When the Stamp Act Congress Convened

On 7 Oct 1765, the Stamp Act Congress convened at City Hall in New York (shown here). It was a week behind schedule.

As proposed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives back in June, this was a convention of delegates from the colonial legislatures of North America to come up with a common response to the Stamp Act.

Royal governors had done their best to stymie legislatures’ plans to participate in the congress, mostly by declining to convene those legislatures in time to choose delegates.

As a result, in Delaware, New York, and New Jersey legislative leaders chose delegates through committees or in meetings held without the governors’ approval. Other colonies, including the oldest and most populous, Virginia, couldn’t finagle a way to send anyone. Out of fourteen colonial legislatures invited (including Nova Scotia), only nine had representatives at the congress.

Massachusetts was one of those nine, but royal governor Francis Bernard was confident that he had things under control, as he reported to the Board of Trade in London on 8 July 1765:

It was impossible to oppose this Measure [for the congress] to any good purpose: and therefore the friends of Government took the lead in it, & have kept it in their hands; in pursuance of which, of the Committee appointed by this house to meet the other Committees at New York on the first of Octr. next, Two of the three are fast friends to Government & prudent & discreet men, such as I am assured will never consent to any undutiful or improper applications to the Government of great Britain. It is the general Opinion that nothing will be done in consequence of this intended Congress: but I hope I may promise myself that this province will act no indecent part therein.

The three Massachusetts delegates were all members of the committee that had recommended proposing the congress:

• James Otis, Jr., of Barnstable, the lawyer who had become leader of Massachusetts’s opposition.
• Oliver Partridge of Hatfield, veteran of the Albany Congress.
• Timothy Ruggles of Hardwick, a former house speaker and brigadier of the militia.

Probably because Massachusetts had instigated the meeting, there seems to have been consensus among the delegates that their chairman should be from that colony. But which man?

TOMORROW: America’s first national election?

Archibald Robertson’s Views of Besieged Boston

I was delighted to discover last week that the New York Public Library’s digital image collection includes the illustrations from Archibald Robertson: His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762-1780, published in 1930.

The image above is labeled “View of Boston 4th Janry 1776 taken from the epaulment of the citadel on the heights of Charles Town”—i.e., the fort that the British army built on Bunker’s Hill. From the same point, Robertson (c.1745-1813) created a series of images of the Continental-held countryside. As an officer in the Royal Artillery, he had practice in studying and sketching landscapes, and inside besieged Boston he had a lot of time on his hands.

Robertson’s other pictures include views from Copp’s Hill in the North End and a study of the Boston Neck. There’s a “Sketch of the burning of the houses on Dorchester Neck, by our troops who went & returned upon the ice. 14 January, 1776.” and a “Sketch of the burning & destroying of Castle William in Boston Harbour” after the evacuation. Some are more stylized than others, with human figures in the foreground.

And there are some views of New York, Halifax, and other places, but who cares about seeing those?

A Mystery Button from “Parker’s Revenge”

Last week I showed this photo of an artifact found during the archeological study of the “Parker’s Revenge” area in Lexington. On Saturday I attended Dr. Meg Watters’s progress report on that work, which included a better photo of this item, and I was quite intrigued.

I flipped the available photo upside-down to make it a little easier to interpret. It’s a cast-copper button of the size that might be used on the front of a man’s waistcoat or at the knees of his breeches.

On the lower half of the button, apparently in the foreground, is what looks like a fox running from right to left. Above that shape is a horizontal ridge; the right light reveals that to be a bridge. On either side are a series of oval blobs, getting smaller as they rise; those are stylized trees. And in the top rear, the starry shape is a windmill with a vertical tower and four sails.

The mystery is that no one has been able to identify similar iconography on any other artifact, or identify what this scene or collection of symbols might mean. Fox, bridge, windmill, trees. Does that scene represent a family, a military unit, a hunting club?

Lecture on James DeWolf in Newport, 8 Oct.

On Thursday, 8 October, the Newport Historical Society will host a talk on “James DeWolf and the Rhode Island Slave Trade” by author Cynthia Mestad Johnson.

DeWolf (1764-1837) was a teen-aged sailor on privateers toward the end of the Revolutionary War. After the peace, he became a merchant captain and then a merchant focusing on a particular type of import:

Over thirty thousand slaves were brought to America on ships owned and captained by James DeWolf. When the United States took action to abolish slavery, this Bristol native manipulated the legal system and became actively involved in Rhode Island politics in order to pursue his trading ventures. DeWolf’s political power and central role in sustaining the state’s economy allowed him to evade prosecution from local and federal authorities—even on counts of murder.

Through archival records, author Cynthia Mestad Johnson uncovers the secrets of James DeWolf and tells an unsettling story of corruption and exploitation in the Ocean State from slave ships to politics.

Johnson will sign books after her talk. Admission is $1 for Newport Historical Society members, $5 for others. Seating is limited, so the society strongly encourages people to make reservations (email).

“Thread, Wool and Silk” at Old South

Old South Meeting House is hosting a series of events this fall on costume and textile-making, and what they say about the economy, social class, politics, and other matters.

Friday, 9 October, 12:15-1:00 P.M.
Lady in the Blue Dress...and You!

