The American Revolution as a Flop and a Model

Last week the Washington Post ran a provocative essay by the Ontario writer and retailer Paul Pirie arguing that the American Revolution was “a flop,” not achieving what the Declaration of Independence set out as its goals—or at least not achieving those goals as well as some other democratic nations today (not least of which is Canada).

Pirie noted that the U.S. of A., despite being founded with the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” today:

• ranks 51st in the world in life expectancy at birth.
• has far more of its population in prison than any other large democracy.
• guarantees fewer benefits and protections for workers, and has a life-satisfaction measure behind Australia and, yes, Canada.

Pirie also points to the gridlock in Washington, a product of the U.S. Constitution’s design for the federal government. (Though I don’t think his example of an “austerity budget” right after a recession is the best example of how government should work, given classical economics. But some rational budget process would be nice.) And he doesn’t even mention the Electoral College.

I agree with Pirie that Americans have a tendency to overlook how many other nations have produced peaceful, prosperous democracies with rights for their citizens and good services for their children even though they aren’t American. Some have even done so while keeping vestiges of monarchy, which the American Revolution threw off. Some have chosen democracy under much harsher economic and geographic circumstances than the U.S.

Over the past century few of of those nations have followed our Constitution’s model. In particular, most have chosen parliamentary systems over our form of separated, overlapping, and often conflicting powers.

But in other important respects those nations have been inspired by the U.S. We Americans may be too wedded to provisions in a Constitution written over two hundred years ago by men who didn’t agree on its meaning then and couldn’t conceive of how we live today, but most nations since 1789 have seen the value of having a written national constitution. Finite terms for elected officeholders, judges empowered to overturn unconstitutional laws, and stated individual rights are other ideas the American republic worked out for the world.

Indeed, the very idea of a large republic of diverse interests was revolutionary. As scholars at the “American Revolution Reborn” conference discussed at length this spring, the American Revolution inspired many others in the following decades, including the French and Haitian revolutions of the late 1700s and the South American revolutions of the early 1800s. The example of the American republic spurred reformers in Britain, and even Canada.

Would, for example, Denmark or South Korea or Costa Rica or even Canada be as democratic as they are today if the U.S. of A. hadn’t been founded as it was in the late eighteenth century? It’s impossible to say one way or the other. History doesn’t allow for controlled experiments of that sort. But if the American Revolution had indeed “flopped,” as Pirie suggested, the world—and even Canada—might look very different today.

Through Colonial Women’s Eyes at Historic Deerfield

Historic Deerfield’s Summer Lecture Series for this year is titled “Through Her Eyes, In Her Words: The Lives and Writings of Three Colonial Women.” It will feature three authors describing the surviving writing of women from colonial New England, one lecture on each of the remaining Thursdays in this month.

11 July: “One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit,” presented by Michelle Marchetti Coughlin. I heard Coughlin speak at the New England Historical Genealogical Society in February. Her book One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit explores what seems to be Coit’s commonplace book, along with other documents. Coit was born in Roxbury in 1673 and moved to Connecticut, where she died in 1758.

18 July: “Writing Her Way to Salvation: the Role of the Pen in the Life of Elizabeth Porter Phelps,” presented by Elizabeth Pendergast Carlisle. Phelps kept a diary and letters over many years in Hadley, providing Carlisle with the material for her 2007 book, Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life at Forty Acres (1747-1817).

25 July: “Re-introducing Phillis Wheatley: A Genius in Bondage,” presented by Vincent Carretta. His recent biography of Wheatley is a fine feat of reconstructing a life both celebrated and shadowed.

Benedict Arnold Sings!

Benedict Arnold was born in January 1741 in Norwich, Connecticut, but there have been times the town wasn’t eager to publicize that fact. The Norwich Bulletin reports that the town will start commemorating that history with a new spirit this fall:

Arnold will be the subject of a new, original musical at the Spirit of Broadway Theater in just a few months. Rarely-seen artifacts from his homestead will be on display at the Leffingwell House Museum. And there’s even a planned Benedict Arnold walking tour built around his old stomping grounds. . . .

The musical, with a working title of “Benedict Arnold,” is being written by Jeffrey Lodin, William Squier and Richard Vetere. It’s set to run from Sept. 11 through Oct. 13, and will be a part of the theater’s schedule for at least the next three years, Bernardini said. It’s [sic] tagline is, “He pledged allegiance…but to who?” . . .

Arnold remains such a lightning rod that Bernardini said many faithful Spirit of Broadway donors have withdrawn funding for the enterprise. It cost about $30,000 to commission the work, and another $100,000 in production costs, he said.

