds, headaches, sleepiness, poor digestion, and hangovers. But in no time tea was soon counted among the necessities of life; many found a warming cup of tea invaluable for entertaining friends, sharing polite conversation and town gossip, practicing their etiquette and lessons in refinement, displaying their family’s wealth and status, or just withstanding the rigors of a cold New England winter.

Though its high cost confined the beverage at first to the parlors of the wealthy, tea eventually extended to all levels of New England society. The popularity of tea proved to be a boon for craftsmen such as potters, silversmiths, cabinetmakers, and glassblowers.

The caffeinated beverage required a host of novel equipment with which to prepare and serve it properly: a tea table and chairs, a hot water kettle, a teapot, sugar bowl, tea canister, slop or waste bowl, cream pot, and silver spoons—not to mention the cups and saucers. Porcelain wares from China were the logical early choice, but it was not long before British and American craftsmen produced their own wares in competition. Utensils made of earthenware or pewter served people of average or lesser means, while the wealthy turned to the silversmith or the china merchant for more fashionable equipage.

This exhibition will be on view through 16 Feb 2014. One could visit on 14 April when Mary Pedley, Adjunct Assistant Curator of Maps at the William L. Clements Library in Michigan, speaks at the Deerfield Community Center on “Mapping Fear: Stoking the Fires of the French and Indian War.” That free event is listed as running 2:00 to 4:00 P.M.

The Flynt Center also still has parts of its “Into the Woods” exhibit of early American furniture-making on display. That was one of the best museum exhibits I’ve seen anywhere. This Antiques Journal article gives a good sense of its topics and approach.

More Details from Capt. Samuel Leighton’s Papers

As I looked over the document dealer Seth Kaller’s offerings from the papers of Capt. Samuel Leighton of Kittery, Maine, a few things jumped out at me.

Records of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety say that a total of 91 guns were delivered to Col. James Scamman’s regiment on 30 June and 7 July 1775. The papers for sale include a receipt for four guns dated 4 July. The most expensive of those guns, worth a third of the total, is connected with Henry Foss, who was the Leighton company’s drummer.

Foss also had one of the best signatures in the company, as shown by this document. A few men signed with their marks only, including one, Stephen Nason, who is listed as a corporal. Normally I expect the non-commissioned officers to be able to write, but this man might have been exceptional.

At a council of war on 3 Aug 1775, Gen. George Washington learned that his army’s stock of gunpowder was considerably smaller than he’d understood. I suspect that led to Capt. Leighton’s inventory of “Aminitson” held by men on 12 August. It looks like most of the company had over twenty rounds.

At the end of the year, Col. Scamman didn’t receive a new Continental Army commission. Despite being acquitted in a court-martial, he apparently hadn’t escaped the cloud hanging over him since Bunker Hill. In fact, he continued to argue against those charges in the newspaper in 1776.

Capt. Leighton and many of his men chose not to reenlist. They accepted money in lieu of winter coats and collected their October pay on 29 December. Leighton turned in some ammunition and other supplies and got a receipt on 1 Jan 1776.

And then Capt. Leighton and many of his men went back home to Maine. Leighton was in Kittery on 8 March when he paid Sgt. Josiah Paul. Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts Gen. Washington was overseeing the endgame of the siege from Dorchester Heights.

A family genealogy includes his Samuel Leighton’s commission in the Massachusetts militia dated 16 May 1776. He led a company back to Boston later that year for guard duty and eventually was promoted to major in the state militia, but never again served in the Continental Army.

Among the other Leighton documents is what Seth Kaller calls a list of instructions for infantry formations. It’s actually the section headings of chapter five of Gen. Steuben’s drill manual, titled “Miscellaneous Evolutions.” That was published in 1779, so I assume Leighton or a relative copied it out later in the war, maybe for militia training.

Capt. Samuel Leighton and His Regiment

Will Steere at the Seth Kaller Inc. dealer in historic documents alerted me to some recent offerings that shed a little light on the siege of Boston. They are more of the papers of Capt. Samuel Leighton (1740-1802) of Kittery, Maine. His men came from that area and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. One can find them all at the Seth Kaller site by searching for the keyword “Leighton.”

