The “Too Obscene” Verses of “Yankee Doodle”

Earlier this spring, while searching for uses of the phrase “King Hancock,” I skimmed a 1909 report from the Library of Congress. Oscar George Theodore Sonneck analyzed the histories of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” “America,” and “Yankee Doodle” for the U.S. government.

On the last song, Sonneck quoted a British broadside from the late 1770s headlined “Yankee Doodle, or (as now christened by the Saints of New England) The Lexington March.” He reprinted six of the verses and added, “Stanzas sixth and seventh are too obscene for quotation.”

Well!

As a public service (albeit one already performed by other, more recent books and websites), Boston 1775 presents the verses that a century ago were too obscene for government work:

Seth’s mother went to Lynn
To buy a pair of breeches,
The first time father put them on
He tore out all the stitches;
Dolly Bushel let a fart,
Jenny Jones she found it,
Ambrose carried it to mill
Where Doctor Warren ground it.

Our Jemina’s lost her mare
And can’t tell where to find her,
But she’ll come trotting by and by
And bring her tail behind her.
Two and two may go to bed,
Two and two together,
And if there is not room enough,
Lie one a top o’ t’other.

The name “Doctor Warren” offers a whiff of contemporary political significance to the first verse, but the second appears to be just general naughtiness. Still, we value a complete historical record.

Crankee Doodle Rides in with Electric Ben

This month brings the publication of Crankee Doodle, a new picture book by Tom Angleberger (who found fame with the Origami Yoda series) and Cece Bell (Rabbit and Robot and more). They also happen to be husband and wife.

In this book Crankee Doodle is reluctant to go to town, much less to wear a feather in his cap. His pony has all the bright ideas. Not since Kermit the Frog and Don Music has the old song been deconstructed so thoroughly.

There’s also a historical note on the “Yankee Doodle” song, and I’m pleased to say that Boston 1775 supplied some of the research material for that.

In other children’s-book news, the winner of this year’s Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for excellence in nonfiction for young readers is the picture book Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, written and illustrated by Robert Byrd. The Horn Book’s review says:

Byrd divides Franklin’s life into seventeen often whimsically labeled double-page spreads, beginning with his childhood and ending with his death. Two such spreads (“Coaxing Sparks from the Sky” and “The Wonderful Effects of Points”) deal with his fascination with electricity, with the remainder covering topics ranging from his ideas for social progress (such as a lending library and fire department) to his diplomatic roles before, during, and after the American Revolution.

About that fire department, Electric Ben says: “Franklin…formed a volunteer fire brigade. It became the nation’s first full-time firefighting force.” Franklin did indeed propose the first firefighting society for Philadelphia in the 1730s. However, he modeled that organization after a tradition in Boston that had started in 1678. And Philadelphia didn’t establish a full-time firefighting department until 1870.

But such is Franklin’s reputation for innovation, and such is the power of celebrity, that some sources cite him as the father of American firefighting.

Two Events Down, Two to Go

This morning I’m at my third historical event in four days, and each has been in a different city.

The first was my Friday talk on Capt. Thomas Kempton’s powder horn at the Society of the Cincinnati’s Anderson House museum in Washington, D.C. While there I also took advantage of their library to do some reading on Henry Knox and William (“Lord Stirling”) Alexander.

On Saturday, I traveled to Philadelphia and caught the end of the “American Revolution Reborn” conference, which took place at the American Philosophical Society. I may have more to say about that event, but for now you can sample it through Eventifier.

Now I’m listening to the opening remarks at the 2013 Mass History Conference at Holy Cross College in Worcester. In the early afternoon I’ll be on a panel titled “Working with Revered Figures: Having Your Myth and Busting It, Too,” with Jayne Gordon of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Nina Zannieri of the Paul Revere House.

The keynote speaker at this event is Ray Raphael, who will also give a free talk tomorrow at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston (and I plan to be there, too). Ray’s lecture will be titled “What ‘The Federalist Papers’ Are Not”:

When and why did The Federalist become The Federalist Papers? What role did the essays play in the ratification debates? Can Publius be considered an authoritative source for interpreting specific sections of the Constitution—or for discovering its inner meaning?

Come on by! I’ll be the person in the audience trying to figure out which city I’m in.

Jupiter Hammon’s “Essay on Slavery”

In the Yale Alumni Magazine, Prof. Cedrick May of the University of Texas’s English Department reported on how his research team identified a previously unpublished poem by Jupiter Hammon (1711-before 1806) of New York. Hammon was enslaved to the Lloyd family of Long Island, who had a few relatives in Boston.

Here’s an image of the first page of the manuscript, and a transcript of the whole poem, which begins:

An essay on Slavery, with justification to Divine
providence, that God Rules over all things
Written by Jupiter Hammon

1
Our forefathers came from Africa
Tost over the raging main
To a Christian shore there for to stay
And not return again.

2
Dark and dismal was the Day
When slavery began
All humble thoughts were put away
Then slaves were made by Man.

3
When God doth please for to permit
That slavery should be
It is our duty to submit
Till Christ shall make us free

I can’t help hearing those lines sung as a hymn.

