Commemorating and Considering the Boston Massacre

Wednesday, 5 March, is the 244th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, and there are a number of commemorations and discussions of the event coming up.

At 6:30 P.M. that evening, Old South Meeting-House will host a free program with authors Audrey and Frank Peterman speaking on “The Future of Our National Parks.” This talk is co-sponsored by Boston National Historical Park to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. The event description says, “The Petermans will reflect on a few of many Boston stories—including Crispus Attucks, the first person to die in the Boston Massacre, and internationally famous African American poet Phillis Wheatley—that evoke the voices and invite the participation of our diverse communities in the history that shaped our nation.”

On Saturday, 8 March, the Bostonian Society has a full day of activities at the Old State House museum commemorating the Massacre. These include the “Trial of the Century” program at 11:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M.: “Watch patriot lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy defend the British soldiers accused of murdering five Bostonians at the Boston Massacre. Audience members are invited to act as witnesses and jurors for this celebrated case.” Tickets will go on sale at 9:00, and are free with Old State House admission.

At 7:00 P.M., the live reenactment of the Massacre will take place outside the Old State House. Some of the region’s best historical reenactors will portray the men of the 29th Regiment and the people of Boston as they move toward their fatal confrontation. I’ll be there as the narrator. This event is outdoors and free. Sight lines aren’t excellent, but being stuck in a crowd is part of the historical experience. Folks can also follow on Twitter through @BostonianSoc and #bostonmassacre.

Next Wednesday, 12 March, at 6:00 P.M., the Old State House will be the site of a talk on “The Legacy of Crispus Attucks in Boston in the Twentieth Century.” Maureen McAleer, a graduate student at Harvard University, will discuss her thesis work on how activists, politicians, and the public have remembered, commemorated, and used Attucks’s name over time. This event is free, but please register on Eventbrite.

Painting the Legend

The Skinner auction house reports that that watercolor I’ve been discussing sold for $39,975, above the estimate. I hope its new owner is pleased with the painting and the little historical mystery it brings.

Thinking about what makes an artifact interesting reminded me of a story I noted back in 2006, right after I started this blog. As reported by National Public Radio and the New Yorker, the story started in 1975 when Alexander McBurney, a doctor in Rhode Island, bought the painting shown here.

A picture of a Revolutionary-era black mariner in uniform is extremely rare, and this images was reproduced in various books over the following decades. For example, in The Unknown American Revolution Gary Nash speculated that a sailor commissioned it after a lucrative privateering voyage.

About 2005 the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York was planning an exhibit on “Fighting for Freedom: Black Patriots and Loyalists.” McBurney sent the canvas out for restoration before loaning it to that exhibit.

But the restoration by Peter Williams revealed that the sailor’s face and brown skin had been painted over a rather ordinary portrait of a Royal Navy officer, probably in the late 1900s. The N.P.R. link includes before-and-after images of the mariner’s hand. The original face was unsalvageable.

Dr. McBurney then asked Williams to restore the canvas to how it looked when he’d bought it, with the face of a fictitious black man. Though he knew that face had no historical authenticity, over the years he’d become fond of it. And he had a much better story.

The Bottom Line on the Pitcairn Painting?

I’ve been discussing this small watercolor painting whose label says it shows Maj. John Pitcairn and was created by Paul Revere. That picture appears to have been first reported in Art in America in December 1922. At that time it was paired with another, also credited to Revere and labeled “A View of South Bridge, Lexington.”

Now I didn’t know Lexington had a significant or picturesque south bridge in the early republic. For someone unaware of local Revolutionary history but playing off the buzzwords of the late-1800s Colonial Revival, “the South Bridge at Lexington” might make a nice bookend with the North Bridge at Concord. That sort of detail keeps me skeptical of the picture’s authenticity, even as I acknowledge that the Massachusetts Magazine and other periodicals published a lot of prints of bridges in the early republic.

In her 1942 biography Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes noted the “charming water-color of Major Pitcairn on horseback” and the bridge painting in a footnote only, saying, “as I cannot feel [they] have been completely verified, I have passed them by.” The pictures have since been in private hands, not in a museum or library, and I don’t know of any more recent author who’s discussed them in connection with Revere or Pitcairn.

When I look into a historical mystery like this painting, I want to find a pretty definite answer. Evidence that the portrait almost certainly was painted by Revere or evidence that it could not have been. But I didn’t find anything so certain. Even the 1810 newspaper scraps inside the frame doesn’t mean the label is accurate. In the end I remain skeptical mostly because of the fact that Revere isn’t known to have painted any other portrait and his engravings don’t show so much illustrative skill as is evident in this picture. But there’s still a lot of ambiguity.

Markets are usually pretty good at dealing with uncertainty, and I think the art market has already factored in the odds that this picture’s label is accurate. In 2012 Christie’s sold a copy of Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre for over $145,000. A print is, by definition, not a unique item. But that one was clearly authentic.

In contrast, the Pitcairn watercolor is said to be the only portrait Revere painted. It’s perhaps the only picture of Maj. Pitcairn near the end of his life by someone who knew him. It’s a unique item. And yet Skinner has estimated its price at only $20-30,000. If we could be definite about its origin, then that price would probably be much, much higher. Or much lower.