Painted in an exquisite blue silk dress by her husband John Singleton Copley, the most famous artist in the American colonies, Susanna Copley was from Boston’s elite, a member of one of the town’s leading merchant families. But in 1773 she found herself surrounded by turmoil when her Loyalist family were named as tea consignees to sell British East India Company tea—the very tea that the Patriots were determined to refuse. Listen as she confides in a friend about her husband’s struggles and her fears for her family’s safety in a world where the established social and political order is coming under siege. Join in the conversation as historic reenactors Elizabeth Sulock and Elizabeth Mees share two well-clad women’s perspectives on a turbulent time.

Admission is free for Old South members, $6 for others. Ticket information here.

Friday, 23 October, 12:15-1:00 P.M.
Sheep to Shawl: Carding and Spinning at the Meeting House with Historic New England

Discover how New Englanders made clothes before the process became mechanized. Learn about the history and technology of spinning and dying wool and weaving cloth from Historic New England educator Carolin Collins. Then try your hand at picking, carding, and spinning wool from Historic New England’s flock of sheep in order to get a hands-on understanding of this vital historical craft!

Admission is free for Old South members, $6 for others. Ticket information here.

Friday, 12 November, 12:30-1:30 P.M.
Thread, Wool, and Silk: Weaving It All Together
Erica Lindamood, Education Director at Old South, will lead an informal discussion weaving together the programs on fashion, social class, and clothing production. Tea and cookies will be served, and participants can bring their own lunch if they wish. Admission is $5 for members, plus one guest.

The Latest Update on Parker’s Revenge, 3 Oct.

On Saturday, 3 October, archeologist Meg Watters will speak at the Concord public library on “Parker’s Revenge Revealed: Notes from the Field.”

This is the latest public update about the re-exploration of part of Battle Road in west Lexington where Capt. John Parker reportedly led his militia company in a counterattack on the British column making its way back from Concord.

The Parker’s Revenge Project is in the last months of its archeological stage, and the Friends of Minute Man Park just issued a press release that says:

Today, the 44-acre site of Parker’s Revenge is on a heavily wooded hillside within the confines of Minute Man National Historical Park. Utilizing a suite of technologies, the Parker’s Revenge project is reconstructing the historic 1775 landscape.

“What we have found to date is very significant. Due to the location and spatial patterning of the musket balls recovered, we now know the exact place where individuals were standing during the battle, allowing us to begin to paint a much clearer picture about what happened that day,” said Dr. Meg Watters, project archaeologist.

A dropped musket ball indicates the geographical position of a combatant. In addition, since the effective range of a 1775 musket was only approximately 100 yards, a fired musket ball also provides clues to combatant positioning. Archaeological investigations have discovered British and colonial musket balls, and a 1775-era copper button from a waistcoat. These findings are significant because they are located within 80 yards of each other. The small cluster is the only occurrence of battle related artifacts over the 44-acre site, clearly identifying the position of individuals fighting that day. Continued archaeological excavations and metallic surveys will complete the historic landscape investigation.

Dr. Watters’s talk, sponsored by the Friends of Minute Man, will start at 7:00 P.M.

The Imprint of Madison’s Hand

A couple of years ago, I attended a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society on a paper by Prof. Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School. She had been studying James Madison’s record of the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787.

That in itself wasn’t unusual; Madison’s notes, first published in 1840, have become the standard source on what happened in those discussions. For folks who take an “originalist” stance to legal interpretations, they’re crucial to what the Founders supposedly meant.

Bilder had focused not on Madison’s record but on how that record had changed since 1787, as revealed by surviving notes and versions copied out by other people in the meantime. The result is the new book Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention.

In this History News Network article, Bilder laid out the basis of her book:

To a remarkable degree, Madison’s revised Notes created the narrative we inherit of the Convention. Hundreds of books and articles have been written about the Convention. They rely on one manuscript: Madison’s Notes. In 1840, after Madison’s death, Dolley Madison published his Notes. They remain the authority for scholars, historians, journalists, lawyers, and judges.

Madison’s Notes are the only source that covers every day of the Convention from May 14 to September 17, 1787. No other source depicts the Convention as Madison’s Notes do: as a political drama, with compelling characters, lengthy discourses on political theories, crushing disappointments, and seemingly miraculous successes. The Notes are, as the Library of Congress catalogs them, properly considered a “Top Treasure” of the American people.

But the Notes do not date in their entirety to the summer of 1787. They are covered in revisions. This fact is known–but the number is a shock. When I saw the manuscript in the conservation lab at the Library of Congress—in the aptly named Madison Building—the additions appear in various ink shades, with handwriting, some youthful, some with the shake of Madison’s later years. Madison even added slips of paper with longer revisions. . . .

Madison’s Notes were revised as he changed his understanding about the Convention, the Constitution, and his own role. Madison’s Notes were originally taken as a legislative diary for himself and likely Thomas Jefferson. They tracked his political ideas, his strategies, and the positions of allies and opponents. The original Notes reflected what Madison cared about.

I love talking about the Notes with students because they know that one cannot take notes of oneself speaking. When they are called on, they either leave their notes blank or they compose that section later, reflecting what they realized afterwards was the right answer. Madison’s own speeches are thus the most troubling in terms of reliability. In fact, in the years immediately after the Convention, he likely replaced several of the sheets containing his speeches in order to distance himself from statements that became controversial. . . .

