“Mr. Josiah Quincy junior then rose”

On this anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, I’m looking at the question of what Josiah Quincy, Jr., said in the Old South Meeting-House during the meeting that led up to that event.

First up, a report to the British government written by someone inside the meetinghouse, evidently there to observe the proceedings and take note of any criminal activity. It appears this report was drafted just a couple of days after the tea was destroyed.

This report described Quincy speaking on 14 December or the morning of the 16th. The meeting was pressing Francis Rotch to order his ship Dartmouth to leave Boston harbor still loaded with tea, as ships’ masters had done in other American ports. Rotch feared the Royal Navy and Customs service would seize the ship for violating a law against leaving port without unloading. (I’ve long wondered what the reason for that law was.) Losing the ship would be a big financial hit for Rotch and his family, so he asked the Boston merchants to buy the ship so they would all run the risk together.

The informer wrote:

Mr. Josiah Quincy junior then rose and said that he thought Mr. Rotch had offered very fair to submit the Vessel to the Appraisement of Merchants and to be a Sharer in the Loss—that it was cruel to put him in the Front of the Battle—that the People ought to be be Sharers with him in the Loss of the Vessel since this was a Business of public Concern—that he himself would give fifty Guineas towards purchasing and sending her back—that he had ever held Humanity as a first Rate Virtue and that Patriotism without Humanity was not true Patriotism etc. with many other Expressions to the like Effect.

As soon as he had finished, one in the Gallery cried out, “You speak Sir very finely, but you don’t shew your Money”—

on which Mr. Quincy replied that whoever suggested that he was bribed, was a Scoundrel, and he averred that he had not directly taken any Money of Mr. Rotch to say thus, which Mr. Rotch also attested, adding that he was much surprized that no Merchant or other of his Fellow Citizens (who might be innocently ensnared as he was) had till then shewn the Generosity to espouse his Cause and offered to share in the Damage he might sustain.

Being written so soon after the event by someone without an obvious bias for or against Quincy, this seems like a highly reliable source. It depicts Quincy as speaking up for someone others perceived as cooperating with the tea tax, and being heckled on that account from the gallery. Even though Quincy was arguing on the basis of what would make the Whigs look fair and humane, he was proposing some sort of compromise, and some people in the hall didn’t want to hear that.

TOMORROW: Quincy’s own words.

Notes on the Stat(u)e of Jefferson

Yet another focus of recent campus protests against honoring historic figures whose behavior was less than honorable has been statues of Thomas Jefferson at the University of Missouri (shown here) and the University of Virginia.

Jefferson was a lifelong slaveholder, of course. He decried the practice, but he never managed to try or even endorse any of the schemes to end slavery that friends presented to him. Jefferson also wrote bigoted things about black people, especially in Notes on the State of Virginia, which some historians argue formed part of the foundation of “scientific racism” in America.

Ironically, Jefferson probably had children with a woman of some African ancestry, his slave Sally Hemings. Because of her age at the time of their first reported child, and because of the power difference between them, many people characterize that relationship as exploitation or even rape.

Of course, there was a lot more to Thomas Jefferson than that. Unlike Isaac Royall, who wasn’t really important, and John C. Calhoun, whose major ideas were repudiated long ago, Jefferson’s ideas and actions are still crucial to the U.S. of A. (In that respect he’s like Woodrow Wilson, another target of criticism for racist policy.) It would be especially difficult to repudiate Jefferson at the University of Virginia since he founded the school.

Some people have argued for removing the Jefferson statues from those campuses. I’m more impressed by the form of protest that evolved out of that debate: students putting sticky notes onto the figures expressing their opposition to the more reprehensible parts of Jefferson’s behavior. Or, presumably, they could express praise, or other thoughts.

I see potential in that becoming a meaningful ritual. It could open discussions, allowing for ongoing acknowledgment of Jefferson’s problematic side without erasing his historical contribution. It could be a form of recurrent iconoclasm without permanent or complete erasure, which brings the dangers of complacency and amnesia.

Certainly it can be a more valuable way of dealing with campus statues than rubbing them for luck, as Harvard students have reportedly done for decades. (Of course, tour guides reportedly say Yale students rub the statue of Nathan Hale the same way, and I can say with certainty that’s a myth.)

How Deerfield Updated a Monument

Last week I considered ways that universities might update symbols that have roots in historic discrimination without simply removing them—which could lead to lack of visible change and complacent amnesia.

Another approach to producing a continual, not one-time, renewal of old historical symbols was taken at the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield a decade ago. The town’s 1882 monument to the 1704 skirmish between English settlers and Native American and French soldiers contained marble panels with language that people had come to recognize as one-sided and offensive.

Back in 2004, the Boston Globe reported on how the monument had been updated:

With this year marking the 300th anniversary of the raid, the local historical society—which oversees many of the markers—has taken to placing removable covers on memorials with language it considers offensive, such as references to “savages” and “Negro servants.”

The coverings are cloth, shaded to mimic the swirls of the marble tablets and scripted with revised text. So where one marble tablet originally read, “Mary, adopted by an Indian, was named Walahowey. She married a savage, and became one.” The covering’s text reads, “She married a Kanien’kehaka and adopted the culture, customs and language of her new community in Kahnawake.”

Because visitors can easily lift the cloth and read both versions, not only is the history of the original event preserved, but so is the history of how Deerfield chroniclers of the late 1800s described that event. We can thus see how historical interpretation has changed, witnessing the effort to improve the understanding of the event and the inclusiveness of its commemoration. Indeed, by lifting those cloths to read and replacing them, we in a small way participate in that process.

