Farewell to Two Historical Gentlemen

The community of historical interpreters in Massachusetts is mourning two gentlemen who died this week.

Among other personas, Thomas Macy portrayed John Adams at many venues, often performing a two-person epistolary play with Patricia Bridgman as Abigail. For years Tom wanted to bring that Adams portrayal to Washington’s Headquarters, and as part of last month’s reenactment he was able to portray Adams’s meeting with Gen. George Washington.

Tom also wrote a short book called The Hannah and the Nautilus: The Beginning of the American Revolution at Sea, published by the Beverly Historical Society in 2002. It’s a detailed study of one of the first naval skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, which took place off Beverly’s coast in September 1775.

In Boston, Bob Jolly was one of the Freedom Trail Players for several years. He was a pioneer in portraying a little-known citizen of Revolutionary Boston rather than a celebrated name, an approach that allows visitors to consider events through the eyes of an ordinary person.

Bob’s character was Nathaniel Balch, a handsome hatter who was a close friend of Gov. John Hancock. Balch seems to have had the personality of a nightclub comic, making him a good match for Bob, who was also an actor and performer of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.

Tom came from Nantucket, Bob from Louisiana, but both found new homes and new friends in the world of local historical interpretation.

Digging in the North End

Yesterday’s Boston Globe offered a progress report on a little dig in Boston’s North End. As part of a renovation project, the Old North Church’s, they invited the city’s archeology department to excavate the back yard of the Ebenezer Clough house, built around 1715.

The result:

During two weeks of digging, Bagley and a crew of volunteers collected tens of thousands of items from the 1700s. The haul included long-ago leftovers of everyday life: animal bones, doll parts, and uncounted chips and fragments of dishes and cups that archeologists hope will reveal more about how Bostonians lived as a bustling city sprang up around them.

“They literally would have just thrown these out the window,” Bagley said of a time when the backyard served as a personal landfill. “This will tell a lot about what people were eating, what toys they were using, and what else was going in the backyard.”

The dig also will give archeologists the rare chance to study a North End site untouched by development. From its beginnings as a pasture, this tiny plot of earth at 21 Unity St. has never been built upon, Bagley said. . . .

The finds include porcelain from China, children’s marbles, a cow or pig tooth, German stoneware, pipe stems, and a ceramic fragment decorated with a painted thistle, possibly from Scotland. Archeologists even found a rat’s skeleton.

In the early 1800s the building became an apartment house, or tenement, owned by upholsterer Moses Grant (1744-1817), one of the guys involved in the pre-Revolutionary events I focus on.

The Globe also offered a slide show of the dig. The overhead image above comes from that collection by staff photographer Pat Greenhouse.

In Like Flints

Earlier this year I missed this article by Joel Bohy at the Skinner, Inc., auction house about a large deposit of musket flints in Concord, in a field above the North Bridge. Joel makes the case that those flints are a relic of 19 Apr 1775:

…over 150 years later, Concord resident and archeologist Benjamin Smith found many of those flints, resting in that same pasture, known today as the musterfield. Smith didn’t set out to uncover a part of American military history. He was a collector of Native American objects, and noticed in the fall of 1934 that the site had been plowed for the first time in his memory.

As he searched the area, he found seven English musket flints. That evening it rained quite heavily, and the next day Smith searched again. In a speech he wrote for the Concord Patriots Day ceremonies in 1961, he stated:

“The following day the field was revisited. Gun flints seemed to be everywhere and they stood out against the dark, wet ground like glittering jewels. Thirty-seven more were recovered that day and it was by then clearly apparent that, after making allowance for the natural disturbance of the plowing and the fact that the men may not have discarded the flints in the same manner, they occurred in two long lines about fifty feet apart and running N.E. to Southwest across the slop of the hillside, roughly facing the North Bridge roadway.”

Within the next few years he had found a total of one hundred dropped flints. About seventy of those now reside in the collections of the Concord Museum.

Joel is working with the museum and other local institutions on a big exhibit about the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 2014, which will include many locally collected artifacts like these. I can hardly wait!

Sgt. Fargo and Gen. Washington’s “Indignation and Shame”

As I introduced back here, in 1775 Moses Fargo was a sergeant in Col. Samuel Holden Parsons’s Connecticut regiment during the siege of Boston. He was ordered to keep an orderly book, copying down the orders for each day as they were dictated to him—which allowed for idiosyncratic spelling. Here’s Sgt. Fargo’s entry for 4 Aug 1775:

it with Indignation and Shame the Genll observes that notwithstanding the Repeated orders which have Ben Given to pervent the Firing of guns in and about the Camp that it is Daily and hourly Pratised

That Contrary to all orders Stragling Soldiers Do steal past the Guards and Fire at a distance Where there is not the Least posabilty of hurting the Enamy and Where there is no other End answerd but to waist there amunition and Expose themselfs to the Redicule of the Enamy and keep there own Camp harised by Frecquent & Continuel alarms to the hurt and Deterement of Every Good Soldier who is thereby Disturbed of his Natural Rest and at Length will Never be able to Distingush Between the Real and the Fals alarmes

for that Reson the Gen’l Forbids in the most perremtory maner any Person or Persons whatsoever under any Pertence to Pass the out Guards unless autherised by the Commanding officer of that part of the Lines Signafyed in Riting which must be Shewed to the officers of the Guard in there Posts any Person Offending in this Perticuler will be Considered in no other Light then a Common Enamy and the guards will have orders To fire on them as Such the Commanding officer of Every Regmt. is to Derict that Every man in his Regmt. is Made accquanted with these orders to the End that no one may plead Ignorance and that all may be aprisd with the Consiquences of Disobediance the Colo. of Regmts and the Commanding officers of Cores to order the Role of Each Company to be Called twice a Day and Every mans Amunition to Examined at Evening Role Calling and Such as are Found Difficant are to be Confined the Guards are to Aprehend all Persons Near there Posts whether towns people or Soldiers

Of course, Gen. George Washington’s “indignation and shame” was just a cover story. Or rather, he probably felt indignant and ashamed, but not because the men were firing at the enemy.