The Spirit of Broadway Theater appears to be dedicated to creating new musicals of all sorts. Watch this webpage for more information about this revolutionary production.

The Declaration of Independence: The Deleted Scenes of Horror

This is a passage from Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that the Continental Congress cut before issuing the document in its collective name. It’s part of the litany of horrible things the Declaration blames on George III:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Jefferson, a little miffed at being edited, made private copies of his draft for friends and posterity. (Those drafts differ slightly one from another, so some transcripts might read a little differently. Note Jefferson’s characteristic omission of capital letters at the start of sentences and possessive “it’s.”)

Sometimes people interpret this passage as a condemnation of slavery, but really it condemns the slave trade: the removal of people from Africa to the Americas. Some colonial legislatures, including Virginia and Massachusetts, had passed laws prohibiting the import of more Africans, and the Crown had vetoed them (i.e., “he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”).

No North American colony had moved to end slavery itself, however. Jefferson, while complaining about the unnatural cruelty of slavery and blaming George III for somehow forcing slavery on him and other colonists, never campaigned to end slaveholding within America.

The Congress deleted this passage for two big reasons: many delegates supported the slave trade, and the complaint didn’t pass the laugh test. Already supporters of the royal government were pointing out how many American shouting for “liberty” were also slaveholders.

The only oblique reference to slavery to survive in the Declaration was the line “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us…”

Faces of the Continental Army

Visit Time magazine’s website for a “Lightbox” feature of thirteen daguerreotypes of veterans of the American Revolution, starting with Boston’s Peter Mackintosh.

These images come from the collection of Joe Bauman, whose books I described here. The article accompanying the images describes how he got into that research:

In 1976, Popular Photography featured the images of The Last Men of the Revolution [1864] in its issue commemorating the United States’ Bicentennial. One reader, a Utah-based journalist named Joe Bauman, was already an avid collector of antique photography when he came across the piece.

“I realized that if these fellows were still alive at the time when glass plate negatives were being made in the 1860s, surely there were plenty who were alive during the daguerreian era,” Bauman told TIME.

Using skills honed by a career of investigative reporting, Bauman sought out other portraits of Revolutionary War veterans. Given the breadth of the War, where most every man from age 15 to 45 was actively involved in one way or another, Bauman could cast a wide net, searching for daguerreotypes of men around the age of 80 or 90 at the time the images were taken.

The print issue of Time dated 8 July 2013 includes a smaller selection of these portraits.

Meanwhile, in New York Harbor

This is the anniversary of a major turning-point in the Revolutionary War. Not because in 1776 the Continental Congress was debating how to publicly declare independence from Britain, as it had voted to do the day before. Rather, on 3 July 1776 the British military returned to the thirteen colonies in force, raising the conflict to a new level.

When Gen. William Howe evacuated Boston in March 1776, all thirteen colonies that had delegates in Philadelphia became basically free of royal control. Patriot leaders knew that situation wouldn’t last, but they enjoyed de facto independence and moved toward formalizing that status.

That spring Gen. Henry Clinton and Comm. Sir Peter Parker commanded a force off the Carolina coasts. In June they tried to take Charleston, South Carolina, the fourth-largest port on the Atlantic coast. In the Battle of Sullivan’s Island on 28 June, American troops fought off that force, but it was relatively small: about 2,200 British soldiers and no more than a dozen ships.

However, the next day a larger British fleet arrived in New York harbor. Gen. Howe had already sailed there from Halifax with most of his 9,000 troops to follow. But on 29 June his older brother, Adm. Richard Howe, arrived from Britain with the largest expeditionary force the Crown had yet assembled: 21,000 soldiers (12,000 British and 9,000 German). Soon Clinton and Parker would join the Howes.

Eventually the British naval force at New York included 73 warships and 300 other ships for transporting soldiers and supplies. But even on the first day the admiral’s fleet was imposing. On 29 June Pvt. Daniel McCurtin of Maryland wrote in his diary:

This morning as I was up stairs in an outhouse I spied, as I peeped out the Bay, something resembling a Wood of pine trees trimed. I declare at my noticing this that I could not believe my eyes, but keeping my eyes fixed at the very spot, judge you of my surprise, when in about 10 minutes, the whole Bay was as full of shipping as ever it could be. I do declare that I thought all London was in afloat.

Just about 5 minutes before I see this sight I got my discharge.

McCurtin headed for home.