TOMORROW: Campus statuary.

And It Looked Like It Was Going So Well for Him

From the Old Bailey court sessions in London, as made available by the London Lives website:

The Information of Samuel Dyer taken on Oath before me James Spagg one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace in and for the said County this 19th. day of July 1773

Who saith that on Saturday last the 17th of July instant about eleven o’Clock at Night two Girls Picked him up in swan Alley and carried him to the House of one Mrs Grear in Swan Alley where he gave a woman now present and says her name is Margaret White a Shilling to get some Liquor and also another Shilling for a Room and bed

that he then went up Stairs with [..] said two Girls and pulled of his Trousers and layed them on a chair at the foot of a Bed

That then one of the Girls Picked his Trousers Pocket of two Shillings

that he got out of Bed in order to prevent her from so doing but the Girls cried out Murther and [..] said they would have his brains beat out or words to that Effect and then run down Stairs

that he endeavoured to follow them but was prevented by the said Margaret White who seized him by the Cholar and held him till the said girls escapd—

That he then got [..] down stairs and into the street naked except his Shirt down Stairs—saith he doth [..] not know the names of either of the said Girls who picked his pocket

This is almost certainly not the American sailor Samuel Dyer whom I’ve researched. More’s the pity.

Charles Steuart’s Stamp Act Crisis

In early December 1765, the surveyor-general of the Customs service in North America, Charles Steuart, sat down in his office in Philadelphia to write a report to his superiors about the state of the continent. (I’ve seen this letter dated to both 7 and 8 December.)

The Stamp Act required all ships leaving North American ports after 1 November to carry Customs office documents, called “clearances,” that had been filled out on stamped paper, a way of collecting a tax on that bureaucratic transaction. That made the Customs agents responsible for enforcing the Stamp Act.

Steuart told his bosses that wasn’t easy:

Your Honours, I presume, have been informed of the distracted State of this Continent on Account of the Stamp Act, I am but ill qualified to give a Description of it, for though I have travelled near 2000 miles since my Arrival in America, I have been fortunate enough to escape all the scenes of Rage and Madness that have been acted in it. I must therefore beg Leave to refer to the Accounts from those Officers whose Residence enabled them to give more full Information and particularly to the Officers at New York, where the fury of the Mob committed great Excesses.

All the Distributors of Stamps between Halifax and St. Augustine have been compelled to resign their Commissions, and no stamp papers can be obtained in all these Countries, this has thrown them into great Confusion. The Courts of Law are shut, Redress for Injuries cannot be obtained, debts recovered, nor Property secured or transferred.

But the Evils necessarily occasioned by a Stop to the internal business and Police of the Colonies, are not equal to the Consequences of shutting up their Ports at this season of the year—permit me briefly to enumerate a few of them.

Thousands of Seamen and Others whose sole Dependance is on Navigation not only rendered Useless to their Country but deprived of the Means of Subsistance, Provisions for which there are at this time large Orders, particularly for Corn for France, Spain, Portugal, the Mediterranean &c. must perish on hand, while famin may spread itself through our West India Islands by being suddenly cut of from their usual Supplies; Ireland would be greatly distressed by the Want of flax seed from hence, on which her linen Manufacture depends; Other Articles of Produce by which Remittances may be made to Britain detained in the Country—the Revenue lessened, and trade and Navigation the Source of Wealth and the Support of a Maritime and Commercial Nation, entirely stopped, which must be attended with Ruin to Multitudes and distress to All. These are weighty Considerations, but a stronger Inducement for proceeding to Business here and at New York still remains.

By “proceeding the business,” Steuart meant having Customs officers approve ships for departure with documents on non-stamped paper. He was trying to make the case for his superiors to approve of that policy to ignore the law, at least temporarily.

The Officers at both Places have by their Address and prudence evaded for a full Month granting Clearances, in hopes that some way would be opened by which they might be extricated out of their Difficulties, that time did not pass without strong Applications and even threats, which they had great Reason to believe would soon become very serious.

It is supposed there are uow in this Port 150 Sail of Vessells; the frost generally sets in about Christmas, and continues upwards of two Months; Nothing is more certain than that so great a Number of Seamen shut up for that time, in a town destitute of all Protection to the Inhabitants, even a Militia, would commit some terrible Mischief, or rather that they would not suffer themselves to be shut up but would compel the Officers to clear Vessells without Stamps this would undoubtedly have been the Consequence of a few days longer delay. And, I hope, I need not add, it would have been highly imprudent to have hazarded the Event; the least Evil attending it would in all probability have been the Loss of about £5000—belonging to the Revenue in the Custom house.

So far Steuart’s letter has raised the specters of loss of imperial trade, famine in the Caribbean, damage to the Irish linen industry, and idle sailors rampaging through the North American ports and looting the Customs house. It may also have mentioned dogs and cats living together. All of which led up to…

The Collector came to me on the Morning of the 2d. Instant, told me his Situation, his Apprehensions and his Resolution of proceeding to business immediately; I could not refuse my Approbation and wrote circular Letters to all the other Ports in the district except Quebec, a Copy of which I have the Honour of sending herewith. I had before written to the Officers at New York when that City was governed by the Mob, that they must clear Vessells, if necessary, which they every Moment expected to be forced to, but the Arrival of their Governour gave them some Respite, and they got leave to wait till Philadelphia should take the lead; they accordingly began the 5th.

At last Steuart had gotten to the main substance of his report: he had already told the Customs officers in New York, Philadelphia, and other ports he supervised that they should clear ships to leave without the stamped paperwork.