Rather, as Gen. John Sullivan’s letter reveals, the day before headquarters issued the orders above, Washington had learned that the army had significantly less gunpowder than he had been told. All that talk about “the ridicule of the enemy” and a “good soldier…disturbed of his natural rest” was meant to stop the men from using up powder while keeping the supply crisis secret from the British.

The Connecticut Historical Society published Fargo’s orderly book in 1899. It transcribed the countersign password as “Iceland,” but other sources say it was “Ireland.” For the sake of Sgt. Fargo and his company, I hope he actually wrote that right.

(Photograph above by Erin and Lance Willett via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.)

Looking for Loyalists in All the Wrong Places?

At All Things Liberty: The Journal of the American Revolution, Elizabeth M. Covart has contributed a series of articles on the interpretation of Loyalism in Boston’s Harborfest activities this year.

Among the sites Liz visited was the Old South Meeting House, which encourages visitors to help reenact the debate over the issues raised by the new tea tax of 1773. That church was the site of huge protest meetings in November and December, with thousands of people showing up to express their opposition to landing the tea and paying the tax. How many people showed up in 1773 to support the new Crown policy? Practically no one.

Our best source on the actual discussions at the tea meetings is a memo titled “Proceedings of ye Body respecting the Tea,” which L. F. S. Upton published in the William & Mary Quarterly in 1965. It was written by someone present at the tea meetings in November and December 1773. Similar reports in the same handwriting are marked “Colman,” suggesting the observer was Benjamin or William Colman, either way a cousin of Massachusetts Attorney General Jonathan Sewall.

The end of this report listed the eight “chief Speakers at the Meetings”: Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Thomas Young, Josiah Quincy, William Phillips, William Cooper, and William Molineux. Those men cover the political spectrum from radical Whig to deeply committed Whig. There was not much debate.

The tea meetings at Old South in late 1773 were not official town meetings, though they were conducted along similar lines. They were special meetings called to protest the tea tax. No one had to attend. Some friends of the royal government probably saw going to those meetings as lending them legitimacy that they didn’t deserve. Others might have gone and found the anti-tea sentiment so strong that they kept from speaking out.

The Colman report described just a few future Loyalists speaking at these meetings, and in limited ways. On 30 November Stephen Greenleaf, sheriff of Suffolk County, came in with a letter from Gov. Thomas Hutchinson (also father of two tea importers), “requiring him to read a Proclamation for them to disperse.” He read that proclamation to “a confused Noise and a general Hissing.” And then the gathering voted to ignore it. Greenleaf evidently went away again. He lost his job as sheriff in independent Massachusetts (his younger brother William took over), but he never left Boston.

John Singleton Copley also appeared. But he didn’t argue that loyalty to the British Empire should outweigh local economic needs, or that the principle of “no taxation without representation” could be safely bent for a small tax on one imported product. Instead, he came to the meeting as a representative of his new wife’s family, the Clarkes, who had imported a lot of the tea. He just asked for a guarantee of their safety if they returned to town, as the people had demanded. Later he returned to say that the tea consignees “thought it not prudent and would serve no valuable Purpose to appear at the Meeting.” Copley went away, apparently satisfied with his job as a go-between. He would sail to Britain the next year and live there for the rest of his life.

Francis Rotch, whose family owned the Dartmouth, was in and out of the meetings a lot. But he didn’t argue for the necessity of obeying Parliament’s laws, or the value of paying taxes for public services, or the divine right of kings. The Rotches were Quakers from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and they kept out of Boston politics. Francis Rotch simply pleaded with the crowd not to do things that would cause his ship to be damaged or confiscated. Rotch spent the war in London, thus qualifying as a Loyalist, but in these meetings he spoke from a neutral perspective as a man caught in the middle.

John Timmins appeared as agent for the cargo on the Beaver and briefly promised that he wouldn’t unload the tea. Timmins also moved to England during the war.

Finally, there was John Rowe, wealthy merchant and part-owner of the Eleanor. Some people in the crowd identified him as “a good Tory” when he arrived. So what arguments did he make?

he expressed his Sorrow that any Vessel of his should be concerned in bringing any of that detestable and obnoxious Commodity, (Tea)” and seeing the Audience were pleased with what he had said, he proceeded and among other Things he asked, “Whether a little Salt Water would not do it good, or whether Salt Water would not make as good Tea as fresh.” And when he had done speaking and at several other Expressions in his Speech, the People testified their Applause by Shouting Clapping etc.

The report author heard crowd members saying quietly that “Mr. Rowe had now become a good Man and they should soon make all the Rest of the Tories turn to their Side as Mr. Rowe had done.”

Rowe went home that night and wrote bitterly in his diary but didn’t record his own words. Clearly he had been cowed by the people, or perhaps just eager for their approval. And in fact he managed to last out Bostonians’ distrust to remain in town through the war, eventually even becoming a representative to the Massachusetts General Court.