Prof. May explains the finding this way:

In the fall of 2011, I gave my graduate students the assignment of acquiring scanned images of Hammon’s writings from libraries and archives I knew to hold copies of his works. A librarian at the New York Public Library helpfully pointed one student toward a Yale Libraries finding aid for the Hillhouse Family Papers, which listed a poem by Jupiter Hammon. A Yale librarian e-mailed the title of the poem to us, and when I saw it was called “An Essay on Slavery,” I realized it might be a new discovery. I purchased a scanned image of the poem, and when it arrived I knew right away I was looking at a never-before-known poem by Jupiter Hammon.

Of course, this “never-before-known poem” was known to the New York librarian who guided Prof. May and his student, and before that to the archivist at Yale’s Manuscripts & Archives Department who had created the finding aid listing it. [Full disclosure: I worked in that department in 1984, in a much less important capacity.]

I’m not convinced by May’s analysis of this poem and how it fits into Hammon’s work:

We know from his writings that his masters raised and educated him under devout Calvinist principles that advocated the compatibility of slavery with Christianity. (His masters later became connected by marriage to the Hillhouse family of New Haven, which is how the poem ended up at Yale.) In his previous publications, Hammon suggests a predestinarian belief that since slavery existed, it had to be part of God’s will, and therefore slaves were bound to obey their masters. But “An Essay on Slavery,” written in 1786, declares unambiguously that slavery is a manmade sin, not the will of God, and then proceeds to celebrate the eventual end of the institution of human bondage. . . . Clearly, Hammon has changed his mind about the theological soundness of slavery’s compatibility with Christianity.

But Hammon’s third verse above precisely repeats the “predestinarian belief” that May describes. The verses describe an end of slavery in the next world, it seems to me, or after the Second Coming. Hammon was still echoing the argument that slaveowners used to convince their human property to obey them for life. Was adding a promise of future supernatural liberation really a change?

Stuart on Defiant Brides in Worcester, 6 June

Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married is a new book by Nancy Rubin Stuart, who previously wrote a biography of Mercy Warren.

The defiant brides of the title are Lucy Flucker and Peggy Shippen, both heiresses from Loyalist families who married striving men on the Patriot side of the Revolution.

Or rather, Lucy Flucker’s husband, Henry Knox, became a firm Whig when the war broke out. As I’ve written in the past, the evidence of his political activity before 1775 is sparse, and I suspect her family thought they might be able to bring Henry around to becoming a friend of the royal government.

But by May 1775 Henry and Lucy Knox had slipped out of besieged Boston, he was soon working with the provincial army, and by the end of the year he commanded the Continental artillery. Lucy Knox never saw her Loyalist relatives again, though she did inherit a substantial amount of land from them—the basis of the Knoxes’ postwar life in Maine.

As for Peggy Shippen, in 1779 she married a man who seemed passionately committed to American independence: Benedict Arnold, Continental general in charge of Philadelphia. Like Knox, he had started his career as a boy in precarious circumstances, unable to rely on his father, and worked his way up in business. Like Knox, he was one of the subordinates Gen. George Washington felt he could always rely on.

But in 1780 Arnold arranged to switch sides and surrender the West Point fortress on the Hudson. Peggy helped her husband escape to the British lines by distracting Gen. Washington with hysterics—whether sincere or feigned we’ll never know. The couple eventually moved to England. Peggy Arnold received a pension from the Crown and lived long enough that historians calculate she earned more from the British government than her husband did.

Booklist’s reviewer wrote about Defiant Brides:

With the seemingly endless parade of books devoted to both founding fathers and revolutionary rascals, it’s nice to see some attention paid to the fervor with which some remarkable women navigated the romantic, political, and wartime challenges of the era.

In its review, Kirkus Reviews said:

Flucker’s correspondence with Henry shows a loving couple who longed for each other when separated—though it’s not terribly enticing reading. Nor are the tales of their extravagances and scrambles for means.

But there have been very few studies of Lucy Knox and her choices, so any attention is new. Plus, social climbing and hanging on were a big part of these couples’ stories.

Stuart will speak at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester on Thursday, 6 June, at 7:00 P.M. This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Kempton Called Back to Service

Walter Spooner (1723-1803) was a representative to the Massachusetts General Court from the town of Dartmouth, which contained what’s become New Bedford. On 24 Jan 1776 Spooner wrote from Watertown, where the legislature was meeting, to Capt. Thomas Kempton of Dartmouth:

Sir—

It is with pleasure that I have it in my power to informe you that you are appointed a Lieut Colo. of a Regiment of Men to be raised as temporary reenforcement of men to continue for the Space of two months or until the first day of April next (if needed so long.) Jacob French is appointed Chief Colo. 50 men are to be raised in the County of Bristol, the other part are raised in the County of Cumberland, the Majr of F’[s] Regiment is appointed in the County & the Adjitent also, the other officers time would fail me to give you a perticuler account off.

Esqr. Baylies is appointed by the Court to come into the Town of Dartmouth in order to raise men. He will furnish you with more particular accompts. I also expect to be at home this weak and shall be glad to see you before I return again. Tho this appointment may be unexpected, yet I hope it will not be disagreeable. I wish your conduct may anser the expectations of your friends, for in your appointment I have taken no small part.

I with truth subscribe my Selfe

Your Friend,
W. Spooner.

Kempton had just finished eight months of service as a captain at the siege of Boston. He hadn’t reenlisted in the Continental Army at the end of 1775. But Gen. George Washington had asked the New England colonies to raise some militia regiments for a short period—two months in this case—to augment his depleted Continental forces. So the General Court gave Kempton a promotion from captain to lieutenant colonel and told him to report again.

