Sorting Out the Deborah Champion Letters

Sam Forman has posted the two distinct surviving texts of Deborah Champion’s letter about traveling to Boston during the siege to deliver dispatches to Gen. George Washington for her father.

The first major difference between those texts is when and where the letter was apparently written.

• The text published in 1912 does not include a dateline.
• The similar text published in 1926 gives the date of “New London, June 14, 1776.”
• The typescript at the Library of Congress is dated “Westchester, Conn. Oct. 2nd, 1775.” That text also says Deborah Champion had been back home for ten days, meaning her ride occurred in September.

The June 1776 date is clearly impossible for a letter written soon after Deborah Champion returned from visiting Gen. Washington in Cambridge. More than two months before then, he had left Massachusetts and moved his army to New York. The October 1775 date is historically feasible, but that copy of the letter was the last to surface.

Alongside the two different dates are two different places from which the letter was apparently sent. Contemporaneous sources say that in 1775 her father, Henry Champion, lived in Westchester, Connecticut (in the house shown above), so that seems the more likely place for Deborah to sit down and write down her adventure. When Sarah E. Booth Champion, the widow of a later Henry Champion, read some version of this letter in New Haven in 1916, she stated that Deborah Champion had started her ride in Westchester. There’s no clue about whether the widow had a copy of the letter datelined “Westchester” or was applying her own knowledge of the family to the 1912 text.

It’s conceivable that Deborah Champion wrote her letter from Westchester in October 1775 and then, because it was so interesting, she or someone else wrote out a copy in New London the following June. A later copyist might have mistaken the date on the copy for the date of the original. Mary Rebecca Adams Squire sent the Deborah Champion Chapter of the D.A.R. a copy of the letter labeled “New London, June 14, 1776,” but no one seems to have doubted that date.

Someone in the Deborah Champion Chapter apparently supplied the text of its letter to the authors of Pioneer Mothers of America. If so, that person might have suppressed the dubious dateline. Alternatively, the authors could have done so, but they had an eye for discrepancies and plenty of other material to print. When the D.A.R. chapter’s local newspaper published its copy of the letter in 1926, it included the June 1776 dateline, suggesting again that no one recognized its oddity.

Meanwhile, someone working with an October 1775 original might have produced a more accurate transcript of the letter which eventually went to the Library of Congress. One that also referred to Deborah Champion’s father as “Colonel Champion,” for example, rather than “General Champion” as in the other versions. (He became a commissary general, but that wasn’t a military rank.)

Of course, another scenario is that people were quietly revising the text as time passed, realizing that it contained anachronistic details and hoping that nobody noticed.

TOMORROW: And frankly the second scenario appears more likely.

The Second Deborah Champion Letter

As I wrote yesterday, a 1912 book and a 1926 newspaper published the text of a letter in which young Deborah Champion described carrying dispatches to Gen. George Washington during the siege of Boston. Sam Forman invited a team of us to investigate that account.

In addition to the published texts, we also discovered that a typewritten transcript of Deborah Champion’s letter is part of the manuscripts collection of the Library of Congress. Derek W. Beck recruited a couple of Washington-based friends, Kevin Peel and Will Brooks, to visit the library on the last day before this fall’s government shutdown and see what that document looks like.

As I said, it’s a typewritten transcript, not an original from the eighteenth century. It was therefore created in the late 1800s or later, in the period when Champion family descendants were spreading Deborah’s story through the Daughters of the American Revolution. We found no clue about when that transcript came to the library.

The first page begins:

Copy of letter by Deborah Champion, daughter of Commissary-General Henry Champion of the Continental Army, telling of her ride to Boston to carry despatches to General Washington—an historic fact. The original letter still in possession of the Champion family.

Neither that typescript nor the library’s catalogue offer a further clue about where the “original letter” might be.

Sam Forman has now shared both texts on his website: the letter published in 1912 and 1926 in nearly identical forms, and the transcript in the Library of Congress. Comparing the two texts reveals some interesting features:

• Both texts tell the same story with many of the same phrases and details, indicating that they both derive from a documentary source. The overlaps and similarities are too numerous for the texts to be independent manifestations of the same family tradition.
• At the same time, there are significant differences between the 1912/1926 text and the undated copy in the Library of Congress—differences larger than could be created by simple transcription errors.

Our conclusion is that someone edited the earliest text to produce the later version(s). Nevertheless, both available texts were presented as accurate copies of a historic original.

And next we turn to the internal evidence of the letter.

TOMORROW: Deborah Champion’s tale.

“I at one time came across a letter”

As I described yesterday, in the early 1900s the Deborah Champion Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which had been formed in Adams, New York, was the proud owner of a copy of a letter from its namesake describing her adventurous ride during the Revolutionary War.

The text of that letter was published at least three times in the early 1900s and continues to be reprinted. Its story caught the eye of Samuel Forman, biographer of Dr. Joseph Warren, because first-person accounts of any element of the siege of Boston from women are rare. Before publishing the story on his website, however, Sam asked a handful of research colleagues to help him assess the letter and find out more about it.

The earliest text of the Deborah Champion letter that we found appeared in the book The Pioneer Mothers of America (vol. 2, 1912), by Harry Clinton Green and Mary Walcott Green. Those authors implied it had been supplied by the Deborah Champion Chapter of the D.A.R. That chapter has now been inactive for decades, and no one knows where its document might be.