If the reenactments of the tea meetings followed that record as a script, the audience wouldn’t hear Loyalist political arguments. In Rowe’s case, we’d be hard put to distinguish his words from those of the most radical Whigs. (Indeed, Bostonians remembered Rowe as being the first to publicly raise the possibility of getting rid of the tea into the ocean. That may have helped his political career.)

I think Old South does good work by making sure visitors are exposed to a debate on the issues surrounding the tea in 1773. That can’t happen unless someone speaks up in favor of the British government. That viewpoint is all the more valuable in being less familiar to most modern Americans, and thus more effective at making us think in new ways. But in providing a forum for the Loyalists’ political positions, today’s Old South is offering a much broader spectrum of voices than people heard in that same space in late 1773.

New Directions in the Study of Sugar, 24-27 October

On 24-27 October, the John Carter Brown Library in Providence will host a conference titled “Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World.”

The conference announcement email said:

The centrality of sugar to the development of the early Atlantic world is now well known. Sugar was the ‘green gold’ that planters across the Americas staked their fortunes on, and it was the commodity that became linked in bittersweet fashion to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Producing unprecedented quantities of sugar through their enforced labor, Africans on plantations helped transform life not only in the colonies but also in Europe, where consumers incorporated the luxury into their everyday rituals and routines. 

And another announcement added:

“Beyond Sweetness: New Histories of Sugar in the Early Atlantic World” will evaluate the current state of scholarship on sugar, as well as move beyond it by considering alternative consumer cultures and economies. Given its importance, sugar as a topic still pervades scholarship on the Americas and has been treated in many recent works about the Caribbean, Brazil, and other regions. This conference thus will serve as an occasion for the assessment of new directions in the study of sugar.

Alongside the conference, the library will host an exhibition titled “Sugar and the Visual Imagination in the Atlantic World, c. 1650-1840.”

Here’s the full program. Online registration for this event costs $54, or $38 for students. I’m not sure what sort of snacks the conference will provide, but I’d be very disappointed if they aren’t sugary.

“They continued playing several hours”

The image above was the only signature of John Hancock that I was studying last night.

In the spirit of that activity, I’m pointing to a B.B.C. item from June repeating a report from the 19 Sept 1749 Whitehall Evening Post of England:

On Tuesday last, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Lord Middlesex, played at Bass-Ball, at Walton in Surry; notwithstanding the weather was extreme bad, they continued playing several hours.

Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), was the eldest son of George II and the father of George III. Though heir to the throne, he never became king, in part because of a sports injury.

The Earl of Middlesex (1711-1769) was, like the Prince of Wales, estranged from his father. The two men were also both keen cricket fans. The earl’s younger brother became Lord George Germain, leading proponent and strategist of the American war.

If This Is Wednesday, We Must Be at Faneuil Hall

I’m spending much of this week playing tour guide to dear friends from London. The twelve-year-old twins in that family will be studying the American Revolution for two semesters next year. That’s about two semesters more than I remember studying the English Civil War or Parliamentary reform, so I’m trying to help out by showing them the local Revolutionary sites.

Monday was Lexington and Concord. One twin took the photo above, though he was put off by the chest-banging aspects of the motto on the flagpole. Munroe Tavern’s presentation of the British soldiers’ experience was a good way to end the day. Today we’ll visit some of the sites in downtown Boston, and tomorrow Bunker Hill after I finish talking to the teachers.

Miscellaneous Observations from Dr. Ephraim Eliot

Toward the end of the 1821 Two Discourses pamphlet I’ve been quoting, the Rev. Henry Ware (shown here) started to add miscellaneous notes. Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s marginal notes in the copy at Harvard University therefore also got a bit miscellaneous, but the result is some more intriguing clues about life in eighteenth-century Boston.

On page 58 the pamphlet says:

The British troops, during the blockade of Boston, treated the churches with particular disrespect. The steeple of the West Church they destroyed, because they supposed it had been used as a signal staff…

Eliot, whose father had stayed in Boston through the siege, commented: “direction for bombardment” and “Christ church was frequently used for signals”. That suggests that locals did indeed use the West Meeting-House steeple and possibly that of Christ Church (now Old North Church) to signal Continental artillerists outside the town where their mortars were landing.

The West Meeting-House had the spire closest to the British army positions on the Common and the Continental Army positions in Cambridge. By the time Ware wrote, the use of the North Church spire by Paul Revere’s confederates on 18 Apr 1775 had already been revealed, but Eliot didn’t mention it in his note.

On the same page the pamphlet reprints an item from the church records:

“October 7, 1762. Voted, that the singers sound the base at the end of the lines, whenever they think proper.” I copy this vote simply because I do not know what it means.

Eliot added this explanation:

The meaning is, that the singers paused a few beats between every line, the bass in the most solemn tones [?] used to continue the sound of the last note in the three first lines of a verse, till the tenor sounded the first note of the next line. There was always a complete pause between the verses, bass & all.

Clearly there had been such a big change in church singing between 1762 and 1821 that even the Rev. Mr. Ware, first president of the Harvard Musical Association, didn’t know the old style.

Finally, on page 59:

In 1781 I find record of a baptism by immersion of a child about ten years old, at the particular request of his mother, “a bathing tub being prepared for that purpose in the meeting-house.“

Eliot added:

It was the tub of the old North [fire] engine then the largest in Boston.

This information was eventually repeated in A History of the Second Church, or Old North [Meeting], in Boston, by Chandler Robbins, published in 1852. However, I’ve been unable to identify the family involved.

