The “Baker General” of the Continental Army

On 3 May 1777, the Continental Congress appointed Christopher Ludwick “Superintendent of Bakers and Director of Baking for the Continental Army.”

When he passed that news on to Gen. George Washington, John Hancock wrote, “I make no Doubt he will do [that job] to the entire Satisfaction of the Troops, and in such a Manner as to save considerable Sums to the Public.”

Ludwick proved reliable. His name appears regularly in army documents from that date through 1782. At least once Washington referred to him as “Baker General” to the army.

On 17 Feb 1781 the Congress resolved:

That Mr. Christopher Ludwick, who has acted with great industry and integrity in the character of principal superintendant of bakers, be, and is hereby continued in that employment; and that he be empowered to hire or inlist any number of bakers, not exceeding thirty, on such terms as the Board of War shall think proper:

That Mr. Christopher Ludwick receive, as a compensation for all past services, one thousand dollars, in bills of the new emissions.

Unfortunately, by that point in the war the “bills of the new emissions” were losing value.

Four years later, in March 1785 Ludwick petitioned the Congress for “a Compensation or Bounty in Land or otherwise equal with other Officers who have served in the American Army,” saying he’d advanced considerable money to his bakers and that the big $1,000 grant had been “reduced by Depreciation.” He gathered certificates of his service signed by Arthur St. Clair, William Irvine, Anthony Wayne, Timothy Pickering, and Thomas Mifflin.

And then Ludwick went for the big gun. On 29 Mar 1785 he wrote to Washington at Mount Vernon:

As Your Excellency often expressed a friendship and Regard for your old Baker Master, and well know what Service he was to the Army—I now beg leave to acquaint you that, finding my private Property greatly injured and diminished by my Attention to, and Exertions in the Public Service, and by necessary Advances of my remaining Cash to some near Relations of my Wife who by the Event of the Revolution have been reduced to indigent Circumstances, I have been obliged to apply to Congress for Compensation—Inclosed is a Copy of my Memorial to Congress, which I transmit for your Excellency’s Perusal.

Several Gentlemen late Officers in the Army have chearfully granted me their Recommendation, but in Order to ensure my Success I wish to have a Recommendatory Letter from Your Excellency in my behalf to Congress on the Subject of my Memorial—I flatter myself that You will not refuse me this favor, and am with great Respect & Esteem Your Excellency’s Most obedt & very humbe servt

Christopher Ludwick

P.S. should your Excellency grant my Request, a Letter by the Post will be very acceptable to C. Ludwick who is now 65 Years of Age.

Washington responded on 25 April:

I have known Mr Christr Ludwick from an early period of the War; and have every reason to believe, as well from observation as information, that he has been a true and faithful Friend, and Servant to the public. That he has detected and exposed many impositions which were attempted to be practiced by others in his department. That he has been the cause of much saving in many respects. And that his deportment in public life has afforded unquestionable proofs of his integrity & worth.

With respect to his losses, I have no personal knowledge, but have often heard that he has suffered from his zeal in the cause of his Country.

Geo. Washington

In June the Congress voted to grant Ludwick another $200. But the old baker reportedly found more value in Washington’s letter about him, “which he had neatly framed and hung up in his parlour.”

[Shown above, courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, are cookie molds that Ludwick brought to Pennsylvania when he immigrated in the 1750s.]

Christopher Ludwick and the Prisoners of War

Yesterday I spotlighted a new picture book called Gingerbread for Liberty!, about a baker named Christopher Ludwick and his activity during the Revolutionary War. Author Mara Rockliff’s main source for that book was Dr. Benjamin Rush’s friendly short biography written shortly after Ludwick died, so how much documentary support is there for his feats?

In fact, Ludwick shows up a bunch of times in the papers of the Continental Congress and Gen. George Washington’s headquarters. He had served in the Austrian and Prussian armies before settling in Philadelphia, so he could speak to the Crown’s Hessian soldiers in their native German language and with some shared experience.

In August 1776, Ludwick was with the Continental forces in New Jersey, perhaps observing the system for supplying the men with bread. On the 14th the Congress resolved to offer fifty acres of land and guaranteed religious freedom to any foreigner who deserted from the British army. That offer was translated into German and copied for distribution among the Hessian troops. But who would pass out those handbills?

Gen. Hugh Mercer summoned Ludwick and on 19 August sent him to Washington’s headquarters. Later that day quartermaster general Joseph Reed, who had (badly) handled Washington’s first espionage efforts back in Massachusetts, passed Ludwick on to William Livingston, about to be governor of New Jersey, writing:

Mr. Ludwig the bearer of this, puts his Life in his Hand on this Occasion in order to serve the Interests of America. We cannot doubt your kind Advice & Assistance as to Mode but must beg it may not be communicated farther least a Discovery may be made which must prove fatal to Mr. Ludwig

Ludwick crossed the Raritan River to Staten Island late on 22 August and returned the next day. Livingston told Mercer, “Ludwig is just now returned disappointed.” But the baker apparently tried again. On 26 August Gen. Washington reported to the Congress: “The papers designed for the Foreign Troops have been put into several Channels in order that they might be conveyed to ’em, and from the Information I had yesterday, I have reason to beleive many have fallen into their Hands.”

A couple of days later, Ludwick was on his way back to Philadelphia, carrying a letter to John Adams complaining about the bread supply—a hint he may have already been lobbying for that business.

The following months didn’t go well for the Continental Army, but they did take some German-speaking prisoners. Ludwick ended up overseeing eight such men. In November Gen. Washington wrote to the Congress “to request you will negotiate an Exchange of the Hessian Prisoners at Elizabeth Town under the Care of Mr Ludwick as soon as possible. They have been treated in such a Manner during their Stay in this City, that it is apprehended, their going back among their Countrymen, will be attended with some good Consequences.”

Ludwick argued that treating Hessians well before exchanging them would make those men eager to desert at their next opportunity, and to bring others with them. Rush’s biography of Ludwick suggested that tactic was sucessful. However, Daniel Krebs’s recent study A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War During the American Revolution (its title taken from Ludwick’s writing) states that none of the eight Hessian men exchanged in late 1776 ever deserted.