Beginning in 1789, Madison began to revise the Notes to convert his diary into a record of debates. Along the way, he converted himself into a different Madison. In the original Notes, Madison was annoyed and frustrated. Slowly by altering a word here, a phrase there, he became a moderate, dispassionate observer and intellectual founder of the Constitution.

One particular area of evolution was Madison’s idea of how much control the federal government had over the states. He went into the convention with the idea that the national government should have a veto over state laws, but that idea was unpopular enough that his notes preserve no record of such a suggestion. Of course, Madison continued to change his thinking about the balance of power between state and nation from the late 1780s to the mid-1810s, depending on his circumstances.

Another issue, inextricably related to that one, was how the Constitution treated slavery. Bilder addressed that in a recent essay at We’re History:

Madison’s role in promoting slavery is often overlooked because historians have relied on Madison’s revised version of his record of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, known to historians as Madison’s Notes. They are the most important source for what happened at the Constitutional Convention. In two comments Madison recorded in his Notes, he spoke against slavery at the Convention. They are the only two times in the Notes he claims to have spoken against slavery. Both occasions occur on August 25. No other delegates’ notes from the Convention contain a single word indicating that Madison was opposed to slavery.

New evidence suggests that Madison composed his anti-slavery comments two years after it appeared he had written them. Madison did not finish the Notes until after the Convention, and he wrote the Notes from August 22 to September 17 after the fall of 1789. Curiously, one of the sentences Madison attributes to himself bears a strange resemblance to a statement that he had originally recorded another delegate, Maryland’s Luther Martin, making on August 21.

Madison was the delegate who suggested enumerating enslaved people not as property but as three-fifths of people, the basis of what became known as the “slave power” in ante-bellum America.

A Momentous Day for Samuel Adams

A couple of days ago, I listed Boston’s three representatives to the Massachusetts General Court as of 25 Sept 1765.

Under the pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts constitution, Boston could elect four representatives. (That still left its population underrepresented compared to the much smaller rural towns.) But one of the men Bostonians had elected in May, the young attorney Oxenbridge Thacher, had died unexpectedly on 9 July.

On the morning of 27 September, therefore, Boston had a special election in Faneuil Hall to fill Thacher’s seat. The town records say that the meeting began with a prayer by the Rev. Samuel Checkley. The selectmen then asked for all white male Bostonians who met the higher property requirements for a General Court election to vote by noon.

the Inhabitants withdrew & brought in their Votes for a Representative, and upon counting and sorting them it appeared that the number of Votes were 572 of which

• John Ruddock Esq. had 110 –
• John Rowe Esq. 137 –
• John Hancock Esq. 40 – and
• Mr. Samuel Adams 247 –

Note that Adams did not yet have the wealth to be accorded the honorific “Esq.” Nor did he have a mathematical majority, though he had a clear plurality.

The selectmen then organized a second round of voting. That time Adams received 265 votes out of 448 and “was duly Elected.”

Thus, four days after Adams had drafted Boston’s special instructions to its legislative representatives, he became one of those representatives. He made the short walk over to the Town House where the General Court was meeting and was sworn in that afternoon.

Whereupon Gov. Francis Bernard announced that sadly this legislative session was conflicting with important court dates and keeping some gentlemen away, so he had no choice but to adjourn the Massachusetts General Court until 23 October. That would be after the Stamp Act Congress in New York, and only about a week before the Stamp Act was supposed to take effect.

Thus ended Samuel Adams’s first day as a Massachusetts legislator.

Gov. Bernard’s Instructions to the General Court

As soon as the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court reported that it had a quorum on 25 Sept 1765, Gov. Francis Bernard summoned that body up to the Council Chamber in the Town House (now the Old State House) for a serious talk.

Since Bernard was the governor, he got to do all the talking. He delivered a long address about the legislature’s response to the Stamp Act—what it had done wrong and what it should do right. Early on, Bernard said, “I shall not enter into any Disquisition of the Policy of the Act.” Once Parliament passed the law, he said, the province had to obey it.

Bernard made four principal points to the legislators:

• The House’s call for a Stamp Act Congress was not in the spirit of loyalty to the Crown that its authors professed.
• Closing the courts and the ports so as not to have to use stamped paper would cause great damage to the economy and society.
• All branches of the government had to respond with unity and firmness to the “violences which had been committed in this town.”
• In particular, the legislature should provide “a Compensation to be made to the Sufferers of the late Disturbances.”

The members of the lower house listened to the governor. They had the speech read to them again the next morning. Then they debated it and named a committee to respond to Bernard. They did not repudiate the idea of the congress or start to work on compensating Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson for the destruction of his house.

The next day, Gov. Bernard notified the legislature that a ship had arrived with stamped paper for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. With Andrew Oliver no longer acting as the province’s stamp agent, Bernard wanted the legislature to come up with a plan for keeping that paper safe, it “being the King’s Property.”

The assembly’s committee, which included Thomas Cushing, Artemas Ward, and others, soon responded that since the stamped paper had been sent to Massachusetts without the involvement of its legislature, keeping it safe was not the business of the Massachusetts General Court. This was not the cooperation the governor had been hoping for.

TOMORROW: A special election in Boston.

Massachusetts Towns Line Up Against the Stamp Act

Two hundred and fifty years ago, representatives to the Massachusetts General Court were heading home after a very short legislative session.