Baptism by immersion wasn’t just fashion; it was a theological dividing-line between Boston’s Congregationalists and Baptists. In 1780 and 1781 ministers from Wells and Ipswich advertised pamphlets about the validity of sprinkling water on babies rather than fully immersing older people. But apparently the Rev. John Lathrop, though a Congregationalist, was willing to provide immersion at a mother’s insistence.

Dr. Eliot’s Gossip about Boston’s Ministers

Yesterday I started quoting from Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s notes inside a copy of an 1821 pamphlet in the Harvard library. That pamphlet is a sermon about the split of the New North Meeting-House’s congregation in 1719, a major event in Boston.

Eliot was the youngest son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot (1718-1778), a later minister of the New North Meeting. And the family clearly put some of the blame for the split on one of the ministers at the Old North Meeting:

The difficulties at the new north [meeting-house] were more owing to Cotton Mather & his influence than to any others. Increase [Mather] was in his dotage. He [Cotton] was afraid of [Rev. Peter] Thachers popular talents, joined & directed the opposition & thought to get them into his parish. if he had thought of their building another meeting house, he would have been quiet.

Instead, the group that split off from the New North formed a new congregation and built the New Brick Meeting-House, attracting some members from the Mathers’ church.

Eliot had other critical things to say about Cotton Mather in his marginal notes. On page 18 he wrote:

No greater enemy to the quakers existed. In his account of the witchcraft of John Goodman’s children, He says, that shewing them a bible or carrying them into his study, would instantly bring them out of their fits, the sight of a book of quakerism or the [Anglican] book of common prayer would throw them into horrid convulsions.

An Irish woman was hanged in Boston in 1688 on the testimony of the Goodman children.

Eliot recorded even juicier gossip about some of Boston’s other pre-Revolutionary ministers which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. On page 23 and then page 41 he wrote about what the Rev. Samuel Checkley (1695-1769) of the New South Meeting was known for:

for eating; he was the largest man in Boston, & his mouth was always full, & his jaw going when not preaching. My father used to say, he hated to preach after Checkley, on acct of the cracking of raisin seeds under his feet with which the floor of the pulpit was always covered. While the people were singing, he was chomping plumbs. . . .

Checkley lost his popularity more from his gourmandising disposition than any other way. he laid out all his money in tidbits, cakes, Raisins, oysters, &c. & ran in debt for other things. To such a degree that his parish chose a committee to get from him a schedule of his debts, which they paid. But he was ashamed to note the debt he owed in small shops for gingerbread &c. Those creditors became noisy, & another committee was chosen to receive & pay all such claims.

Checkley’s daughter Elizabeth became the first wife of Samuel Adams.

And about the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton (1705-1777), minister of the New Brick Church starting in 1754:

So high did his vanity carry him that when asked by Mr. Eliot to exchange, he observed that his people would consent to hear no other parson. His popularity burned out. But the parish dwindled more from his being a violent Tory, & the Bosom friend of Gov [Thomas] Hutchinson, who was one of his parish. Many people would not worship at the New Brick because of that circumstance.

Thus, in 1777 the shrinking New Brick Meeting had a building but no pastor while the Old North Meeting had no building but a popular pastor—the Rev. John Lathrop (1740-1816). They worked out the obvious solution, thus starting to reverse the splits of the early decades.

TOMORROW: A few more tidbits from Dr. Eliot’s notes.

[The photograph above, courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream, shows the house in the North End where Dr. Ephraim Eliot grew up. It was originally built by the Rev. Increase Mather after the fire mentioned yesterday.]

Someone’s Been Writing in Two Discourses

I stumbled across this Google Books file of Henry Ware’s Two Discourses Containing the History of the Old North and New Brick Churches, United as the Second Church of Boston, published in 1821, and noticed someone had written in it. These scans come from a copy owned by Harvard University.

The title page is signed by John F. Eliot, but the note on page 7 is signed “EE,” which indicates the notes come from that man’s father, Dr. Ephraim Eliot (1761-1827). Ephraim was a son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot and brother of the Rev. John Eliot. He left several detailed essays about the history of Boston, including a wonderful profile of Dr. Amos Windship.

Ephraim Eliot evidently went through this pamphlet and added his own recollections and family lore. Thus, after a description of the galleries built in the Old North Meeting-House in the 1680s, his handwritten footnote describes their shape (“altogether formed an octagon”), name (“they were called Hanging Galleries”), and fate:

upon a general repair of the house [they] were removed, when I was a small boy. The society had become very small, & they were for a long time useless. I remember the talk about taking away the hanging galleries, but never saw them.

And then that meetinghouse was torn down during the siege of Boston and turned into firewood.

On page 6 Eliot wrote this interesting note:

My good old grandmother was brought up in the belief, that Increase [Mather (1639-1723), shown above] was endowed with the gift of prophecy. as one instance of it, she used to tell, that on concluding his last sermon before the fire, he exclaimed, there must be an instant reformation, or there will be a [phrase ending “tation,” unreadable in the scan because of ink bleeding from the other side of the paper]. Before the next morning, the meeting house was in ashes, with many other buildings.

Enoch Pond’s 1870 biography of Mather suggests that Eliot’s grandmother wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that sequence of events:

In the year 1676,…Boston was visited with a distressing fire. In some unaccountable way, Mr. Mather had a presentiment of the approach of this calamity, and warned his people of it, two Sabbaths in succession. The very night of the second Sabbath, the fire broke out in his immediate neighborhood, his meeting-house and dwelling-house were both consumed, and whole streets were laid in ashes.

TOMORROW: Unabashed gossip about Boston’s ministers.