In March 1777 Ludwick was still making that argument to Congress, recommending that it designate a “discreet & humane German Person” as “Guardian of the German Prisoners” to be “their Counsel & solemn Witness in Contracts which they may make with their Employers.” He assured the Congress that

Many of the Hessians and Waldeckish Prisoners of War especially single men are so well pleased with this Country and the Way of its Inhabitants that at all Events they would rather prefer to settle here than to return to the dreary abodes of Bondage from whence they came.

Krebs notes that Ludwick might have been hoping to gain the labor of these prisoners for little money. But he also seems to have been genuinely motivated by charity and enthusiasm for life in America. In the end, the Congress didn’t adopt that plan, and few of the German-speaking soldiers captured in that campaign defected to the U.S. of A.

Instead, the Congress asked Ludwick to take on another position.

TOMORROW: “Baker General.”

Behind Gingerbread for Liberty!

Gingerbread for Liberty!: How a German Baker Helped Win the American Revolution is a picture book due to be released next month. Author Mara Rockliff tells the story of the Philadelphia baker Christopher Ludwick, whom the Continental Congress appointed “Superintendent of Bakers, and Director of Baking” in May 1777.

As Publishers Weekly reports, the artist Vincent X. Kirsch, a former food stylist, created watercolor illustrations inspired by gingerbread cookies. Ludwick was known in Philadelphia for his gingerbread; indeed, it looks like he had made a tidy fortune between arriving in that growing city in the early 1750s and the Revolutionary War.

Rockliff told that magazine about her challenges in finding sources on Ludwick: “It turned out that pretty much everything anyone knows about Ludwick comes from a short biography first published in 1801, the year he died, by his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”

Rush sent an early copy of that pamphlet to Abigail Adams, writing on 23 July 1801:

The Account of Christr: Ludwick was written to fulfil an Old promise made many years ago, in case I should survive him. You will feel the patriotic Sentiments uttered by him. To the present calculating generation, they appear fanatical, and unintelligible.—

(Subtext: Young people today.)

Adams replied:

The Life of Christopher Ludwick will be read with pleasure by all Lovers of virtue, honor and patriotism; it is a model for the Youth, but my dear Sir these days of prosperity, Luxury and dissipation are not those in which such characters flourish; we have an intire new Theory in Religion, Morals & politicks, corresponding with our State of Society.

(Subtext: It’s all Jefferson’s fault.)

Rush’s pamphlet was reprinted throughout the 1800s by the charitable organization Ludwick had funded. It naturally portrayed him in a good light.

TOMORROW: How much did Ludwick really do during the war?

John Hancock and the Bombarding of Boston

On 4 July 1812, the young Attorney General of the United States, Richard Rush, delivered an Independence Day oration to the House of Representatives. His main message was about how wise it was to go to war with Great Britain again.

For that speech Rush had consulted notes of his father, Dr. Benjamin Rush, about details of the last war with Great Britain, which had gone so well. According to Henry A. Hawken’s study of Fourth of July orations, Trumpets of Glory, the elder Rush wasn’t pleased that his son pulled him into the debate over the new war, even obliquely.

Coyly crediting his father as “one of the surviving patriots of our revolution,” Rush told this story about John Hancock, as quoted in the 7 August City Gazette of Charleston, South Carolina:

During the siege of Boston, General [George] Washington consulted Congress upon the propriety of bombarding the town. Mr. Hancock was then President of [the Continental] Congress. After General Washington’s letter was read, a solemn silence ensued. This was broken by a member making a motion that the House should resolve itself into a committee of the whole, in order that Mr. Hancock might give his opinion upon the important subject, as he was so deeply interested, from having all his estate in Boston.

After he left the chair, he addressed the chairman of the committee of the whole in the following words: “It is true, sir, nearly all the property I have in the world is in houses and other real estate in the town of Boston; but if the expulsion of the British army from it, and the liberties of our country require their being burnt to ashes—issue the order for that purpose immediately!”

Rush sent a copy of his oration to John Adams, among others. Adams replied, “When will the Character of Hancock be understood? Never. I could melt into Tears when I hear his Name.” He did not, however, confirm that he had heard Hancock deliver that remark.

While extracts of Rush’s speech appeared in collections of American oratory over the next several decades, that story didn’t make the cut. Instead, it followed a different route into popular lore. On 9 Sept 1822 the American Mercury newspaper of Hartford reprinted the anecdote without attribution to Rush. On 14 September the Independent Chronicle and Boston Patriot picked it up, and on 21 September Niles’s Weekly Register quoted the “Boston Patriot.”

Freeman Hunt’s American Anecdotes, published in Boston in 1830, included the story as item 88, “Disinterested Patriotism of Hancock.” Again, there was no source given. The same story then appeared in other American collections of inspiring anecdotes, of which there were a lot. They seem to have operated rather like quotation websites today, with the same rigorous standards.

Not surprisingly, the story changed a bit along the way. Authors gave Hancock more dramatic words than “issue the order for that purpose immediately!” Examples include:

• “If the country demand the sacrifice, let the torch be applied. To other causes you must look.” —Horace Mann, The Bible, the Rod, and Religion, in Common Schools (1847).
• “Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar, if necessary to accomplish this object!” —Benjamin Cowell, Spirit of ’76 in Rhode Island (1850).
• “Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar, if the public good requires it!” —James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators (1852). Loring also claimed that Hancock said those words during a North End Caucus meeting at Boston’s Salutation Tavern.

“Burn Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar!” became the standard punch line for this story, repeated in many more books and magazines. One can argue that there’s evidence Hancock expressed that general sentiment to the Congress’s committee of the whole, but it’s clear he didn’t use those words.

“Sergeant Smith and His White Horse”

In Anecdotes of the American Revolution, published in 1845, the anonymous compiler John Lauris Blake included this story titled “Sergeant Smith and His White Horse”:

At the very first exhibition of American courage, which proved so fatal to the British troops in their excursion to Lexington and Concord, Sergeant Smith showed himself a skilful marksman. Learning from rumor, which seemed to have spread that night with a speed almost miraculous, the destination of the detachment, he arose from his bed, equipped himself with cartridges and a famous rifle he had used at Lovell’s fight at Fryeburg, saddled his horse, and started for Lexington meeting-house. Meeting with a variety of hinderances, and twice escaping narrowly from some straggling parties of the red-coats, it was late when he arrived on the ground, and the troops were already on their rapid retreat towards Boston.