I also found the 29 Dec 1926 Jefferson County Journal, which served the town of Adams. In an article titled “Deborah Champion’s Famous Ride,” it printed the same letter and indicated that it had come to the chapter from Mary Rebecca Adams Squire, a descendant of Deborah Champion living in Pennsylvania. She described her discovery this way:

Searching among some long neglected archives (I had almost said rubbish) belonging to our family, I at one time came across a letter written in the long ago time. As there seems to be an interest attached to old records just now, I have thought it might possibly interest those, who, like ourselves, had ancestors whom they are proud to acknowledge, and whose memories are held in reverence. The letter seems to be a copy of one written at the age of 17, by Deborah Champion, daughter of Commissary General [Henry] Champion of the Continental Army, to her dear friend, Patience Gilbert of East Haddam [Connecticut].

I will herewith transcribe the same.

The newspaper printed the transcription that Squire had sent. Note that she didn’t claim to have the original, only “a copy,” but we don’t know where her property might have gone.

Sam found an item in the Yale Daily News for 16 May 1916 that also mentions the letter. An article headlined “Meeting of Historical Society” says:

A meeting of the New Haven Colony Historical Society will be held this evening at 8. . . . Mrs. Henry Champion will read a letter written by Deborah Champion, describing her ride from Westchester, Connecticut, to Boston, carrying dispatches to General Washington.

The historical society’s annual report states that the letter “gave a graphic description” of Deborah Champion’s ride but offered no more details.

The person who read that letter in New Haven was Sarah Elizabeth Booth Champion, widow of Henry Champion (1838-1867), leader of the Mary Clap Wooster Chapter of the D.A.R. (member #3392), and author of Our Flag: Its History and Changes from 1607 to 1910.

The letter published in 1912—apparently in Adams by this time—doesn’t mention Westchester as the start of Deborah Champion’s ride. Sarah might have read the published letter and added that detail based on her knowledge of the Champion family. Or she might have read from another copy of the letter.

TOMORROW: Another copy of the Deborah Champion letter, of course.

The D.A.R. and Deborah Champion

In 1890, one year before The Champion Genealogy was published (as described yesterday), eighteen women and four men met in Washington, D.C., to form the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution. That organization reflected several trends in American society: the Colonial Revival, British-Americans’ interest in tradition in the face of rising immigration from other parts of Europe and the world, and greater political activity by women, even if that didn’t go all the way to suffrage.

Among the women who joined the Daughters of the American Revolution in the group’s first decade were descendants of Henry Champion of Connecticut. He was a Continental Army commissary from 1776 to 1778 and then commissary general for the Eastern Department until 1780. He had particular responsibilities to supply cattle for the army. Any woman who could document descent from Henry Champion was therefore entitled to become a member of the D.A.R. The first two to join—Mary Deming Shipman (member #2312) and Martha Isham Mix Cone (#2838)—were from Connecticut, but the family had spread out over the eastern U.S. of A., and soon more far-flung relatives became members.

One of those descendants was Isabella Bryce Isham Thomas, born in Ohio. In 1897 the fourth volume of the D.A.R. Lineage Book listed her as member #3116 and added:

[Henry Champion’s] daughter, Deborah, at the age of seventeen bore despatches on horseback from her father to Washington, attended only by an old negro servant and at one time she carried money for the army through the lines of the enemy.

The story in the privately-published Champion Genealogy thus reached an audience outside the family.

In the same year as that volume, the 27 October Saint Paul Globe published an article about the meeting of a Minnesota chapter of the D.A.R. headlined “Honor Mrs. Squires.” (Mary Smyth Squires, member #13507, was the chapter’s newly elected president.) The newspaper quoted the group’s historian, “Miss Greene,” who described Revolutionary exploits by several ancestors of the members present, including:

Deborah Champion was sent by her father, at the age of 17, to carry despatches from New London to General Washington, at Boston. She made the journey there and back on horseback, attended only by an old slave named Aristarchus. At another time she passed through the British lines carrying funds to pay the American army—her sex enabling her to pass without suspicion.

This statement is almost identical to what appeared in the 1891 Champion Genealogy except that it makes clear that Deborah had taken two trips. Evidently there was a Champion descendant out in St. Paul with a copy of that book.

Another branch of the Champion family had settled around Philadelphia and helped to found the Declaration of Independence Chapter of the D.A.R. in January 1902. The following year, the Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine reported on the inaugural gathering at the Germantown home of Mary Adams Brooks (#31835, born in Troy, New York—her married name sometimes reported as Brooke):

The friends sang “America,” Mrs. Squire, the mother of our hostess, read a charming tale entitled “Deborah Champion’s Night Ride,” a vivid picture of an episode in the life of an ancestress of Mrs. Squire’s.

“Mrs. Squire” was Mary Rebecca Adams Squire, D.A.R. member #43315, born in Ohio, and also living in Germantown as of 1904. (Mary Rebecca Adams Squire appears to have no relationship to Mary Smyth Squires of St. Paul, mentioned above.)

Yet a third group of Champion descendants was living around Adams, New York, and in 1902 they helped to form the Deborah Champion Chapter of the D.A.R. there. Perhaps those members read about Mary Rebecca Adams Squire’s presentation in the society’s magazine the next year, or perhaps they were already in touch with their distant cousins. However it happened, by 1912 Harry Clinton Green and Mary Walcott Green wrote in the second volume of The Pioneer Mothers of America:

One of the cherished treasures of the Deborah Champion Chapter, D. A. R., of Adams, N. Y., is a copy of a letter supposedly written by Deborah Champion herself, describing this adventure to her friend Patience Gilbert of Haddam and which was presented to the Chapter by a lineal descendant.

A publication of this same letter in the 29 Dec 1926 Jefferson County Journal indicates that that document came to the ladies in New York from Mary Rebecca Adams Squire.

TOMORROW: “A letter supposedly written by Deborah Champion herself.”

Introducing the Story of Deborah Champion

This is the story of two documents that Sam Forman, author of the recent biography Dr. Joseph Warren, just posted on his website. This story (and it’s a long story) is the product of work by a team that Sam assembled virtually late last year, including Rachel Smith, Tamesin Eustis, Derek W. Beck, and myself, along with helpful friends.