On 3 July, on the advice of Gen. James Robertson, the Howes began to land troops on Staten Island. The Continental troops on that island quickly retreated to New Jersey, taking a few prominent Patriot families with them. By the next day, the British had 9,000 soldiers on friendly territory in position to threaten New Jersey, the American positions on Long Island, and New York City itself. And more ships and men were still arriving.

“Battle Road” Workshop, 5-8 Aug

The Massachusetts Historical Society is offering this summer workshop for educators and the interested public.

Battle Road: Crisis, Choices, and Consequences
Monday, 5 August, to Thursday, 8 August

Using historical documents, landscapes, buildings and artifacts as investigative tools, participants will examine the concerns, conflicts, dilemmas, decisions, and dramatic confrontations of people along the road to revolution. Presented by the Massachusetts Historical Society and partnering organizations, the workshop takes place in locations throughout Boston, Lexington, Lincoln, and Concord. An outstanding group of historians, educators, and site interpreters will work with the group over the course of the four day workshop.

This workshop is funded in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati. The registration fee is $125, or $100 for teachers and M.H.S. members or fellows. Educators can earn P.D.P.’s and (for an additional fee) two graduate credits through Framingham State University.

Sites visited include the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the Lexington Historical Society’s taverns, the Concord Museum, and the Old Manse. The final evening will feature living-history characters, colonial entertainment, and dessert in Minute Man National Historical Park.

Among the authors scheduled to address the group are William M. Fowler (Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan), Robert Gross (The Minutemen and Their World), Brian Donahue (The Great Meadow), and Mary Fuhrer (“The Worlds of Lexington and Concord Compared”).

See this page for more information and registration instructions.

“From Revolution to New Nation” Teachers’ Institute, 29 July-2 Aug

Here is the first of two weeklong workshops for teachers that I know are happening in and around Boston this summer.

From Revolution to New Nation: Exploring Boston’s Trails to Freedom, 1760–1860
Monday, 29 July, through Friday, 2 August 2013

Travel along Boston’s Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail and meet some famous, and some not so famous, Bostonians whose contributions helped to bring the United States from British colonies to an independent country to a nation on the brink of Civil War.

Experience in-depth tours of the sites themselves, explore primary-source documents, examine replica artifacts, and listen to lectures by scholars in their fields. Learn exciting ways to make this time period come to life in elementary and middle school classrooms from museum educators and park interpreters.

I’ll give one of the lectures along the way, about the controversies before, during, and after the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Participants can earn 30 P.D.P.’s or two graduate credits through Framingham State University. The basic cost is $125; graduate credit involves more work and an additional fee. Participants must be able to walk up to 1.5 miles per day in hot weather, and some sites are not fully accessible. Space is limited to 25 participants with preference given to Boston Public School 3rd–8th grade teachers who haven’t attended a Boston People and Places teachers’ institute in the past.

Boston People and Places is a collaboration among historic sites along Boston’s Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail, Boston National Historical Park, and Boston African American National Historic Site. Its partner in this institute is the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, founded in 1892 to cultivate an interest in Colonial and American history by publishing, encouraging research, and facilitating active discussion of historical issues and events.

For more information, contact Emily Holmes at the Paul Revere House (617-523-2338) or institute coordinator Elisabeth Nevins. You can download the flyer for this institute from this page.

Another American Revolution Miniseries in the Works

This month Deadline reported on another upcoming television miniseries set during the American Revolution:

Production on The Book Of Negroes…will begin in the fall on the project written [by] Clement Virgo and [Lawrence] Hill. It will air stateside on BET and on CBC in Canada.

The story centers on Aminata Diallo, who is taken by slave traders from West Africa to South Carolina. It follows her through the American Revolution in New York, the isolated refuge of Nova Scotia and the jungles of Sierra Leone, before she ultimately secures her freedom in England in the early 1800s.

The Book of Negroes miniseries is based on Lawrence Hill’s novel of the same name, first published in Canada in 2007. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize the next year. If you’ve never heard of it, that might be because it was published in the U.S. of A. and elsewhere under the title Someone Knows My Name.

Hill’s original title referred to the list of free blacks evacuated with the British military from New York at the end of the war. That list is an important element in the book, and a valuable historical source for such studies as Cassandra Pybus’s Epic Journeys of Freedom.

In 2008 Hill wrote in the Guardian about why his American publisher had, probably after feedback from major retailers, asked to change the book’s title:

In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it’s partly because the word “Negro” resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are asking to have your nose broken.

When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title.