Learning that the people were all abroad, lining the fences and the woods to keep up the fire upon the enemy, he started in pursuit, and in the course of a few miles, on riding up a hill, he found the detachment just before him. Throwing the reins upon his horse, and starting him to full speed, he rode within a close rifle-shot and fired at one of the leading officers. The officer fell; and the sergeant, retreating to a safe distance, loaded his rifle again, and again rode up and fired, with equal success. He pursued the same course a third time, when the leader of the retreating body ordered a platoon to fire at him.

It was unavailing, however; and a fourth, fifth, and sixth time, the old rifle had picked off its man, while its owner retreated in safety.

“D—n the man!” exclaimed the officer, “give me a musket, and I'll see if he bears a charmed life, if he comes in sight again.” It was but a moment, and again the old white horse came over the brow of a hill. The officer fired, but in vain; before the smoke of his charge had cleared away, he too had fallen before the unerring marksman, and was left behind by his flying troops.

When the day had closed, the wounded were collected by the neighbors upon the road, and every kindness rendered to them. The officer was not dead, and on being laid upon a bed where his wounds could be examined, his first question, even under the apprehension of immediate death, was, “Who was that old fellow on the white horse!”

Longtime Boston 1775 readers will recognize this anecdote as a rewrite of “The White Horseman,” a “legend” that appeared in the Boston Pearl literary magazine in 1835. There were no mounted riflemen active on 19 Apr 1775, much less fifty years earlier at “Lovewell’s Fight” in Maine.

In the first published version of this tale, the old fellow was named “Hezekiah Wyman.” There were men named Hezekiah Wyman in Middlesex County in 1775, and scholars have tried to identify one of them with the man in the story. But as this republication shows, back in 1845 authors didn’t view the details of the tale as historical. “Hezekiah Wyman” could become “Sergeant Smith” as long as the core of the story remained entertaining.

Johnson on “Occupied Newport,” 8 Jan.

On Thursday, 8 January, the Newport Historical Society will host a lecture by Don Johnson on “Occupied Newport: Tales from a Revolutionary City under British Rule.” He will discuss “the complex experiences of Newporters living under British military rule” from late 1776 to 1779.

As in other port cities that the British army held for extended periods, inhabitants responded in a range of ways: some left or resisted secretly, others were pleased by the return of Crown rule, and many simply persevered, trying to figure out what the best course would be.

It’s rare for such a military occupation—thousands of soldiers from other places (in this case Hessians as well as British) demanding everyone conform to wartime security measures in a time of stress and scarcity—to make the occupiers more popular. According to the society’s announcement of this lecture, “By the time the troops withdrew after three long years, only a tiny fraction of those who had sided with them in 1776 remained loyal.”

As the Newport Historical Society’s 2014 Buchanan/Burnham Fellow, Johnson developed an interpretive plan for the Society’s “Revolution House” project. He’s earned an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program and is in the final stage writing his dissertation on military occupation during the American Revolution at Northwestern University.

This talk will take place at the Colony House on Washington Square in Newport starting at 5:30 P.M. Admission costs $5 per person, or $1 for members of the Newport Historical Society. To reserve a place, call 401-841-8770.

“ODE on the New-Year” 1775

Traditionally Boston 1775 observes the turn of the year with a “carrier verse,” one of the topical poems that newspaper delivery boys and printers’ apprentices distributed at the new year to aid their request for tips.

This year’s example comes from the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter at the start of 1775, when the Crown had closed Boston’s port to intercolonial trade and stationed several army regiments in town. The News-Letter, then owned by the widow Margaret Draper with young John Howe probably running the presses, supported the Crown editorially.

That’s one thing that makes this verse so striking. It talks about Bostonians “with arms opprest” needing to “Be firm” against “threats of war” from “the grand Ruler of the NORTH” (i.e., Lord North). That was the Patriot line at the time. If this verse didn’t have the News-Letter’s name on top, I would have assumed it came from Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette or Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy.

The Carrier of the Massachusets-Gazette,
and Boston Weekly News-Letter,
humbly presents the following ODE
on the New-Year, to all his generous
Customers.                   1775.

I.
BEHOLD! Poor BOSTON sore distrest,
Why is she thus with arms opprest,
By’r cruel Parents hands?—
The reason surely, is because
She’ll not submit to BRITISH laws,
Impos’d by her commands.

II.
Let the grand Ruler of the NORTH,
Spend all that fair BITANNIA’s worth
To lay us at his feet:—
He’ll find his work but just began,
When seven long years their course have ran,
And seek a safe retreat.

III.
Be firm, BOSTONIAN’s, stedfast, true,
Yea ne’er submit to Turk or Jew,
Be of one mind and heart:—
Twas long ago that Heav’n decreed,
That our Fore-fathers here should bleed,
Shall we their cause desert?

IV.
No! GOD forbid,—we’ll firmly trust
In Heav’n’s protection,—’gainst the worst,
Thro’out the ensuing year:—
Tho’ hostile armies from afar,
Have reach’d our coast, with threats of war!
Like heroes banish fear.

V.
Permit your Servant at the door,
Who may be number’d with the poor,
Your bounteous hand to kiss:—
Whose grateful heart shall be replete,
With joy and transport at the sight,
And the kind Donor bless.

Another notable detail about this sample of printing is the prominence of the typographical errors: the printers not only spelled “Massachusetts” differently from how it appeared on the newspaper masthead, but they managed to screw up “Britannia.” Tradition holds that the apprentices themselves wrote and printed carrier verses, and that might explain why both politically and orthographically this one differed from the newspaper.

In one respect, this verse was remarkably prescient. It predicted “seven long years” of struggle for Lord North before he pulled back from his plans for America. Indeed, Lord North’s government fell seven years later in March 1782.

Firm on this Basis Liberty Shall Stand

“About this image you want to include in your history textbook—we see potential problems with it.”

“Really? The rights are clear. It comes from the masthead of John Holt’s New York Journal in late 1774. And the Continental Congress adopted it about the same time.”

“Okay, but we have questions about how high-school students will…interpret it.”

“There’s a lot of symbolism in there—I think that’s a plus. There’s the rejoined ‘Join, or Die’ serpent as an icon of unity, and the Magna Carta, and the Liberty Pole—”

“Yes, the Liberty Pole.”

“With the Liberty Cap on top.”

“That’s the part we think might present problems for teachers.”

“Oh, and the hands—those represent the twelve colonies at the First Continental Congress. They’re making the pole stand up straight.”