The Governours were applyed to, but thought proper to observe a cautious Silence. I might have done the same, but do not think it honourable, nor consistent with my duty to withhold my Advice and Opinion in a Matter of Difficulty, when called upon by those who have a Right to demand them.

Having now without Exaggeration laid before your Honours the Situation in which the Officers of these two Ports stood, it is humbly hoped that, abstracted from any Reasoning on the Propriety of the Step they have been compelled to take, their Conduct and my Approbation of it will stand justified on the Plea of Necessity and Self Preservation.

This letter is thus an example of making a decision and asking for forgiveness afterward instead of proposing an action and asking for approval in advance.

These days Steuart is best known as the slaveowner in the Somerset case, but here he was playing a small but significant role in the Stamp Act crisis.

“I related to him the Disposition of the Inhabitants”

As we recall, late on the night of 1 Nov 1765, an anti-Stamp Act mob in New York destroyed the home of Maj. Thomas James of the Royal Artillery.

Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden and Gen. Thomas Gage sent James home to Britain to report on what had happened to him and to seek compensation.

Sometime in early 1766 the major wrote back to Colden explaining how his arrival had affected the debate over the next several weeks about how to revise the Stamp Act:

So soon as I arrived in London on the 10th December I waited on General [Henry Seymour] Conway [the Secretary of State in charge of North America, shown here] with the Dispatch you honourd me with

I related to him the Disposition of the Inhabitants before they ever knew of the Stamp Act having passd the House of Commons, and so lead him on untill I embarq’d and saild on the 8th of November

General Conway was astonish’d and would have taken me to the King that very Day had I been fit to have been seen—

I have gone through many Examinations; and it is impossible to conceive the pains and Trouble the Americans have taken to obtain a Repeal, no Stone has been left unturn’d, many Accusations have been laid to my Charge, all which I have answerd to His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester Privy Council, Lords and Commons; for I was two hours and a half at the Bar of the House—

The House were engaged in Reading American Letters being in Number 400!—with every paper from the American Press with all their Pamphlets &c from Tuesday Wednesday and Friday five in the afternoon.

James reported that Parliament called three other witnesses from North America besides himself: “Dr. Moffatt Mr. Howard and Col Mercer.” Which is to say:

• Dr. Thomas Moffatt and Martin Howard of Newport, Rhode Island.
• George Mercer of Virginia.

All four men had suffered from anti-Stamp mobs in the preceding months (though only Mercer had been a designated stamp agent). Together they reported that there had been riots in most of the biggest colonies, and that when they had left North America it looked like several colonial governments would not be able to enforce the Stamp Act at all.

TOMORROW: A report from the American Customs service.

The Marquess of Rockingham’s Stamp Act Revisions

I’m going to break from the campus debate over revising now-problematic symbols to catch up with developments in 1765 concerning the Stamp Act.

When we last left the Marquess of Rockingham, the sudden death of the king’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, had left him as the leader of the British government.

Rockingham’s allies in Parliament had opposed the Stamp Act, so he had no stake in maintaining the previous administration’s law. On the other hand, he didn’t want to undermine his own authority or the authority of the Crown by appearing to back down to mob violence or selfish colonists who didn’t want to do their part in maintaining the British Empire.

On 7 November, the London alderman Barlow Trecothick wrote to Rockingham about the problems with the American Stamp Act. Trecothick was linked by business and marriage to the Apthorp family of Boston and New York, and had become the voice of the Caribbean trade in London—a very big part of the imperial economy. With Trecothick’s input, Rockingham started to shape what he hoped would be a compromise that everyone could accept.

By late November, according to John L. Bullion’s 1992 study of how the British ministry reacted to the anti-Stamp protests, the marquess wrote out a memorandum proposing three revisions to the Stamp Act that answered American objections while preserving the tax itself:

• Disputes arising from the law would be handled in local colonial courts, not the Vice Admiralty court in Halifax, and thus be subject to trial by jury.
• People could pay the tax in legal notes of their colonies, not just in scarce gold and silver coins.
• Merchants would not have to use stamped paper for trade within the British Empire—a point Trecothick had pushed particularly.

Those changes responded to three of the four common complaints about the law. But they wouldn’t have addressed the issue that would in a couple of years come to be known as “taxation without representation”—whether the Parliament in London could levy taxes on British colonies.

Rockingham and Trecothick appear to have developed a plan in which the alderman and the London business community would propose those ideas, and the first minister would consider them seriously and decide that for the cause of imperial trade the government could adopt them. In the first week of December, Trecothick got the ball rolling by presiding over a meeting of top merchants doing business with the West Indies.

But Rockingham’s proposals never went before Parliament. A few days after Trecothick’s meeting, London learned that the situation in America was even worse than people had feared.

TOMORROW: Hearings in the House.

Honoring Belinda’s Contribution to the Law

In 1936, Harvard University appropriated the heraldry of the Royall family to be the crest of its law school, honoring Isaac Royall for endowing the first law professorship.

Under the holophrastic Harvard motto, that crest shows three sheafs of wheat bound up after harvesting. There’s no sign of who did the harvesting. Of course, most observers would also not be able to identify that crest with Isaac Royall or recall what he had to do with it.

The “Royall Must Fall” campaign at Harvard has adapted that image by showing three workers in dark silhouettes bending under the burden of that wheat (shown here). That’s not actually how people carry such sheaves, I believe, but it’s a clever reappropriation of the Royall imagery. It’s also an emblem of black subservience that the campaign surely doesn’t want to become permanent.