As it is, whoever wins this auction will be living with an interesting-looking little picture, and living with the mystery behind it. Which for some people could make for a better story.

What Stands Behind That Watercolor of Maj. Pitcairn?

This is another detail of the watercolor painting that Skinner is offering for sale this weekend, labeled as showing Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines and painted by Paul Revere.

This detail comes from the other side of the painting, or actually from inside the wooden frame. In investigating the picture, the folks at Skinner opened the frame and looked inside. There were scraps of newspaper glued to the wood as part of the matting process, and specialist Joel Bohy kindly sent me an image of them. This is one portion of that photograph.

I’m not an expert on folk art or handwriting. I don’t know the details of British army uniforms like some of the people who commented on Thursday. But by golly, I can search for text in historical databases. So I set out to identify those newspapers.

It would have been so helpful if any of those visible scraps had included a year. Clearly the newspapers weren’t printed in 1774-75, when both Pitcairn and Revere were living in Boston’s North End, because they don’t include the long S.

But, as I wrote on Thursday, I already thought that was an unlikely time for an American to create a portrait of Pitcairn; it seemed more likely that the painting dated from sometime in the early republic, if not the Colonial Revival. So when was that scrap of newspaper printed?

I picked out what I hoped were unusual phrases and words in the visible portions of the scrap and ran those through the search function of Readex’s Early American Newspapers database. Usually I use that resource to search for newspaper coverage in the Revolutionary period, but it extends many decades further as newspapers become more numerous and frequent.

After a bunch of false hits, I narrowed down the search terms to eliminate those that were more common that I’d thought. And I started to get real hits.

The ad at the top of this scrap was a notice from “Sam. Stilwell, Sec’y.” of the Woodstock Glass Manufacturing Society to shareholders for a meeting at his house in May 1810. That item ran many times in the Mercantile Advertiser of New York in the early months of 1810. It was always set the same way in the paper, so the printers were saving that block of type from one issue to the next. (Incidentally, that glass company never seems to have gotten off the ground.)

Below that ad were two more, placed by Benjamin Bailey and Walter Willis, dissolving their partnership with William Osborn and announcing a new partnership between the two of them alone.

Again, those ads ran in the Mercantile Advertiser several times in early 1810. The same text appeared in some other New York papers in the same months, but with different typesetting.

I didn’t find the precise issue of the Mercantile Advertiser in which the glass company’s ad appeared over Bailey and Willis’s ad, but those two matches make clear that scrap of paper came from the year 1810. That was within Revere’s lifetime (he died in 1818). It was also during the peak of the New York career of Duncan Phyfe, said to have owned the watercolor. So it’s quite plausible that Phyfe or his workmen had pages of the Mercantile Advertiser lying around when they framed this painting.

Of course, it’s also plausible that someone trying to create a fake artifact from the Revolution a century or more afterwards found an old business newspaper to slip inside the frame and give it an air of antiquity. But if I were to fake a painting—not that I’ve ever tried that, no, not me—I’d choose scraps of newspaper that had dates on them. Not scraps that would require a not-yet-invented computerized database to identify.

TOMORROW: The Pitcairn watercolor on the market.

The Signature Style of Paul Revere

Yesterday I showed a watercolor painting of a British officer that the Skinner auction house is selling this weekend. And here’s the detail that makes this image so interesting: the words at the bottom of the picture identifying the subject as “Major John Pitcairn” and the artist as “P. Revere.”

I’m skeptical of most things from the Revolution that aren’t clearly contemporaneous, and some that are. I was therefore skeptical about the authenticity of this portrait. As Skinner says, it’s the only known painting credited to Paul Revere. For his engravings he relied on other artists like Christian Remick and Henry Pelham, or he copied prints from Britain. Even that note on the back of this picture’s frame says:

The portrait is a really creditable piece of painting, revealing the facial evidences of individual character, a work that must enhance his artistic reputation, at present resting upon the various engraved Views in which the figures barely escape caricature.

Yet the draftsmanship is neither so competent nor so incompetent as to indicate, at least to these untrained eyes, whether it’s authentic. If George W. Bush can take up painting in retirement, why couldn’t Revere?

On the other hand, if the only thing connecting this artwork to Revere is his signature, I figured I should take a hard look at that. I went looking for other examples of Revere’s signature, and found variations over time.

Here’s how Revere signed the 1767 non-consumption agreement recently digitized at Harvard’s Houghton Library:

The way he wrote his name at the start of his first deposition about the events of 18-19 Apr 1775, digitized by the Massachusetts Historical Society:

His name at the start of the “fair copy” of that deposition, also through the M.H.S.:

And his formal signature on the bottom of that document:

Finally, an 1816 receipt:

In all those signatures, the left leg of the P and R swoops up to the left. Those two capital letters also have a big swoop down from the top—sometimes a huge swoop. Those details also appear in the name on the painting.

However, in the penned signatures above, all the letters after the initial capitals are connected. In contrast, the “P. Revere” on the watercolor is made up of separate letters. And the little R is in a different style from the same letter in all the examples above. In those respects, that label is more like the way Revere added his name to engravings, as shown below in images from the American Antiquarian Society.