I suspect that when the miniseries airs in the U.S., it will be called Someone Knows My Name.

Abigail Adams Birthplace Open House, 30 June

On Sunday, 30 June, the Abigail Adams Birthplace in Weymouth is reopening after a two-year restoration, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger reports. The 1685 house has been structurally reinforced, equipped with climate control to allow year-round programs, and spruced up with new clapboards.

I should note that this birthplace isn’t quite in the same place as it was in 1744, when baby Abigail Smith was born there, or 1764, when she married John Adams in the parlor. The house was moved to a new site by oxen in the early 1800s. After World War 2, it was sawed in half, moved back to its original neighborhood, and reassembled. The Boston Globe shares a photo of the latter move as well as the image above.

Three of Weymouth’s ministers lived in the house, with the Rev. William Smith being the second. But apparently it wasn’t officially the town parsonage—it appears to have been the property of the ministers themselves, and each family sold to the next. The building is now the property of the Abigail Adams Historical Society.

The newspapers disagree, but the society’s website says that after a members’ reception it will host a reopening ceremony for the public from 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. The house will then be open for visits this summer on 13 and 28 July and 10 and 25 August. Admission will be $5 for adults and teens, $1 for children under age twelve.

The Royal Irish Artillery at the Revere House, 29 June

On Saturday, 29 June, from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M., the Paul Revere House in the North End will host Fred Lawson, a founder of the Royal Irish Artillery reenacting group. He will show off sample artillery tools and discuss the use of those weapons in battle (though the chance of setting off cannon in downtown Boston is very small).

Revere was an artillerist, eventually commanding Massachusetts’s regiment during the 1779 expedition to Maine. He was never in the Royal Irish Artillery, of course. Instead, the site reports, “The Royal Artillery fought against Paul Revere at the Siege of Castine in Penobscot Bay.”

Histories of the Royal Irish Artillery, including David Dooks’s article on the reenacting unit’s site, say that most of the unit remained in Ireland throughout the war. Seventy men were drafted (i.e., transferred) into the Royal Artillery to accompany Gen. John Burgoyne’s thrust down from Canada in 1777. Those artillerists were captured after Saratoga.

William L. Calver’s 1922 article “The British Army Button in the American Revolution” reported that a Royal Irish Artillery button had been found in Somerville, where some of the prisoners of war from Burgoyne’s army were housed. Dooks quotes a letter saying the Irish artillerists, unlike many of their fellow captives, were to be exchanged by the end of the year. So were those men among the British forces in Maine?

Wikipedia says another Royal Irish Artillery button was found at Fort George in Castine, Maine. However, Calver wrote that such a button was found at the Fort George out on the Niagara River, so that might be a false lead.

Regardless, Lawson’s demonstration of artillery tools and tactics will be technically correct. Artillerists who don’t know their craft don’t last as long as his unit has.

And there are many more summer events at the Paul Revere House. Saturdays in July will feature music, including fife and drum, dulcimer, Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica, and colonial dance tunes. In August, experts will demonstrate weaving, tailoring, tinsmithing, penmanship, and other useful arts.

These events are free with admission to the museum: adults for $3.50, seniors and college students $3.00, children aged 5 to 17 $1.00. (Members and North End residents get admitted free.) For more information, check the house’s website.

(For the record, the Military Campaign dates the Royal Irish Artillery button shown above to after 1785.)

The Declaration of Independence and Big Capital

The folks at Seth Kaller, Inc., and the Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries sent a report on a big sale:

The rare first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence we auctioned yesterday brought $632,500—a record price for any historic newspaper. . . . The July 6, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post was only the second printing of the Declaration in any form. The copy sold yesterday is one of just four issues of the Post’s Declaration printing that have appeared at auction in the past 50 years.

The purchaser was David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Six years ago he bought an antique copy of the Magna Carta, then loaned it to the U.S. National Archives while funding a large display facility for the agency. He’s also made multimillion-dollar gifts to benefit Monticello and the Washington Monument.

In its booklet announcing this sale, with good photographs of the newspaper for sale and other 1776 printings of the Declaration, the firm noted the typographical differences between Benjamin Towne’s Post printing and the earlier official broadside issued for the Continental Congress by Pennsylvania Packet printer John Dunlap (shown above).

Both versions capitalize the beginning of sentences, proper names, and words such as “God,” “King,” “Prince,” etc., but excluding those, Dunlap capitalzes an additional 291 internal words (within sentences). However, Towne capitalizes only two internal words.

