Planning Your Patriots’ Day Season

The anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War is coming up on 19 April, and commemorations of that event start this weekend.

At one point I tried as a public service to catalogue all the celebrations, reenactments, parades, and other historic events scheduled for that season. I wore myself out keeping up with the details.

So I’m just going to point you to some fairly authoritative sources for information:

• Battleroad.org
• Minute Man National Historical Park
• The History List for Massachusetts

There are other events as well, especially communities’ local commemorations and traditions.

My own annual ritual usually includes listening to the Lincoln Salute, an outdoor assembly of fife and drum corps at Pierce Park in Lincoln, and watching the Boston Marathon four blocks from my house. This year I’ll probably throw in some PowerPoint preparation for our history comics workshops in the days that follow.

But I’ll note a couple of special tours of the Minute Man Park scheduled for next weekend.

Saturday, 16 April, 10:30 A.M.
Explore Bloody Angle with Edmund Foster
Hartwell Tavern, Hartwell Tavern Parking Area, 100 North Great Road, Lincoln
Edmund Foster, a volunteer from Reading (portrayed by park volunteer Ed Hurley), will lead a tour to this key battle site where he fought in 1775.

Sunday, 17 April, 2:00 P.M.
Revolutionary Dogs: “Paws for the Cause!”
Minute Man Visitor Center, Route 2A, Lexington
Join Park Ranger Roger Fuller and his pug, Cricket, in a 45-minute walk on the Battle Road to explore the lives of dogs in colonial America and in the Revolution. The tour proceeds about half a mile west with four stops along the way. Well-behaved, friendly dogs welcome.

History Comics Workshops, 19-22 April

Massachusetts’s public school vacation week is coming up, and I’m going to spend four of those days working with talented artists as we offer workshops on history comics at four historic sites.

Designed for kids in grades 4 to 8 (though others are welcome) and their parents, these hands-on family workshops will use the 250th anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act to explore that conflict, how we remember it, and how we can retell history in graphic form.

Workshop participants will receive a comic book that relates “The Rise and Fall of the Stamp Act,” mostly through the eyes of children in London and Boston. The four short chapters feature art by Jesse Lonergan, John Carvajal, L.J.-Baptiste, and Ben Doane, with a color cover by Jerel Dye, all assembled by Roho at Riverbird Comics. (The sketch above is a detail of Dye’s cover art, showing the anti-Stamp protest of 14 Aug 1765 as it was about to tip into violence.)

In addition to having scripted that booklet, I’ll give a brief talk at each site about how the Stamp Act set thirteen American colonies off on the road to independence. The artists will speak about the ways they create comics, and then we’ll guide all the workshop participants through making their own short comic about whatever historical story interests them.

The workshops are free, but space is limited and prior registration is required. The program has been made possible through the support of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, Revolution 250, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. The comics creators have all been active in the Boston Comics Roundtable.

Here are the particulars of each day’s program and how to sign up for it.

Tuesday, 19 April, 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
Reserve spaces through this link

Wednesday, 20 April, 1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
The Shirley-Eustis House, Roxbury
Reserve spaces by calling 617-442-2275 or by email

Thursday, 21 April, 2:00 to 4:00 P.M.
Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, Cambridge
Reserve spaces by calling (617) 876-4491 or by email

Friday, 22 April, 2:00 to 4:00 P.M.
The Old State House, Boston
Reserve spaces through this link

“Deserved and received the respect”

On 19 Feb 1730, John and Thankful (Crowell) Lewis of Yarmouth (or Cape Cod) had a baby. According to an item in the 22 Jan 1770 Boston Evening-Post:

bearing a similarity of both Sexes, it was disputed what apparel it [the child] should be dressed in, but ’twas at last agreed to dress it in Women’s, and it was baptised by the name of Deborah

Within a few years, the family moved to Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard.

In the summer of 1764, the Evening-Post reported that Deborah Lewis

who, till within a few Days since, constantly appeared in the Female Dress, and was always supposed to be one of the Sex, suddenly threw off that Garb, and assumed the Habit of a Man; and sufficiently to demonstrate the Reality of this last Appearance, is on the Point of marrying a Widow Woman.

On 16 August, Deborah Lewis, now known as Francis Lewis, married Anne Luce.