“You’re not helping your case here.”

“In 1775 the engraver John Norman updated this symbol for America’s first architecture book. He dedicated it to Hancock and ‘all the MEMBERS’ of Congress.”

“Really, you should just stop talking.”

The Black Settlers of Nova Scotia

I admit that this book cover was what caught my eye first. There have been several studies of black Loyalists in recent years, led by Cassandra Pybus’s Epic Journeys of Freedom.

Black Loyalists: Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia’s First Free Black Communities, by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, seems to be more deeply rooted in the province where many of those refugees made homes after 1783. It attempts to recreate those settlers’ entire lives, not just the period after the Revolution as they sought places for themselves in the British Empire.

At Canada’s History, Mark Reid wrote:

Whitehead, a research associate with the Nova Scotia Museum, writes with an academic’s rigorous attention to detail, but also with a storyteller’s flair. Her prose is bluntly honest. For instance, when writing about the practice of collecting bounties on runaway slaves, including higher prices for dead slaves, she labels it for what it truly was: “murder” for money.

Black Loyalists is divided into three sections, and of them I found the opening section on the early history of the slave trade to be the most fascinating. Drawing on primary sources and slaves’ own narratives, the author paints a picture of an American society sick with moral rot. One can’t escape the hypocrisy of slave owners drawing on Biblical passages to justify slavery, nor can one forget that America — founded on principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — was quick to deny these basic human rights to anyone with the “wrong” skin pigment.

While “white masters” are the historic face of the slave trade, Whitehead reminds readers that the business of slavery also relied on middlemen in Africa who eagerly captured their fellow Africans and sold them to the white slavers based along the African coast. . . .

Black Loyalists is a good primer for readers who want to learn more about Canada’s place in the centuries-long effort to eliminate slavery. It’s also a great background text for fans of [Lawrence] Hill’s Book of Negroes novel. Black Loyalists reminds us that the story of Canada is far more complex and diverse than the typical English-French and Aboriginal-colonizer narratives taught in grade school, and that “American” and “Canadian” histories are more tightly entwined than we generally realize.

At the History Girls, Katherine Langrish wrote about her friend’s work:

Ruth Holmes Whitehead took eighteen years to write and research this book which is both a work of scholarship and a labour of love, gracefully and clearly written with some poignant personal touches. Ruth herself was born in South Carolina and has found slave owners among her own ancestors; her co-researcher Carmelita Robertson has “multiple Black Loyalist ancestors who escaped … during the American Revolution.”

And here’s the Publishers Weekly review.

The Online Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts

I started researching Revolutionary New England in earnest a little over fifteen years ago. I was lucky to begin as the World Wide Web spread and as institutions like the Google corporation, the Hathi Trust, and universities decided to digitize books and make them available to anyone.

Gradually I’ve seen one series of sources I learned to consult in libraries after another come online: the Boston Town Records, the journals of the Continental Congress, the papers of the major founders, the early Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and so on. I’ve obtained some other resources still protected by copyright, such as Shipton’s Harvard Graduates and the consolidated records of Boston’s churches, on CD-ROMs.

But until recently I still couldn’t find digital versions of the Massachusetts House’s official proceedings. Those are in the public domain, having been printed each year in the eighteenth century. The Massachusetts Historical Society undertook to reprint facsimile volumes in the late twentieth century, but only in small quantities. Those books weren’t showing up fully on Google, possibly because of corporate worries about those relatively recent reprint dates.

Then several weeks back I stumbled across those volumes in the Hathi Trust’s “Records of the American Colonies” collection. They’re part of an assemblage of “Published documents--legislation, court proceedings, records, correspondence, etc.--from the 13 original colonies and their predecessors.” The Massachusetts volumes for the Revolutionary period fall on this page.

The person who assembled the links to those digital files is Nicholas Okrent of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and of course I’m grateful to him. In fact, for my purposes he may have done too good a job. That collection contains nearly 900 volumes, and I really don’t care about the stuff from the seventeenth century or most of the other colonies. (At least not yet.)

I’m still figuring out how the Hathi Trust website works. One can search just within that collection, and then within individual volumes. The optical character recognition (O.C.R.) and transcription system doesn’t handle the long s and other vagaries of eighteenth-century printing smoothly, making the digital texts less reliable for searching and copying. But those books are indexed, and the biggest challenge is still cutting through the legislative procedures to figure out what was really going on. Later series in the same collection were printed in a more modern style for easier consulting.

As a result, another set of references that I once had to leave the house to find are now available any time of day without me even having to get up. I suppose I’ll die sooner because I’m no longer getting so much exercise. But in that shorter lifespan I’ll have seen more books, so I’ll still win.

Just Desserts in a New Children’s Book?

A picture book to be published next month takes readers through three centuries of history following a simple recipe for blackberry fool, but it has depths that some people have found troubling.

The book is A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. It shows four parent-child pairs preparing the receipt in successive years: 1710, 1810, 1910, and 2010. At each stage, the technology for whipping the cream and otherwise becomes more sophisticated.

And at each stage, the family and its situation change, starting with a mother and child in rural England and ending with a father and child in a modern American city. That dimension of social history evidently troubled the reviewer at Publishers Weekly:

Unfortunately, an attempt at historical authenticity backfires as the 19th-century plantation family’s blackberry fool is made for them by their slaves. The African-American cook and her daughter are not permitted to eat the dessert they’ve made; instead, they serve it to the white family, and the two are left to lick the bowl in a dark closet. The historical facts are not in dispute, but the disturbing injustices represented in this section of an otherwise upbeat account either require adult readers to present necessary background and context or—worse—to pass by them unquestioned.

Parents or teachers supplying “necessary background and context”? Based on “historical facts”? How unfortunate indeed!

Evidently, this reviewer felt that American children aged four to eight wouldn’t have been introduced to slavery before, even at this basic level. And that families’ enjoyment of a simple luxury like blackberry fool or a full-color picture book should not be disturbed, even for a few pages, by the thought of injustice. That was enough for this reviewer to call the plantation episode, unaccountably, “an attempt at historical authenticity.”

Other early reviewers, such as Kiera Parrott at School Library Journal, saw more value in that history. And it’s clear that picture of change in everyday life was crucial to the conception of this book for both author and artist. You can follow artist Blackall’s visual research through her series of blog posts.