But, as you can see, Revere used different lettering styles on different prints. I didn’t try to capture all the variations. Yet another consideration is that Revere had engraved his names on those plates backwards. So it would be natural for him to write his name a little different when he wrote it in pen, even if he was trying to write it as it usually appeared on his engravings.

And, of course, someone else writing Revere’s name on this watercolor could have found similar examples to copy.

In sum, I was hoping to find definitive evidence to confirm or allay my skepticism about this painting, and I didn’t find it in the signature.

TOMORROW: Peeking inside the frame.

When Would Paul Revere Have Painted Major Pitcairn?

This weekend the Skinner auction house is offering this watercolor painting of a British army officer on horseback, which is labeled at the bottom “Major John Pitcairn” and “P. Revere del.” for “Paul Revere drew this.”

According to a typewritten note glued to the back, this picture was owned by the furniture-maker Duncan Phyfe. Thus, this one artifact links three historic names famous during the Colonial Revival.

In his blog post on the painting, Skinner specialist Joel Bohy offered this hypothesis about how the painting came about:

Pitcairn was quartered at a home in Boston that belonged to Francis Shaw, Paul Revere’s neighbor. According to lore, the locals respected Pitcairn at first. Paul Revere may have sketched his portrait during late 1774 or early 1775 in preparation for an engraving. But it seems that before an engraving could be made, a revolution intervened.

I offered a different idea: that the image might date from the early republic. Yes, some sources say that Pitcairn earned the respect of locals in 1774-75, but he was still part of the very unpopular royal military occupation. But after the war that didn’t matter so much. Pitcairn had died at Bunker Hill, and his body was a tourist attraction under the Old North Church, which would certainly have prompted interest in him. That was when people began to say the major wasn’t such a bad guy. In addition, the American print media had expanded, producing new outlets for engravings like the Massachusetts Magazine.

But there doesn’t seem to be a way to date this painting since there’s no evidence of its origin besides that label. It surfaced in the early 1900s in the estate of Phyfe’s grandson.

TOMORROW: Exploring the details.

Should Today Be “Salem Gunpowder Day”?

Earlier this month the Boston Globe published an essay by the historian Peter Charles Hoffer that it headlined, “Happy Salem Gunpowder Day! Did American independence start with a peaceful protest? The case for a new holiday.”

That holiday would be today, 26 February, and the article began:

In nine weeks, America will once more celebrate Patriot’s Day, in honor of the battles of Lexington and Concord. . . . But when it comes to the start of the Revolution, history has forgotten another crucial British retreat, one that might just as well be the day we celebrate instead. It happened on a Salem bridge on Feb. 26, 1775—239 years ago next Wednesday.

No shots were fired; no patriots or regulars fell. But on that day, for the first time, the Colonists stood up to a British Army serving field commander, and the British withdrew.

The story of the fierce but bloodless showdown that sparked the war is a reminder that our country was born not just out of violence, but from another kind of resistance altogether. If we were to commemorate that day instead—call it Salem Gunpowder Day—it would put a very different spin on our understanding of how our country’s war for independence began.

By no coincidence, Hoffer’s latest book is Prelude to Revolution: The Salem Gunpowder Raid of 1775. He was doing his job as an author, using the news media to bring attention to his book and argue for its importance.

But for me this essay left me less convinced Hoffer knows what he’s talking about. That’s harsh, especially since I’ve enjoyed some of his previous writing, but the run-up to the Revolutionary War in New England is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time on.

If we want to celebrate (mostly) non-violent resistance, then we should highlight the events of the late summer of 1774. Crowds in Massachusetts’s western counties closed their courts, and four thousand men massed on Cambridge common, all to protest the Massachusetts Government Act. Those unarmed crowd actions forced royal appointees to resign their posts or agree not to act under that law. By the end of the first week of September, it was clear that Gov. Thomas Gage exercised no authority outside of Boston. That opened a vacuum for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress formed weeks later.

If we want to spotlight the moment when the political conflict in New England turned military, then we might want to look at the shots fired at Fort William & Mary in Portsmouth harbor in December 1774. Nobody was killed there, but that confrontation got closer to being fatal than the Salem raid.

Why wasn’t the confrontation in Salem fatal? Hoffer paints the provincial obstruction as non-violent, but parts of the Essex County militia did mobilize and march to Salem. They simply arrived too late to get involved, after the British troops had started to withdraw. Only because the crisis was over by then could Hoffer call the event “bloodless.”

In fact, local historians didn’t call the confrontation at the drawbridge “bloodless.” Instead, Salem authors claimed that their townspeople shed the “first blood” of the Revolutionary War because the king’s soldiers pricked some locals in the chests with their bayonets. Not many authors from outside the county have agreed that that blood was so significant.

But most striking to me is how Hoffer refers to the “Salem Gunpowder Raid” and “Salem Gunpowder Day.” What gunpowder? In justifying the action to London, Gen. Gage wrote:

The circumstance of the eight field pieces at Salem led us into a mistake, for supposing them to be brass guns brought from Holland, or some of the foreign isles, which report had also given reasons to suspect, a detachment of 400 men under Lieut. Col. [Alexander] Leslie, was sent privately off by water to seize them. The places they were said to be concealed in were strictly searched, but no artillery could be found. And we have since discovered, that there had been only some old ship’s guns, which had been carried away from Salem some time ago.