This observation led us to compare two June 1776 working drafts of the Declaration, one in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, and one copied from Jefferson’s draft by John Adams. The Adams copy follows the same pattern, with Adams capitalizing many words that Jefferson has in lower case.

The firm suggests that there might have been multiple manuscripts of the Declaration in July 1776, one used by Dunlap and one by Towne—one perhaps from Adams and one from Jefferson.

I think this analysis is missing an important factor. Almost all the words capitalized in Dunlap’s broadside but not in Towne’s newspaper are nouns. The rest are adjectives preceding important nouns. In eighteenth-century English it was still common, though old-fashioned, to capitalize all nouns and noun phrases (while capitalizing and italicizing proper nouns). Dunlap followed that rule of style for his Declaration broadside; Towne chose the more modern style for his newspaper reprint. The differences between the two printings could thus arise from each printer applying a systematic rule to the same text.

Was Dunlap guided by John Adams’s style? I doubt that since Dunlap also published Adams’s Thoughts on Government in 1776, and that pamphlet didn’t capitalize most nouns, as this careful transcript shows. (I also checked images of the pamphlet, but I can’t link to them.) Adams did capitalize many nouns, though irregularly, in the letters leading up to that pamphlet. Thus, I conclude:

• Dunlap didn’t conform to Adams’s capitalization when setting his manuscripts.
• Dunlap didn’t always capitalize all nouns, even in serious publications like Adams’s pamphlet.

Dunlap also didn’t capitalize most nouns in his newspaper, and neither did Towne.

On the other hand, when the Congress issued a broadside on 10 Dec 1776 (about “the Army that now threatens to take Poessession of this City”), Dunlap reached into the capital case again. So it appears that someone important at the Congress in 1776 liked Big Letters for its major announcements.

I haven’t done a systematic survey, but I did see that when the Congress issued its “Address to the Inhabitants of the United States” in May 1778, with Henry Laurens as presiding officer, Dunlap did not use the extra capitals. And John Hancock had gone home.

Benjamin Vaughan, Franklin Fanboy

The Englishman who edited Benjamin Franklin’s essays for the press in 1779 was his admirer Benjamin Vaughan (1751-1835). Like Franklin, he had family in Boston.

Born in Jamaica, Vaughan was a grandson of the Massachusetts merchant captain Benjamin Hallowell, Sr. (The captain’s namesake son became one of the most hated of the royal Customs Commissioners in Boston.)

Vaughan’s immediate family were Unitarians, not fitting in with either New England Congregationalists or the established church in Britain. He attended dissenting grammar schools in Britain, and his faith limited the possibilities of a university degree.

Vaughan studied science under the Quaker scholar Joseph Priestley, then law, and finally medicine when he was trying to impress his future wife’s father that he could earn a steady living. But what really excited him was politics. He became a radical, which in Britain meant a republican. Vaughan stood somewhere between activists like John Horne and more establishment figures like the Earl of Shelburne. All that was going on while he collected Franklin’s older books and circulating manuscripts and prepared them for the press in 1779.

When Shelburne became prime minister in 1782, he asked Vaughan to go to Paris and use his relationship to Franklin to create a sort of back-door channel for news and reassurances. He wasn’t officially part of the British diplomatic delegation but seems to have contributed to the peace of 1783.

Vaughan served in Parliament from 1792 to 1794. Despite coming from the left, he opposed the idea of ending slavery in the British West Indies (his own family’s fortune was of course based on slave labor). When the old rivalry between Britain and France heated up again, this time with France as a militant republic, Vaughan came under suspicion of being a French sympathizer and fled the country.

Unfortunately, he arrived in France just as the “Terror” gave way to the “Thermidor” reaction, consuming one set of leaders after another. Vaughan was locked up on suspicion of being a British spy—I can’t tell exactly when and how his treatment fit with the swift changes in the French government at the time. But after a brief stretch in prison Vaughan made it out to Switzerland, then sailed for Boston in 1795.

Vaughan soon settled for life in Hallowell, Maine, where he had inherited land through his mother. His personal library was said to contain 10,000 books, one of the largest in the country. In American politics Vaughan became a firm Federalist, thus on the right. He finally started practicing medicine and promoted the use of Francis Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. He also built up his area of Maine with mills, wharfs, and stores.

There are papers related to Vaughan and his family at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Clements Library, and elsewhere, given his correspondence with many early American statesmen. Vaughan’s house in Maine is now a historic site, though it’s not open to tours this summer. 

Benjamin Franklin’s “Present Hostile Character”

Yesterday’s posting mentioned almost in passing that Benjamin Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces was published in London in 1779. Think about that.