I Only Read This Book for the Relatable Past

You might think that Thomas A. Foster’s Sex and the Founding Fathers is about the sexual behavior of the men who led the American Revolution and the creation of the federal government. But take a look at the subtitle: The American Quest for a Relatable Past.

That signals how this study isn’t about those men’s sexual thoughts or behaviors, about which we have very little information, anyway. Rather, it’s about how American authors have described the sexual side of those men’s lives, in many cases selecting and massaging the known facts to fit what they wanted the readers of their times to believe, or what readers wanted to read.

For instance, what has it meant to Americans that George Washington, the “Father of His Country,” evidently couldn’t father children? Was it a somewhat embarrassing reflection on his masculinity, or a natural frustration that humanizes him, or even a handy refutation of the occasional suggestions that he had children out of wedlock? (Of course, he could have had extramarital affairs without leaving the evidence of a fertile man.)

Foster notes Washington biographers stating strenuously that his infertility problem could not have been due to a sexual transmitted disease—that was simply beyond reason. But they were mum about the possibility of erectile dysfunction, a much more common problem for men but one with symbolic implications of impotence in other areas. (Foster doesn’t discuss a theory I recall seeing bandied about in recent decades, that Washington might have had Klinefelter syndrome, due to XXY chromosomes. Talk about raising gender issues!)

Foster also discusses how historians have treated John Adams, who was known for his long, close, and faithful marriage, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Gouverneur Morris, who weren’t. Originally the book also discussed Aaron Burr, but Foster converted that material into this article at Common-Place; in contrast to the others, American authors could gleefully discuss Burr as a libertine because he became a villain in the national saga.

Sex and the Founding Fathers also shows how the Founders serve as a barometer of the culture’s attitude toward sexual behavior. For instance, late in the Victorian period the Massachusetts Senator George F. Hoar decided that Franklin, of all people, didn’t belong in a National Hall of Fame:

Dr. Franklin’s conduct of life was that of a man on a low plane…one side of his character gross and immoral. . . . [His letter] on the question of keeping a mistress, which, making allowance for the manners of the time, and all allowance for the fact that he might have been partly in jest, is an abominable and wicked letter; and all his relation to women, and to the family life were of that character.

Come on, Senator, tell us how you really feel!

For me the star of this book was Gouverneur Morris, the least known of its subjects. He was frankly interested in sex throughout his long bachelorhood. Foster argues that Morris doesn’t deserve to be called a rake, however, because he (at least sometimes) passed up sex if he and his lover weren’t really in love, because he cared about whether those women had a good time, and because some of his affairs lasted for years. He just had a lot of them, and his (married) male friends liked to gossip about him.

Foster notes that only four full-length biographies of Morris were published in the 1800s and 1900s. Since 2003, however, there have been “three academic works and two popular biographies.” Those discuss the sexual side of Morris’s life more frankly—far more frankly—than books of previous eras did. Perhaps Gouverneur Morris is the Founder for our time.

In case you wonder, Sex and the Founding Fathers does come with illustrations. Illustrations like “A Philosophic Cock,” a political cartoon attacking Jefferson for his relationship with Sally Hemings.

Editing the “Compulsively Circumspect” Thomas Hutchinson

This year the Colonial Society of Massachusetts published the first volume of its Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson series, a project decades in the making. That makes a valuable and widely discussed source available at last.

This month the series’s chief editor, John W. Tyler, contributed two essays about that work to the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s Vita Brevis blog, and one can sense his pleasure and pride that it’s finally seeing print.

In the second posting, Tyler discusses the challenges and pleasures Thomas Hutchinson left us:

Many eighteenth-century authors wrote a first draft in their letter books, allowing a scribe (or in Hutchinson’s case, his children) to make a fair copy that would be dispatched to the recipient. One of the very first phases of any letters project is to gather all the existing copies of a letter for comparison, and for someone as compulsively circumspect as Hutchinson, the differences between the various copies are often enlightening. In almost all cases, the recipient’s copy provides the printed text, since those were the words that were read and acted upon. We usually note differences among the copies in the notes, although in some cases we have actually printed two versions of the same letter, since his unguarded first thoughts make much juicier reading.

Annotation…is the part I most enjoy. It is exactly like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The first reference to a person or event may not be exactly clear, and many times, if the editor is patient, the mystery will resolve itself a few letters down the line. Thus, “old Warren” – who may be any resident named Warren living in Hampshire County, Massachusetts – will eventually be revealed as Seth Warren, one of the so-called Berkshire Rioters, who attempted the rescue of a friend imprisoned for debt during the period when all the courts were closed because of the Stamp Act.

A good memory also helps to identify unnamed correspondents (of whom there are many in the Hutchinson Correspondence) when something said in one letter matches with something said in another. In certain instances, Hutchinson may deliberately leave a name blank or refer to an individual only by his initials, as a safeguard against charges of libel or protection against prying eyes at a time when letters were frequently opened by curious individuals while still on their way to the addressee. Here it helps to know the cast of characters or the way he habitually refers to them, as in “my chief adversary” or “the principal demagogue in the province” by which he almost always means James Otis, Jr.

Hutchinson was himself a historian who collected and studied the documents of previous generations. I’m sure he’d be pleased that, if we in Massachusetts must continue to paw through his private letters, it’s being done with this level of accuracy and care.

The Latest

Back in September, my ears perked up at this History News Network article, “Why Historians Can’t Afford to Ignore Gossip.” As a supporter of unabashed gossip, I found the history of that term interesting:

The very definition of gossip has changed over time. In English, the word originated as a noun, “godsibb,” meaning a relative in God, and connoted a godparent or a person in attendance at a christening. By the sixteenth and seventeenth century, however, a new, gender-specific definition of gossip became common: a woman attending a mother at childbirth. At the same time, gossip also became a verb and devalued, as with Dr. Johnson’s 1755 dictionary definition of gossip: “One who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in.” Popular understandings of gossip continue its negative association with women’s talk, but historical evidence shows both women and men engaging in the practice of gossip.

Although contemporary definitions of gossip vary, they all share a concern with the personal and often the private, and, thus, gossip can be identified as “private talk.” Gossip makes private matters public, and, for many, gossip’s most transgressive quality is precisely how it blurs the imaginary yet influential boundary between public and private. For historians, gossip’s boundary-crossing provides us with direct evidence of its existence in the past and the sources necessary to make it a subject of historical inquiry.