In 1891, Francis Bacon Trowbridge published The Champion Genealogy, tracing the descendants of Henry Champion of Connecticut. He was a militia colonel and commissary during the Revolutionary War. The book included this stirring story of a young woman during the Revolutionary War:

“Mrs. Deborah (Champion) Gilbert,” says a descendant, “was sent by her father at the age of seventeen to carry dispatches from New London to General Washington at Boston. She made the journey there and back on horseback, attended only by an old slave named Aristarchus. At one time she passed through the lines of the British soldiers carrying funds to pay the American army, her sex enabling her to pass without suspicion. I am proud to be able to remember her as a stately old lady of ninety-three years.”

That unnamed descendant’s account seems to describe two significant journeys: one by Deborah Champion as a seventeen-year-old from New London to Boston, and one through British lines carrying a Continental Army payroll.

The same genealogy—indeed, the same page—said that Deborah Gilbert was born in 1753 and died in 1845. Those dates appear on the Gilberts’ gravestone, shown above (courtesy of FindaGrave.com). That presents two glitches for the unnamed descendant’s story:

• Deborah Gilbert died at the age of ninety-two and thus was never “a stately old lady of ninety-three years.”
• When Deborah Champion was “at the age of seventeen,” the year was 1770, five years before she could have met “General Washington at Boston.” (Her sister Dorothy was seventeen in 1775, though that might just be coincidence.)

Clearly the details of this story had gotten foggy as it was passed along. Trowbridge the genealogist didn’t call attention to those discrepancies. After all, Champion descendants were the primary market for his book.

TOMORROW: Outside the family.

The News Carriers’ “Postscript” for 1799

Yesterday’s posting quoted from the poem that the apprentices of the Massachusetts Mercury prepared for the end of 1799.

Through most of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, printers’ devils and newspaper carriers printed and sold such broadsides, now classified as “carrier verses,” as they went around to collect tips from subscribers around New Year’s.

But 1799 was different from previous years. As the boys prepared for their busy season, the news arrived that George Washington had died on 14 December. All four of the surviving carrier verses that I’ve seen from Boston papers included about a dozen hastily written new lines mourning the first President. (The lads at two of the Federalist papers snuck in praise for John Adams as well.)

Here’s what the Mercury boys came up with.

POSTSCRIPT.

The Muse, in grief directs the trembling pen,
And joins the World to mourn the best of men.
Mark poor COLUMBIA now, with woe oppress’d,
Heave the deep groan and beat her aching breast.
By GOD translated is her matchless Son—
No longer Earth can boast a WASHINGTON.
Where’er the voice of man the News shall bear,
The sigh will heave, and fall the mourning tear.
And till, by GOD’s decree, the rolling World,
Torn from its axis, is in chaos hurl’d,
Shall all Columbians weep at his lov’d name—
He was their Wisdom, Strength, and Boast and Fame.

Hey, they had a tight deadline.

From the News Boys of the Massachusetts Mercury

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition around New Year’s to quote from the verses that newspaper apprentices printed and sold around that holiday. This year’s lines come out of a rather long piece of poetry set by the youth of the Massachusetts Mercury to greet the new year of 1800.

Looking at other verses from that year shows it had become common for the apprentices to work their employer’s address into their verse. The Massachusetts Mercury was published out of State Street, as you’ll be able to guess. This poem also alluded to a landmark on Beacon Hill—the memorial column with an eagle at the top—before drawing a helpful picture of how Bostonians consumed their newspapers in 1799:

Each proper morn, in routine way,
When Beacon’s EAGLE spies the day,
We sally forth from Street of State,
And as at breakfast board you set,
Present the sheet, t’inform, amuse—
You coffee sip and read the News.
Reclin’d at ease in elbow chair,
You smile at this, at that you stare;
And as the columns you pursue,
Lo, the whole World comes in review.
You, like the SUN, o’er Nations glance,
Nor rest at Russian, Britain, France.
You soon discern who basely Prints,
That “RORA’s” cloudy, “ARGUS” squints;
That the pert “BEE”’s a worthless dunce,
Sans sting or honey of his own.
But dropping anger, loud you laugh,
At signals false of “TELEGRAPH.”

Those latter lines look like trash-talking about Jeffersonian rivals. Boston had a new newspaper called The Constitutional Telegraphe, discussed back here. The other references appear to be to Philadelphia’s American Aurora, New London’s Bee, and New York’s Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser, which had Argus on its masthead. Others Boston carrier verses for this year also refer to their rivals or the pseudonyms of their usual contributors; before the war, such verses usually bad-mouthed foreign enemies and extolled patriotic unity rather than playing out domestic political quarrels.

The Mercury boys’ verse continues:

Perhaps at Store our sheet you view,
Or in some Office learn what’s New
—To us the toils the same—the treat to you.

Say, who besides, for Public Good,
Like the News Boys have yet withstood
The fretting Snows—the bruising Hail,
And the North-wester’s freezing Gale?
The drenching Rain—the sultry Air,
The Thunder’s Roar—the Light’nings Glare?
Too much for us small Lads to bear,
Did not HOPE lend her potent cheer.
She points us to your purse and face—
There’s pence, she cries, and there is grace.

The purpose of these broadsides, you may remember, was to remind customers that New Year’s was the traditional time to tip one’s newspaper carriers.

But the turn of the year 1800 wasn’t just any year.