Yesterday I quoted how Kempton’s grandson understood the way his Revolutionary War service started, as opposed to the slightly different story that documents from the time suggest. When Daniel Ricketson wrote his 1858 History of New Bedford, Kempton’s son told him that his father had “left service at the evacuation of Boston by the British troops” because of “a failure of health.” In fact, Lt. Col. Kempton’s term was up in April 1776.

It’s possible that health concerns played a role in Thomas Kempton’s decision not to reenlist in the Continental Army at the end of 1775 and later, though he was only in his mid-thirties and lived another thirty years. It’s also possible that Kempton had other reasons: a feeling that he’d done his part, pressure to be home with his family, better opportuntities in privateering (he had been a whaling captain years before) or civil government. But he did serve again in early 1776. When he died in New Bedford in 1806, the Columbian Centinel newspaper called him “Col. THOMAS KEMPTON, an aged and respectable inhabitant of that town.”

Today at 12:30 I’ll speak at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., about one of Thomas Kempton’s souvenirs of his military service in 1775: an engraved powderhorn now owned by that museum.

Capt. Kempton Answers the Call

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll speak at the Anderson House museum of the Society of the Cincinnati about this powder horn, inscribed with the name of Capt. Thomas Kempton.

In 1775 Kempton commanded a company raised mostly in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. His part of that town became New Bedford in 1787, and his family remained there for at least two generations.

Leonard Bolles Ellis’s History of New Bedford (1892) drew on that family’s documents about their Revolutionary forebear, and on their lore:

“I well remember,” says John K. Cushing, grandson of the commander, Capt. Kempton, “hearing my mother tell the story as she heard it from my grandfather’s lips, how, when the news arrived in town, he was at work upon his new house, situated on what is now Thomas street. He was at work on the outside of the building when the alarm was brought to him (and it must have been conveyed to him by the swift rider) as the chief military man of the village. ‘You must take care of everything now, for I am going to camp at Roxbury,’ he said to his family, as he hastened away to muster his company of minute men. One of the neighbors took grandfather’s horse, and away he went carrying the startling news into Rhode Island.”

This is an example of what I call a “grandmother’s tale,” passed down to a child who then grows up with it as one of the bases of his understanding national history. The story presents Thomas Kempton as immediately answering the call of duty.

In fact, Ellis’s book also quotes a pay roll of “the minute company which marched from Dartmouth April 21, 1775,” commanded by Capt. Kempton. That was two days after news of the shooting at Lexington had started to spread. And it makes sense for Kempton to have taken a day to gather his men and ensure they were well equipped.

But any intervening time, enabling more humdrum preparation for the call of duty, got shaved off when Kempton’s daughter told her son about the alarm and he later told Ellis. The essence of the story remained valid: the captain left his family, quite possibly with an unfinished house, in order to take part in the first campaign of the Revolutionary War. But the details became just a little more dramatic and heroic.

TOMORROW: Capt. Kempton called back to service.

Lucia Stanton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Granger

Common-place shares an interview with Lucia Stanton, a self-effacing historian at Monticello, on the publication of her collection Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

As “Cinder” Stanton describes her career, she started out helping to annotate Thomas Jefferson’s detailed account books and was pulled into writing about the man’s many enslaved workers:

As we developed the content of the new outdoor tour, we tried to prevent his voice from drowning out the voices of the almost four hundred men, women, and children who lived in slavery on the 5,000-acre Monticello plantation during his lifetime. His nearly 20,000 surviving letters swamp their baker’s dozen.

Furthermore, in his writings Jefferson inflated his own agency, sometimes with the breezy use of the personal pronoun (“I work myself upwards of 100 spindles,” he said in connection with his textile shop). And the accounts of Monticello visitors obscured the enslaved with the passive voice (“toddy was brought” and “fires were lighted”). Jefferson’s Farm Book and letters provide names, ages, locations, and occupations but are virtually silent on emotions, values, and even talents, since most of the references to enslaved people deal with negative events like unsatisfactory work, punishment, illness, or death. The slaves’ labor, not their lives, is invariably the issue. The human dimension is almost entirely missing from the Jefferson archive. . . .

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty. Although he never wrote any kind of tribute to George Granger, phrases such as “George says” or “George knows” or “concluded with George to” help to reveal the remarkable knowledge and character of the only enslaved man to serve him as overseer. Fragmentary references assembled in chronological order bring a towering figure out of the mist, as well as the contours of a story of life at Monticello that George Granger himself might have told.

The casual remark of Jefferson’s son-in-law that tobacco was Granger’s “favorite crop” evokes a man anxiously scanning the western sky for portents of the rain needed for transplanting or stretching a tobacco leaf over his knuckles to determine if the crop was ready for stripping. In Jefferson’s request for seed of the Canada lily that “George found for me in the woods” we can see a man walking the slopes of Monticello with an observant eye and an appreciation of the natural world.

Late in life, Granger was given the challenging twin commissions of making a productive crop for his master and disciplining his own community and family members. Entries in several different records show that on the first day of November 1799, Jefferson consulted his overseer about the expected cider yield of a bushel of apples, and on the second day Granger was dead at the age of sixty-nine.