Gov. Francis Bernard had called the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature to convene on Wednesday, 25 September, in Boston. Most of the representatives summoned to that meeting had been elected back in May, and their towns had given them instructions about how to vote on the big issues of the day. But the Stamp Act, and New England’s forceful response to it, had produced a bigger confrontation than anyone imagined. Many towns therefore held another meeting to come up with additional instructions for their legislators.

On 23 September, Boston’s town meeting approved its special instructions, reiterating its opposition to the Stamp Act and anything that looked like compromise about that new law. That argument came out of a committee, but the man who gets the most credit for drafting it is Samuel Adams. Though the instructions didn’t use the phrase “taxation without representation” (not coined until 1767), that idea was the philosophical basis for Boston’s objection to the stamp tax.

When Boston created its instructions, its representatives in the House were:

• James Otis, Jr., the fiery attorney who a few years before had resigned his royal appointments and started to represent the interests of the Boston merchants.
• Thomas Cushing, one of those merchants. His late father had employed Samuel Adams in his mercantile house as a young man, with results that convinced both of them that Adams’s talents didn’t lie in business.
• Thomas Gray (1721-1774), also the province’s auditor. As a sign of how cozy the political class was then, the province treasurer whose accounts he checked was his older brother, Harrison Gray.

And there was a player to be named later.

Other Massachusetts towns came up with similar instructions for their representatives. In Braintree, Samuel Adams’s second cousin John was the principal drafter. John Adams later claimed that his draft had been adopted nearly without editing (there was a moderate amount of editing), and that it was the model for many other towns’ instructions (other towns were already making the same arguments). Braintree’s protest did use an impressive amount of legal jargon, however.

TOMORROW: The governor’s opening speech.

Two Talks by Ray and Marie Raphael

Ray Raphael has a new history of the American founding, written with his wife Marie, and they’re coming to Massachusetts to talk about it in the next week.

The book is The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began. It builds on Ray’s The First American Revolution, published in 2002, filling out the argument that America’s political shift to republican rule was well under way in New England before the actual shooting started in 1775 and well before independence in 1776.

On Wednesday, 30 September, at 7:00 P.M., Ray and Marie Raphael will speak and sign books at the Worcester Historical Museum. This free event is sponsored by the Worcester Revolution of 1774, the consortium commemorating the local events that played a big role in the Spirit of ’74 story. The museum is at 30 Elm Street in Worcester, and there’s free parking off Chestnut Street.

On the next night, Thursday, 1 October, at 7:30 P.M., the Raphaels will speak at the Minute Man National Historical Park visitor center in Lexington. That park is of course where the war began in earnest, but also the site of crucial Massachusetts Provincial Congress sessions earlier. Again, there will be a book-signing after the talk.

Alderman Wooldridge and an Unfortunate Young Woman

Last month I introduced the figure of Thomas Wooldridge, an alderman of London who started the war as spokesman for the London merchants doing business with America and ended going bankrupt for the second time before dying in distant Boston.

While he was still a respectable magistrate in London, Wooldridge showed up in this story in the May 1777 London Magazine alongside a list of prisoners the American army took at Trenton:

Saturday 3 [May].

Yesterday two inhabitants of the parish of St. Mary Abchurch, made application to Mr. Alderman Wooldridge, at Guildhall for a warrant against the keeper of an infamous house, agreeable to the particular directions of the act of parliament; a warrant was granted, and Mr. Payne the constable immediately went to execute it; he presently came with the prisoner, a woman so big with child that she was on the eve of delivery; with her a pretty young woman, who, it afterwards turned out, was a nymph of the house.

Being closely interrogated by the alderman about her situation, she burst into a flood of tears, and a scene ensued that was extremely affecting: she said that she had lived in many reputable families, which she named, till being debauched by an attorney’s clerk, by whom she was with child, she was compelled to leave service and go to her father; but her mother-in-law [i.e., stepmother] turning her out of doors, she had no other resource to fly to than seeking that dissolute way of life which she now followed: every person present felt for the unfortunate girl, though nobody so much as herself, for her story was accompanied with the most evident emotions of contrition.

The alderman, in very severe terms, reprehended the keeper of the brothel, for to such characters, he justly observed, girls in general owed their ruin; but as the prisoner’s situation made her a very unfit object for a jail, she was permitted to return home, on a promise to discontinue the practice for which she was apprehended.

The young woman was sent by a constable to her father, who is a man of reputation; and we trust he will exercise tenderness, and not severity to a girl who appears to be more unfortunate than abandoned.

No word about how to deal with her stepmother.

See the In the Words of Women for an analysis of the print shown above.

“Pewter Dish (?) with Handle”

Smithsonian Magazine’s website featured this object back in August, saying:

An 18th-century bedpan isn’t all that different from one today. Then, it was round and made of pewter with a handle. In an era before plumbing and bathrooms, the bedpan could be gently heated and slipped under the covers of a sickbed.

The elderly, ill, and women recovering from childbirth could use the bedpan without having to risk further injury by leaving their bed. While healthy adults could use a chamberpot, which might be kept in a cabinet or attached beneath a hole in a chair seat, the bedpan was designed for the immobile.

This particular bedpan was made by a New York pewterer named Frederick Bassett in the late 18th century.

Why did it merit that attention? Because this particular bedpan can be traced to George and Martha Washington.