At that time, Franklin was the rebel American states’ minister to Paris, doing his best to increase French aid, recruit Continental military talent, and thwart British espionage. His last major public appearance in London was being castigated in front of the Privy Council for helping to leak confidential letters on Massachusetts politics.

Yet Dr. Franklin’s major essays were collected and published in the capital of the British Empire. And with his participation: he reviewed the early printed pages and provided an appendix of “Addenda & Corrigenda.”

Many eighteenth-century books came out anonymously, but this collection didn’t hide its author’s identity or status. A profile of Franklin appeared opposite the title page, the author bio identified him as “Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Paris for the United States of America,” and the contents listed essays on “American Politics before the Troubles” and “American Politics during the Troubles.”

The 1779 collection was not an inexpensive venture: it filled nearly 600 pages, and the editor commissioned special type to reproduce Franklin’s phonetic alphabet in print for the first time. That required a type cutter to carve the new symbols and cast them, and the printers to go to extra trouble in setting those pages.

The editor’s preface addresses Franklin’s status in the British Empire directly:

Can Englishmen read these things and not sigh at recollecting that the country which could produce their author was once without controversy their own!—Yet he who praises Dr. Franklin for mere ability, praises him for that quality of his mind which stands lowest in his own esteem. Reader, whoever you are and how much soever you think you hate him, know that this great man loves you enough to wish to do you good:

His country’s friend, but more of human kind.

The Monthly Review reprinted those words about Franklin in a positive review of the book that started by acknowledging “the present hostile character he bears to this country.”

TOMORROW: Who edited and published Franklin’s essays in 1779?

A Peek at Franklin’s Improved Alphabet

Last mont Smithsonian Magazine’s Design Decoded blog highlighted a story on Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet.

The posting left me confused when it said:

Franklin developed his phonetic alphabet in 1768 but it wasn’t published until 1789, when Noah Webster, intrigued by Franklin’s proposal, included its description in his book Dissertations on the English Language. However, because, Webster lacked the type blocks to illustrate Franklin’s changes, the alphabet wouldn’t be seen until Franklin had new blocks cast to print the alphabet for his 1779 collection of writings, Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces.

No matter how I look at things, 1779 comes before 1789, so Franklin’s alphabet, explanations, and examples appeared in print ten years before Noah Webster reprinted the correspondence—translating it back out of the phonetic spelling into familiar form. I think the passage above must mean that Franklin’s scheme wasn’t published in the U.S. of A. until 1789, and even then the actual lettering couldn’t be reprinted.

But copies of Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces had undoubtedly been shipped into America in the 1780s. Many American authors, including the Rev. Cotton Mather, Prof. John Winthrop, Phillis Wheatley, and the Rev. William Gordon, had their books published in London even as they expected American sales. Webster probably found Franklin’s letters in one such imported copy. Incidentally, the American printer who didn’t have the typeface to replicate the London printing for Webster was Isaiah Thomas.

TOMORROW: What’s really remarkable about Franklin’s 1779 collection.

The English Prize: Quite a Capture

The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, an Episode of the Grand Tour is a lavish, oversized, and no doubt highly priced art book. (I found a copy at my local library.) It’s unusual in that it catalogues not the work of a particular artist, school, or period, but the collecting activity of a particular class of people at a particular time, preserved by chance like Pompeii or Wolstenholme Town or some other archeological site preserved all of a piece and precisely dated.

The story of this collection began with the Grand Tour, an almost necessary part of the education of male English aristocrats in the late 1700s. Young gentlemen such as Francis Bassett (1757-1835), inheritor of copper mines in Cornwall, and George Legge, Viscount Lewisham (1755-1810), eldest son of the Earl of Dartmouth, would travel to Italy in the company of a mentor, described variously as a tutor, governor, companion (so as to allow him entry into the top social events), or “bear leader.” There the young aristocrats would socialize with others of the same class while studying art, fencing, language, and other genteel skills.

It was common for those Tourists to have their portraits painted, and some Italian artists, such as Pompeo Batoni, specialized in such commissions. They had a variety of poses and motifs available for choosing, showing the young man holding a map of Italy or standing in front of ruins so no one could miss the point that they were now cultured. Some of the more aesthetically ambitious Tourists would buy other artwork, classical artifacts, books, and other cultural items to ship home.