TOMORROW: A hastily written extra.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

At the Armchair General website, Scott Stephenson wrote a very gratifying review of the Journal of the American Revolution’s first collection of articles, noting two of my own contributions to the volume among many others:

I found more information in this one volume than I have in the last half-dozen books on the Revolutionary War that I read. . . . For the student of history this book is a wonderful treat. Articles such as the biography of Artemas Ward, or the story of Nathan Hale’s capture, or the life of British army camp followers are engagingly written and provide a great look at the Revolutionary War. Military enthusiasts will delight in the aforementioned Delaware crossing article, the details of Pyle’s Massacre, and coverage of Eutaw Springs and the skirmish at Monmouth that occurred two years before the better-known Battle Of Monmouth. There are even a few recipes for making 18th-century food such as savory chicken pie and boiled pudding (you don’t need a bread oven, you can use modern conveniences).

So what about the hard-core, dyed-in-the-indigo, I Know What Cornwallis Ate For Breakfast student of the American Revolution? You’ll learn that the famous 1776 “Take Notice” recruiting poster was actually printed in 1798 for the Quasi-War with France. You’ll discover the phrase “no taxation without representation” first appeared as a newspaper headline in 1768 London and deeply researched pieces on the deaths of Major John Pitcairn and General Simon Fraser. The origin of the Molly Pitcher legend, what happened after the 1780 Battle of Camden before General Nathaniel Greene took command of the colonial forces, a biography of John Trumbull, an interview with best-selling author Thomas Fleming—this book contains all that and so much more.

My emphasis.

Last week the J.A.R. site offered a group interview with contributors on these five questions:

• In your opinion, what was George Washington’s biggest blunder of the war? Its impact, if any?
  
• Do you think there was a greater strategy behind most of the pre-war violence, or was it primarily raw emotion and vengeance?
  
• What books do you consider essential to any American Revolution buff’s library? Why?
  
• What aspects of or questions regarding the American Revolution need to be further explored by historians?
  
• If you could time travel and visit any American city/colony/state for one year between 1763 and 1783, which city/colony/state and year would you choose? Why?

Question #2 produced the broadest disagreements. I was surprised by the relative lack of variety in answers to #5.

And now a look ahead at what 2014 will bring for Boston 1775. I’ve completed over seven years of blogging daily about Revolutionary New England. In the coming months I plan to rerun some older postings I particularly like, refreshing their links and adding any necessary corrections or new information. Those might amount to one or two postings a week. I’m hoping that will yield a little more time for other projects.

Commemorating the “Worcester Revolution of 1774”

Another anniversary coming up next year is the 240th of the uprising that ended royal rule in Worcester County. Okay, that’s not a sestercentennial, but I sense the local history community wants to raise awareness of that transition and institute a commemoration so as to be ready for its 250th.

On 6 Sept 1774, 4,622 militiamen from 37 county towns marched into Worcester to stop the county court from meeting. This was part of a series of crowd actions all over Massachusetts as the populace protested Parliament’s Coercive Acts and refused to cooperate with royal appointees.

That fall, month towns were also electing representatives to the Massachusetts General Court or, in case Gov. Thomas Gage refused to call that legislature back into session, a Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The Worcester town meeting elected blacksmith Timothy Bigelow as its representative to the congress, a role traditionally reserved for upper-class gentlemen.

Furthermore, in its instructions for Bigelow, the Worcester town meeting declared:

you are to consider the people of this province…to all intents and purposes reduced to a state of nature; and you are to exert yourself in devising ways and means to raise from the dissolution of the old constitution, as from the ashes of the Phenix, a new form, wherein all officers shall be dependent on the suffrages of the people, whatever unfavorable constructions our enemies may put upon such procedure.

This went further than the resolutions of other towns in the same period, in effect a declaration of independence. It wasn’t an explicit break with the British Empire or king, but it was based on the same political philosophy that led to the Continental Congress’s Declaration over a year and a half later.

A group of historic and cultural organizations in Worcester County is planning a commemoration of this “Worcester Revolution of 1774.” Their effort has started with the www.revolution1774.org website. They envision a series of events over the course of next year, such as:

• A county-wide reading of Ray Raphael’s The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, which highlights central Massachusetts in 1774, through local book clubs and libraries.
• Walking tours and narratives of historic locations.
• Concerts by colonial music groups in the open air and concert halls.
• Presentations by authors and academics on colonial Worcester County and 1774.
• Visits by re-enactors to Worcester Public School classrooms.
• Teacher workshops on 1774.
• Museum exhibits, lectures, and more.

On 7 September there will be a free, day-long public celebration on Worcester Common, with historic reenactors and craftsmen and a dramatic presentation about the Revolutionary events.

The organizing consortium includes the American Antiquarian Society, Assumption College, Congress of American Revolution Round Tables, Daughters of the American Revolution Massachusetts Society, Old Sturbridge Village, Preservation Worcester, Sons of the American Revolution Massachusetts Society, Tenth Regiment of Foot, Worcester Historical Museum, and Worcester Public Schools. The Worcester Historical Museum is the fiscal agent for grants and donations to this project.

Annual Flag-Raising in Somerville, 1 Jan.

The new year can’t start without Somerville’s annual commemoration of the raising of the “Grand Union flag” at Prospect Hill Park. That will start on 11:30 A.M. on Wednesday as an actor on horseback portraying Gen. George Washington leads a procession from Somerville City Hall to Prospect Hill Park, just north of Union Square.

This year’s ceremony will feature a presentation by Byron DeLear of the North American Vexillological Association. He’s found evidence that the phrase “United States of America” was first written in Washington’s Cambridge headquarters early in 1776, soon after that flag-raising.

Back on 4 July 1775, the new commander-in-chief had told the army that “They are now the Troops of the UNITED PROVINCES of North America.” That was still the Continental Congress’s official term for the entities it represented. The shift to calling those entities “states” was a step toward thinking of them as independent of Britain. Ironically, the first man on record to do so was an immigrant to America.

The Somerville ceremony will also feature songs, readings, and His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot representing the British Army. A Grand Union flag will be raised atop the Prospect Hill Tower.