Luce was just about to turn twenty-four, and I haven’t seen evidence of an earlier marriage on her part. I also see no evidence of the newspaper’s claim that she had lodged with Deborah Lewis and ”found herself to be with child.” The couple’s first documented child was born in November 1765, a year after the marriage, with four more coming by August 1782.

Almost sixty years later, in January 1823, the Providence Gazette reportedly ran this death notice:

DIED,—…
In Tisbury, (Martha’s Vineyard,) Mr. Francis Lewis, ag. 93—32 [sic] of which years he dressed as a woman, and was supposed to be such. After that, he took his proper apparel as a man, and passed the remainder of his life in the marriage state, and has left numerous descendants. The family has always deserved and received the respect of those who knew it.

Francis Lewis’s life story was obviously unusual, and thus a topic of wide interest. The newspaper items I’ve quoted were reprinted in several other newspapers, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, New-York Journal, Newport Mercury, New-Hampshire Gazette, and Boston Daily Advertiser.

On the other hand, Revolutionary-era Americans could obviously accept that a person first thought to be female, raised as a girl, and living as a woman into young adulthood could actually be a male who “deserved and received the respect” of his neighbors.

The North Carolina’s recent H.B.2 law and similar measures in other states today presume otherwise.

Talk on Dawes, Warren, and Heath at Forest Hills, 17 Apr.

On Sunday, 17 April, at 2:00 P.M., Forest Hills Cemetery will host a talk by Dee Morris on “The Other New England Patriots.”

Morris’s subject will be three men who were significant in the start of the Revolutionary War—particularly the start of it on 19 Apr 1775.

All three are buried at that cemetery:

• William Dawes, Jr.
• Dr. Joseph Warren
• Maj. Gen. William Heath

Warren sent Dawes out to Lexington on 18 April with a warning for Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The following morning, the doctor himself slipped out of town to see what had become of the regulars. He linked up with Heath, the highest-ranking Massachusetts militia officer to see fighting that day, and together they directed provincial troops at the end of the British withdrawal.

Both Warren and Dawes died in the eighteenth century and were originally interred inside Boston. But their families moved them out to Forest Hills in the late 1800s as rural cemeteries became more popular than urban burying-grounds. Heath always lived in Roxbury, dying there in 1814. That was well before Forest Hills was established, so I assume his remains were moved, too.

Dee Morris is an independent scholar and educational consultant specializing in Boston history. She is the author of Boston in the Golden Age of Spiritualism and Somerville, Massachusetts: A Brief History.

This lecture will take place in the Forysth Chapel located at the cemetery’s main entrance at 95 Forest Hills Avenue in Jamaica Plain. The site is “an easy walk from the Orange Line Forest Hills stop via the Tower Street pedestrian gate.” The fee for this hourlong talk is $10. Light refreshments will be served afterwards.

(Image of Warren’s gravestone above courtesy of The Dreamer comic.)

Remembering John A. Nagy

I was saddened to learn that author John A. Nagy had died on the first of this month.

John was an expert—really, the current expert—on Revolutionary War espionage. He had several books to his name, including Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution and Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution.

I never met John in person, but over the last several years we had a steady correspondence by email about spying during the siege of Boston. We exchanged sources and leads. Every couple of years I would receive a barrage of messages signed just “John” asking about various individuals in colonial Boston, and I knew he was working on a new manuscript.

In Spies in the Continental Capital: Espionage Across Pennsylvania During the American Revolution, John presented contemporaneous documentation for the espionage activities of Lydia Darragh. I sent him congratulations because I’d been so skeptical about her legend, which arose in dramatic form a generation or two after the war. John vacuumed up all the stories and evidence about Revolutionary espionage he could find, and he spotted a period document pointing to Darragh’s family.

In his biography Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy: A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution, John endorsed my conclusion about the identity of the doctor’s mistress. Convincing John Nagy gave me confidence in my interpretation of the evidence.

John was a stalwart of Philadelphia’s American Revolution Round Table, which he helped to found and run. Every year he asked me whether we had a similar group here in Massachusetts, and eventually Dr. Mel Bernstein started one up. I hoped that John and I would finally meet at a Round Table meeting this year, either in Middlesex County or in Philadelphia, but that won’t happen now.

There’s a new John A. Nagy book scheduled to come out this fall: George Washington's Secret Spy War: The Making of America’s First Spymaster. It’s bound to be based on the most thorough assembly of evidence about the commander-in-chief’s intelligence and counterintelligence work.