The article’s authors, Kathleen A. Feeley of the University of Redlands and Jennifer Frost of the University of Auckland, just co-edited a collection of essays titled When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History.

Alas, the book doesn’t contain material on the Revolutionary period, though there are articles on the Salem witch hunts, the early eighteenth-century letters of Virginian Philip Ludwell, and the Jacksonian scandalmongering of Anne Royall. Alas also, the book is $95 or more.

Complete Medical Histories from the Founders

Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health came out from New York University Press in 2013. Here are an H-Net review, a Journal of Interdisciplinary History review, a C-SPAN video, and a podcast discussion of the book on Liz Covart’s “Ben Franklin’s World” podcast.

I didn’t find the book to be as interesting as some other reviewers have. Most of it consists of chapters on George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, with a few pages each on James and Dolley Madison and on Dr. Benjamin Rush. Each chapter takes the form of a capsule biography pinned with seemingly all details about its subjects’ health preserved in their papers. Thus, we read every mention of illness in letters or diaries, every known instance of ill health, every bit of health legislation, every possible diagnosis from a latter-day article.

However, those profiles don’t dig very deep below the surface. For example, some scholars have suggested that Abigail Adams, after suffering a health scare giving birth and losing a child, found a way to keep from becoming pregnant so often—possibly longer breast-feeding. But Adams didn’t write about that openly, so it doesn’t make the book. In fact, Revolutionary Medicine seems to have no discussion of birth control at all and only one mention of breast-feeding, which shows the limits of its approach.

Similarly, while these profiles offer an exhaustive discussion of the medical experiences of their elite subjects, they don’t delve far into how the bulk of families with less money experienced health crises and medical care. We learn—as if we didn’t already know—that eighteenth-century medicine was usually painful, disruptive, and useless, but the book doesn’t have much to say about why these people nonetheless thought they were getting the best care possible.

Abrams is Professor at Penrose Library and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, and her previous books are about Jewish immigrants to the American west in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book didn’t give me a sense that she was yet at home in the world of the eighteenth century, despite the extensive mining of the Founders’ personal papers.

Certainly Abrams seems to have a limited view of the consensus of the field. Page 180 says, “Despite decades of controversy, many historians now believe that it is unlikely that Jefferson conducted a liaison with Sally Hemings and that there is no verifiable proof that he fathered any of her children.” That’s backwards: most historians of early America today believe it likely that Thomas Jefferson had a long sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Abrams doesn’t explain what she means by “verifiable proof” about the paternity of a child born two hundred years ago, but we have more biological evidence about Hemings’s children than about practically any others from the period.

Abrams ventures into modern politics in her book’s last paragraph, declaring that the Founders “surely would have balked at requiring all citizens to purchase health care insurance.” She doesn’t reconcile that statement with a fact reported on page 155, that President John Adams pushed for legislation requiring all American sailors to give up some of their wages to support the Marine Hospital Service—i.e., Adams’s administration required a class of its poorer citizens to purchase health care insurance.

Given how much Revolutionary Medicine says about the Founders’ very limited knowledge of medical science, I’m not sure how their opinions can carry much weight on modern medical policy anyway. We might as well ask if they’d require surgeons to scrub their hands before operating.

Early New England’s Blotter

Anthony Vaver’s Early American Crime blog offers one of the liveliest landscapes of life in colonial and federal America. It tells stories of burglary, murder, counterfeiting, and other crimes.

Earlier this year Vaver collected the best of those stories in Early American Criminals: An American Newgate Calendar, Chronicling the Lives of the Most Notorious Criminal Offenders from Colonial America and the New Republic. That book also includes two chapters published on other websites and another exclusive to print.

Most of those tales come from New England, largely because this region had so many printers to record the juicy details in the first place. Unlike Old Bailey Online, Early American Criminals isn’t just a compilation of period reports on the crimes.

Rather, for each story Vaver has assembled evidence from period newspapers, published confessions, execution sermons and verses, and later studies. The emphasis is on the narratives of those crimes rather than analysis of the social or legal conditions behind them.

Thus, it’s the details of those stories that stand out. For instance, when Bryan Sheehen was hanged in Salem for a violent rape in January 1772, he left his body to a Dr. Kast for dissection. (That was most likely the apothecary and physician Philip Godfrid Kast, Jr.) But in March, the Massachusetts Spy reported, a large crowd of locals dug up Sheehen’s grave and determined that his body was still intact. Which I guess shows that they still cared.

Early American Criminals is over 350 pages long with an index and occasional illustrations. It was published through Vaver’s Pickpocket Press and is probably most easily bought through Amazon.

Between Reluctance and Revolution

In From Resistance to Revolution Pauline Maier portrayed American Whigs as gradually becoming disenchanted with higher and higher levels of British government until in late 1775 or early 1776 they gave up on King George III himself and opted for independence.

Even while complaining about royal appointees in the 1760s, American colonists proclaimed their loyalty to fundaments of the British constitution—acting “more British than the British,” as Nick Bunker writes in An Empire on the Edge. While trying to force change in the London government through boycotts in the 1770s, they still raised the British flag on Liberty Poles.

And even as Americans fought against the British army in 1775, they referred to the enemy as “the ministerial troops” and sent appeals to George III to solve the crisis by reining in those government ministers. Complaints about the tyranny of the king himself (as heard at the recent Boston Tea Party reenactment) were exceedingly rare before the war.

That pattern is a big reason why authors like Jack Rakove portray most American activists as “revolutionaries despite themselves.” Such political activists as Samuel Adams ended up producing much more change in their society than they had imagined. In the early 1770s anti-French, anti-Catholic rhetoric was Boston’s common discourse. By the end of that decade the town had hosted thousands of French sailors and soldiers, and by the early 1780s it had a Catholic church. Was that the point of the Suffolk Resolves, with its bitter attack on the Quebec Act?

Bunker argues against that picture of most colonists as “reluctant to rebel.” Indeed, he describes them as ready to discard the whole British system, including the king, early in the 1770s. “Above all, the Americans had come to doubt Great Britain’s commitment to liberty”—not just individual officials’ commitment, or Parliament’s, but Britain’s. “The Tea Party meant rejection of British rule in its entirety.” That characterization seems to fit with Bunker’s picture of the Empire as thin and crumbling, but I think most American colonists before 1775 would have loudly rejected it.