The campaign has floated the idea of renaming the Royall Professorship of Law after Belinda Royall, a woman enslaved on Isaac Royall’s estate in Medford. Her 1783 petition for a pension in compensation for her labor was reprinted across the English-speaking world, thus becoming a more important legal document than Isaac Royall ever produced.

Now it’s not clear Belinda ever used or would have been happy with the surname “Royall.” She was legally “Belinda” until a late marriage, when she started to appear in documents as “Belinda Sutton,” according to the Royall House & Slave Quarters.

But an annual “Belinda Lecture” at the Harvard Law School could be a way to regularly shift honor from the legacy of Isaac Royall to the cause of his former servant, from a man who inherited great wealth and power to a woman who had to repeatedly argue for fair treatment. Would that be the equivalent of reenacting the toppling of George III’s statue, an annual reaffirmation of the more inclusive values we share today?

COMING UP: Visual renewal of old symbols.

“For the very purpose of having conversations about this”

At Yale, one of the dormitories for upperclassmen (called “residential colleges”) is named after John C. Calhoun, the U.S. Vice President and Senator who championed nullification and slavery in the early 1800s.

Back when the residential-college system was set up in the 1930s, Yale didn’t have many other nationally influential figures to name colleges after. (William Howard Taft, President and Chief Justice, appears to have been too recent to be non-controversial.)

About ten or fifteen years ago, some people in the Yale community proposed changing the name of Calhoun College so that it honored someone whose views had not become so repugnant, someone who had moved American society forward.

At that time, I wrote to the college alumni magazine suggesting that the name Calhoun should remain, but as a reminder of how having wealth and power can blind people to common justice. We graduates could sometimes use that reminder.

That’s similar to what Jonathan Holloway, once master at Calhoun College and now the Dean of Yale College, argued at a forum last year:

Holloway explained his belief that the Calhoun name should remain “as an open sore, frankly, for the very purpose of having conversations about this.”

“I’ve seen too many instances where Americans have very happily allowed themselves to be amnesiac and changed the name of something and walked away,” Holloway said, according to an audio recording of the panel.

“I want to hold Yale accountable for the decisions it made.”

Which would be more likely to start such conversations, seeing Calhoun’s name or not seeing it? Which course would be more likely to lead to complacency, keeping the troubling name or choosing a new name and letting the old one fade to forgotten? Would a recurrent, almost ritual, grappling with Calhoun’s name and legacy, like the repeated toppling of King George’s statue or the annual dumping of tea into Boston harbor, best serve the issues?

When Janet Halley took the Royall Professorship of Law in 2007, she started a similar conversation by highlighting its financial roots in slavery:

“The fact that the funds that established the Royall Chair derived, directly and/or indirectly, from the sale of human beings and the appropriation of their labor—these are facts,” said Halley. “What does one do about them? Thinking in binarized terms of condemnation and redemption just doesn’t seem to capture the complexity of this question.”

Halley began her remarks with a roll call of the names of the distinguished professors who have held the Royall chair before her. She ended her talk—in a coda that left audience members visibly moved—with a contrasting recitation of the recorded names—most of them first names without surnames—of the slaves of the Royall household. “It is a solemn roll call, as intrinsic as the first one I read to our Isaac Royall legacy.”

But I don’t think that “solemn roll call” was ever institutionalized as a regular event. Those individuals went back to being invisible.

More recently, Halley spoke to the Boston Globe about the trade-off of changing the school’s crest so that it doesn’t honor Isaac Royall: “The upside would be that there would be this cathartic moment of saying no to its origins. But the danger would be that it could facilitate a forgetting of its origins.” That’s because the cathartic moment could occur only once. A reading of names, on the other hand, could be part of a regular reexamination of that history.

TOMORROW: Which Royall?

The Power of Iconoclasm, and How to Keep It from Fading

Last month I attended Wendy Bellion’s lecture on “Representing Iconoclasm: Paint, Print, Performance” at the American Antiquarian Society. And I find that’s clarified my thinking about the current campaign to change the seal of the Harvard Law School and the name of the Isaac Royall Professorship there.

On 9 July 1776, New Yorkers listened to a formal reading of the Declaration of Independence, marched from the city common down to the Bowling Green, and pulled down a gilded lead statue of King George III. Most of that statue was melted down into musket balls, though a few pieces survive.

A few months later, the British army charged onto Manhattan, and the Crown held the city for the rest of the war. In the new republic, therefore, New York City didn’t have a lot of good stories to tell about its history during the Revolutionary War. The toppling of the king’s statue became one of the most important.

Bellion showed how that event was recreated in paintings, engravings, pageants, and parades from the early 1800s to the Bicentennial. In other words, the statue of King George was repeatedly reproduced so that it could be destroyed again.

That’s the power and nature of iconoclasm. Once an icon has been removed, broken, or defaced, it starts to lose power—but so does the act of removing it. With no visible reminder and only a fading memory of that icon, the choice to erase it becomes less visible and memorable as well. To recall the act of iconoclasm in the most affecting way, a society has to recreate the very icon it tore down.

What might that phenomenon tell us about the current controversies about slaveowners or their defenders being featured in places of honor on college campuses? The campaign at Harvard Law School is called Royall Must Fall, the very name evoking the images of a royal statue or emblem coming down.

The people campaigning to change those images or names acknowledge they’re symbolic, and that the change would be symbolic as well. But such change would send the right message about the institution’s values, a message that it is seeking to be more fair and inclusive than in the past.