Gage’s orders were all about cannon. That was why Lt. Col. Lesie headed for a blacksmith’s shop across the drawbridge across Salem’s North River—because David Mason had collected cannon there to be mounted on carriages.

Mason and his Patriot colleagues hadn’t collected gunpowder there. We know that because one of the rules that people in the eighteenth century knew to live by was:

You don’t store gunpowder in a blacksmith’s shop.

A Newly Recognized Example of Paul Revere’s Silver Work

The Newport Historical Society received this teapot in a large gift of artifacts, historic clothing, and documents from Frances Raymond in 1998. In fact, her gift was so large that it took a long time before a staff member was able to examine the teapot closely and see that it’s marked “Revere.” The maker’s mark and rococo style indicate that it came from the workshop of Boston silversmith Paul Revere in the 1760s. (Compare it to the one that John Singleton Copley painted in Revere’s hand.)

On Thursday, 6 March, the Newport Historical Society will host a lecture by Gerald W. R. Ward on “A Revere Revelation: A ‘New’ Teapot by Paul Revere the Patriot.” Ward is Senior Consulting Curator and the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture Emeritus at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is a co-editor of Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000.

In his talk Ward plans to “place the teapot in the context of Revere’s work as Boston’s leading silversmith of the day and of the turbulent times of Boston in the 1760s.” A few years back he helped to plan the Museum of Fine Arts’ American Wing, which does a fine job at the same task; one of the highlights is the Copley portrait of Revere displayed next to the man’s silver.

This talk will start at 5:30 P.M. at the Colony House on Washington Square in Newport. Admission costs $5 per person, $1 for Newport Historical Society members with membership card. To reserve spaces, call 401-841-8770.

“The Honors of the Preceding Night”

Yesterday I broke off the story of the first documented public celebration of Gen. George Washington’s birthday in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1779 just as things were getting interesting: the celebrants were ready to set off two cannon. Dudley Digges, a member of the state Council, was determined to stop them.

Digges had already told the young men planning that party that it would be improper during a war. When he saw them grabbing the cannon from a smithy, he sent a lieutenant to bring those guns back, and the partygoers refused.

Most of those celebrants appear to have been students at the College of William & Mary, and their master of ceremonies was former school usher James Innes. It’s striking that Innes was a generation younger than Digges but held a higher military rank.

The account from college student David Meade Randolph continues:

Captain Digges went immediately to the Arena, where, in the pride of his power, with sixty men, he drew up in form; and demanded the cannon at the point of his bayonets! Innis stept up to Captain Digges, and shaking his cane at him, swore that he would cane him, if he did not depart instantly with his men! This enraging Digges,—he said that if the pieces were not surrendered, he would fire upon the party. Innis repeating his threat,—ordered [William] Finnie to charge the cannon with brick bats: the mob in the street, and the gentlemen of the ball, re-echoing the order. The pieces were soon charged with brick bats: Innis all the while firmly standing by the Captain at the head of his men, daring him to fire! After some delay, the Captain retreated with his men; and the evening closed with great joy.

Next day, Innis was arraigned before the Hustings Court, for Riot! confronted by the valiant Captain Digges. During the proceedings, when Innis replied to the charge, Digges in the body of the Court, and Innis in the Bar—among other particulars characteristic of the Colonel's temper and genius, he swore “it made no odds whether Captain Digges wore a red coat, or a black coat, he would cane him!” The case was attended with no farther particulars. Innis facing the Court, and repeating his threats; till at length he was dismissed, and triumphantly walked out of Court, attended by most of his friends, who had shared the honors of the preceding night.

I can’t help but think the punch being served at that party had a significant alcohol content.

And let’s think about how the events of that night were first reported, in one of the Williamsburg newspapers:

On Monday the 22d instant a very elegant entertainment was given at the Raleigh tavern by the inhabitants of this city, to celebrate the anniversary of that date which gave birth to GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON, Commander in Chief of the United States, the saviour of his country, and the brave asserter of the rights and liberties of mankind.

Given the private recounting by a participant, that newspaper item looks like an attempt to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

Finally, let’s think of how Gen. Washington would have reacted if he’d heard the story of this behavior in his honor. Wouldn’t he have been proud?

“It was thought proper to enliven the occasion by discharges of cannon”

Yesterday I quoted a 1779 newspaper from Williamsburg, Virginia, briefly describing an “elegant entertainment” in honor of Gen. George Washington on the 22nd of that February.

Decades later, in 1835, the Southern Literary Messenger published a longer, franker account of the same event:

We are permitted by RICHARD RANDOLPH, ESQ. to publish the following extract, from a Journal kept by his father, the late David Meade Randolph, when a Student at William & Mary College in 1779 under the patronage of PROFESSOR [Robert] ANDREWS. It is a curious anecdote and will be read with interest.

Washington’s Birth Night. On the 22d February, 1779, the students of William & Mary College, and most of the respectable inhabitants of Williamsburg, prepared a subscription paper for celebrating Washington’s birth night; and the pleasure of presenting it, was confided to certain students immediately under the patronage of Professor Andrews.