Of course, the term “Grand Union flag” was coined by George Preble in 1872, an error for what Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet called “the great Union Flag” in its 15 Jan 1776 issue. (The Pennsylvania Gazette used the same phrase on 17 January.) Gen. Washington had termed that banner a “Union flag” in his letter to Joseph Reed on 4 January.

Another vexillologist, Peter Ansoff, has argued that “Union flag” was the standard term for the British standard, showing how the Congress and Washington were not yet ready to break with Britain but still fighting for British rights within the Empire. Byron believes that the evidence supports the tradition that the Prospect Hill flag was a new design of the Union Jack with thirteen stripes. Unfortunately, a definite answer to that question harder to pin down than the phrase “United States of America” in a letter.

The St. Michael’s Tercentenary in Marblehead

Over the next week I’ll highlight some intriguing historical events coming up in the new year.

In Marblehead, St. Michael’s Church will celebrate its 300th anniversary. This is the oldest Episcopal Church in New England still conducting services in its original building, erected in 1714. Its first minister, supplied by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, arrived from Britain the next year, and the building grew with a new roof in 1728.

In that century Marblehead was the second-largest town in Massachusetts, with its own port. The townspeople were more focused on fishing and trading than the farmers of rural towns, and more open to immigrants and Anglicans. Still, the Rev. George Pigot’s sermon defending the celebration of Christmas in 1728 prompted a pamphlet war.

The reredos or altarpiece inside the church is thought to date to 1714. Other eighteenth-century artifacts include the twelve-branched chandelier, donated in 1732 by a Customs official in Bristol, and a 1745 silver flagon.

According to the church’s website, “St. Michael’s first bell was hung in 1718. When news of the Declaration of Independence broke out in 1776, it was rung so hard by fervent patriots that it cracked.” (Those Patriots, who were probably not part of the congregation, also pulled down the royal coat of arms.) The bell in the tower today was cast by the Paul Revere & Sons Foundry in 1818.

In the coming year, historians of early America and architecture will present a series of public lectures about the church’s history. Musicians will perform concerts on its organ. On 7 June there will be a scholarly symposium produced with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The 28 September anniversary worship service will include the Bishop of London, whose predecessors oversaw St. Michael’s Church up until the Revolution.

The Importance of “Being George”

On 26 Dec 1776, Gen. George Washington led a successful attack on Crown forces at Trenton, his first battlefield triumph of the Revolutionary War. That move began with his fabled Crossing of the Delaware River, which local volunteers reenact yearly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Or try to reenact. When the weather is too harsh or the current too strong, local governments call off the row for the sake of safety—for both participants and spectators. (Already the crossing is scheduled for daytime when people can see it easily rather than night-time when people couldn’t.) I recall many news stories over the years about reenactors glumly walking across the bridge instead of getting to travel in the boats.

I also recall reports of some resentments about who got the plum role of Gen. Washington. For a long time that was a matter of seniority within the local reenacting group. Then the director of Washington’s Crossing Historic Park asserted more control. The current process is more formal, with auditions before a panel of judges from local historical organizations, but that doesn’t mean it’s free of controversy.

The Star-Ledger newspaper produced a documentary titled “Being George”, about the choice of Washington in 2012. Directed by Nyier Abdou and Adya Beasley, the video is about forty-five minutes long and focuses on four of the ten men who vied for the post:

• the incumbent, breaking with a recent precedent of not seeking the role again after a three-year term.
  
• a past Washington who never got to cross by water in his years.
  
• a devoted Washington impersonator from outside the local community.
  
• a long-time reenactor in his forties, about the same age Washington was in 1776. (The other candidates, and our image of Washington, are older.)

Who has the strongest claim? Who would do the best job? Unfortunately for the sake of the documentary, the auditions and the judges’ discussions of them were off-limits to the camera. And unfortunately for the sake of “reality” television, the candidates are too polite for fireworks to erupt on screen. But the emotions are clear, both in the video and in the comments section below it. And there’s always next year.

Toys for the Custis Children

As I described yesterday, a number of recent publications have included a list of toys that George Washington supposedly ordered for his new stepchildren, Jacky and Patsy, on his first Christmas with them in 1759. But no such list appears in The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, which can be searched at Founders Online.

However, I found that John C. Fitzpatrick used some of the phrases on that list in his 1933 biography, George Washington Himself. Fitzpatrick was then overseeing the edition of Washington’s papers put out by the federal government in the early twentieth century.

That encouraged me to revisit the Library of Congress’s American Memory digital database of Washington’s papers, which includes transcriptions of the notes that Fitzpatrick included in that edition. Those notes quote some documents not included in the current edition of the papers (which is in other ways more complete).

And indeed, Fitzpatrick noted a March 1760 invoice to Washington from Robert Cary & Co. that included:

from Unwin & Wrigglesworth—
A Tunbridge Tea Sett ... ¼
3 Neat Tunbridge Toys ... 1/
A Neat Book lash Tea Chest ... 4/6
A Bird on Bellows ... 5d.
A Cuckoo ... 10d.
A turnabout Parrot ... 1/3
A Grocers Shop ... 5/

and from Mount & Page—
6 Small Books for Children ... 3/.
A Box best Household Stuff ... 4/6
A Straw patch box wt. a Glass ... 2/
A Neat dressd Wax Baby ... 3/6
An Aviary ... 1/3
A Prussian Dragoon ... 1/3
A Man Smoakg. ... 1/

For his biography Fitzpatrick plucked out items from that list which were most likely children’s toys. The Mount Vernon Midden blog shows images from those invoices. The 1760 Universal Pocket Companion for Londoners listed Unwin & Wrigglesworth as “hardwaremen” doing business on Cheapside; they probably sold more than toys.