However, just like pulling down New York’s statue of King George, changing a building name or removing a statue would send that message only once. That particular symbol would lose its power and fade from memory. The act of removal and repudiation would thus also fade, muting its significance and its message for new students.

As New Yorkers ritually recreated and then pulled down the king’s statue, they refreshed the memory of the city’s 1776 choice of republicanism over monarchy. In the same way, Bostonians refresh the memory of the hated East India Company tea of 1773 by bringing in new tea each year—this year from the East India Company, even—only to toss it again into the harbor.

So could university communities create a stronger message of inclusion not by removing problematic symbols permanently but by creating recurrent ways to reexamine and reject the behavior behind them?

TOMORROW: Institutions wrestling with that challenge.

How Isaac Royall Came to Endow a Harvard Law Professorship

As historical background for the current controversy over Harvard Law School’s adoption of the Royall family crest, the Harvard University Press recently published a long extract from On the Battlefield of Merit, Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball’s recent institutional history of the school’s first century.

In April 1775, Isaac Royall (1719-1781, shown here) found himself in Boston and cut off by the siege lines from his estate in Medford. Of course, he could have left Boston and gone home if he wanted, but some of his neighbors accused him of leaning toward the Crown—which he did, though not fervently.

Royall evacuated to Halifax even before the British troops left in March 1776, then traveled to London. Yet he kept talking about going back to Medford, and he really didn’t want to lose control of his property in Massachusetts.

In 1778, as the war ground on, the Massachusetts legislature moved to confiscate the property of former royal officials, supporters, and “absentees” who had left with the British. The provincial army had already used some of that property during the siege, including the Royall house, and for the next couple of years the state administered those estates while maintaining their original legal ownership. But this new initiative would lead to permanent seizures. The state planned to sell the estates to finance the war effort.

Loyalists who had relatives, friends, or well-placed attorneys to lobby for them were more successful in fending off attempts to seize their property. In Royall’s case, his advocate was one of his neighbors, Dr. Simon Tufts.

It was only in 1778, long after Royall had “gone voluntarily to our enemies,” that his property was provisionally confiscated and reserved by the Committee of Medford for future heirs, under the watchful eye of Tufts. In contrast, the estates of his Tory sons-in-law, George Erving and William Pepperell, were taken under the “Act to Confiscate the Estates of Certain Notorious Conspirators,” passed April 30, 1779. Furthermore, Royall was not mentioned in the initial three lists of proscribed persons under the Acts of September 1778, April 30, 1779, and September 30, 1779.

To his death in 1781, Royall claimed that only ill health prevented his return and remained outraged at any slur on his loyalty. . . . exiled in Kensington, he made a will on May 26, 1778. It contained generous gifts to his friends, to the church and clergy in Medford, and to the Medford schools, together with a devise of land to the town of Worcester. But it also contained a gift to Harvard College that was to ensure Royall’s lasting fame. The provision reads, “All the remainder of said tract of land in said Granby containing eight or nine hundred acres more or less...I give, devise, and bequeath to the overseers and corporation of Harvard Colledge...to be appropriated towards the endowing a Professor of Laws in said Colledge, or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, whichever the said overseers and Corporation shall judge to be best.”

The will only came to probate in 1786. This delay may not have been accidental. Due to his popularity in Medford, Royall was covered under the “Absentee Act” of April 30, 1779, which provided some procedural protection against confiscation, and it appears that Royall’s devoted friend Simon Tufts—essentially the trustee of Royall’s property—was waiting out events. It was a good strategy. The Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783, contained provisions that at least promised recovery of loyalist property, and Jay’s Treaty of 1794 further raised hopes. In 1795 Harvard hired a lawyer to begin to locate the land in Royall’s bequest in preparation for sale.

Royall’s bequest to Harvard therefore got that influential institution behind his other heirs’ efforts to keep his property out of the state government’s hands.

In 1786 and 1787 Shays’s Rebellion had taken place in the region around Granby, and the ill feeling against loyalists, absentee landowners, and their well-to-do and politically connected friends persisted. The Harvard lawyer found Royall’s land stripped and occupied by squatters. In 1796, $2,000 was all that could be obtained from the Granby estate. . . . The college invested the money with remarkable success, despite economic adversity, and by 1815 there were a capital fund of $7,593 and interest on hand of $432. . . .

In retrospect, it was lucky for the Law School that the gift in Royall’s will could not be effected until thirty-three years after his death and eleven years after the receipt of the initial $2,000. It was not just about having enough money. In 1775 Harvard designated a bequest from Dr. Ezekiel Hersey of £1,000 to support “two Professors of Anatomy and Surgery, and of the Theory and Practice of Physic.” This was followed by further bequests of £1,000 in 1790 from Hersey’s widow and £500 in 1793 from his brother “for the encouragement and support of a Professor of Surgery and Physic.” After Royall’s death in 1781, the college was therefore occupied with appointing three medical professors and founding its medical school in 1782 and 1783.

Royall’s will gave Harvard the option of a “Professor of Law” or a “Professor of Physick and Anatomy.” In 1782 this would have played right into the development of the new Medical School. By 1815, the Medical School looked relatively secure…

The Boston Globe adds that the Harvard Law School didn’t adopt Royall’s crest as its own symbol until more than a century later, in 1936. Thus, while Royall’s bequest has been effective for two centuries, that school crest is less than eighty years old.

Removing Symbols of the Old Ways

On 18 July 1776, the Massachusetts Council oversaw the reading of the Declaration of Independence at the State House. Afterwards, the public pulled down the royal emblems of the lion and unicorn from that building and burned them in a big bonfire.