Bunker suggests that “for a rising generation of radicals in New England the events of 1774 were something for which they had been preparing ever since their childhood.” But that paragraph’s primary example of a Boston leader “only too willing to fight” is William Molineux, who spent his childhood far away in Staffordshire and never expressed a clear political program to go with his confrontational temperament.

Dr. Thomas Young left a much larger pile of political essays showing clear radicalism. In a 1766 letter he even praised the new gallery in the Massachusetts legislative chamber as a way for the people to make their views known directly to their representatives—a truly democratic idea. But, like Molineux, Young had moved into Boston as an adult and didn’t represent its dominant views, especially on religious matters.

We really have to ask what John Hancock was saying because he was unsurpassed in sensing Massachusetts’s political mood and positioning himself there. Bunker writes that in his 1774 oration about the Boston Massacre Hancock “came close to accusing George III of waging war against his people.” But Hancock took care to condemn “that villain who dared to advise his master to such execrable measures,” naming “Hillsborough, and a knot of treacherous knaves in Boston.” He closed with a wish to “secure honour and wealth to Great Britain, even against the inclinations of her ministers.”

Both portrayals of American activists—as conservatives sliding into radical measures with radical results, and as radicals ready to fight British institutions and restructure their government—depend on explaining away some contrary evidence. Hancock ended his oration declaring he was confident the struggle would end “gloriously for America” but earlier declined to speak of Britain’s future—was that a dog-whistle hint about the possibility of separation? Samuel Adams, who was also then insisting publicly that he and his followers were still loyal to the Crown, later declared that around 1773 he’d concluded that independence was the only way to preserve his countrymen’s liberties.

On the other side, Bunker writes, “During the second half of 1773, Franklin began to lose his last vestige of loyalty to Great Britain.” Yet he also describes how from December 1774 through February 1775 Franklin engaged in back-channel negotiations with British Whigs seeking a compromise that could keep the American colonies within the British Empire. Was that the work of a man with no loyalty left?

In the end I remain convinced by the portrait of Masschusetts’s Whigs as radical in their methods but essentially conservative in their aims and values up through the beginning of the war. They saw themselves as fighting for the British constitution. Of course, so did their political opponents, from Thomas Hutchinson and his circle on up to George III. Who was correct about what that constitution demanded? Well, that was what the fighting was all about.

COMING UP: Defining the terms of the discussion. But first, some other books.

What Did Bostonians Start a Revolution for?

In An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, Nick Bunker posits a provocative parallel for Massachusetts in 1773, during the lead-up to the Tea Party: “Perhaps the closest equivalent in modern times was the end of the Communist regime in East Germany.” Having visited Leipzig and other G.D.R. cities as the Cold War dissolved into mist, Bunker suggests we view Boston through that lens.

Of course, he acknowledges, the British Crown had no equivalent of the Stasi or other elements of the totalitarian Soviet satellite. But in Bunker’s view both societies were aching to break through the flimsy oppression of an old regime: “The town of Boston needed to reinvent itself as the great industrial city it would eventually become after the War of 1812.”

Massachusetts, and New England as whole, indeed had a lot of advantages for an expanding republican economy. The region had the highest literacy rate of anywhere in the British Empire. As Bunker notes, the town was the size of a small British seaport that might support one newspaper, yet it had five or more papers each week in the years before the Revolutionary War, representing a spectrum of political ideas.

What’s more, New England’s relatively equal distribution of land, scarce labor, and town-meeting system let more men gain independent livings and participate in their government than anywhere else in the Empire. The leaders of the government in London didn’t believe in that system—they couldn’t imagine the region really ran that way, and they didn’t think it was a good idea anyway. In 1774 those ministers tried to roll back New England self-government, leading to the decisive countryside confrontations from summer 1774 through spring 1775.

On the other hand, the stultifying culture that might plausibly make Boston resemble Leipzig wasn’t anything that London government had created or supported. It was the system of New England’s own establishment, descendants of Puritans who disliked any form of faith but their own. Their laws didn’t just ban theater and stifle Christmas. They barred work from Saturday night to Monday morning, and blocked travel in Sundays between one town and another except in emergencies. For all of New England’s vaunted literacy, only the top households owned any non-religious reading material.

Since the start of the century Philadelphia had vaulted ahead of Boston in population and trade. Some of the reason was geographic: Philadelphia’s harbor was open for more of the year, and it wasn’t perched on a small peninsula. But most of the southern city’s advantages were cultural. It was more welcoming to immigrants and non-conformists. The most inventive Bostonian of the century, Benjamin Franklin, left for Philadelphia in his teens not because he lacked a place within New England society but because he didn’t like that place.

Bunker writes of the need for Boston to reinvent itself as an industrial center, “Even before the revolution, it contained men and women who understood this was so.” He doesn’t identify such individuals, however, and I’m hard pressed to think of any among the Revolutionaries. There’s no doubt that some benefited from the coming of industrialization: Paul Revere remade himself from a skilled craftsman into a manufacturer, and Loammi Baldwin of Woburn went from a farmer to a civil engineer overseeing the Middlesex Canal.

But almost to a man, Boston Patriots went into political activism and then the Revolutionary War not seeking to break free from their narrow society but to protect it from change. London’s new taxes were preventing a return to the town’s previous prosperity, they complained. When the political confrontation heated up, they demanded to go back to Massachusetts’s old charter, not to make reforms.

Samuel Adams certainly didn’t aim to lead a revolution that would open Boston to a Catholic church and competing theaters. Elias Hasket Derby (shown above) made a fortune in the post-war China Trade, but in April 1775 when he was pushing for his Salem militia company to march faster against the redcoats he would surely have been happy just to have the British Customs service roll back its enforcement to the 1750s level.

With Patriots like those, I think Bunker’s assessment that “Boston needed to reinvent itself as the great industrial city” is like saying that Tyrannosaurs needed to reinvent themselves as the light, maneuverable flyers they eventually evolved into. There’s no doubt now that birds descended from two-legged dinosaurs while Tyrannosaurs died out, but those dinosaurs weren’t spending their days trying to fly. Similarly, conservative New Englanders taking action against the Crown in the 1760s and 1770s were trying to preserve their way of life for themselves and their children, not to open up their society to the possibilities of industrial (or other) change. And yet that’s what they did.

TOMORROW: Reluctant revolutionaries?