Or at least to the descendants of Martha’s granddaughter Britannia Wellington Peter Kennon. Around 1900 they inventoried and numbered all the household items that family lore said had come from Mount Vernon after Martha Washington’s death in 1802. This was identified as a “pewter dish (?) with handle.” In the 1930s one heir sold it to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association as a “plate warmer.”

Apparently, however, no one used this container in any commemorative banquets before a material-history expert recognized it as a bedpan. And that’s how it’s been catalogued and occasionally displayed at Mount Vernon ever since.

Early American History Schedules at the M.H.S.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has announced its schedule of seminars for the upcoming academic year. These come in four series: on early America, environmental history, urban history, and the history of women and gender.

I’ve picked out those that relate to colonial and federal America. Except for the one noted otherwise, every session starts at 5:15 P.M. at the society’s building on Boylston Street in Boston.

Tuesday, 6 October
Jane Kamensky, Harvard University, “Copley’s Cato or, The Art of Slavery in the Age of British Liberty”
Comment: David L. Waldstreicher, Graduate Center, C.U.N.Y.

Thursday, 8 October
Jen Manion, Connecticut College, “Capitalism, Carceral Culture, and the Domestication of Working Women in the Early American City”
Comment: Cornelia Dayton, University of Connecticut
This session takes place at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge starting at 5:30 P.M.

Tuesday, 3 November
Owen Stanwood, Boston College, “Peter Faneuil’s World: The Huguenot International and New England, 1682-1742”
Comment: Wim Klooster, Clark University

Tuesday, 10 November
Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University, “André Michaux and the Many Politics of Trees in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World”
Comment: Joseph F. Cullon, W.P.I./M.I.T.

Tuesday, 1 December
Rachel Walker, University of Maryland, “Faces, Beauty, and Brains: Physiognomy and Female Education in Post-Revolutionary America”
Comment: Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut

Tuesday, 19 Jan 2016
Sara Georgini, Adams Papers, “The Providence of John and Abigail Adams”
Comment: Chris Beneke, Bentley University

Tuesday, 2 February
Wendy Roberts, University at Albany, S.U.N.Y., “Sound Believers: Rhyme and Right Belief”
Comment: Stephen A. Marini, Wellesley College

Tuesday, 1 March
Abigail Chandler, University of Massachusetts–Lowell, “‘Unawed by the Laws of Their Country’: The Role of English Law in North Carolina’s Regulator Rebellion”
Comment: Hon. Hiller Zobel, Massachusetts Superior Court

Tuesday, 5 April
Jared Hardesty, Western Washington University, “Constructing Castle William: An Intimate History of Labor and Empire in Provincial America”
Comment: Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire

Tuesday, 3 May
Joanne Jahnke-Wegner, University of Minnesota, “‘They bid me speak what I thought he would give’: The Commodification of Captive Peoples during King Philip’s War”
Comment: Kate Grandjean, Wellesley College

In these seminars, the author of the paper doesn’t read it aloud. Instead, subscribers are invited to download that paper in advance. Discussions begin with comments by the author and commenter, and then any other attendees who have questions can join in. A subscription to three of the four series can be purchased for $25 through this site. (That doesn’t include the 8 October session, in the women’s history series.)

Saturday Events at Minute Man Park and the Wayside Inn

On this Saturday, 26 September, Minute Man National Historical Park is hosting open houses at its Battle Road Homes in Lexington, Lincoln, and Concord.

At the Captain William Smith House, the Lincoln Minute Men will conduct drill and musket-firing programs between 10:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. As I noted a year ago, the group helped to refurnish the house in genteel fashion.

At Hartwell Tavern, members of the Hive will demonstrate methods of food preservation: pickling; making relishes and ketchups; stringing beans; and potting, brining, and smoking meats. And of course, they’ll review of what every housewife knew about using her root cellar.

Other open-house sites in the park will include the Whittemore House in Lexington, the Merriam House in Concord, and the Col. James Barrett House in Concord.

Meanwhile, Saturday is also the date of the Sudbury Colonial Faire & Muster at the field across from Longfellow’s Wayside Inn. As sponsored by the Sudbury Companies of Militia & Minute and the Sudbury Ancient Fyfe & Drum Companie, this event will feature dozens of fife & drum bands, demonstrations of musket fire and contra-dance, farm animals, and games for kids. Admission is $2 for adults.

(I’ll be at the Wayside myself, speaking to a private group about the events of 1774.)

A Hasty Claim about the Adamses

Recent news about the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard College included the detail that it claimed Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams as alumni. And indeed it does, listing at the head of its list of notable past members:

John Adams, 1775
Attended First Continental Congress; Signed Declaration of Independence; First US Vice President, 1789; Second US President, 1796

John Quincy Adams, 1788
US Senator; Secretary of State under President James Monroe; Sixth US President, 1825-1829; US Representative

The two President Adamses’ portraits appear also prominently on the club’s overview page.

That seemed odd to me. The Harvard and Massachusetts rules against theatricals in the Adamses’ time weren’t the issue since the Hasty Pudding Club’s activities didn’t coalesce around theater until the mid-1800s.

Rather, it’s the question of dates. John Adams was at Harvard College from 1751 to 1755 and later earned an M.A. in 1758 while teaching school and studying the law. His son attended the college from 1784 to 1787 and received his M.A. in 1790. (M.A.’s were pretty informal back then.) So right away there’s a question of how those dates for the Adamses’ inductions match their careers at Harvard College.