In the following years, the town of Boston renamed King Street and Queen Street to the more republican State Street and Court Street. King’s Chapel (shown here) was called the Stone Chapel for a while. The town’s main road, which had four names for different stretches in 1776, eventually became Washington Street to honor the new country’s new leader.

Hutchinson Street bore the name of the reviled Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, so it was renamed Pearl Street. In 1776 the town of Hutchinson petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to change its name as well; it became Barre, after Isaac Barré, a British Whig in Parliament who had advocated for American colonists for a decade. A few years later, the town of Foxborough was named for Charles James Fox, another sympathetic M.P.

Similar changes happened all across the new nation. New Yorkers pulled down the gilt statue of King George III on the Bowling Green. Tavern owners altered their signs, as Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle” later played on for comic effect.

This history is useful to recall when we consider current campaigns like those to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, remove the statue of Thomas Jefferson at the University of Missouri, or create a new seal for Harvard Law School that doesn’t honor Isaac Royall.

Throughout history, societies have used names, public art, and other symbols to honor individuals they admire, and societies have removed or changed those symbols when they no longer reflect widespread values. That’s something societies do. It’s nothing new, so claiming that there’s an unprecedented wave of “political correctness” reveals historical blindness, not historical consciousness.

Furthermore, removing symbols of honor doesn’t erase the history behind them. The Bostonians who destroyed the lion and unicorn still knew full well that they had been part of the British Empire. They still acknowledged that Thomas Hutchinson had been the royal governor of Massachusetts from 1770 to 1774. They weren’t rewriting history. They just no longer felt those people and institutions deserved so much public respect.

Many people accuse those who now want to remove symbols they associate with slavery and racism of wishing to eradicate or hide troubling aspects of our history. That’s ridiculous. The people driving those campaigns will remain quick to highlight an institution’s historical connections to slavery and racism, and to argue that those connections remain significant. They’re really interested in preserving and broadening the memory of that history. They just disagree with previous generations about which historical figures deserve so much honor.

Accusing those campaigners of the opposite of their stated aims and usual behavior suggests their critics are parroting talking points they’ve never really examined. That seems to show a lack of knowledge and a disrespect. And I suspect there’s a significant overlap between people who say we should retain symbols despite their roots in slavery and racism and people who say they’re tired of hearing about the effects of slavery and racism.

People can respond to those symbol-changing campaigns in multiple ways, depending on circumstances and philosophy. We may support the goal but not the methods. We may differ on whether removing such symbols really helps efforts to eradicate the underlying wrongs, or might even hurt. I’m going to share some thoughts on those issues over the next couple of days. But mistaken claims that such behavior is new or that it’s an attempt to “erase history” add nothing to the discussion.

An Anti-Stamp Stamp

In the second quarter of 2016, the U.S. Postal Service will issue this stamp commemorating the repeal of the Stamp Act. Which makes this a stamp celebrating the end of another stamp.

Linn’s Stamp News & Insights reports, “The stamps will be issued in a pane of 10 with the image of a one-penny revenue stamp proof print.”

Linn’s also states that this issue is connected with the World Stamp Show in New York next spring. That might mean this stamp gets limited circulation to philatelists and no big debut in Boston. But we can hope for some sort of ceremony here because it appears to depict activists nailing the big news to Liberty Tree.

Earlier in 2016, no doubt in February, the U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp commemorating the Rev. Richard Allen (1760-1831), founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He was enslaved in Delaware when the Revolutionary War began. In 1777 he became a Methodist, as did his owner, and that opened the door for him to purchase his freedom six years later.

Tea Burning in Lexington, 13 Dec.

The Lexington Historical Society and Lexington Minute Men are commemorating the town’s burning of tea on 13 Dec 1773, three days before the destruction of newer tea in Boston harbor, with an expanded program this year.

Here is the schedule of events planned for Sunday, 13 December, at the Lexington Visitor’s Center (1875 Massachusetts Avenue) and nearby:

• 9:00 A.M.: ​Lexington Minute Men encampment open for visitors.
• 10:00:​ Musket drill, inspection, and run-through of the Manual of Arms at the encampment.
• 11:00: Demonstrations of 18th-century cooking.
• 12:00 noon: ​Parade by the Lexington Minute Men in military formation with fife and drum. Militia muster on the town common.
• 12:15 P.M.: Musket drill, inspection, and run-through of the Manual of Arms on the common, concluded by ten volleys, one for each Lexington militiaman killed on 19 Apr ​1775.
• 1:00-7:00: S​pecial holiday tours of Buckman Tavern, across the street from the common. (Free for members of the Lexington Historical Society; $5 for others.)
• 1:30: Ceremonial bonfire of tea at the encampment, with members of the public invited to join reenactors in consigning the hazardous herb into the flames. Music by the William Diamond Junior Fife and Drum Corps.
• 2:00-4:00 P.M.: Lexington Minute Men encampment open for visitors.

The encampment and events on the common are free and open to the public.

Mrs. Murray’s Medium in Gloucester

In 1795, two years after the Boston’s first theater opened on Federal Street, it hosted its first play “Written by a Citizen of the United States.”

The anonymous author of The Medium: or, Happy Tea-Party (the subtitle later changed to Virtue Triumphant) was Judith Sargent Murray, already busy as an essayist. Boston Literary History states:

Murray suffered through the hastily rehearsed performance and then had to cope with a potentially damaging review that implied that the author was her husband John Murray, a Universalist minister. Beyond the brouhaha that followed, the play is worthy of study because it conveys Murray’s feminist outlook, especially in the character of Eliza Clairville. Notably, because Eliza wants her marriage to be a union of equals, she refuses to marry the man she loves until she reaches personal financial stability.