Almanac Oddities

Yesterday’s New York Times reported on the New-York Historical Society’s project to “to catalog its 5,700 American almanacs, one of the nation’s most comprehensive collections.”

For 18th-century American families, two kinds of books were considered indispensable: Bibles and yearly almanacs.

Yet in the almanacs, the routine daily weather predictions were practically afterthoughts; essays, data charts, cartoons and advertisements dominated the pages. Each almanac also had an editorial viewpoint and mood, depending on the publisher’s personality and local market trends. . . .

A 1713 almanac from Rhode Island provides puzzling weather predictions like “suspicious.” . . .

Handwritten notes also appear in the historical society’s collection. After the Declaration of Independence was issued in 1776, a New Yorker predicts that “rivers of blood will flow.”

The N.Y.H.S. collection includes several almanacs not known to survive anywhere else.

As for the weather predictions in almanacs, those always struck me as problematic. Only within the past few years have we expected meteorologists to be able to forecast the next week’s weather with any accuracy. It’s hard to believe, therefore, that farmers actually expected almanac makers to describe the weather more than twelve months in advance.

On the other hand, the phases of the Moon, sunrise and sunset times, and high and low tides were eminently calculable for eighteenth-century scholars like Dr. Nathaniel Ames (whose work is shown above). And that information was useful for farmers, mariners, and many others. I think those were the parts of an almanac that buyers relied on. This article from Common-place describes the form.

Of course, all the almanacs written for a particular location would have had the same astronomical data. So the rest of the material was necessary to make one almanac stand out from the competition, or at least not fall behind. But I suspect smart almanac-maker promoted information that wasn’t so easy to test as weather predictions.

For 1773, for example, Boston schoolboy Joshua Green used an almanac that featured Israel Remmington, a boy “giant” from Hingham. The New England Historic Genealogical Society also owns the almanac Joshua’s father chose for that year, and it’s definitely less sensational.

How Tall Was Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday I quoted Louisa Catherine Adams’s anecdote about a visit to her father’s house in England from the twice-retired general Benedict Arnold. She described him as “a small neat looking man.”

In response, Boston 1775 reader John L. Smith, Jr., asked:

I had read in some journal or book somewhere that Benedict Arnold was 5' 5" tall. Have you ever run across that?

I actually looked into the question of Arnold’s height when I drafted that posting, wondering if he really fit Adams’s description. And it turned out to be an interesting historiographical question.

So far as I know, no one who met Arnold ever wrote down his exact height. Instead, we have descriptions like these:

• Samuel Downing, a veteran of Saratoga: “He was dark-skinned, with black hair, and middling height; there was n’t any wasted timber in him”.
  
• John Henry, a veteran of the march to Québec: “He was well formed, very stoutly built, with a florid complexion.”
  
• Rev. J. S. Leake, son of a neighbor: “My father…has often described him to me, as about his own size, which was something below the middle height, well formed, muscular, and capable of great endurance.” (Extra trivia: Leake also said Arnold was ”the most accomplished and graceful skater” his father ever saw.)

That record got confused because there is a record of a ”Benidick Arnold” who enlisted in the New York militia in 1758-60 and was measured as 5'9". Some early biographers wrote that this was the future general, which allowed them to treat his militia record as a forecast of his career in the Continental Army: he enlisted eagerly at the age of eighteen, took his enlistment bonus, and then deserted.

However, that Benedict Arnold was identified as a weaver and laborer while the future general was already in training as an apothecary clerk. That Benedict Arnold was listed as coming from Norwalk, not Norwich, Connecticut. And at 5'9" that Benedict Arnold was above average height for a British-American of his time, not “middling” or “something below the middle height.”

There were several Benedict Arnolds in Connecticut and Rhode Island at the time, named after a seventeenth-century governor. One of them joined the New York militia, most modern biographers agree. Another one, shorter and already on a more lucrative career path, became a famous officer in the Continental and British armies.

So I don’t think we can say Arnold was 5'5" tall, which implies we can be precise to the inch. But we can say that contemporaries thought he was around that height, on the short side of the average range. And Louisa Catherine Adams, whose father and husband were both about 5'7", told her children that Arnold was “small.”

Joshua Johnson Receives a "small neat looking man”

Here’s more from Louisa Catherine Adams’s memoir of living in London in the 1790s, when her father, Joshua Johnson, was serving as a consul-general of the U.S. of A. in Britain. Johnson had been born in Maryland but moved to England, married, and entered business there before the war:

It was about this time that a Gentleman called on my father a small neat looking man in a very handsome chariot with livery Servants &ce. He walked into the Office entered into conversation very agreeably and then presented some papers to my father which concerned some American business to be done before the Consul—

My father returned the papers for signature and stood to see the name when to his utter surprize he discovered that it was the Traitor [Benedict] Arnold, and he deliberately took up the pen with the Tongs and put it into the fire—

The gentlemean sneaked off endeavouring not to notice the act—This trait will give you a real insight into your Grandfathers character—He was a perfect Gentleman in his manners and universally respected—

Adams wrote out this recollection around 1825 when her husband, John Quincy Adams, was President and his political rivals were trying to make hay of his marriage to a Englishwoman. She therefore had a strong reason to portray her father as a strong supporter of the U.S. of A.

Did Arnold really call on Johnson? (He wasn’t particularly “small” for his time, certainly not compared to some men in the Adams family. And what sort of “American business” did he expect to conduct?) Did Johnson really show his distaste for Arnold so openly? All we can say for sure is that Adams left this story for her descendants.