Stanton’s primary purpose in such research wasn’t publication, like many academic historians, but helping to improve how the staff of Monticello interpreted the site to the public:

All the visitors came armed with preconceptions. Many white people wanted to hear that Jefferson was a “good master” who would have freed his slaves if he could have. Some black visitors viewed slavery through a lens dominated by whips and rape. Many of both races said they would have run away or rebelled if they had been a slave.

And the same story could elicit totally different interpretations. When a guide spoke of the garden plots where Monticello’s enslaved families raised an assortment of produce, some saw them as a sign of a kind and indulgent Jefferson allowing his slaves the time and place to supplement their diet. To others they reflected his severity in depriving them of enough food to sustain health.

Both missed the point by seeing the situation in terms of Jefferson rather than of the enslaved people themselves. Over centuries, slaves throughout the South struggled to maintain one of their few customary rights, the right to cultivate their “own” garden plots in their “own” time. These provided not just a better diet but access to money, for Monticello’s families sold their surplus produce to the Jefferson household and elsewhere. Without minimizing the harshness of the institution of slavery, we wanted to tell a story not just of oppression, but of creative responses to oppression.

For her book, Stanton collected her major behind-the-scenes essays on slavery at Monticello over the years rather than rewriting them into a single study. Those Who Labor for My Happiness thus preserves the site’s shifting interpretations as Stanton and her colleagues brought forward new evidence or looked at older evidence from a new angle.

“1763 and the Americas” Events in Boston & Providence, 6-8 June

A slew of organizations is co-sponsoring a public symposium on “1763 and the Americas” over two days in two cities next month. That event commemorates and examines the end of the Seven Years’ War 250 years ago and considers how it laid the groundwork for profound change in North America.

As an appetizer for the main event, on Thursday, 6 June, the John Carter Brown Library in Providence will host a book talk by Jack Greene, author of Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Then comes the symposium. The first session is on the afternoon of Friday, 7 June, in Boston’s Faneuil Hall:

• 2:00-3:45 “New England in the Age of Global War, 1739-63,” with William Pencak (Dept. of History, Penn State University), Sandy Balcom (Parks Canada, Fortess of Louisbourg National Historic Site), and Eliga Gould (Dept. of History, University of New Hampshire), chair
• 4:00-5:30 “The Seven Years War and the Coming of the Revolution,” with Fred Anderson (University of Colorado, Boulder), Pauline Maier (Dept. of History, MIT), Jack P. Greene (emeritus, Dept. of History, Johns Hopkins University, and author of the new book Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain), and Paul Mapp (Dept. of History, College of William and Mary), chair

The next day, 8 June, the action moves to the MacMillan Reading Room at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence:

• 10:00 A.M.-noon “Nos amis les ennemis: intercolonial relations before, during, and after the mid-century wars,” with Bertie Mandelblatt (Dept. of History, New College, University of Toronto), Thomas Truxes (Dept. of History, NYU), Sandy Balcom (Parks Canada, Fortess of Louisbourg National Historic Site), Charles-Phillipe Courtois (Dept. of History, Royal Military College of Saint-Jean), Matt Schumann (Dept. of History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University), and Fred Anderson (University of Colorado, Boulder), chair.
• Noon-2:00 P.M. Break for lunch!
• 2:00-3:30 P.M. Roundtable discussion: Looking Back, Looking Forward. The past, present, and future of North America’s political geography through the lens of 1763, with symposium speakers and chairs.

Both parts of this symposium are free and open to the public. It has been organized by the 1763 Peace of Paris Commemoration and supported by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the John Carter Brown Library, the Lowell Institute, Norman B. Leventhal and Mapping Boston, the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, the Canadian Consulate General Boston, and the Mouvement nationale des Québécoises et Québécois.

Lloyd on Ordinary Bostonians, 1700-1850, on 30 May

On Thursday, 30 May, Boston’s Vilna Shul hosts an event co-sponsored with the Beacon Hill Scholars: scholar Joanne Lloyd inviting folks to “Meet the ‘Ordinary People’ of Early Boston.”

The event’s description says:

Join us as Joanne Lloyd, Ph.D., discusses her book Beneath the City on the Hill. Like the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers and the well known writers and intellectuals who garnered early-19th-century Boston the honorific “Athens in America,” the ordinary people; the sailors, fiddlers, Irish servants, African slaves, brothel workers and liquor sellers had a hand in the making of colonial and early republic Boston. Yet we know little about them. Dr. Lloyd’s book tells the stories of these people that have been left out of many of our history books.

I went looking for the book, and it appears to be Lloyd’s doctoral dissertation from Boston College, written in 2007. Lloyd’s description of that work offers more detail about her approach and scope:

Few American cities have garnered the scholarly attention that colonial and early republic Boston has. Narratives of Puritan fathers and their “goodwives” and of “Founding Fathers” and “Founding Mothers” line the shelves of our libraries and book stores, but an aspect of Boston’s past has been long missing. More than anything else, in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Boston was a maritime town. Its connection to the Atlantic world made Boston a city different than the proverbial “City on the Hill” that we tend to imagine.