Despite that early experience, Murray wrote two more plays. The second, The Traveler Return’d, also has a notably independent and intellectual female lead. Murray published them in her collection The Gleaner, but they didn’t stick around in the repertoire of American drama.

This month the North Shore Folklore Theatre is mounting the first-ever theatrical revival of The Medium in Murray’s home town of Gloucester. The performances will take place at the Magnolia Library & Community Center on Lexington Avenue on weekends from Friday, 4 December, through Sunday, 20 December. Check this webpage for times and tickets, or buy season tickets to the North Shore Folklore Theatre here.

“New England Captives” Tour, July 2016

Historian Donald Friary and the New England Historic Genealogical Society are offering what looks like an unusual tour of New England and Canada next summer. The theme is “New England Captives Carried to Canada.” The description:

Between King Philip’s War in 1675-76 and the fall of Quebec in 1759 almost 1,000 captives—soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children—were taken by Natives and French from New England frontier settlements to Canada. Some died on the journey, many were redeemed and returned to their homes and families, but others remained, as their descendants still do, in Native villages and French seigneuries along the St. Lawrence River.

From July 16-24, 2016, the New England Historic Genealogical Society will offer a tour to the places where the captives lived as Mohawks, Abenakis, Hurons, and naturalized French subjects—Montreal and Quebec, Chambly, Boucherville, Trois-Rivieres, Ile d’Orleans, Kahnawake, Kanesetake, Odanak, Wendake—to learn of the struggle among the French, English, and several Native groups for control of the borderlands that both separated and united them.

Friary is an experienced tour leader who also spent years as Executive Director of Historic Deerfield, in a town with a well remembered raid of 1704.

The tour will depart from Boston by bus on Saturday, 16 July 2016. Its itinerary includes “4 nights each in the best Montreal and Quebec hotels, walking tours of both cities, 5 Native sites, and a dinner cruise on the St. Lawrence.” The bus returns the following Sunday.

The base cost is $4,995.00 for double occupancy, registration before 1 Feb 2016. The cost goes up for registration after that date, for single rooms, and for people who are not already members of the N.E.H.G.S. Check this webpage for more information.

The picture above shows Mother Superior Marie-Joseph de l’Enfant-Jésus, née Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780). She was born in Wells, Maine, and taken prisoner by Abenakis in 1703. Her family arranged for those Abenakis to release her to a French priest in exchange for a captured Native child. (There could presumably be an equivalent tour of where the English sent their Native captives from these wars, though that might involve Caribbean travel.) After spending the next couple of years in Québec, however, Esther became a Catholic nun and chose never to return to New England. I believe this portrait is on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

“The dead siphoning life from their relatives”

On Thursday, 3 December, Clark University in Worcester will host a seminar with Brian Carroll on “The Introduction of Vampire Belief to New England.”

I’ve got your attention now, don’t I? Here’s the event description:

Between 1782 and 1820, New Englanders suspected severe outbreaks of tuberculosis were caused by the spirits of the dead siphoning life from their relatives. In order to stop the spread of the disease, they exhumed the corpses they thought responsible, burned their hearts, and made a medicine from the ashes.

Originally a European belief, the practice was brought to the region during the American Revolution by German military physicians serving in Hessian regiments. Many became itinerant doctors in the aftermath of the war and taught Americans to believe in the undead. But vampire belief in America was medicalized—turned from a folk belief into a cutting-edge medical procedure. The exhumations were conducted like autopsies and doctors used “science” to identify and destroy supposed vampires. American doctors quickly caught on and began using it as a cure for the deadly wasting disease.

This is separate from, though perhaps related to, the vampire fear in Jewett City, Connecticut, in 1854.

Carroll is Assistant Professor of History and American Indian Studies at Central Washington University. He flew to New England to be an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, which co-sponsors this seminar series along with the history departments at Clark, Brown, and the University of Connecticut.

This seminar will start at 4:00 P.M. in the Rare Book Room of Goddard Library on the Clark campus. There will be refreshments provided before the paper. If you plan to attend, please email Paul Erickson by the end of the workday today so he’ll know what to expect.

Viewing the Tea Party in Context

If you attend the Boston Tea Party reenactment at Old South and the Boston Tea Party Ships, I have two things for you to keep in mind about what you’re hearing.

As I’ve written before, it’s unlikely that many friends of the royal government came to Old South to debate what to do about the tea. To begin with, those mass gatherings weren’t official town meetings, so even showing up would grant them more legitimacy than most Loyalists wanted.

At least one supporter of the royal government was there to take notes and report back to the authorities, and of course that man, apparently named Colman, wouldn’t have called attention to himself. He did note who spoke and about what, and he didn’t mention many political compatriots. Unless they were trying to save their property (John Rowe) or their new in-laws (John Singleton Copley), Loyalists kept far away from the other side’s rally.

Voicing only anti-Tea Act opinions would therefore be a more accurate depiction of the final tea meeting, but that would provide a false impression of the larger debate in Boston and in America in late 1773. There really was a political dispute, as well as smaller disagreements about tactics. So there’s a good reason the script includes more Loyalist voices.

As for that script, a lot of it ends up in the hands of the audience as people take turns reading arguments about what to do off cards they receive when they come in. Ideally, there would be a one-to-one ratio of speakers and arguments. In other words, everyone who wants to speak would have something to say, and nobody would repeat anyone else. But of course life doesn’t work that way.