Governor [Patrick] Henry was first waited on, and offered the paper: he refused his signature! “He could not think of any kind of rejoicing at a time when our country was engaged in war, with such gloomy prospects.” Dudley Digges [1729-1790], and Bolling Starke [1733-1788], members of the Council, were both waited on by the same persons, and received less courteous denials, and similar excuses.

The ball, nevertheless, was given at the Raleigh. Colonel [James] Innis [1754-1798], more prominent than any other member of the association, directed its proceedings. It was thought proper to enliven the occasion by discharges of cannon. There were two pieces at the shop of Mr. [Josias?] Moody that had lately been mounted. There was a Captain commanding a company of soldiers, under the orders of Governor Henry; but the cannon were under no other care or authority at the time, than that of Mr. Moody the mechanic. Colonel Innis, with a party seconded by Colonel [William] Finnie [1739-1804], brought the two pieces before the door of the Raleigh. On the way from the shop to the Raleigh, not two hundred yards, Colonel Innis saw Captain Digges passing up the street. Whilst the party concerned were collecting powder, and preparing for firing, Lieutenant [William?] Vaughan appeared before the Raleigh with a platoon, demanding possession of the cannon. He was carried in; took some punch; and said that he was ordered by Captain Digges to take away the pieces, by force, if they were not surrendered peaceably. This was refused. Vaughan repeated his orders: He was prevailed upon to return to his quarters, and report to Capt. Digges. Captain Digges waited on the Governor, and reported the state of things; and soliciting instructions how to proceed. The Governor referred Captain Digges to his own judgment.

Southern gentlemen! Cannon! Punch! Surely this disagreement will be resolved through rational discussion unaffected by questions of relative honor and masculinity.

TOMORROW: So how did this evening turn out?

[Gov. Patrick Henry observes the proceedings above.]

Washington’s Birthday Observed in Virginia

Around about Washington’s Birthday in 2013, Boston 1775 ran a few postings that were, well, about Washington’s Birthday. They quoted descriptions of celebrations from the middle of the Revolutionary War, the earliest in 1779 in Milton.

All those celebrations took place on 11 February, which was the date on the British calendar when George Washington was born. However, by the end of the century, with some prodding from his secretary Tobias Lear, most Americans had switched to celebrating on 22 February, that same day’s date on the Gregorian calendar. The British Empire had made the shift when Washington was a young man.

An old newspaper clipping quoting Washington biographer Douglas Southall Freeman mentioned another celebration of Washington’s birthday in 1779, this one on 22 February, eleven days later. I wondered if that date was solid or had simply been attached to accord with later tradition. Colonial Williamsburg historian Taylor Stoermer found me the contemporaneous article in Dixon and Nicolson’s Virginia Gazette:

WILLIAMSBURG, February 26.

On Monday the 22d instant [i.e., of this month] a very elegant entertainment was given at the Raleigh tavern by the inhabitants of this city, to celebrate the anniversary of that date which gave birth to GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON, Commander in Chief of the United States, the saviour of his country, and the brave asserter of the rights and liberties of mankind.

Thus, in early 1779 Americans in Massachusetts and Virginia were both starting to celebrate Gen. Washington’s birthday publicly (as they had previously celebrated the king’s birthday). But they hadn’t settled on the proper date. Eventually the Virginia position won out.

TOMORROW: What happened in Williamsburg that night.

[The photo above shows Colonial Williamsburg’s rebuilt Raleigh Tavern.]

Elizabeth Canning of Connecticut

Elizabeth Canning was a nineteen-year-old houseservant when she disappeared in London in January 1753. She was gone for a month, returning dirty, bleeding, and missing her stays. On recovering, she described being kidnapped by gypsies while coming home from relatives and held captive under pressure to become a prostitute.

The novelist and playwright Henry Fielding investigated Canning’s case in his capacity as a magistrate. In February he accused several individuals of holding Canning captive and stealing her stays; the latter was actually the more serious crime under British law because theft could bring the death penalty.

Crowds mobbed the courthouse during the ensuing trial, reportedly frightening away witnesses ready to testify the defendants were nowhere near the village where Canning said she’d been held. The verdict came in guilty, with one woman sentenced to hang.

One of the judges, with the delightful name of Sir Crisp Gascoyne, found Canning’s story improbable and her supporters dislikable, so he decided to investigate further. He found more witnesses to exonerate the accused and lots of holes in Canning’s testimony. In March, Gascoyne indicted the young woman for perjury. George II remanded the death penalty (there were many more death sentences in Georgian England than actual executions), though the defendants remained in prison.

Over the next several months, Canning lay low, and the British press and bar divided into two camps. Both Gascoyne and Fielding published pamphlets about the case. Some of Canning’s witnesses recanted, others were indicted for perjury. People’s prejudices about class, ethnicity, religion, and gender all came out, and of course the arguments turned personal. The closest analogue in our time is the Tawana Brawley case of 1987-1988.

In the spring of 1754 Canning presented herself at Old Bailey to be tried for perjury. Dozens of witnesses testified on both sides, though no one answered the question of where the defendant had been in January 1753. The court finally decided Canning had lied under oath and sentenced her to a short imprisonment followed by exile. Canning agreed to emigrate to the Connecticut colony as an indentured servant. She continued to have devoted supporters.