Indeed, there were two Bostons. With great humility I borrow the concept from Charles Dickens and suggest that this narrative tells a tale of two cities. We know much about the “City on the Hill” and practically nothing about those who lived beneath it. Colonial widows who sold liquor in waterfront taverns, young single women who worked in brothels, women who ran low boardinghouses, black men who played fiddles in early republic Boston’s many dance cellars, and black mariners who sailed aboard Boston ships bound for China: these are the men and women who stand at the heart of this study.

Two laws serve as approximate bookends. Promulgated in 1705, the first 1aw banned interracial sex and outlawed interracial marriage. Passed in 1843, the second law repealed the first. During the 150 years between these two laws, the lives of plebian white and black Bostonians intertwined and intersected in social, economic, and intimate ways that have been obscured by narratives that portray colonial and early republic Boston as a culturally homogeneous town, by nineteenth-century narratives that erased the black presence or filtered out the white presence, and by modern narratives that focus on racial alienation. Consequently, Boston’s historiography is racially segregated. There is a white narrative and a black narrative. Interweaving the two, the present study describes the making and the remaking of “the lower orders” and illuminates men and women whose lives have been obscured by the long shadow cast by the “City on the Hill.”

Thus, the Revolution stands in the center of the period Lloyd covers. Aside from inspiring the end of slavery in Massachusetts, what impact did that political change at the top have on Boston’s poorer working people?

Lloyd’s talk is scheduled to begin at 6:00 P.M. The Vilna Shul is at 18 Phillips Street in Boston. The event is free, but the site asks people to register by email.

“Foodways in the Northeast” in Deerfield, 21-23 June

On 21-23 June, Historic Deerfield will host the 38th annual Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. This year’s topic is food. In more detail:

“Foodways in the Northeast II: A Second Helping” is a three-day conference of seventeen lectures, a supporting workshop, and demonstrations on the subject of New England’s culinary history from 1600 to the present. The program complements and expands on scholarly developments presented at a previous Seminar held thirty-one years ago in Deerfield in 1982.

Beginning Friday evening with the keynote speaker, John Forti of Strawbery Banke Museum, the conference will address colonial-period foodways; the foodways of schools, politics, and culinary revivals; diet and religious foods; nineteenth-century farm management; and foodways in the twentieth century. The conference will end on Sunday with a panel discussion on the renaissance in New England of artisan and slow foods, followed by comments from Caroline F. Sloat, a speaker at the 1982 Seminar.

The Seminar is designed for educators, historians, culinarians, collectors, authors, librarians, and museum curators; students and the general public are cordially invited to attend.

More detail, including the lineup of planned papers and activities, can be found in this download of the registration form. Registration is $155 for all three days, with discounts for full-time students and Dublin Seminar members and extras for additional events.

Here’s the contents list of the 1982 Foodways volume. I particularly remember Daphne Derven’s “Wholesome, Toothsome, and Diverse: Eighteenth-Century Foodways in Deerfield, Massachusetts,” which analyzed account books from the town and discovered seasonal cycles for slaughtering and consuming different types of meat before refrigeration. That gave me a new way of looking at what I ate.

Treaty of Paris Celebrates Its 250th Birthday in Boston

Today the Bostonian Society opens an exclusive new exhibition: “1763: A Revolutionary Peace.” This year marks the sestercentennial—that’s the 250th anniversary—of the end of the Seven Years’ (French & Indian) War.

To observe the occasion, the British government has loaned its original copy of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, signed by representatives of Britain, France, and Spain, which has never been in North America before.

The exhibit announcement explains how profoundly important this treaty was for the people on this continent:

The Paris treaty of 1763 literally redrew the map of North America, giving Britain all lands east of the Mississippi River, including Spanish Florida. Lands west of the Mississippi (and New Orleans) remained French, but because France had secretly transferred those claims to its ally Spain, the treaty effectively ended France’s presence on the continent’s mainland.

Britain had won the war, but now faced complex challenges in integrating new territories, peoples (including Native nations and French inhabitants), and governments into the new order. Even as the Treaty of Paris promised the start of a new era of peace and prosperity, it also sowed seeds of discontent from which a new crisis in the British Empire would soon grow.

(In fact, this Treaty of Paris was so unsuccessful at keeping the peace in North America that it appears to be completely overshadowed online by the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended America’s War for Independence. When I went looking for web images of the 1763 treaty, I kept finding documents and proclamations from 1783 that had been mislabeled. It took me about fifteen minutes before I stumbled on the image above in a blog about the Kennedy administration. And odds are that’s a different copy.)

The exhibit at Boston’s Old State House museum has been curated by Donald C. Carleton, Jr., director of the 1763 Peace of Paris Commemoration. In addition to the treaty, the display includes weapons and artifacts from the Seven Years’ War, medals marking peace between the Crown and First Nations formerly allied with France, and a Native American wampum treaty belt. It will be on view through 7 Oct 2013. And this is the treaty’s only North American appearance, perhaps for another 250 years.

COMING UP: A two-day, two-city symposium about the 1763 Treaty of Paris.

Tooting the Horn for Two Talks

In the next three weeks I’ll give two talks in two different cities about two different powder horns from the siege of Boston.

On Friday, 31 May, I’ll speak at Anderson House, the museum of the Society of the Cincinnati, in Washington, D.C. The topic will be “Thomas Kempton’s Engraved Powder Horn.” One of the curiosities of this horn is that it was first labeled as engraved by Capt. Kempton, and then that line was changed to for Capt. Kempton. What were Kempton and the carver trying to say? And what other stories does that object tell us about the siege of 1775-76?