And those dates match the society’s history. The Hasty Pudding Club was founded in 1795. So it couldn’t have inducted members, even honorary ones from the college alumni, twenty and seven years before.

As an undergraduate in the class of 1787, John Quincy Adams did join a speaking club that eventually became known as the Institute of 1770, after its founding date. That merged with the Hasty Pudding Club in 1925, so the combined organization can claim that President as an alumnus—if its history acknowledged that he was actually in the speaking club. But his father, John Adams, still doesn’t even appear on the rolls of the Institute.

I found a catalogue of Hasty Pudding members from 1867 which does indeed list John Adams and John Quincy Adams. However, those young men were both less distinguished grandsons of the Presidents with the same names:

• John Adams, class of 1823.
• John Quincy Adams, class of 1853.

“Succeeded with Liberty and Property and three Cheers”

After being surrounded by five hundred men on horseback, detained in a Wethersfield tavern for three hours, and warned by the crowd leader that he wasn’t sure he could contain them any longer, Connecticut stamp agent Jared Ingersoll finally reached his limit.

“I now thought it was Time to submit,” he wrote a few days later.

Ingersoll spoke to that local militia officer:

I told him I did not think the Cause worth dying for, and that I would do whatever they should desire me to do. Upon this I look’d out at a front Window, beckoned the People and told ’em, I had consented to comply with their Desires; and only waited to have something drawn up for me to sign. We then went to Work to prepare the Draught. I attempted to make one myself; but they not liking it, said they would draw one themselves, which they did, and I signed it.

They then told me that the People insisted on my being Sworn never to execute the Office. This I refused to do somewhat peremtorily; urging that I thought it would be a Prophanation of an Oath. The Committee seemed to think it might be dispensed with; but said the People would not excuse it. One of the Committee however said, he would go down and try to persuade them off from it. I saw him from my Window amidst the Circle, and observing that the People seemed more and more fixt in their Resolution of insisting upon it, I got up and told the People in the Room, I would go and throw myself among them, and went down, they following me.

When I came to the Circle, they opened and let me in, when I mounted a Chair which stood there by a Table, and having pulled off my Hat and beckoned Silence, I proceeded to read off the Declaration which I had signed; and then proceeded to tell them, that I believed I was as averse to the Stamp-Act as any of them; that I had accepted my Appointment to this Office, I thought upon the fairest Motives; finding, however, how very obnoxious it was to the People, I had found myself in a very disagreeable Situation ever since my coming Home; that I found myself, at the same Time, under such Obligations that I did not think myself at Liberty peremtorily to resign my Office without the Leave of those who appointed me; that I was very sorry to see the Country in the Situation it was; that I could nevertheless, in some Measure, excuse the People, as I believed they were actuated, by a real though, I feared, a misguided Zeal for the Good of their Country; and that I wished the Transactions of that Day might prove happy for this Colony, tho’ I must own to them, I very much feared the Contrary;—and much more to the same Purpose.

Remarkably, this rehash of Ingersoll’s arguments for the past month combined with new chidings and warnings didn’t get the crowd all angry again. I have to assume those men were tired of waiting around. Or maybe they just stopped listening after a while. They were clearly more interested in seeing Ingersoll go through rituals of crowd deference and patriotism:

When I had done, a Person who stood near me, told me to give Liberty and Property, with three Cheers, which I did, throwing up my Hat into the Air; this was followed by loud Huzzas; and then the People many of them were pleased to take me by the Hand and tell me I was restored to their former Friendship.

I then went with two or three more to a neighbouring House, where we dined. I was then told the Company expected to wait on me into Hartford, where they expected I should publish my Declaration again. I reminded them of what they had before told me, that it might possibly ensnare the Assembly for them to have an Opportunity to act, or do any Thing about this Matter. Some inclined to forego this Step, but the main Body insisted on it.

We accordingly mounted, I believe by this Time to the Number of near one Thousand and rode into Hartford, the Assembly then sitting. They dismounted opposite the Assembly House, and about twenty Yards from it. Some of them conducted me into an adjoining Tavern, while the main Body drew up Four abreast and marched in Form round the Court House, preceeded by three Trumpets sounding; then formed into a Semi-circle at the Door of the Tavern. I was then directed to go down and read the Paper I had signed, and which I did within the Presence and Hearing of the Assembly; and only added that I wisht the Consequences of this Day’s Transaction might be happy. This was succeeded with Liberty and Property and three Cheers; soon after which the People began to draw off, and I suppose went Home. I understand they came out with eight Days Provision, determined to find me, if in the Colony.

Those were some very determined citizens.

And what about Connecticut’s officeholders? The legislature that had sent Ingersoll to London to represent the colony in 1764, the governor he had consulted with the day before, the delegates who had ridden past the tavern where the crowd was holding him as he called to them from a window? They had more natural sympathy with Ingersoll, but they hadn’t been any help to him at all.

I am told the Assembly were busy in forming some Plan for my Relief, the lower House thinking to send any Force, was it in their Power, might do more hurt than good to me, agreed to advise the sending some Persons of Influence to interpose by Persuasion, &c. and communicated their Desire to the upper Board, in Consequence whereof certain Gentlemen of the House were desired and were about to come to my Relief, it being about half an Hour’s Ride; but before they set out they heard the Matter was finished.