Instead, the way it works out is that an audience member who’s eager to participate lines up, waits her turn, and then reads off her card—even if someone else has read the same argument already. There’s a lot of repetition, and speakers don’t respond to what others have just said. However, I’m quite sure the event organizers know all that, and there’s really no smoother way to incorporate the audience into the discussion. The value of being able to participate in the reenactment—especially for younger audience members—outweighs the drawbacks of this approach.

While listening to all those debating points last year, I heard a lot of political anachronisms—rhetoric that might be appropriate during the Revolutionary War, but not two years earlier. In 1773, American Whigs weren’t yet attacking King George III. They were still focusing their anger on what they saw as a corrupt Parliament and corrupt government ministers while proclaiming loyalty to the king and the British constitution.

Similarly, there were no British army troops patrolling Boston in 1773. They had been there from October 1768 to March 1770, and they were ordered back in May 1774 as a response to the Tea Party. Any complaints you hear about redcoats in the streets during the Tea Party would also be anachronistic. The Crown hadn’t yet taken any steps to close the port or disarm the colonists.

As with the criticism of King George, such complaints arise from looking back at the Revolution at such a distance that the distinctions between particular years blur together. But seeing how they accumulated and how American thinking evolved is useful in understanding that the Revolution developed. The Tea Party of 16 Dec 1773 was a particular moment in a gradual process.

The Tea Party in Review

Old South Meeting House and the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum are hosting their annual reenactment of the first Boston Tea Party on Wednesday, 16 December, starting at 6:30 P.M. (Doors open at 5:45.) Tickets are still available through this website.

I attended last year’s reenactment on a media pass, trying not to block paying customers’ views by standing behind a video camera (see photo). So it’s about time I reviewed that presentation.

The first act of the event takes place at Old South, the exact site of mass meetings about the tea in November and December 1773. Its main floor and first gallery are filled with people, Revolutionary reenactors mostly at the center and the public everywhere else. As people enter, they receive cards with remarks on the controversy over the East India Company’s tea monopoly and how Boston should respond.

At the start, some of the reenactors use first-person interpretation (i.e., portraying individual figures from 1773 Boston) lay out the basics of the debate. Then the gentleman presiding over the meeting opens the floor to other voices—folks in the audience. Everyone who wants to participate can line up at one of the microphones and read an argument from his or her card. As those lines wind down, sea captain Francis Rotch returns to report that Gov. Thomas Hutchinson has refused to permit him to sail away with the tea. Some of the reenactors whoop and head outside.

The audience is then led through the streets (rain, shine, or chill) to a viewing area across the channel from the well-lit Boston Tea Party Ships. From there they watch Sons of Liberty arrive on the ship, demand the keys to its hold, and start breaking open tea chests and throwing the cargo overboard. Finally, there’s a short spoken presentation by performers from the Tea Party Ships about what the tea destruction will lead to.

The tea crisis is a tough political confrontation to explain. The action in Old South lays out the issue on the highest level—Parliament has enacted a tax and granted a monopoly without North American subjects having any say in the matter. It also explains the lowest level—if the tea stays in those ships one more night, the royal authorities win. But the combination of laws, regulations, and circumstances that links those levels is still murky.

But these sorts of public presentations aren’t meant to lay out every detail of a historical event. They’re designed to give the public a vivid experience—in this case, hearing the arguments about the tea in Boston in late 1773 and then watching men destroy that tea on the night of 16 December. If everything works, the visuals the reenactment provides and the emotions it evokes are strong enough to entice people to learn more.

TOMORROW: Historical facts to keep in mind.

A Look at Samuel Selden’s Horn

Back when I reviewed the “We Are One” exhibit at the Boston Public Library [closing this weekend!], I finished by saying, “Over the next couple of days I’ll discuss a couple of the ‘We Are One’ items in more depth.“

The first of those artifacts was the Crispus Attucks teapot, and looking into that led to a much longer series of postings about Attucks than I expected. As a result, I never got to the second.

That neglected artifact is the Samuel Selden powderhorn, owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Here’s a blog post from the M.H.S. about it.

The Selden horn is dated March 9, 1776. It identifies its owner (not necessarily its carver) as “MAJOR SAMUEL SELDEN” of Lyme, Connecticut, and identifies itself as “MADE FOR THE DEFENCE OF LIBERTY.” The horn’s main decoration is a schematic map of the fortifications on “BOSTON NECK.” The “YANKES BRESTWORK” and “REDOUTS” with a big “MORTER” face off against “THE REGULARS BRESTWORK.”

But the horn’s unique graphic is a picture of a ship labeled “SHIP AMARACA” flying two flags. At the topmast is a banner with a tree—either the Liberty Tree or a variation of the “Appeal to Heaven” pine tree. At the aft is a flag with a Union Jack near the staff (but not exactly in the place of a canton) and a field that could be a series of horizontal stripes or a colored field denoted by hatching. Thus, it’s possible—but not in my eyes definite—that this horn is one of the earliest representations of the flag that the Continental Congress designed for its navy at the end of 1775.

I held the Selden horn in my (gloved) hands while examining two other powder horns owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society three years back. It was striking to see it again on display at the Boston Public Library.

Not until I came home from the exhibit, however, did I realize that Samuel Selden (1723-1776) was an ancestor of mine. Another branch of the family still uses “Selden” as a given name. After finishing the Boston campaign, Col. Selden took his regiment down to New York. He was captured in a skirmish during the Landing at Kip’s Bay on 15 Sept 1776, fell ill while imprisoned in City Hall, and died on 11 October.