That talk is part of a program that Anderson House calls “Lunch Bites,” designed for people to enjoy on their lunch break or while sightseeing in the capital. The session starts at 12:30 P.M. I’ll speak for no more than half an hour, leaving time for questions and looking at the horn itself. That talk and the museum are free and open to the public.

Back in Boston, on Friday, 14 June, I’ll speak at the Massachusetts Historical Society about “Ephraim Moors’s Powder Horn” (shown above). This talk is connected to the society’s exhibit called “The Object in History,” featuring some of the treasures and curiosities in its collection, including “Portraits, needlework, firearms, clothing, furniture, silver, scientific instruments, documents, and books.”

I spoke about the Moors powder horn at the Concord Museum last year, but since then I’ve learned more and have developed a new theory about its creation. This talk starts at 2:00 P.M., will be about an hour long, and is free to all. The society’s exhibit runs through the first week of September, Monday through Friday, and is also free to all.

A Fort from 1779, a Redcoat from 1799

Here are a couple of eighteenth-century archeology stories from the past month.

The Associated Press reported on a dig in Georgia that located Carr’s Fort, site of a skirmish in February 1779. The article explains:

Robert Carr was a cattle farmer who settled with his wife, children and a single middle-aged female slave in Wilkes County after colonists started arriving there in 1773. Carr also served as captain of a militia company of roughly 100 men. Responsible for leading his militiamen and looking out for their families, Carr built a stockade wall to protect his farmhouse and surrounding property, which included shacks and crude shelters. . . .

In February 1779, about 80 British loyalists marched into Carr's Fort and took control, presumably while Carr and other patriot militiamen were away. Patriots responded quickly by sending 200 men from Georgia and South Carolina to retake the fort.

Dan Elliott’s archeological team found an area that contained old bullets, musket parts, buttons, horseshoes, hinges, and a “coin believed to a King George half-penny from the 1770s.” However, they haven’t found remains of the fort’s walls, and there’s still no evidence of where Carr himself was during the fight over his property.

Across the Atlantic, the B.B.C. reported on a body found in Dutch sand dunes that had been preserved under asphalt for a while before being uncovered again. The artifacts with the body allowed archeologists to connect the remains to a particular British army regiment and expedition:

In August 1799, Britain and Russia launched an invasion of northern Holland in an effort to topple the Batavian Republic and restore the House of Orange. The action formed part of the wars against revolutionary France, which supported the Dutch republic.

The British-Russian armies - including the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards, consisting of some 1,000 soldiers - arrived in Groote Keeten under the Duke of York. About 12,000 British soldiers were landed in total. [Archeologist Esther Poulus explains:] “In the Netherlands, they call it the forgotten war - it didn’t take very long, and was quite local.”

The soldier was buried in his uniform, along with several muskets, which may simply have been thrown in the grave to dispose of them, or may have been fashioned into some kind of makeshift stretcher to carry his body to its resting place.

“When we found the buttons he had worn on his tunic, we thought, ‘Wow - we can identify this soldier.’”

The webpage shows not only those buttons but also some of the bones, as shown above.

“Spectacle of Music” in Newport, 26 May

On Sunday, 26 May, the Newport Historical Society will host “A Spectacle of Music” at the Colony House in Washington Square.

This is a series of varied concerts:

• 1:00 – The Ministers of Apollo present the Orange County Militia Drum and Fife Band (as shown in part to the left), who perform military music of the American Revolution with period instruments in authentic clothing.
• 2:00 – Mother Earth Singers: Traditional Native American drum and singing courtesy of the Dighton Intertribal Council.
• 3:00 – Singer Gerard Edery and violinist Meg Okura perform “Treasures of Sephardic Song,” tracing the surprising and exotic musical synergies between Christians, Arabs, and Jews from Medieval Spain to the present.
• 4:00 – Stuart Frank and Mary Malloy share eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballads and songs in a concert based on Rhode Island whalemen’s journals. Dr. Frank is Senior Curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

These performances thus represent the different cultures and professions that made up eighteenth-century Newport. The concert is the first “Spectacle of Toleration” event for the year.

The concert is free, though the historical society naturally welcomes donations.

Maps of the 1700s at the Boston Public Library

The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library is hosting an exhibit titled “Charting an Empire: The Atlantic Neptune” in two parts this year. As the exhibit explains:

The period following the French and Indian War (1754-1763) was a time of change and discovery in North America. In this display of charts, views, and maritime objects, we look at the decade following the war, when Britain set out to accurately chart the coast and survey the inland areas of their new resource-rich empire in Atlantic Canada, as well as the eastern seaboard extending from New England to the West Indies. The resulting charts were published collectively by Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres in The Atlantic Neptune, a maritime atlas which set the standard for nautical charting for nearly half a century.

Through 28 July, the map center will exhibit Des Barres’s maps and charts of Atlantic Canada. From August through 3 November it will exhibit the pages on the eastern seaboard of what became the U.S. of A.

Connected to that exhibit, this evening, 21 May, at 5:30 P.M., the map center hosts a lecture on “Mapping the Revolutionary War in Virginia” by William Wooldridge. This event was organized by the Boston Map Society and takes place in the library’s Glass Orientation Room. Wooldridge will also sign copies of his book Mapping Virginia, from the Age of Exploration to the Civil War. The library asks people to reserve a seat by emailing maps@bpl.org.