Olive Bailey included a similar list in Christmas with the Washingtons (1948). She also transcribed a list of toys that Unwin & Wrigglesworth had shipped earlier, billing Daniel Parke Custis, Martha’s first husband, who died in 1757:

A child’s fiddle
A coach and six in a box
A stable with six horses
A corner cupboard
A neat walnut bureau
A filigree watch
A neat enameled watch box
A toy whip
A child’s huzzif

So we’re on solid ground to say that Washington bought that list of items I quoted yesterday, and that most of those things were toys. But we can’t say that Washington ordered those toys specifically. The Mount Vernon Midden blog quotes him as vaguely ordering “‘10 [shillings] worth of Toys’ for Jacky and ‘A Fash[ionably] Dres[sed] Baby…& other Toys’” for Patsy in September 1759. The London merchants picked out what they thought those children would like.

We also can’t say those goods had anything to do with Washington’s first Christmas as a stepfather. They were apparently ordered in September 1759 but not shipped until March 1760. In fact, Washington’s papers say almost nothing about Christmas celebrations at Mount Vernon. (In 1769 he won some money on cards that evening while visiting Fielding Lewis.)

Instead, it appears that twentieth-century authors chose to view these goods through the lens of our own traditions. Most Americans give children lots of toys on Christmas, and our culture encourages us to give even more. Therefore, these toys appeared in Christmas with the Washingtons and Reader’s Digest Book of Christmas even though they had no link to the Washington-Custis family’s holiday. Jacky and Patsy were probably glad to get them whenever they arrived.

(The image above shows the remains of two small clay figurines found in an archeological dig at Mount Vernon. Were those some of Jacky and Patsy Custis’s toys? Or the toys of Jacky’s children?)

Christmas Shopping with George Washington?

This month HistoryTube shared a heart-warming glimpse of George Washington, the just-retired young colonel of the Virginia forces, as a new stepfather:

In 1759 George and Martha Washington spent their first Christmas together at Mount Vernon. They had been married less than a year. A list of presents George Washington intended to purchase for stepson John (Jacky), age 5, and stepdaughter Martha (Patsy), age 3, shows a heartfelt appreciation for the joys of childhood. His list reads:

A bird on Bellows
A Cuckoo
A turnabout Parrott
A Grocers Shop
An Aviary
A Prussian Dragoon
A Man Smoaking
A Tunbridge Tea Sett
3 Neat Tunbridge Toys
A Neat Book fash Teas Chest
A box best Household Stuff
A straw Patch box w. a Glass
A neat dressed Wax Baby

The items on the list would have likely been handmade and imported from Europe. Many mechanical and hand-carved toys of this period were produced in the cities and towns of northern Germany, such as Hamburg and Hannover. Although we can’t be sure what each one looked like, several were fairly common. The bird on bellows, cuckoo, turnabout parrot and “smoaking” man were probably mechanical toys made of metal. The bird and parrot would have contained whistles and may have had flapping wings. The grocer’s shop also likely was made in northern Germany, where elaborate miniature toy room settings were crafted and sold. The Prussian dragoon was probably a metal toy soldier, and the wax baby doll would have been made of poured, tinted and painted wax, a common method for doll construction in the 1700s.

The three Tunbridge toys were probably made in Tunbridge, Kent, England. They may have been puzzle boxes, yo-yos or small decorative chests, made in the Tunbridge fashion, of many small pieces of wood glued together to create a mosaic effect. The tea set and tea chest may have been toys or could have been for a dowry for Patsy. The patch box contained small cloth patches to apply to the face as beauty marks. Were these for Patsy to play with, or meant as a present for Martha?

I’m always touched by watching Washington try so hard to do the right thing. Here he was achieving his social and economic aims by marrying wealthy widow Martha Custis, and he’s suddenly thrust into the role of patriarch responsible for providing for two young children as well.

Since I usually like to add a little something when I quote from other blogs, I went looking for more context for that list of toys. And I found that phrases like “Prussian Dragoon” and “turnabout Parrott” don’t appear in Founders Online, which includes the latest edition of Washington’s colonial papers.

Instead, my searches found this list appeared in a lot of recent books, in the 1973 Reader’s Digest Book of Christmas, and in a 1969 editor’s note at the start of an issue of the American Bar Association Journal. None of the publications I saw indicated a source. So I started to worry.

TOMORROW: It’s a Christmas miracle. (Sort of.)

The Original “Wicked Statesman”

A week ago I shared this picture, engraved by Paul Revere for Isaiah Thomas’s 1774 almanac. It shows a “Wicked Statesman” being tormented by Death and a Devil. Under his left arm is a £1,500 salary—what Gov. Thomas Hutchinson was accepting from the tea tax. That engraving is part of the American Antiquarian Society’s online catalogue of all its engravings connected with Revere.

In a comment E. J. Witek wrote that Revere based this picture on a British original titled “The Minister in Surprize.” Indeed, Revere was an excellent silversmith but not a talented draftsman, and he based almost all his engravings on someone else’s work. In some cases, he collaborated with a local artist like Christian Remick. In others, he copied without permission, as in his scene of the Boston Massacre cribbed from Henry Pelham. Often Revere based his engravings on British originals.

In this case, I think the original isn’t “The Minister in Surprize” but the likely source of both: “The wicked Statesman, or The Traitor to his Country, at the hour of Death.” That’s the same title as Revere’s picture, and it has the figures of Death and the Devil while the “Minister in Surprize” has only the Devil.

The original “Wicked Statesman” appeared in the Oxford Magazine in August 1772. It’s an attack on the “Earl of ———” for “Selling England to the French.” At his feet the earl has books labeled Art of Bribery and Machiavel.