Dozens of chests from such young men, including Bassett and Lewisham, were loaded onto the English ship Westmoreland in the port of Livorno (Leghorn) in 1779. Then came news that the French and Spanish had declared war on Britain, turning what had been a civil war within the British Empire into a worldwide conflict. The captain of the Westmoreland armed his ship with cannon and obtained a letter of marque, allowing him to capture French and Spanish ships as a privateer.

At first this worked out well. The Westmoreland took a French cargo vessel. Then the tables turned, and two French ships stopped the Westmoreland in the eastern Mediterranean. The ship was sent to the Spanish port of Malaga, its perishable goods sold and its passengers exchanged. For four years the rest of the cargo sat in a warehouse.

With the arrival of peace in 1783, some of the British art patrons began to ask for their goods. Meanwhile, the Spanish prime minister learned about the captured artwork and decided to obtain the best pieces for King Carlos III and most of the rest for the new Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Most of the English prize’s cargo thus remained in Spanish state museums.

Fortunately, because of the legalities of condemning those goods and good archival work by the institutions involved, there’s a very good record of what items came from what chests in that English prize. Further research allowed the scholars behind this book to locate correspondence connected with some of those works, especially the portraits, with individual Britons. The result was an exhibit and this book, capturing almost completely a moment in the collecting of British Tourists in 1779.

Personally, I’m not taken with the eighteenth century’s depictions of mythological subjects and landscapes, but I like most of the portraiture, and this book has a lot of it, in both painting and sculpture. The front cover shows Batoni’s portrait of young Bassett, leaning against a statue with a map of Rome in his hand. (How cultured!)

Bassett tried for years to get that painting back from Spain, and may even had commissioned a Spanish artist to make a copy. But Britain and Spain kept going to war against each other, so his portrait remained at the Real Academia, identified simply as a “Young Man” until the research behind this book connected all the dots.

The Prince’s Gift for the Late President

To close off my poking around in the record of the Braddock sash, I found more information about how and when it came (back) to Mount Vernon.

The published records of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association for 1920 include this passage:

Prince Yoshihisa Takugawa’s gift to Mount Vernon in 1919, “to be used for the purpose of purchasing some Washington relic appropriate to be placed in Washington’s home,” has enabled the Association to have returned to Mount Vernon the sash worn by General [Edward] Braddock at the time of his defeat, and upon which he was borne mortally wounded from the field of battle by his aide, Colonel George Washington, and two soldiers. General Braddock gave the sash to Colonel Washington who brought it to Mount Vernon in 1755; here it was kept until after his death, when it passed into the possession of his nephew who married “Nelly” Custis. In 1846 Colonel Butler, of Louisiana, who married their daughter, presented the sash to General Zachary Taylor after his victories on the Rio Grande, and, while General Taylor was President of the United States, the sash was in the White House. His daughter, Mrs. Bliss, brought it to Virginia after President Taylor’s death, and last summer it was purchased from one who had inherited it.

The request made by the Japanese Prince, that “his name might be associated with the relic, as this act on his part is but an expression of sentiment,” should be complied with.

Thus, by 1920 the association had “purchased” the sash “from one who had inherited it.”

The Japanese donor’s family name is usually spelled “Tokugawa” now. As I understand it, Yoshihisa Tokugawa was a son of the last shogun and a nobleman but not a member of the imperial family. For folks who can read Japanese, here’s his Wikipedia entry in that language.

Evidently the ladies of Winchester, Virginia, appear to have preferred to think of the sash being “a perpetual loan” to Mount Vernon, as Katherine Glass Greene wrote in her 1926 local history, rather than sold outright. But money and property changed hands by 1920, so that looks like a sale to me.

How Many Sashes Are at Mount Vernon?

Some recent books on Mount Vernon refer to a “Washington sash” in its holdings. For example, The George Washington Collection (2006) shows a woven sash and posits that it might be one that eager young George Washington bought near the start of his military career in 1754, as discussed here. We also know his Philadelphia supplier sent him another sash in late 1774, as quoted here.

The funny thing is that the photos of the “Washington sash” appear to show the same sash that other books (such as George Washington Remembers) identify as the sash of the late Gen. Edward Braddock.

George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths expresses doubt both that Washington wore that sash in his 1772 portrait and that it’s really connected with Braddock. But the date woven into the sash, 1709, has no apparent link to Washington and a possible link to Braddock, as I suggested earlier this month.

At this point, I’m guessing that:

• Washington ordered a crimson sash in 1754 and probably had himself painted in it eighteen years later.
  