If that’s not enough maps, Historic Newton is hosting an exhibit called “Mapping a New Town: 1714-1874” at its Jackson Homestead and Museum. For more information, visit Historic Newton.

James Hall, American Soldier

Yesterday I shared the first half of an essay by Dan Lacroix about stories told in Westford and Cavendish, Vermont, about a man named James Hall, said to have deserted from the British column on 19 Apr 1775 after being hit by a provincial musket ball and playing dead.

How reliable are those accounts? For example, did Sgt. Hall really try to shoot “Minuteman Wright of Westford” at Concord’s North Bridge? Did John Gray of Westford really steal his “military cap with its ostrich feathers”? And what might those details say about the underlying story, that James Hall wasn’t one of the British dead interred in Concord? Here’s more of Dan’s report:

Prior to Henry B. Atherton’s 1875 newspaper stories, the only Westford men reported to have been at the North Bridge at the time of the skirmish were Lt. Col. John Robinson, Sgt. Joshua Parker, the Rev. Joseph Thaxter, and Oliver Hildreth. The earliest any of the eight documented Wright men who served that day is said to have arrived at the bridge is as the skirmish was ending.

Moreover, even the Lowell Daily Courier article questions the existence of John Gray, a man who continues to elude proper documentation. It’s likely that Atherton gained his knowledge of Westford’s eighteenth-century residents by listening to the stories told by the descendents of the dozens of Westford veterans who emigrated to the Cavendish/Ludlow region of Vermont after the war. But was that oral history reliable?

Further details of James Hall’s life in America after 1775 are supported by vital records, as well as a family document found in a carton of the personal papers belonging to his grandson James Ashton [Under-Lyne] Hall (1816-1845) many years after his premature death. In this more straightforward telling of the story we find that following the grazing of his shoulder James Hall deserted when he found it “convenient.” He then returned to Westford with John Hildreth and spent the next year working for him and his brother Ephraim Hildreth, 3rd. For a time he moved to neighboring Chelmsford and took up the blacksmithing trade with Phineas Chamberlain (1745-1813), whose house still stands today (shown above and in this report).

By 1779 James had grown so fond of his adopted country and its ambitions for independence that he took up the call for nine months’ service in the Continental Army. His time was spent in the Hudson Highlands at West Point with Col. Michael Jackson’s 8th Massachusetts Regiment, part of it during the “winter of the deep snow.” For this service he later received a pension.

One of the many transcribed period documents in Wilson Waters’s History of Chelmsford provides a further example of James Hall’s support for the cause: we find him listed in 1781 along with Chamberlain, his blacksmith mentor, and a class of men who provided financial incentive for another man’s service in the army.

Soon after, the lure of freshly established communities in Vermont drew James and his blacksmithing trade to Cavendish with other Westford veterans. He returned in January of 1784 to marry Thankful Hildreth, and brought her back to Cavendish that same winter. During the 1790s they returned to Massachusetts, residing in Acton and Westford, before settling one final time in Vermont shortly before the turn of the century. In 1822, while living with his son James Whoral Hall in Reading, Vermont, this veteran died at the age of 69.

Like so many of his fellow revolutionary soldiers, James Hall’s weather-worn memorial stone proudly establishes him as “A Soldier of the Revolution.” Not surprisingly, there is no mention of his service to the King, though it very prominently declares his Lancashire birth, as well as the fact that he “Emigrated” from mother England in 1774.

So was Pvt. James Hall of the 4th Regiment one of the three British soldiers killed in the fire at the North Bridge and buried in Concord? Or did his comrades simply think that he was killed, allowing him to take up a new life as a New Englander? If James Hall wasn’t buried in Concord, who was? Or were there two James Halls in the British column, one who died and one who deserted? Very interesting questions. Thanks, Dan!

James Hall, “a British soldier”

Today I’m pleased to share with you the first half of an essay by Dan Lacroix. As a historical researcher, Dan has worked for years with the Westford Museum & Historical Society. As a reenactor with the Westford Colonial Minutemen, he also has a specialty in eighteenth-century house joinery (carpentry). And a while back Dan clued me in on a fascinating mystery from New England’s Revolution, so I asked him to write up some of his findings as a guest blogger.

About eight years ago my research into the lives of Westford’s Revolutionary War soldiers took an unexpected turn. A short passage in Edwin Hodgman’s 1883 History of Westford describes a past resident by the name of James Hall as “a British soldier, born at Ashton-under-line [Lyne], England, who during the retreat of the Regulars from Concord, April 19, 1775, voluntarily surrendered to the Provincials and came to Westford and worked for Ephraim Hildreth, 3rd, whose daughter he married in 1784.”

An interesting story in itself, but wasn’t James Hall also the name of one of the British soldiers from the 4th (King’s Own) Regiment killed at the North Bridge? The precise identities of those three soldiers have been debated for years, and I won’t be delving into that debate here. Though it may not be possible to conclusively prove that two men named James Hall are one in the same, there is considerable evidence supporting the core facts within some engaging nineteenth-century family stories.