Had they come, I conclude it would have had no Effect.

With Ingersoll’s unconditional, written, publicly repeated resignation on 19 Sept 1765, there were no stamp agents left in New England or New York. Protests on the Boston model were spreading to the Middle and Southern Colonies.

But in six weeks, at the start of November, the Stamp Act was still supposed to take effect.

(The photo above shows the Old State House in Hartford. It wasn’t built until 1796, three decades after Ingersoll’s experience. But it’s a handsome building.)

“The Sight of me seemed to enrage the People”

Yesterday we left Jared Ingersoll on 19 Sept 1765 in the middle of a circle of five hundred club-bearing men on horseback in Wethersfield, Connecticut. (That’s the handsome Wethersfield meeting-house, built in 1761, and burying-ground in the photo.)

For anyone following these sestercentennial posts, it should come as no surprise what those men wanted Ingersoll to do: resign from his job collecting the Stamp Tax. He insisted that he had “always declared that I would not exercise the Office against the general Inclinations of the People.” Which those men were no doubt attempting to express.

Ingersoll went on to say that he “had given Orders to have the stamp’d Papers stopt at New-York” and not shipped to him in New Haven unless the colonial legislature would “plainly shew their Minds and Inclination to have the stampt Paper brought into the Colony.” He also warned the crowd “that the Governor, would have Power and Instructions to put in another if I should be removed” from office.

That led to this open-air exchange, as Ingersoll reported it a few days later:

They said, Here is the Sense of the Government, and no Man shall exercise that Office.

I askt if they thought it was fair that the Counties of Windham and New-London should dictate to all the rest of the Colony?

Upon this one said, It don’t signify to parly—here is a great many People waiting and you must resign.

I said I don’t think it proper to resign till I meet a proper Authority to ask it of me; and added, What if I won’t resign? what will be the Consequence?

One said Your Fate.

Upon which I looked him full in the Face and said with some Warmth, MY FATE you say.

Upon which a Person just behind said, The Fate of your Office.

I answered that I could Die, and perhaps as well now as another Time; and that I should Die but once.

Upon which the Commandant (for so, for Brevity sake, I beg Leave to call the Person who seemed to have the principal Conduct of the Affair) said we had better go along to a Tavern (and which we did) and cautioned me not to irritate the People.

Ingersoll went to the tavern but didn’t refrain from irritating people. Instead of dismounting, he told the men that they should tell him all they had to say and he’d ride on to Hartford. “They said No, You sha’n’t go two Rods from this Spot, before you have resigned; and took hold of my Horse's Bridle.” Though Ingersoll “was told repeatedly that they had no Intentions of hurting me or my Estate; but would use me like a Gentleman,” he understood that was on condition that he cooperate. So he got off his horse and went into the tavern with the crowd leaders.

In the discussion that followed, Ingersoll perceived a gap between those designated spokesmen and the men outside:

Upon the whole, This Committee behaved with Moderation and Civility, and I thought seemed inclined to listen to certain Proposals which I made; but when the Body of the People come to hear them they rejected ’em, and nothing would do but I must resign.

While I was detained here, I saw several Members of the Assembly pass by, whom I hailed, acquainting them that I was there kept and detained as a Prisoner; and desired their and the Assembly’s Assistance for my Relief. They stopt and spoke to the People; but were told they had better go along to the Assembly where they might possibly be wanted. Major [Elihu] Hall also finding his Presence not altogether agreeable, went away; And Mr. [Yale] Bishop, by my Desire, went away to let the Governor and Assembly know the Situation I was in.

After much Time spent in fruitless Proposals, I was told the People grew very impatient, and that I must bring the Matter to a Conclusion; I then told ’em I had no more to say, and askt what they would do with me?

They said they would carry me to Windham a Prisoner, but would keep me like a Gentleman.

I told them I would go to Windham, that I had lived very well there, and should like to go and live there again.

This did not do. They then advised me to move from the front Window, as the Sight of me seemed to enrage the People. Sometimes the People from below would rush into the Room in great Numbers, and look pretty fierce at me, and then the Committee would desire them to withdraw.

Ingersoll and the committee spent three hours in this sort of back-and-forth. Finally the militia leader Ingersoll called the Commandant came up to warn “that he could not keep the People off from me any longer; and that if they once began, he could not promise me where they would end.”

TOMORROW: Where they ended.

“About Five Hundred Men, all on Horseback, and having white Staves”

When Boston 1775 last left Connecticut stamp agent Jared Ingersoll, he’d been hanged and burned in effigy in half a dozen towns, a crowd had surrounded his New Haven home, and he’d promised not to carry out the Stamp Act if it proved unpopular. Which, frankly, it already appeared to be.

On 10 September, Ingersoll wrote a long letter to the Connecticut Gazette pointing out that he owed his post to the recommendation of London alderman Barlow Trecothick, known as a friend to American interests. Both he and Trecothick had argued against the Stamp Act. So surely they couldn’t have conspired to pass that law just to enrich themselves, right?

Again, when the measure of making ye Appointments in America was thus general [i.e., non-partisan], & come into as generally, will any body think that any one of the persons concerned Imagined he betrayed his Country by falling in with the measure? Perhaps at this time, when popular rage runs so very high, some may think the friends of America mistook their own & their Countrys true Interest, when they listened to these overtures, but who can think their intentions were ill?