“Hoping he will still continue Honestly, faithfully & obediently to serve”

To find out more about Caesar Marion, also called “the well-known Caesar Merriam,” I looked into the life of the man who once owned him.

Edward Marion was born in Boston in 1692. He served in some town offices in the 1720s and ’30s, joined the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and donated blacksmithing work for the town’s new workhouse.

Marion didn’t advertise his services (blacksmiths rarely had to), but he placed a couple of advertisements in the Boston Gazette in 1758 when he administered the estate of turner John Underwood.

Marion married Mary Reynolds in 1715. I’ve found no evidence that they had children, which would explain why the blacksmith didn’t feel a need to preserve his property for a son. It also left the Marions without the traditional source of support in their old age.

Both Edward and Mary Marion turned seventy years old in the early 1760s. Presumably journeymen and slaves like Caesar were already doing most of the physical work in Edward’s smithy.

On 9 May 1769, Marion made out an unusual written promise:

of my own meer motion & in consideration of the Faithfullness & honesty wherewith my Negro Servant Caeser has Served me for divers years past, & hoping he will still continue Honestly, faithfully & obediently to serve me & his mistress Mary my Wife I do hereby order & declare that it is my Will & pleasure that at & immediately after the Decease of me and my said Wife & the Survivor of us that my said Negro Caeser shall be manumitted & freed from his Servitude.

And I do also hereby give & order unto my said Negro at the time of his freedom all my working Tools belonging to the Black smiths Business now in my Shop & also the sum of six Pounds lawfull money and I do hereby also order my Ex’ors or Adm’ors In Case of his Living to be Aged or Infirm & unable to Support himself, that they be Aiding & Ajusting to him out of my Estate to prevent his becomeing a Charge to the Town—

provided always & these presents are granted upon this Condition that my said Negro shall honestly Soberly obediently & faithfully [missing word—behave?] himself towards me & my said Wife during our & each of our Lives otherwise I do hereby reserve in my own Power to revoke & invalidate this my bequest in case my said Negro shall not so faithfully & honestly bare & behave himself towards me & his said Mistress as I hope & expect he will.

I or his said Mistress may invalidate the same either by Destroying this Instrument or Expressing the same by Writing

Marion added to that promise on 30 Jan 1770:

I the within named Edward Marion do further give and order unto my said Negro at the time of his Freedom All his Cloaths Bed & Bedding, & also the Use & Improvement of my Blacksmiths Shop for him to Work in during his Life upon the Condition of his future faithfull Service to me & my said Wife as within mentioned.

As discussed yesterday, notary Ezekiel Price recorded the document on 2 February.

Jared Hardesty interprets the legal recording of that document as evidence of Caesar Marion looking out for his economic interest, exercising agency in his own life. I’m struck by how it shows the reversal of a concern I’ve seen in anecdotes about enslaved people resisting emancipation in old age, when they feared their owners simply didn’t want to support them any longer after having squeezed the labor out of them.

In this case, Edward Marion was concerned for his and his wife’s support. And he was willing to make their slave into their heir to ensure it. Of course, the blacksmith also added clauses demanding that Caesar keep up his end of the bargain at the risk of losing everything (and added a clause to keep him from becoming a burden on the town). Of course, Edward Marion may also have been motivated by feelings of duty and genuine fondness toward Caesar—we can’t read that in the legal record.

COMING UP: How did this arrangement work out?

(Thanks to professional genealogist Liz Loveland for sharing images from the Ezekiel Price notarial records at the Boston Athenaeum, the source of the above quotations.)

A New Clue to Caesar Marion

Back in 2006, I wrote about a black man named Caesar Marion who protested a town meeting measure in August 1775, during the siege of Boston. The Essex Gazette referred to him as “the well-known Caesar Merriam.”

I’d found the name of Caesar Marion on the 1771 provincial tax list, indicating that he owned property. Being a free black with real estate might have been rare enough on its own to make him “well-known.” Marion’s willingness to speak out against the authorities, even to the length of being put in jail, suggests he might also have been a recognized community leader.

But I didn’t know anything more about Marion until last month Jared Hardesty shared “Finding Agency in Unexpected Places” on the African American Intellectual History Society’s website.