One of Hodgman’s sources might have been an article in the Boston Journal from 26 Apr 1875, which was repeated with annotations two weeks later in the Lowell Daily Courier. Written by an accomplished lawyer and Civil War veteran, Capt. Henry B. Atherton (1835-1906, shown above), the article was based on family stories and traditions from his home town of Cavendish, Vermont, where James Hall, born 29 Sept 1753, ultimately settled and established his family.

From Atherton we learn that at about the age of twenty James “awoke with the fatal shilling of the recruiting sergeant in his pocket,” and then was “engaged with the rest of his regiment in laying roads in Scotland.” A six-week passage (with two of them becalmed off of Newfoundland) brought him to Boston Common with his regiment in 1774.

In true Centennial-era detail we learn of his experiences on April 19th of the following year:

At Concord, he was among those stationed at the bridge. As they were about to begin the retreat, Minuteman Wright of Westford called to them “Boys, don’t pull up the planks!” whereupon Hall took deliberate aim at Wright and shot, but failed to hit him.

And further,

On the retreat through Lincoln Woods, a shot from one of the Minutemen grazed his shoulder, and worn out with fatigue, he threw himself on the ground, his comrades exclaiming, “There goes Sergeant Hall; he is dead!”

After they passed, he rose and returned to the Wright Tavern in Concord. There he suffered no indignity, except that John Gray of Westford pulled off his military cap with its ostrich feathers, which he retained and subsequently gave to his daughters.

The colorful nature of the story aside, certain details immediately raise some questions.

TOMORROW: Details and discrepancies in the legend of James Hall.

“Near this site was buried a British soldier”

Yesterday’s posting included a recent photograph of the monument marking the grave of two British soldiers who died in the skirmish at the North Bridge in Concord. That tablet, with lines by the poet James Russell Lowell, has been on the site for decades.

In recent years, as D. Michael Ryan’s article from 2000 describes, Concord installed a stone marker on the site linked to a third soldier said to be fatally wounded in that fight. Concord chronicler Lemuel Shattuck had described his burial according to the landmarks of his time, and local research in real estate records relocated the approximate spot.

Ryan’s article states that the names of the three British soldiers buried in those places are Thomas Smith, Patrick Gray, and James Hall. Minute Man National Historical Park, Wikipedia, and the Silver Whistle site that supplied the photo above say the same.

How did Ryan and other historians arrive at those three names? They looked at the muster rolls for the company of His Majesty’s 4th Regiment known to be at the North Bridge. They counted which men were listed as killed or missing after the Concord march. Three names of three privates—three bodies—case solved!

But a few years ago Dan Lacroix of Westford shared some research that convinced me that neither of those graves probably contains the remains of Pvt. James Hall of the 4th. You’ll see some of that research tomorrow. Dan is more careful about that conclusion than I am; for one thing, the name “James Hall” was common enough that it’s hard to rule out the possibility of two men with that name, a lucky confluence like Hezekiah Wyman. But see what you think. Is James Hall buried in Concord?

TOMORROW: Or, would you believe, Vermont?

“They came three thousand miles and died”

So how many British soldiers died at the North Bridge in Concord? How many were buried nearby? Those questions have answers, but not definite ones.

As I quoted earlier in the week, one of the British officers there, Lt. William Sutherland, described leaving two men “dead on the Spot.” But Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie reported losing three men overall. And Capt. Lawrence Parsons reportedly saw three men dead at the bridge as he later passed that spot—or was that count influenced by Laurie’s report?

When Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis, Jr., described burying corpses of the regulars who died at the bridge, they said “neither” had been scalped, suggesting there were two. But their testimony was probably selective. Had another corpse already been moved away?

In 1827, Concord minister Ezra Ripley wrote that in the firing at the North Bridge “Two of the British were killed and several wounded,” with the dead still lying “near the bridge” when their comrades returned from Col. James Barrett’s. Furthermore:

The two British soldiers killed at the bridge were buried near the spot where they fell, both in one grave. Two rough stones mark the spot were they were laid. Their names were unknown. Several others were buried in the middle of the town.

Ripley wrote nothing about Ammi White and his hatchet.

In his 1835 history of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that “Three British soldiers were killed” at the bridge, but only two were “left on the ground” there and later interred nearby. “One of the wounded died and was buried where Mr. Keyes’s house stood,” Shattuck added. Many later authors have therefore written that two British soldiers were killed immediately at the bridge and another badly wounded, making it back to the center of Concord before dying there.

And who were the “Several others” that Ripley said were interred in central Concord? Shattuck reported that one was Pvt. John Bateman, who died under the care of Dr. John Cuming “at the house then standing near Captain Stacy’s”—Daniel Bliss’s house, according to other authors. (This despite Bateman giving a deposition in Lincoln, not Concord, on 23 Apr 1775.) Bateman “was buried on the hill,” Shattuck wrote.

Don Hagist has reported that Bateman was a grenadier in the 52nd Regiment. The companies at the bridge came from the 4th, 10th, and 43rd. So Bateman must have been fatally wounded in the British withdrawal from Concord, not at the bridge. (It’s notable that some founding settlers of Concord were named Bateman; perhaps people of that town brought him back out of some feeling of kinship.)

According to Shattuck, therefore, there were four British soldiers buried at three sites in Concord soon after 19 Apr 1775. According to Ripley, there might have been “Several others,” but that’s too vague to track down.

TOMORROW: Commemorations and looking for names.