This might have been aimed at the Earl of Bute, though by that year he’d been out of politics for nearly a decade; his enemies did accuse him of bribery, affairs with the king’s mother, and scheming to debase Britain under some Catholic power. However, they also disliked the fact that he was a Scotsman and usually showed him in a kilt or other ethnic clothing, which is not seen here.

“The Minister in Surprize” simplified that picture, removing Death and, alas, the crocodile-demon at lower right. It also turned the cartoon into a comment on American policy. The sign held up by that image’s Devil reads “The American Resolves are a Devil of a Dose.” The minister’s papers say ”New Members” and “Civil List in Arrears” while the books below are American Constitution and List of Pensioners. Overall, I think that’s meant to suggest the surprised minister has been trampling American rights to bring in more money to pay off pensioners, civil servants, and Members of Parliament.

Both the “Minister in Surprize” and Revere’s “Wicked Statesman” are reversed left to right from the original “Wicked Statesman.” That’s because prints are mirror images of their engravings, and if you had a print it was easiest to copy it directly onto a sheet of copper and then produce prints that flipped the original around. (It’s also possible that “The Minister in Surprize” came first, a second British artist added figures and details while reversing the scene to create the first “Wicked Statesman,” and Revere copied that derivative to create his own “Wicked Statesman,” reversing it again.)

Newly Discovered Map of New York in Late 1776?

Earlier this month DNA Info New York reported that British map dealer Andrew Adamson says he might have found an unusual hand-drawn map of New York from 1776. The story goes:

A few years ago, Adamson was looking through archives at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office in Somerset, England, when he came across a “very brown and dusty plan” that showed New York City and its surrounding areas.

“What was of immediate interest was the inclusion on the map of British troop positions, including General [William] Howe’s headquarters at Newtown, Long Island,” Adamson told DNAinfo New York via email. [The label “Head Quarters” seems to appear near the center of the detail above.]

Based on those troop positions, Adamson surmised that the map showed British-occupied New York in the summer of 1776, the period between the Battle of Brooklyn and the Battle of Harlem Heights. Adamson said he believes the document was part of a working military field map at the time.

Also of interest to Adamson was a second, smaller piece of paper at the center of the map that shows Manhattan in great detail. He said he believes this sheet is a drawing by Bernard Ratzer — a famous cartographer of that period — that was copied and used to make a larger, well-known Ratzer map of New York that was published in 1776. . . .

The rest of the map Adamson found was less carefully drawn, and he believes the smaller piece of paper was used as a starting point for other surveyors to sketch out the rest of it. He also believes the document is one portion of what was once a much larger map, since its edges are frayed.

The hand-drawn map, which belongs to a branch of the British government, still has to be authenticated.

Adamson’s firm, Heritage Charts, sells reproductions of the Ratzer map. A couple of years ago the Brooklyn Historical Society had its copy of that map conserved, and Barnet Schechter, author of The Battle for New York and George Washington’s America, spoke about it; that lecture is available as a podcast.

More Things at All Things Liberty

This month I’ve been busy contributing to the Journal of the American Revolution. (That’s the website that published its first collection this fall, with other essays by me.) The new articles include:

“Five Myths of Tarring and Feathering”: From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” to the John Adams miniseries, scenes of Boston mobs attacking genteel officials with tar and feathers have been a staple of American popular culture. But how common were such attacks really, and how much damage did they do? This article now comes recommended by Debby Witt at National Review Online. [Insert snarky political comment of your choice here.]

“Washington’s Five Books”: This short piece grew from a section of my study for the National Park Service of George Washington’s first few months as commander-in-chief. With the help of Don Hagist and the internet, I found more details about the books the general recommended to an old Virginia colleague who had just accepted a colonel’s position. For example, when Washington recommended a particular edition of a book recently republished in Philadelphia, it turns out that edition had been dedicated to…Washington.

“An Interview with Richard C. Wiggin”: Rick Wiggin has already shared some stories from his book Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783 here as a guest blogger. This conversation goes into much more detail about the background of the book, Rick’s research, and what we can learn from the lives of one town’s Revolutionary War soldiers.

Next week, visit AllThingsLiberty.com for my responses along with those of other contributors in a week-long group interview about the burning issues of the Revolution, such as riots and time travel.

Rhode Island’s First Major General

A few days back, I quoted Samuel Ward’s December 1774 letter describing how Rhode Island was putting itself on a footing for war by, among other things, appointing the first major-general in the colony’s history. That was not Nathanael Greene, who sprang from the rank of private to that of general only after the war had begun. So who was it?

The Rhode Island legislature appointed Simeon Potter (1720-1806) of Bristol. He had gained wealth and notoriety as a privateer during the mid-century imperial wars and allegedly helped to lead the raid on the Royal Navy’s Gaspée in 1772.

According to Beggarman, Spy: The Secret Life and Times of Israel Potter, by David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar, Simeon Potter was not a mild-tempered man. For instance, in 1761 he beat up a seventy-four-year-old minister. (To be fair, the minister had told Potter, “There is whoring wherever you go.”)

What did Maj.-Gen. Potter do in the spring of 1775? On 19 April, two members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress—James Warren of Plymouth and Dr. Charles Pynchon (1719-1783) of Springfield—came to Providence to consult with Rhode Island legislators about the outbreak of fighting in Middlesex County. One of the Rhode Island politicians, Stephen Hopkins, sent Potter a letter reporting:

The King’s Troops are actually engaged butchering and destroying our brethren in the most inhuman manner. The inhabitants oppose them with great zeal and courage.

Hopkins asked Potter to come to Providence to consult with Lt. Gov. Darius Sessions, who had been put in charge of the colony’s military preparations.

Potter never took the field. According to Beggarman, Spy, he “claimed to have received a letter from the commanding general of the Massachusetts Militia telling him that no troops were needed.” Unfortunately, Chacko and Kulcsar don’t quote that letter, and their citation isn’t specific or clear.