At another point in her memoir, Adams characterized her father’s move to Nantes in France in 1778 as politically motivated—getting closer to America’s new ally. But the footnotes in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s new edition of Adams’s papers suggest that he also had financial reasons: the war had hurt his main business of importing tobacco from North America to Britain. But telling stories about grandfather’s patriotism was a republican mother’s duty.

What the Rev. William Stith Truly Said

The Summer 2013 issue of Colonial Williamsburg contains an article titled, “Life, Liberty, and No Pistole,” by Susan Berg. It begins:

Twenty-three years before Virginia patriot Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” the Reverend Mr. William Stith of Williamsburg raised a glass and toasted “Life and liberty, and no pistole.” That sparked a protest against Lieutenant-Governor Robert Dinwiddie that spread throughout the colony and across the Atlantic to the upper levels of English government.

Unfortunately, the article renders Stith’s toast inaccurately. It didn’t actually start out like Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which the article quotes at the end. Stith’s words were “Liberty and property and no pistole.”

In this political dispute from 1753, Lt. Gov. Dinwiddie had imposed a one-pistole (16s.8d.) fee on new land patents. Naturally, Virginians who speculated in land disliked this. The House of Burgesses, which included a lot of land speculators, also disliked it on principle since Dinwiddie hadn’t gone through them; in essence, this was “taxation without representation” before that phrase was coined.

Stith, the new president of the College of William and Mary, became a leading voice against the fee. In 1940 the William & Mary Quarterly published his 21 Apr 1753 letter to the bishop of London in which he admitted:

Once in a publick Company, where that Subject had been much debated, being called upon for my Toast, I gave Liberty & Property and no Pistole; and I believe, I might afterward drink it six or eight times at my own Table. However, the thing took; and I have been told, that it has been since frequently drunk in various Parts of the Country.

A 1954 footnote in the same journal reported that a man named John Blair had also written to the bishop accusing Stith of making “the same toast,” but a 1958 issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography said Blair accused Stith of toasting, “Liberty & No Pistole.”

Percy Scott Flippin had quoted the same 1753 letter from Stith in his monograph “The Royal Government of Virginia,” published in Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law in 1919. But I mention that mostly because I just don’t have enough opportunities to write “Percy Scott Flippin.”

No period source quotes Stith as saying, “Life and liberty…” As of this writing, Google finds only three domains on the web which render his words that way. Two are run by Colonial Williamsburg and point back to this article. The third is a 2009 homework assignment from a California school.

Most of the article about Stith concerns his work as a minister, teacher, and historian. He does appear to have been a significant figure in the history of Virginia. The pistole-fee dispute was also a forerunner of the larger issues that led to the break between colonies and Crown. It’s a shame the article’s title and opening are based on a mistake.

The Face of Joseph Corré

Yesterday I left Joseph Corré in 1803 with his Mount Vernon Gardens theater closing. He advertised that real estate for rent for many months in the New York newspapers. All of the other ads from him that I’ve seen in the 1800s are for real estate, not theater or catering services, suggesting he didn’t go back to those businesses.

The 14 Aug 1823 National Journal reported:

Yesterday afternoon, in the 76th year of his age, Joseph Corré, a native of France, and for many years a resident of this city. His friends and those of his family, are requested to attend the funeral this afternoon, at 5 o’clock, from his late dwelling No. 49 Lespinard st.

The 18 August Boston Daily Advertiser also reported that Corré had died in New York, aged 76.

More information appears in the Genealogy of the Bostwick Family in America, published in 1901, but it’s not fully reliable. That book says:

Joseph Corré was born in Montpelier, France, May 26, 1748. He married in Manheim, Germany, June 15, 1777, Barbara Baker. She was born in Manheim, Germany, Nov. 27, 1759.

The family name was originally spelled Corréard, and on his arrival in this country, having left his native land at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Joseph Corréard changed his name to Joseph Corré.

He died in New York City, Aug. 14, 1823, and his wife died there Apr. 4, 1845.

The couple had eleven children between January 1778 and September 1799, and the second-youngest daughter married into the Bostwick family in 1822.

That family tradition conflicts with William Dunlap’s recollection, quoted yesterday, about meeting Corré first in the winter of 1777 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, cooking for a British army officer. (At the time, the impressive white-wigged cook was apparently not yet thirty years old.) A plethora of newspaper advertisements show that Corré was in business in New York well before “the outbreak of the French Revolution.” But it might have been easier for the family to picture their ancestor as a refugee from the French Revolution than as part of the British military force.

Given that Joseph Corré was in America by early 1777, when and where did he marry Barbara Baker (whose name might originally have been Biekert or the like)? Her reported native city, Mannheim, is right beside modern Hesse, so perhaps she came to New York in 1776 attached to the king’s Hessian troops. Did the couple emigrate together? Or did they meet in New York and marry there? Their first child arrived seven and a half months after the wedding.

The Bostwick family also owned the portrait of Joseph Corré shown above, painted alongside one of Barbara by James Sharples (1751-1811). They were sold at Sotheby’s in January 2010 and at the Leighton Galleries in May 2010, if I read Artfact correctly.

Joseph Corré: cook, hotelier, impresario

Yesterday I introduced the figure of Joseph Corré, President George Washington’s ice cream supplier in the spring and summer of 1790. At the time, of course, New York was the capital of the U.S. of A.

Here’s a profile of the man from William Dunlap’s 1833 History of the American Theatre:

Mr. Corré will be long remembered by the elder citizens of New-York as an honest, industrious, and prosperous man. He was a Frenchman, and is first remembered as a cook in the service of Major Carew, of the 17th light dragoons, the servant of his Britannic majesty.