Canning arrived in America in late 1754 and took up residence with Elisha Williams in Wethersfield. Williams’s career had included being a town minister, rector of Yale College, both chaplain and colonel of the colony’s regiment, and a lawyer, judge, and political representative. Theologically Williams appears to have been an early “New Light.” Canning didn’t work for him for long, however, because he died in 1755.

In late 1756 Elizabeth married a local man named John Treat, and their first child arrived seven months later. They had three more children before Elizabeth died unexpectedly in 1773. The Connecticut Courant in nearby Hartford noted the passing of “Mrs. Elizabeth Treat,…formerly the famous Elizabeth Canning.”

The couple’s oldest child, Joseph Canning Treat, joined the Continental Army in 1777 and served until 1783. Later he received a pension. Thus, members of the Sons of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Revolution could be descended from the notorious convict Elizabeth Canning.

Listening Closely to Elizabeth Parsons

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcast doesn’t have an exciting format—it consists of professional readings of O.D.N.B. entries. But the podcast producers obviously like picking out quirky subjects to share with listeners.

I recently caught the life story of Elizabeth Parsons (download), a teen-aged girl in London who became the focus of a supernatural mystery in 1762. Eventually Horace Walpole, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Lord Mansfield all came into her story, which is better known as the tale of the Cock Lane Ghost or Scratching Fanny.

The cartoon about the case above, available through Wikipedia, notes several famous examples of “English Credulity” in the eighteenth century, including the man who advertised that he would jump into a bottle, the woman who claimed to have given birth to rabbits, and alleged kidnapping victim Elizabeth Canning.

After her moment of fame, the O.D.N.B. reports, Elizabeth Parsons got on with her life, married, and died in 1807.

TOMORROW: And Elizabeth Canning?

St. Michael’s Lectures in Marblehead

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Marblehead has announced the first three lectures in its
Tercentenary Celebration.

On Wednesday, 26 February, Judy Anderson will speak about “Marblehead: 1714”, the year that church was erected. Her illustrated talk will discuss community and social life of the period, including how Marblehead residents dressed and furnished their houses. She’ll describe the many domestic and public buildings built in the seaport town in the early 1700s. Formerly curator of Marblehead’s Jeremiah Lee Mansion, Judy is author of Glorious Splendor: The 18th-Century Wallpapers in the Jeremiah Lee Mansion.

Robert Booth’s Tuesday, 11 March, lecture is titled “Who Filled the Pews in St. Michael’s Church: 1714-1750?” Booth, author of Death of an Empire: The Rise and Murderous Fall of Salem, America’s Richest City, will discuss the Anglicans in a town with a Congregationalist majority. Who chose to belong to Marblehead’s poorest and smallest congregation? Why did they do so, and what was their place in a community evolving from a depressed fishing town to a wealthy seaport?

On Wednesday, 30 April, architect Edward O. Nilsson will discuss “The Architecture of St. Michael’s: English and Dutch Antecedents.” Nilsson’s visual essay will explore possible 17th-century English and Dutch antecedents of the church, which is unique in American ecclesiastical architecture. The presentation will also look at 19th-century modifications to the building fabric that renewed the worship environment to the liturgical practices of the day.

More events are coming up.

“African American Stories” in Medford, 19 Feb.

Tomorrow evening, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford will host an illustrated talk by Jennifer Pustz titled “Uncovering African American Stories at Historic New England.”

Historic New England was founded in 1910 as the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and it was about as Yankee an organization as one could imagine. But people of African descent have been part of New England life for nearly four centuries, and they lived and worked at many of the sites Historic New England preserves. The organization has been doing great work expanding beyond its initial scope.

The description of the talk elaborates:

Though too often hidden, the contributions of African Americans, enslaved and free, are important to understanding the history of New England. The story of Prince Sayward of York, Maine, who fought in the American Revolution, and that of Cuff Gardner, a free African American who worked at Rhode Island’s Casey Farm at the turn of the nineteenth century, reveal new aspects of daily life at these sites. These stories are about labor, but also about these individuals’ participation in the fight for freedom and in such uniquely New England traditions as “Negro Elections.”

Pustz is museum historian at Historic New England and author of Voices from the Back Stairs: Interpreting Servants’ Lives at Historic House Museums. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa.

This talk will begin on Wednesday evening at 7:30. It’s free to Royall House members, $5 for others. There’s on-street parking in that neighborhood of Medford, and the museum is also located on the 96 and 101 bus routes.

Seeing “Whites of Their Eyes” Everywhere and Nowhere

After Liz Covart tweeted about my post tracing a variation of “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” to Israel Putnam, I had an interesting chat about the quotation on Twitter with Alexander Rose, author of Washington’s Spies.

We agree that it’s unlikely Putnam coined the phrase in 1775, that probably many officers in the British Empire had said such words to many infantrymen and sailors. That seems even more likely given yesterday’s quotation credited to Adm. Richard Howe in 1794, which hints that the phrase had already become linked (at least in Englishmen’s minds) to “the Old English way of fighting.”