Hardesty examined the records of Ezekiel Price, a well-connected notary, court clerk, and insurance agent in eighteenth-century Boston, at the Boston Athenaeum. He found transcripts of documents that Price had been asked to notarize by African-American townspeople:

Upon obtaining their freedom, many blacks turned to Price to help them record and lay claim to property. In this sense, freedom was only the first step. Property would allow freed men and women to enjoy that liberty and, more importantly, secure independence within white society. There are two instances of free blacks looking to secure property in Price’s books. The first involved a man named Charles whose former master gifted him a small Hopkinton, Massachusetts farm in his will. Charles had Price record three different testimonials from white neighbors acknowledging his inheritance. The other document belonged to a freedman named Caesar Marion, whose master, retired blacksmith Edward Marion, not only manumitted his slave in 1769, but also gave Caesar all of his tools and use of his shop. Caesar then used this property to go into business for himself, becoming one of the few black property owners in Boston listed in the 1771 Massachusetts tax assessment.

This document thus helps to fill in a crucial part of Caesar Marion’s story.

TOMORROW: Edward Marion’s grant.

The End of the Washington Elm

This photograph comes from the Leslie Jones Collection at the Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth.

The webpage dates the image as “ca. 1917–1934,” but we can be more specific. In his essay “The Washington Elm Tradition” Samuel F. Batchelder wrote:

Finally, on October 26, 1923, the whole wretched ruin was accidently pulled over by workmen trying to remove another dead branch, and crashed against the iron railing surrounding it. Examination showed that the trunk was hopelessly rotted below the ground, a mere mass of punk: the wonder was that it had stood so long.

The photographs must have been taken shortly afterward as people in Cambridge debated whether the patriotic symbol had been felled by Communists. (Seriously.)

Here are two more photographs from the series. The traffic island where the tree stood was removed, a metal plate left in the road to mark the exact spot.

A New Look at Saratoga

At the American Revolution Conference two weeks ago I met Larry Arnold, an expert guide to the Saratoga battlefield.

During a drive to the Green Spring battle site, Larry told us about a recent discovery he’d made on eBay. He saw a letter that mentioned Saratoga offered with a scan big enough to actually read. And when he read it, he realized it offered a new look into the fight.

This week the Daily Gazette of Schenectady broke the story:

The letter was written by New Hampshire militia adjutant Nathaniel Bacheller to his wife, Suzanna, and is dated Oct. 9, 1777. . . . He wrote that his regiment was told to join [Benedict] Arnold’s brigades on the uplands around the Nielsen house, and soon afterward Arnold went out on horseback with an aide to try to determine how large the British force was.

“General [Horatio] Gates Soon arived to our Lines & Inquired for General Arnol & was Told he was out of the lines to View the Enemy,” Bacheller wrote in the letter, which is full of the misspellings and punctuation errors typical of many 18th century writings.

Gates ordered one of Arnold’s regiments forward, and sent word forward to Arnold not to have his men fire on the nearly deployed unit.

Arnold soon returned, in Bacheller’s account, and told Gates the “Enemy Design was To Take Possession of a hill about a Quarter of a mile To the west of our lines.”

“General Arnol says to General Gates it is Late in the Day but Let me have men & we will have some fun with them before Sun Set,” wrote Bacheller, who incorrectly spells Arnold’s name throughout the letter.

The battle then commenced, and the British withdrew in defeat that evening. . . .

Bacheller’s account runs counter to standard narratives that say Gates stayed in his own headquarters and left others to do the fighting, or that Arnold angrily charged into the fighting after Gates deployed Arnold's men without Arnold’s involvement.

The document itself went to an unknown buyer for nearly $3,000, but the staff at Saratoga National Historical Park downloaded a digital copy for transcription. It should presumably be part of any new account of the battle.

Omohundro Institute Conference in Worcester, 23-26 June

On the same weekend as the Dublin Seminar, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture will hold its 22nd Annual Conference in Worcester. This year’s conference themes are “Native American Transformations” and “Early America at Work.”