And wasn’t it better for American colonists if other Americans collected the tax, rather than some appointee from Britain?

That didn’t convince Ingersoll’s opponents. An item in the 16 Sept 1765 Boston Gazette referred to him as “Gared Negrosoul,” rhetoric sinking low enough to cause collateral damage.

Ingersoll hoped that the Connecticut legislature could give him some cover before symbolic violence gave way to real damage. In yet another long letter, written 23 September, he reported:

Having received repeated and undoubted Intelligence of a Design formed by a great Number of People in the eastern Parts of the Colony to come and obtain from me a Resignation of the above mentioned Office, I delivered to the Governor [Thomas Fitch], on the 17th, at New-Haven, in his way to meet the General Assembly at Hartford on the 19th, a written Information, acquainting him with my said Intelligence, and desiring of him such Aid and Assistance as the emergency of the Affair should require. On the 18th I rode with his Honour and some other Gentlemen, Members of the Assembly, in hopes of being able to learn more particularly the Time and Manner of the intended Attack.

About eighteen Miles from hence, on the Hartford Road, we met two Men on Horseback with pretty long and large new made white Staves in their Hands, whom I suspected to be part of the main Body. I accordingly stopt short from the Company, and askt them if they were not in pursuit of me, acquainting them who I was, and that I should not attempt to avoid meeting the People. After a little Hesitancy they frankly owned that they were of that Party, and said there were a great Number of People coming in three Divisions, one from Windham through Hartford, one from Norwich through Haddam, and one from New-London, by the way of Branford, and that their Rendezvous was to be at Branford on the Evening of the 19th, from thence to come and pay me a Visit on the 20th. These Men said they were sent forward in order to reconnoitre and to see who would join them.

I desired them to turn and go with me as far as Mr. [Yale] Bishop’s the Tavern at the Stone House, so called [in Meriden]. One of them did. Here I acquainted the Governor and the other Gentlemen with the Matter; and desired their Advice. The Governor said many Things to this Man, pointing out to him the Danger of such a Step, and charging him to go and tell the People to return Back; but he let the Governor know, that they lookt upon this as the Cause of the People, & that they did not intend to take Directions about it from any Body.

Ingersoll wrote that he feared those men would go to New Haven, the local militia would turn out as “an Opposition to their Designs,” and “some Lives might be lost.” Given that the people of New Haven had already turned out against him, that looks like wishful thinking. In any event, he decided to meet the crowd at Hartford. But he also sent a letter to his family in New Haven “that they and my House might be put in a proper state of Defence and Security.”

On Thursday, 19 September, Ingersoll proceeded toward Hartford with his host and legislator Elihu Hall of Wallingford.

we went on together until we come within two or three Miles of Weathersfield, when we met an advanced Party of about four or five Persons. I told them who I was, upon which they turned, and I fell into Conversation with them, upon the general Subject of my Office, &c.

About half a Mile further we met another Party of about Thirty whom I accosted, and who turned and went on in the same Manner.

We rode a little further and met the main Body, who, I judge, were about Five Hundred Men, all on Horseback, and having white Staves, as before described. They were preceded by three Trumpets; next followed two Persons dressed in red, with laced Hats; then the rest, two abreast. Some others, I think, were in red, being, I suppose, Militia Officers.

They opened and received me; then all went forward until we came into the main Street in the Town of Weathersfield, when one riding up to the Person with whom I was joined, and who I took to be the principal Leader or Commandant, said to him, We can’t all hear and see so well in a House, we had as good have the Business done here; upon this they formed into a Circle, having me in the Middle, with some two or three more, who seemed to be the principal Managers, Major Hall and Mr. Bishop also keeping near me.

I began to speak to the Audience, but stopt and said I did not know why I should say any Thing for that I was not certain I knew what they wanted of me…

Which by this point seems remarkably obtuse.

TOMORROW: A parley in Wethersfield.

Woody Holton on the Stamp Act’s Origins

Boston 1775 isn’t the only website running material on the Stamp Act this season. Humanities magazine shared this article by Prof. Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina.

Holton is reliable for contrarian takes, usually from a populist perspective, and in this article he says in part:

Contrary to popular myth, which has the British government adopting the Stamp Act to force Americans to pay down their share of its staggering debt, the real reason for the Stamp Act was to help fund a garrison of ten thousand British soldiers who remained in North America at the conclusion of an Anglo-French war in 1763. This was a sizable force: about the same number of troops Washington would have at Valley Forge fifteen years later.

Why weren’t these men sent home to Britain with their comrades? Thomas Gage, commander in chief of British forces in North America, explained in a December 1765 report to Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, that the redcoats had stayed behind because of “the Numerous Tribes of Savages who joined the French during the War, and over run our Frontiers.” . . .

At the close of the Seven Years’ War, the British government adopted two major policies aimed at appeasing the Indians. On October 7, 1763, the king-in-council issued a proclamation drawing an imaginary line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. All of the land west of this so-called “Proclamation Line” would be reserved for the Indians. . . .

the single most important reason for the British government’s unprecedented decision to leave ten thousand troops in North America after the Seven Years’ War was not to guard the colonists against Indian incursions. Just the opposite. It was to protect the Indians from the colonists.

See the full article for more of this argument, and Holton’s Forced Founders for even more.