This company was part of the regiment of Col. James Scamman (1742-1804). Documents in the Massachusetts archives indicate that some officers and men in that regiment wanted their colonel to be Johnson Moulton, a veteran of the French & Indian War who had mustered a minute company on 21 Apr 1775 and marched south. By the time Moulton returned home four days later, however, Scamman was evidently recruiting.

Moulton signed on to Scamman’s regiment as lieutenant colonel on 2 May but brought Gen. Artemas Ward a letter from prominent neighbors dated three days later recommending that he be made colonel. “There is a considerable number of good men enlisted already, with a view of said Moulton being their Colonel,” the letter closed. Scamman could be lieutenant colonel, they suggested.

The Massachusetts Committee of Safety was convinced enough to ask Scamman to step aside in a 7 May letter. But he didn’t. Instead, he marched his regiment to Cambridge and mustered them there on 23 May.

The committee decided that they couldn’t remove Scamman without his cooperation. They certified his regiment as “nearly full” and recommended commissions for his officers. On 29 May, Moulton was officially made the regiment’s lieutenant colonel. Later the Continental Congress issued the equivalent commissions. Leighton’s commission as a Continental captain, dated 1 July, is quoted here.

By then, Leighton’s company had been involved in the fight for Hog Island but not in the Battle of Bunker Hill for reasons explained here. According to a muster roll Leighton prepared, three of his men had deserted, two reportedly on 1 July.

TOMORROW: More of Capt. Leighton’s documents.

250 Years After Pontiac’s (and Others’) War

On 4-5 April, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia will host a conference titled “The War Called Pontiac’s, 1763-2013.” As you can see, this year marks the 250th anniversary of that frontier conflict, which is usually overshadowed by the French & Indian War.

The conference description says:

The 250th anniversary of what has long been known as “Pontiac’s War” offers scholars an opportunity to reexamine the conflict and its impact on the history of North America. The role of the Odowa leader Pontiac and the widespread scope and the varying aims of other Native participants in the conflicts of the mid-1760s defy easy categorization, a problem well summed up by historian Francis Jennings’s phrase, “The War Called ‘Pontiac’s.’”

Many contemporary British observers and combatants sought some conceptual clarity by casting the blame on French-inspired treachery. Many Native people located the treachery among the British. In the mid-nineteenth-century, Francis Parkman constructed an epic tale of a single charismatic Indian leader and the last gasp of a doomed people. More recent work offers a much more complex interpretation of an inter-Native movement grounded in Native spirituality and aiming to regain status as well as land for its Native participants in the new geopolitical world after the Seven Years War.

Among commanders in the siege of Boston, Gen. Thomas Gage oversaw the British army in North America in the latter part of this war, and Israel Putnam was part of the force recruited by Robert Rogers to reinforce Fort Detroit. Among the political legacies of the war was the British government’s conviction that enforcing the Proclamation Line of 1763 and maintaining significant troops in North America were both necessary for keeping the peace, even after that year’s victory over the French Empire. Both policies would, of course, lead to discontent in the Atlantic colonies.

This conference will consist mainly of discussions of pre-circulated (and hopefully pre-read) papers rather than lectures. It’s free and open to the public, but to gain access to those papers online attendees have to register at the conference website.

Cuts at National Historical Park This Summer

The federal budget cuts under “sequestration” will affect the U.S. National Park Service for the rest of this federal fiscal year, to the end of September. The National Geographic Education blog explains:

The terms of the sequestration require the National Park System to cut 5 percent, or $134 million, from its overall budget. Because each park receives its own budget, each park must cut 5 percent of its spending. This requirement is especially hard-hitting because the cuts are coming half-way through the year after the parks have already spent part of their yearly budget. Additionally, the cuts are coming on the cusp of the summer season when parks are typically increasing their staffing and costs of operations to meet the demand of summer tourists.

As I understand it, the Park Service’s central office told each site to preserve critical services and personnel as much as possible. But I’m sure people will notice some effects, and I hope they’ll recognize the root of the problem.

Most parks that I’ve heard about will still have full-time rangers giving tours this summer. But there won’t be so many seasonal rangers to provide more tours at the busiest times and help out in other ways. There won’t be so many “non-critical” programs for the public.