Sir John Fortescue’s History of the 17th Lancers: 1759-1894 and other sources confirm that Richard Carew or (more often) Crewe was a captain in that unit starting in 1769. Crewe embarked for America with his troop in April 1775, spending several months inside besieged Boston, and was promoted to major there in February 1776. He participated in the New York and New Jersey campaigns of 1776-77, and Corré accompanied him, at least to winter quarters, as Dunlap vividly recalled:

The first time the writer saw Corré, he stood with knife in hand, and in the full costume of his trade, looking as important as the mysteries of his craft entitle every cook to look, “with fair round belly, with good capon lined,” covered with a fair white apron, and his powdered locks compressed by an equally white cap. His rotundity of face and rotundity of person—for he was not related to Hogarth’s Cook at the gates of Calais—with this professional costume, made his figure, though by no means of gigantic height, appear awfully grand, as well as outré, and it was stamped upon the young mind of his admirer in lights and shadows never to be erased.

When we say the costume of his trade, we mean such as we see it in pictures, and as travellers see it; the writer had at that time never seen other than a female cook, and such always black as Erebus. This was in the winter of 1776-7, before the New-Jersey militia and the great chief of our citizen-soldiers had driven the English to the protection of their ships and the safety of water-girt islands. It was at Perth Amboy that Corré stood lord of the kitchen, which his lord, the major of dragoons, had wrested from the black cook of the writer’s father, and held by the same title which made the Corsican lord of the Continent of Europe—military force. The gallant major occupied and improved the upper part of the house, and Manager Corré ruled below.

Maj. Crewe retired on 3 June 1778, replaced by Oliver DeLancey. The major returned to Britain, but Joseph Corré remained in British-occupied New York. He opened a confectionary and catering business, then a tavern, moving to different addresses as the years passed.

When the war ended, Corré chose not to evacuate with the Loyalists but to remain in his adopted city. In 1791, the city council even chose his hotel to host a banquet celebrating the eighth anniversary of the British military’s departure. That same year, Corré first advertised theatricals at the City Tavern on Broadway, establishing a new tradition in American theater.

Over the next two decades, Corré expanded his business, as Dunlap watched:

Mr. Corré afterwards kept the City Tavern, in New-York, with reputation and success, and established those public gardens [i.e., theaters] in State Street still existing, on the site of a part of what was Fort George when he first saw America. He was a thriving and worthy man, and his descendants have reason to respect his memory, although these situations in life might little qualify him to direct public taste, except in the way of his original employment. Mr. Corré and the writer were now, in 1800, both theatrical managers, and Mr. Corré proved the most successful manager of the two. In regard to literary qualifications, Mr. Corré was probably not far behind many other managers who have since ruled the fates of actors and destinies of authors.

In 1801 Corré and a rival theater manager got into a newspaper debate over whether they could mount productions on the same nights. Corré, who was infringing on the other man’s usual dates, made the free-trade argument: “The public in America are not to be told, on Monday you shall go here, and on Tuesday you shall go there…” Nevertheless, Corré’s Mount Vernon Gardens closed after three years.

A Presidential Ice Cream Order

According to this report, today as the third Sunday in July is National Ice Cream Day. Furthermore, in 1984 Ronald Reagan issued another order designating this whole month as National Ice Cream Month. And none of that should limit me: as a Bostonian, I consider every day to be Ice Cream Day. [Shout outs to Wally’s Wicked Good Ice Cream, Cabot’s, Lizzy’s, and J.P. Licks.]

Last week Lee Wright at The History List asked me about a statement that shows up in many feature articles this time of year that President George Washington spent a great deal on ice cream. Lee found statements of the current value of that purchase ranging from “over $5,000” to “about $100,000”—on ice cream in 1790. But what’s the historical basis of that claim?

I followed dribbles on the web back through Paul Dickson’s Great American Ice Cream Book (1973) to mid-century trade journals with titles like Confectionary and Ice Cream World and The Ice Cream Trade Journal. Several of those sources say the merchant who billed Washington for about $200 worth of ice cream was “Mr. Cove of Chatham Street.”

In fact, he was Joseph Corré, a native of France, reportedly a former cook for a British army officer who stayed in New York after the war. He ran nine notices in the New York Daily Advertiser in May-June 1790 thanking patrons for buying ice cream and ice from him. He sold out of his house at 55 Wall Street.

In May 1791 Corré opened a theater on State Street, presenting The Beaux’ Strategem and The Lying Valet. His Columbia Gardens and Mount Vernon Gardens businesses became notable values for plays and concerts in early New York, and he also appears in histories of the American circus.

According to this catalogue page, Mount Vernon owns Corré’s receipt for £51.6s.2d of ice cream and “mouls” (molds) delivered to Washington’s household from June to August 1790. I also saw mention in an antiques magazine of another Corré receipt for the President’s kitchen for earlier that spring, so he was a regular supplier. I don’t know when Corré’s ice cream receipt became public knowledge, but it looks like that happened about 150 years after he wrote it out.

Did George Washington eat that much ice cream? Not by himself. Rather, ice cream was part of how he and Martha entertained guests, officials, their wives, and members of the public at regular “levees,” or receptions. Abigail Adams described them in a letter to her older sister, Mary Cranch, on 27 July 1790:

mrs washington…has fix’d on every fryday 8 oclock. I attended upon the last, [with] mrs smith & charles. I found it quite a crowded Room. the form of Reception is this, the servants announce—& col [David] Humphries or mr [Tobias] Lear—receives every Lady at the door, & Hands her up to mrs washington to whom she makes a most Respectfull curtzey and then is seated without noticeing any of the rest of the company. the Pressident then comes up and speaks to the Lady, which he does with a grace dignity & ease, that leaves Royal George far behind him. the company are entertaind with Ice creems & Lemonade, and retire at their pleasure performing the same ceremony when they quit the Room.