That book’s notes mention “Simeon Potter’s letter of September 3, 1774 to his nephew Nathan Miller of Warren in WHS [Warren Historical Society] that is only partially reprinted in NDAR [Naval Documents of the American Revolution].” The second volume of N.D.A.R. does include a letter from Potter dated 3 Sept 1775, saying it went to Col. William Turner Miller and is at the Rhode Island Historical Society. But that letter says nothing about the April crisis or a message from Massachusetts. It’s conceivable that that published transcript is based on an incomplete, mislabeled copy and that the Warren Historical Society holds a longer document, but I wish the information were more solid.

In any event, the Rhode Island legislature cleaned house in May 1775. It replaced Lt. Gov. Sessions with Nicholas Cooke, and later pushed out Gov. Joseph Wanton in favor of Cooke as well. It made Greene a brigadier-general commanding three regiments of infantry and an artillery company outside Boston. For its own defense, the colony chose a new major-general: William Bradford (1729-1808), also of Bristol. In October Bradford became lieutenant governor and Joshua Babcock (1707-1783) of Westerly became the new major general.

As for Potter, one of these days I’ll quote that September 1775 letter to show his resentment about the whole situation. Potter did end up providing cannon for the Continental Army—at a price. In 1776 the Rhode Island legislature even appointed him an Assistant, or member of the upper house. But Potter didn’t show up for sessions, the next year he stopped serving in town offices, and he refused to pay taxes to the new government. That didn’t save him from losing his mansion in a British raid in 1778. Potter had to move into a smaller house, which is now a bed-and-breakfast.

Meeting William Pencak

Yet another historian of early America who died this fall was William Pencak, who spent most of his career at Penn State. He wrote on a great many topics, including Pennsylvania’s Revolution and Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800, but also the American Legion and Icelandic sagas.

In War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (1981), he looked at the Revolutionary unrest with a long lens:

Before 1760, it had been customary for men to marry before the age of twenty-five, usually between twenty-one and twenty-three. After 1760, marriages of men in their late twenties became more common. When the Revolution broke out, weddings by men over thirty became the rule rather than the exception. . . . During nearly two decades of war, migration had been primarily female and predominantly local. Beginning in 1765, migration not only increased phenomenally but became primarily male. The newcomers now came not only from Massachusetts, but from other colonies and overseas. The end of warfare, the disbanding of the army, and a postwar depression reinforced in Massachusetts by the catastrophic drought of 1763 to 1764 accounted for the presence of so many single men in Boston. They undoubtedly swelled the size and added to the vigor of the “Boston mob.”

He also co-edited a volume titled Riot and Revelry in Early America.

I met Bill this spring at the “Revolution Reborn” conference in Philadelphia. He sat in the balcony and boomed down comments, but he was also happy to engage with non-academic “buffs” like myself. He had retired from Penn State and seemed to delight in shocking academic colleagues with the news that he’d taken a position at the University of South Alabama.

Bill was also part of a panel on the Treaty of 1763 at Faneuil Hall a few days later, and afterward we walked over to the Old State House together. Or rather, we tried. It was raining hard, the path was uphill, and Bill finally begged off, saying he was exhausted. He really didn’t look well, and I worried about whether he could get back to where he was staying. (Not that Bill let me walk him further than the T stop.)

So I can’t say I was shocked to learn of Bill’s death during heart surgery at age sixty-two. But I was definitely sad. He was still working on at least two big projects, a Jewish Studies program at his new university and a biography of Philadelphia’s first Episcopal bishop, and clearly still enjoying his work.

Michael G. Kammen’s Season of Youth

Last month brought news of the death of Michael G. Kammen, an American historian who taught for several decades at Cornell University.

Kammen’s first book was A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (1968), about the colonies’ lobbyists in London. He wrote other histories of early America, such as Colonial New York (1975) and People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1973.

However, the field that Kammen staked out for himself wasn’t so much what happened as how we Americans have liked to remember events happening. A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986) won the Francis Parkman and Henry Adams Prizes by discussing what we think of when we talk about the Constitution. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) treated our understanding of history as itself a historical construct, and spearheaded a school of books about how we consider and commemorate the past.

The Kammen book most meaningful to me, because of my interests, was A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (1978), which isn’t always included among his major works. Among other topics that book considered the historical fiction set during the Revolution, and why the most popular books set in that period are about boys coming of age:

Almost to the point of numbing monotony,…imaginative writers have consistently perceived the American Revolution as a national rite de passage, and have relentlessly projected that vision to an ever-widening readership. . . .

In some instances…a divided family exemplifies the divided empire; but much more common is the intergenerational conflict between father and son within the colonies, or a young man and his prospective father-in-law.

Of course, American Patriots coined the metaphor of parent and child when discussing relations with Britain, among other ways of viewing the crisis. But later generations seized on it.

Kammen traced a pattern of American novels through school staples like Johnny Tremain (1943) and and My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974) and lesser examples like Thomas Forty (1947), April Morning (1961), and even Kenneth Roberts’s Loyalist novel Oliver Wiswell (1940). Further examples published since Kammen’s book include the two volumes of The Life and Astonishing Adventures of Octavian Nothing and the eventual three volumes of the Forge trilogy.

We might counter that most fiction for young readers is at some level about coming of age, and the adult supporting characters will almost always be less complex than the young main characters. But Esther Forbes actually labeled Johnny Tremain “A Novel for Old and Young,” suggesting she wasn’t just trying to write for fifth-graders. If her hero was a teenager, that’s because she felt Johnny’s story was a good vehicle for his society’s political awakening. And that book remains the twentieth-century novel of the Revolution that has struck the most chords for American readers.