There will definitely be cuts behind the scenes. As the Boston Globe reports, Minute Man National Historical Park will face “delays on replacing equipment,” and “rangers will likely have to lend a hand with basic maintenance, while volunteers help with guided tours and staffing visitor centers.”

At Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge, the contract to clean the visitor center and its bathrooms has been canceled. The permanent staff will take up that task, which might mean they won’t be able to give so many tours during the day.

Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters also has a long-running summer festival of concerts and poetry readings, free to all. The park had to cut its financial contribution to those events, and a non-profit group (with whom I work) is scrambling to fill the gap. This summer’s schedule may therefore be shorter than usual.

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia (shown above), the local N.B.C. affiliate reported that Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell will close at 5:00 P.M., affecting about 150,000 visitors; several related historic buildings won’t open to the public at all; and all ranger-led walking tours and programs are canceled.

And of course the cuts mean less money going to the students and teachers who are often seasonal rangers, to the cleaning contractors, to the equipment makers, and to other private enterprises that do work for the Park Service.

Most economists advise against such government austerity when the economy is recovering from recession and the currency is strong; Britain’s government chose otherwise and is suffering no growth or a secondary recession. In the U.S. government, the House of Representatives (where the Republican majority received 1.4 million fewer votes than the Democratic minority) has been demanding such deep cuts, and with “sequestration” achieved that goal. This summer we’ll see how we the people like the results.

Knockoffs of Cincinnati Chinaware

A while back, a longtime Boston 1775 reader alerted me to this story in the New York Times:

Shirley M. Mueller…, an independent scholar and collector of Chinese export porcelain in Indianapolis,…is looking for dinnerware painted with winged goddesses, holding aloft trumpets and bald eagles, which are symbols of the Society of the Cincinnati. Elite military officers formed the Society in 1783, and they commissioned custom porcelain from artisans in China. Those artisans applied the American insignia on standard white ceramic wares, with blue scrollwork and leaves around the undulating rims.

Chinese factories also exported plain versions of the blue-edged products. Some nefarious painters have lately been adding goddesses and eagles to the centers of authentic but boring 18th-century plates.

Ms. Mueller has so far tracked down a few freshly embellished pieces. In 2009 she borrowed one suspect for lab testing at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, comparing it with an authenticated platter in her own collection that had been widely exhibited and featured in publications. The pigments on the forgery contained levels of chromium, zinc and cobalt that do not appear in those used by Chinese ceramists.

The whole back of the fake had the wrong tint. “The necessary refiring of the later dish to add the central embellishment left a partial gray surface on the back,” Ms. Mueller and the Winterthur scientist Jennifer Mass wrote in a 2011 article for The Magazine Antiques.

The porcelain shown above is a genuine fake. It’s a modern reproduction of George Washington’s Cincinnati chinaware, sold by Mount Vernon.

Rebirthing the Revolution for the 2000s

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and nearby organizations are hosting a conference in Philadelphia from 30 May to 1 June 2013 on “The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century.” What does that mean?

The conference aims to identify new directions and new trends in scholarship on the American Revolution. The conference organizers expect that it will be the first in a series of conferences exploring important themes on the era of the American Revolution. The four themes that will guide the first conference are Global Perspectives, Power, Violence, and Civil War.

The format of the conference will differ from most academic conferences. Instead of privileging[*] papers, the conference organizers have created a program that aims to foster conversation between panelists and the audience with the hope that this dialogue will point toward the new directions in scholarship that the conference hopes to catalyze. . . . Instead of reading papers, panelists will pre-circulate short papers (10 pages). In the papers sessions, panelists will have just eight minutes to present their work, leaving the larger part of each papers session for discussion with the audience.

The organizers say, “We expect the audience to be as much a part of the conference as the panelists.” Nonetheless, the scheduled panelists are a stellar lot, including Linda Colley, Edward Countryman, Christine Heyrman, Jane Kamensky, Margaretta Lovell, Marcus Rediker, Annette Gordon-Reed, David Shields, Thomas Slaughter, Alan Taylor, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Along with the McNeil Center, the hosting organizations include the David Library of the American Revolution, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the American Philosophical Society. More information is available on the conference website.

* The use of “privilege” as a verb acting upon things instead of people confirms that this is a modern academic conference, just as the planned discussion of who was the best general shows that this weekend’s American Revolution conference in Williamsburg is not primarily designed for academics. But perhaps the two approaches can cross-pollinate.