• He accepted a second sash from the dying Braddock in 1755 and preserved that as a relic instead of wearing it. (It’s apparently still stained with the general’s blood—hardly what one should wear while commanding new troops.)
• He ordered a third sash in 1774, but didn’t make that part of his Continental Army uniform.

The second is probably the one and only historic sash preserved at Mount Vernon today, returned after a trip to the White House. The other two probably don’t survive.

Washington’s Canceled Order

As I described yesterday, in the fall of 1774 and spring of 1775, George Washington was busy ordering sashes and other officers’ insignia for the independent Virginia militia companies. But his favored supplier in Philadelphia, William Milnor, was having trouble securing those sashes.

In early April, Washington’s contact in the Prince William County militia told him, “it is the desire of our Officers, that if they can’t be furnished with such sashes, as are proper; they would not incline to have any.” But he left the decision up to Washington.

Our next clue about that endeavor comes from Milnor’s letter dated 18 April, the same day that up in Boston Lt.-Col. Francis Smith was preparing to lead a column of British soldiers to search Concord. The merchant told Washington:

I have acted exactly agreable to your directions, respecting the Sashes, as I forbid the Maker to proceed any farther with them, immediately on seeing the first he made, which I sent to Mr. [George] Gilpin…

So Col. Washington had canceled the order.

It’s possible to read too much into this little exchange (or aborted exchange), so I’ll do just that. As an eager young officer in the 1750s, Washington had treated military sashes as an almost necessary part of an army’s officers look. He knew that British officers wore such garments, and he wanted Virginia officers to do the same wherever possible so as to impress their skeptical comrades from across the Atlantic.

In 1775, Washington and his fellow Virginians weren’t so concerned about mirroring the standards of the royal army.

Washington’s June 1775 accounts include a payment of £6 “for a Sash had of you by Mr W. Milnor.” But, in contrast to his 1772 portrait, Washington didn’t wear a sash as an American general. On reaching the Boston siege lines in July, Gen. Washington instead bought a blue “ribband to distinguish myself,” as shown in his second Charles Willson Peale portrait. That band of cloth was reminiscent of a traditional military sash but not the same.

Uniforms and rank were still very important to the new commander-in-chief, but in 1775 he was willing to come up with a new system of insignia.

Washington Orders More Sashes

In the fall of 1774, as they heard about the crisis in Massachusetts, George Mason and his Fairfax County neighbors organized an “independent” militia company outside Gov. Dunmore’s control. For their commander they naturally chose Col. George Washington, then away at the First Continental Congress.

When he received this news (probably not altogether unexpected), Washington bought new clothes. In a letter that appears to be lost, he sent to the Philadelphia merchant William Milnor for some of the insignia that a military officer needed. On 29 November, Milnor wrote back:

your favour of the 17th. Inst. [i.e., this month] came to hand on fryday last, I have made the strictest search, after a Sash and have sent the only one, that is to be had in this City, I am sorry to inform you, tis not intirely New tho’, not much changed. I have bought it Conditionally if not approved of, to be sir returned by the first post & taken again, I had no Alternative, as no Other Could be had…

It looks like Washington kept that “not intirely New” sash. Over the winter other Virginia counties also started to organize independent companies, and several applied to Washington to be their colonel and/or to order supplies for them. On 23 Jan 1775 he wrote to Milnor about muskets, cartouche boxes, and more:

I have lately received a request from the Officers of the Prince William Independant Company, for the following Articles;

4 Officers Sashes like the one you sent me...

But in Philadelphia those supplies were still hard to find. Having visited Mount Vernon early in the month, Milnor wrote back on 21 February:

As to Sashes, the Maker tells me, he thinks, he cannot get Silk Enough, for more than three, those he will have done in three weeks, they will come at Nine pounds each perhaps by the time they are done we may find more Silk—. The Gorgets, Shoulder Knots &c I have bespoke & will send all, as soon as possible—

But on 7 March:

I have Just to mention that the Sashes are all like to be done soon, Silk enough for the whole is procured, the Gorgets will be done about the same time the shoulder Knots are all finished, I hope I shall have them all to send by Peter Jones, he leaves this place on the 19th. Inst:

Jones probably didn’t bring the good news (or sashes) that Washington hoped for, and in early April  he evidently passed on the news of the shortage to William Grayson of Dumfries, Virginia, in Prince William County. On 5 April Grayson replied:

it is the desire of our Officers, that if they can’t be furnished with such sashes, as are proper; they would not incline to have any; but this matter is altogether left to yourself, as the person most capable of determining…

So everything was up to Col. Washington.

TOMORROW: What did Washington decide?