But if the quote was really so common, I wonder, why doesn’t it appear in several British or American sources before 1794? I’ve searched in all the databases I have access to, including Google Books, books on Archive.org, Readex’s Archive of Americana, Founders Online, and British History Online. Using those resources let me push back the publication date as far as I have. I’ve found the phrase “whites of their eyes” in other eighteenth-century contexts—medical, veterinary, even religious—but not military.

Many modern books and articles credit particular British military officers with saying some variation on “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” at specific battles in the mid-1700s. But those statements don’t appear in print until the mid-1800s, after the phrase had already become famous in American history.

For example, Gen. Sir Andrew Agnew is said to have told his troops at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 not to fire “till they saw the white of their een.” But I can’t find a written report of Agnew saying those words before Thomas Maccrie published The Memoirs of Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw about a descendant in 1850. (That quotation evolved into “Dinna fire till ye see the whites o’ their e’en!” by the time of The Agnews of Lochnaw in 1864. Curiously, in the April 1841 United Service Magazine a veteran officer put the words “Dinna fire, men, till ye see the wheights of their eyes” into the mouth of Lt.-Col. William Gordon of the 50th Regiment during the Peninsula War against Napoleon.)

In January 1806 The Gentleman’s Magazine published a letter from “W.P.” crediting Capt. Robert Faulknor of the Royal Navy with saying, “My boys, hold hard, I’ll tell you when to fire; let us see the whites of their eyes first.” That was supposedly in 1761 during a fight between the Bellona and the French Courageux. Of course, forty-five years elapsed between the battle and the letter, which offered no other information to back up its statement. Did anyone record Faulknor’s words at the time? Were they the inspiration for Adm. Howe?

Wikipedia says Gen. James Wolfe (shown above) gave an order about “whites of their eyes” during the attack on Quebec of 1759. But its citation for that order is a book from 1960. Wolfe got a huge amount of press in colonial America after that battle. His orders and subordinates’ battle reports were widely reprinted. So why can’t we find an eighteenth-century source for such an order?

Of course, as more printed materials, especially British periodicals, are digitized, the key words could pop up in a mid-1700s publication. They could even be visible now, but hidden by imperfect scanning and transcription, variations in wording, or dialect like the Scottish variations above. But so far they’ve eluded me.

I’m not saying that lack of evidence means no eighteenth-century British military officer told his men, “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!” or the like. In fact, there’s a strong argument that because the phrase pops up in different military sources around 1800 it had probably spread orally before then. But if we credit those words to a particular man at a particular time, we should have solid evidence for that attribution, not just a claim made decades later.

A Old English “Whites of their Eyes”?

On 1 June 1794, the Royal Navy fought a fleet of French warships in the eastern Atlantic, an action that became known (in Britain, anyway) as “the Glorious First of June.”

There are two connections between this fight and America. First, the French warships were escorting a grain convoy from the U.S. of A. to Revolutionary France, and Britain wanted to interrupt that supply.

Second, the British commander was Adm. Richard Howe, by then Earl Howe (shown above), who with his brother Gen. Sir William Howe had once commanded the British forces in North America.

Because that battle was so close to London, before the month was out the the Gentleman’s Magazine published a detailed account of the action dated 14 June from “a Naval Correspondent of high Rank.” Among his comments:

Never was so much havock, and so complete a victory, gained in so short a time. Earl Howe plainly convinced the Sans culottes that he could yet shew them the Old English way of fighting, “not to fire before he could see the whites of their eyes.” The crews of the ships that sunk all perished; a fine gang for Old Davy indeed!

This presents an interesting foil to the report that I quoted yesterday, about Gen. Israel Putnam saying he’d given an order at Bunker Hill for his soldiers not to fire until they could see the whites of their enemies’ eyes. In between when Putnam reportedly made that claim (before he died in 1790) and when it appeared in print (in 1800), a British commander was quoted as using the same phrase. To add to the irony, Admiral Howe’s brother had commanded the troops facing Putnam in 1775.

The Gentleman’s Magazine correspondent suggested that holding fire till you see the white of their eyes was “the Old English way of fighting” (presumably as opposed to new-fangled, Revolutionary, Sans culottes methods). One might therefore expect to find a lot of earlier uses of the phrase in British military sources. But I haven’t turned up any. An equivalent phrase is documented in German sources in the mid-1700s, but that’s not “the Old English way of fighting,” is it?

A Solid Source for the “Whites of Their Eyes” Tradition

“Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” is the most famous quotation arising from the Battle of Bunker Hill. Authors have debated which American officer said it, which has been another way of debating who was in command. In recent decades most historians have treated those words as a legend, or at least a tradition that can’t be verified.

That tradition doesn’t benefit from the fact that for a long time the earliest chronicle known to quote the line was the biography of George Washington by Mason Weems, whose tales of cherry trees and praying in the snow at Valley Forge have become exemplars of American mythology.

This month I got lucky in some digital databases and found an earlier source for the “whites of their eyes” tradition, with a clear chain of transmission from the battlefield.

The story starts with David Humphreys’s publication of An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam in 1788. That book’s description of Bunker Hill does not include the quotation. It also suggested that Dr. Joseph Warren was directing the New England forces in his new capacity as a Massachusetts major general.