“Hardcore guys—90% of them emanate from a one-square-mile neighborhood called Charlestown”

This week Deadline.com broke the news that Warner Bros. paid a fairly hefty sum for a movie option on Nathaniel Philbrick’s upcoming book, Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution.

The article said:

The project was acquired for Pearl Street Films as a potential directing vehicle for Argo helmer Ben Affleck, who partners in the company with Matt Damon. Word is that Affleck (who is busy adapting the Dennis Lehane novel Live By Night to direct, star in and produce) will turn the book over to his Argo scribe Chris Terrio, making this a major project.

But not Affleck’s next project, and of course there’s a possibility that it might never be filmed. But if Affleck wanted to combine his fondness for Boston with what he learned from Argo about staging historical fiction, Bunker Hill offers a terrific combo.

Back in 2007 I was part of a discussion of the movie potential for that battle and offered this scene of Abijah Willard recognizing hardcore guy William Prescott on the provincial redoubt.

In The Whites of Their Eyes, Paul Lockhart was skeptical that ever happened. I’m pleased to say that Philbrick’s Bunker Hill makes the case that it was possible. But just because we can’t rule out the story doesn’t mean it really happened.

I’m still not totally convinced about the details, given the multiple versions of the tale that have come down to us. The tale must have been juiced for drama before it was first written down. But it’s documented enough for Hollywood.

Von Hoffman on Colonial Country Homes, 20 Mar.

On Wednesday, 20 March, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford plays host to a lecture on “The Social Significance of Boston’s Colonial Country Houses” by Alexander von Hoffman, lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

The event description says:

Dr. von Hoffman will explore how the members of Boston’s eighteenth-century elite expanded their social lives into the town’s suburban and rural environs. Fashionably designed country houses are among the most notable and long-lasting artifacts left by these leading Bostonians.

The stately homes that still ring Boston include not only the Isaac Royall House in Medford but also the Vassal-Craigie-Longfellow House in Cambridge, the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain, and the Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury.

The presentation will feature a close look at the architecture of these buildings and the social context in which they were built, offering lively and accessible insights into this important, but often overlooked, aspect of Boston's history.

One interesting analysis of the Revolutionary political turmoil points out that many of the leading Whigs—James Otis, William Molineux, Dr. Thomas Young, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Benjamin Church, John Adams, Joseph Greenleaf—had moved into the town after growing up elsewhere. In contrast, some leading supporters of the royal government—Thomas Hutchinson, Andrew and Peter Oliver—were emulating landed gentlemen in Britain by leaving the urban environment to build country estates.

That analysis leaves out Boston natives who remained in town, such as Samuel Adams, James Bowdoin, and Samuel and William Cooper, and Loyalists who didn’t grow up there or never left. But it does connect to what those monumental mansions signified.

Alexander von Hoffman is a Senior Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University and author of House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods.

Dr. Von Hoffman’s talk begins at 7:30 P.M., with the door opening an hour earlier. This event is free to Royall House Association members, $5 for others. On-street parking is available, and there might be punch and cookies afterward.

“He began scattering the crowfeet about”

Lt. Jesse Adair of the British Marines was one of the officers who was on the march out to Concord on 18-19 Apr 1775, stopping provincial horsemen along the way.

He was also one of the last British military officers to leave Boston during the evacuation on 17 Mar 1776, as Martin Hunter (then a lieutenant, later a general) described in his memoir:

Lieutenant Adair of the Marines, an acting engineer, was ordered to strew crow-feet in front of the lines to impeded the march of the enemy, as it was supposed they should attack our rear. Being an Irishman, he began scattering the crowfeet about from the gate towards the enemy, and, of course, had to walk over them on his return, which detained him so long that he was nearly taken prisoner.

The photograph above from Britain’s National Army Museum shows a crow’s foot or caltrop from the seventeenth century. They were developed to stop cavalry charges as well as slow down infantry. Minuteman Treasures shows another type.

I don’t think any American source describes Continental soldiers trying to capture Lt. Adair, so I suspect that part of Hunter’s story is jocular exaggeration. After all, what’s an ethnic joke without wild exaggeration?