Nick Bunker’s Sharp Edges of Empire

After so much reading about the approach of the Revolution in New England, I’m always pleased to find books that give me a new perspective on the major events of those years. Sometimes that perspective comes from a tight focus on an individual or a lesser-known aspect of the conflict.

Nick Bunker’s An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America manages that even while examining the well-known Gaspée incident, Boston Tea Party, and response to the Coercive Acts.

Bunker, an Englishman, describes those events as seen from London, where the American mainland colonies were a source of mystery and bother if the government’s overworked ministers had any time for them at all. His book has chapters on major events in New England from 1772 to 1774, but Bunker emphasizes sources that tell the British side of each story.

A great deal of archival work went into An Empire on the Edge, and its notes brim with unfamiliar sources that can set a researcher’s mouth to salivating: the War Office’s accounting of British army dead from 1774 to 1780; private verses that the Earl of Suffolk, junior secretary of state, wrote about the nascent rebellion; a painting of Boston in 1764 by Byron’s great-uncle; Lt.-Col. Alexander Leslie’s bitter letter from Castle William ten days before the Tea Party; a 1774 intelligence report about gunpowder shipments from Holland.

Bunker was a financial journalist before he turned to writing history, and that seems to surface in his analyses of economic pressures: abundant credit led to overproduction of tea in China, harvests failed in India and later in Europe at just the wrong times, a London banker tried to short East India Company stock a little too early and set off a cascade of banking failures. The book profiles John Hancock as a businessman more prominently than Samuel Adams as a politician, and devotes relatively little space to political philosophy, religion, and other forces.

Bunker’s background is especially valuable as he lays out how the East India Company finally ran aground in 1773 and the British government—despite George III and Lord North being no fans of the company—deemed it too big to fail. Competing business and political interests ultimately produced two redundant rescue schemes: one that allowed the Crown to take over the company’s territory in India, the other that rewrote the rules for sending surplus tea to North American ports. The first gave Britain the basis of its nineteenth-century empire while the second ultimately cost it much of the empire it had built in the previous two hundred years.

One player in shaping the latter policy, An Empire on the Edge argues, was Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, through his letters to British tea magnate William Palmer. Hutchinson’s interests were all mixed up: his sons were in the tea business, and his salary as governor (and those of his in-laws, the Oliver brothers) came from the tea tax. Thus, while Hutchinson sincerely sought the best for the British Empire and for Massachusetts, he looked corrupt—and just when the leak of some private letters made him look devious.

While many American authors emphasize the strength of the British Empire after the Seven Years’ War, especially its military, Bunker paints it as fragile and overextended. Stretched tight between North America and India, much of it was “only a make-believe empire.” The book starts symbolically with a description of that dominion’s western edge at Fort Charters in modern Illinois, a structure won from the French in 1763 and then allowed to slip gradually into the Mississippi. The figure of Edward Gibbon, Member of Parliament, floats through the book, not because of any astute observations on the political situation from him but perhaps because he wrote about another empire’s decline and fall.

An Empire on the Edge is thus a “sympathetic study of failure,” Bunker writes. He offers portraits of the top government ministers in London—especially Lord North and the Earl of Dartmouth—that bring out their good qualities instead of making them distant antagonists. (I recall how Bernard Donoughue’s British Politics and the American Revolution from 1964 struck me with a story of Lord North being robbed by a highwayman even as he won a government majority; this book does the same with the picture of the prime minister laying out a playing field for his sons.)

But none of those men’s personal strengths, Bunker says, were right for avoiding the “tragedy” of “a war the British should never have allowed themselves to fight.” Neither North nor Dartmouth had the broader vision that the situation demanded. At no point in the book, however, do I see a turning-point that would have allowed the British government to satisfy all the needs of its 1770s empire. I have a sense of what would have satisfied the Massachusetts Whigs, but I doubt that approach would have satisfied Bunker.

TOMORROW: An Empire on the Edge on Massachusetts.

“Nothing but the Horrors”

One measure of the poor reception for the American Heroes Channel’s American Revolution series among historians this week was how it drove Alex Cain to start a blog. His first post said:

…the Battle of Lexington, as depicted in “The American Revolution”, is woefully inaccurate and replete with factual inaccuracies. For the producers to say the Lexington militia were all armed with squirrel rifles, that the “minutemen” actually blockaded the Road to Concord, and that the battle took place in a random field outside of Lexington is unacceptable and grossly misleading.

Cain is the author of We Stood Our Ground: Lexington in the First Year of the Revolution, studying each soldier from Lexington, so he knows that particular patch of ground.

It looks like Cain’s second blog posting is an extract or excision from his new book, I See Nothing but the Horrors of a Civil War: The Rise, Fall and Ultimate Triumph of McAlpin’s Corps of American Volunteers, about a set of Loyalists from New York and “the Hampshire Grants,” now known as Vermont.

Here’s a bit from the blog about the wife of corps leader Daniel McAlpin, a retired British army captain who had settled near Stillwater, New York, until the war broke out:

Mary McAlpin described her family’s treatment at the hands of the rebels in vivid language. “From the day her husband left to the day she was forced from her home the Captain’s house was never without parties of the Rebels present. They lived at their discretion and sometimes in very large numbers. They destroyed what they could not consume. Shortly after the capture of the fleeing loyalists a group of armed Rebels with blackened faces broke into the McAlpins’ dwelling house. They threatened Mary and her children with violence and menace of instant death. They confined them to the kitchen while they stripped every valuable from the home. A few days after this, by an order of the Albany Committee, a detachment of Rebel Forces came and seized upon the remainder of McAlpin’s estate both real and personal.” Mary McAlpin and her children were taken to an unheated hut located in Stillwater and locked inside “without fire, table, chairs or any other convenience.”

Hoping that the hardship would eventually break Mrs. McAlpin and induce her to beg her husband to honorably surrender, the rebels kept Mary and her children in captivity for several weeks. Mary McAlpin refused to comply and instead responded her husband “had already established his honour by a faithful service to his King and country.” Enraged, rebels seized Mary and her oldest daughter and “carted” both of them through Albany. According to the Reverend [John] Munro, “Mrs. McAlpin was brought down to Albany in a very scandalous manner so much that the Americans themselves cried out about it.” A second account stated “when Mrs. McAlpin was brought from the hut to Albany as a prisoner with her daughter…they neither of them had a rag of cloaths to shift themselves.”

I See Nothing… is available in digital and print-on-demand formats.