The Rev. Josiah Whitney (1731-1824), minister in Brooklyn, Connecticut, followed that up with his most famous parishioner, Israel Putnam. The retired general said that Warren had come onto the battlefield as a volunteer, not a commissioned officer, and didn’t presume to take command. Putnam died in 1790, and Whitney described their conversation in a footnote to his sermon A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of the Honorable Major-General Israel Putnam, of Brooklyn.

Ten years later, the Rev. Elijah Parish (1762-1825) of Byfield, Massachusetts, published An Oration, Delivered at Byfield, February 22d, 1800, the Day of National Mourning for the Death of General George Washington. On page 15 he added his own footnote describing the Battle of Bunker Hill. Parish, who originally came from Lebanon, Connecticut, said he’d discussed that battle with his older colleague Whitney.

Parish wrote:

Putnam was the commanding officer of the party, who went upon the hill the evening before the action: he commanded in the action: : he harangued his men as the British first advanced, charged them to reserve their fire, till they were near, ‘till they could see the white of their eyes,’ were his words.—At the second assault he commended their former calmness, assured them “they would now do much better,” and directed them “to aim at the officers.” They obeyed. The fire was tremendous. ‘My God,’ said said Putnam, in telling the story, ‘I never saw such a carnage of the human race.’

These things he related to the Reverend Mr. Whitney, his Minister, by whose permission they are now published.

Parish repeated this story in a history textbook he cowrote with the Rev. Dr. Jedidiah Morse, A Compendious History of New England (1804).

Thus, we have a clear line of transmission for the quotation:

• Gen. Israel Putnam reminiscing to Rev. Josiah Whitney, probably between 1788 and 1790.
• Whitney passing on an interesting anecdote to Rev. Elijah Parish between 1790 and 1800.
• Parish publishing the story twice in the early 1800s, enough to bring it to the attention of the Rev. Mason Weems by 1810.

That doesn’t mean Putnam coined the “white of their eyes” phrase, but it’s more likely that he said those words at Bunker Hill, just as a few veterans reported later. Eventually the phrase evolved into the now-famous “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.”

TOMORROW: When Howe said “not to fire before he could see the whites of their eyes.”

Grace Under Pressure

The following item appeared in a bunch of American newspapers toward the end of 1768, possibly in a British gazette the next year, and finally in some British publications about fifty years later.

But its first appearance appears to have been in the Boston Evening-Post dated 28 Nov 1768:

Extract of a letter from New York, Nov. 17.

“We have here a new Species of Creature called a Dutchess—Some time ago a Milliner’s Prentice of this Town was to wait on the Dutchess, but fearful of committing some Error in her Address she went to consult with a Friend about it, who told her that when she came before the Dutchess she must say her Grace to her,

accordingly away went the Girl, and being introduced, after a very low Curtesy, she said For what we are going to receive the Lord make us thankful; to which the Dutchess answered, Amen.”——

The 1 Sept 1768 New-York Journal passed on a rumor than the Duchess of Gordon was on board a ship to New York. That’s the only item I could find suggesting that a duchess was actually in the city that year. The Duchess of Gordon was a famous beauty, a wit, and a leader in fashion who had only nine fingers. There’s no evidence she actually visited America; in fact, in that month she was about to have her first child. But I’m showing her picture with her oldest son anyway.

Judge Jacobs and His Dinah

Reading about Harvey Amani Whitfield’s new book on slavery lingering in Vermont even after being banned in the new republic’s 1777 constitution led me to this Vermont Today article from 2006 about a court case in the early 1800s.

All the parties agreed that Stephen Jacobs had bought a woman named Dinah as a slave in 1783, the same year he moved to Windsor, Vermont. A Yale-educated lawyer, Jacobs prospered eventually became a member of Vermont’s supreme court. As for Dinah, by the end of the century she had become “infirm, sick, and blind,” needing support.

But who had the responsibility to provide that support? New England towns had funds for their poor citizens, but Windsor felt that Dinah should be Jacobs’s charge alone. He insisted that he would pay his share of taxes for her support but no more.

In 1800 Jacobs’s lawyers got the case thrown out on the ground that the deputy sheriff who had served the action was also a citizen of Windsor and therefore had an interest in the case. The town appealed.

In 1802 the Windsor selectmen’s attorney argued that Jacobs had “discarded” Dinah two years earlier when she was no longer of value to him. Jacobs’s lawyers responded that “several of the inhabitants of Windsor…[had] inveigled her from her master’s family and service by the syren songs of liberty and equality” and that she had “spent the vigour of her life with these people.” The record is unclear about when that happened and how long Dinah had been away from Jacobs’s household.

The judge who decided the dilemma was Boston native Royall Tyler. He convinced his colleagues that the 1783 bill of sale for Dinah carried no legal weight under Vermont’s constitution and therefore the town could not introduce it as evidence that Jacobs legally owned the woman. No evidence, no case. I can’t help but get the sense that the state judiciary was looking for ways to decide in favor of their colleague.

Windsor paid for Dinah’s board in different houses over the next few years, for her medical care and burial. However, town records continued to refer to her as “Judge Jacob’s Dinah.”