Adams put a similar description, also including “Ice creams,” in her 6 Feb 1791 letter to Cotton Tufts.

(Those period quotations negate a statement in Benson J. Lossing’s Mary and Martha: “Ice-cream, the favorite delicacy of today, was then unknown.” But that book about the women in Washington’s life has long been recognized as hopeful myth. In fact, Mount Vernon has found records of the Washingtons buying ice cream equipment as early as 1784.)

The next question is how much £51.6s.2d. was worth in American dollars in 1790 and would be worth today? And that’s quite a complex question. In fact, examining how early American money worked is a very good way to realize that colonial life was by no means simple. There wasn’t enough specie (gold and silver coins) circulating in the economy, so most people paid off bills with paper notes whose values fluctuated depending on who had issued them, how far away the issuing institution or person was, and other factors. Most articles suggest the President’s ice cream purchase amounted to $200, which is probably a low approximation.

The next issue is how to calculate changes in currency between 1790 and today. The Measuring Worth website has been developed out of John J. McCusker’s monograph How Much Is That in Real Money? But there’s still a problem with equivalencies: because of technology, changing demands and supplies, the move away from coerced labor, and other factors, the real prices of different goods and services have changed at different rates. For example, unskilled labor is much more expensive these days while cloth is much cheaper. When I enter “£51” and “1790” into the Measuring Worth page for “Computing ‘Real Value’ Over Time With a Conversion Between U.K. Pounds and U.S. Dollars, 1774 to Present,” the result is:

When using the CPI/RPI, the (average) value in 2010 of £51 from 1790 is $6830.00. The range of values is from $0.00 to $9250.00. This answer is better if the subject is a consumer good or something else of interest to an individual.

Ice cream is of abiding interest to me, but I can’t say that fact makes narrowing a range between zero and $9,000 any easier. But I think we can eliminate the “about $100,000” figure cited above.

Because of modern refrigeration, ice cream is probably much cheaper relative to other foods than it was in Washington’s time. That means even if £51 in 1790 is on average about $6,800 today, I bet $6,800 today could buy even more ice cream than £51 bought for the Presidential mansion in 1790.

Gen. Gage at Salem Maritime Park, 20-21 July

I didn’t hear about this event until yesterday, and it looks like the schedule is still being worked out (with one possible factor the rolling but oh-so-welcome thunderstorms):

General Gage and His Troops Return to Salem

In May of 1774, General Thomas Gage, the newly-appointed Governor of Massachusetts, arrived in Boston with some controversial orders in his pocket: move the capital of Massachusetts to Salem, where calmer heads would hopefully prevail after several years of upheaval in Boston. He was wrong. During that summer, the Massachusetts legislature defied him, sent representatives to the first Continental Congress, and rejected his authority as Governor, setting in motion the events that culminated in the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

To commemorate that event, Salem Maritime, the National Park in Salem, and the Center for 18th Century Life at Minute Man N.H.P. are once again hosting a British Encampment at Salem Maritime on July 20-21, 2013. The National Park Service has invited some of the best re-enactors in Massachusetts to portray General Gage, his staff, his troops, and the legislators and civilians that he met in Massachusetts.

The events are due to run 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. It makes an interesting bookend with last weekend’s reenactment of Gen. George Washington’s arrival in Cambridge in 1775. While the two homes Washington used are still in place, the house where Gage lived is now in Washington, D.C.—but of course there are many other Revolutionary-era sites to enjoy in Salem.

The image above comes from the N.P.S.’s gallery of photographs from a similar event in 2011.

Henry Lloyd Worries about the Mail

The National Postal Museum has a webpage devoted to a 3 May 1775 letter from Henry Lloyd (1709-1795) to the New York merchants Oliver DeLancey and John Watts.

Lloyd was the eldest son in a mercantile family with roots in both Boston and Long Island, New York. He was a decided Loyalist. In March 1774 he tried to import tea into Boston, and a crowd destroyed it—part of the lesser-known second Boston Tea Party. By 1775 Lloyd was supplying the British military, which was the main topic of this letter.

At the time he wrote, Lloyd was besieged inside Boston with the British troops. He warned his New York colleagues that rebels might be opening their mail:

Your fav.r of 24th Ult.o [i.e., last month] came safe to hand Yesterday. Per Post & the Seal not broke, tho’ most of the Letters both publick & private were open’d before they got here & some of them stop’d, this Letter goes by a private Conveyance to Providence to be put into the Post Office there & hope it will reach you safe. . . .

Fresh provisions of all kinds are stop’d coming in here, & I don’t know how I shall be able to procure the Pork & Rice, Flour, & Pease I suppose may be had from Canada, some Butter I have procur’d here.

In 1776 Lloyd evacuated to Halifax with the royal authorities, and eventually the American governments confiscated his property in Massachusetts and New York. DeLancey and Watts remained in New York through the end of the war and then evacuated as well.

Henry’s younger brother James stayed in Boston after the siege. His neighbors knew he too was a Loyalist, but he was generally tolerated as a popular physician. James’s namesake son actually became a U.S. Senator.

(Photograph of the Lloyd brothers’ childhood home on Long Island courtesy of the Caumsett Foundation. The buildings are maintained by the Lloyd Harbor Historical Society.)