The conference starts on the evening of Thursday, 23 June, with an informal social gathering at the Goddard Daniels House of the American Antiquarian Society. The formal sessions start at 9:00 A.M. on Friday at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and run through 12:30 P.M. on Sunday. Here’s one of the many paper panels as an example:

Session 9—Taming Early America: Human-Animal Relationships Along the Blurred Line of Domestication

Chair: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, University of Colorado, Boulder

Whitney Barlow Robles, Harvard University, “‘Liberty Rendered Him Insolent’: Raccoon Pet-keeping as a Laboratory in Early America”

Strother E. Roberts, Bowdoin College, “‘Their Wealth is in Proportion to Their Dogs’: Dogs as Livestock Among Indian Communities of the Seventeenth-Century Northeast”

Tom Wickman, Trinity College, “Yoked for Winter: Oxen, the Anglo-Wabanaki Wars, and the Little Ice Age”

Anya Zilberstein, Concordia University, “Poor Creatures: Corn Feed for People and Other Animals”

Comment: Audience

In addition to the plenary addresses, panels and roundtable discussions, there will be hands-on workshops about the digital tools Omeka and TEI and demonstrations of two ongoing digital humanities projects, the Georgian Papers Programme and the Thomas Broadside Ballads. There will also be an app for the conference made available in May.

Visit the conference page for information about registration and much more.

Down to the Sea in Deerfield with the Dublin Seminar, 24-26 June

On the weekend of 24-26 June, Historic Deerfield will host the annual Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, this year’s topic being “New England at Sea: Maritime Memory and Material Culture”:

Focusing on how the region remembered its maritime past, the weekend begins with a keynote address by the historian W. Jeffrey Bolster on the pivotal role that Gloucester, Massachusetts, played in the memory of its fishing industry.

It continues with individual topics such as chart making, the keeping of ship logs, and ship-design technologies. Later sessions address subjects such as whaling, slaving, privateering, and maritime family life; the rise of marine societies and efforts to preserve old ships; and the growth of maritime antiques businesses. The conference concludes with minorities’ experience of seafaring and maritime laboring and the material culture of sailors’ (and diplomatic) dress.

An optional workshop presented on Friday afternoon will examine the history of celestial navigation including a detailed exploration of the sextant, and Mystic Seaport’s digital resources used in genealogical and maritime-related research.

The main program of nineteen lectures (with discussion periods after each grouping) will begin in the Deerfield Community Center at 7:00 P.M. on Friday evening and will continue until around noon on Sunday. The conference registration fee includes lunch and dinner on Saturday, June 25, plus coffee and (really good locally made) doughnuts each morning.

The Dublin Seminar casts a wide net for researchers and for attendees, including university scholars, other educators, curators, collectors, librarians, preservationists, students, and the general public. Selected papers from this event will be published in a couple of years as the 2016 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

For more information and to register, visit this webpage.

A Plagiarized Puzzle

On N.P.R. Weekend Edition yesterday, Will Shortz announced this as the puzzle for the week:

The University Press of New England has just published a book by Boston College professor Paul Lewis, called The Citizen Poets of Boston: A Collection of Forgotten Poems, 1789-1820. It has a chapter devoted to puzzles in poetic form. Most of the puzzles are explained—but one puzzle never had a printed answer.

I’d like to see if the collective brainpower of NPR listeners can be brought to bear to clear up this mystery. It’s a two-line verse from the Nov. 12, 1803, issue of the Boston Weekly Magazine:

I am both man and woman too,
And go to school as good boys do.

If you can solve this riddle, let us know. I’ll select what I think is the best answer that’s submitted. If no one sends what I judge to be the intended answer, then I’ll pick what I consider the most ingenious one, whether it’s “correct” or not.

Headlined “A Rebus,” that puzzle was published as “For the Boston Weekly Magazine” and credited to “R. S. G.”

However, the same puzzle had appeared in the London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer in December 1759, as shown below.

So “R. S. G.” might have some explaining to do.

Samuel Johnson defined a rebus as “a word represented by a picture.” However, this magazine and popular culture used the term to mean a puzzle-poem challenging readers to identify a word based on its parts, either syllables or letters. Here’s an example that Paul Revere wrote for his soon-to-be second wife, Rachel. This London Magazine page has another example.

So what was the original solution to this rebus? It appeared in the March 1760 issue of the London Magazine. If you want to know, click on the box below to enlarge the image.

Frankly, I think N.P.R. listeners can do better.

Lectures in Boston and Waltham, 7 April

On Thursday, 7 April, the Skinner auction house in Boston is hosting ceramics expert Robert Hunter speaking on “The Art and Mystery of Early English Pottery: The Troy D. Chappell Collection.”

Since 2001 Hunter has been editor of the annual journal Ceramics in America, published by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee. Here is a gallery of examples from the Chappell Collection, courtesy of Chipstone in 2001.

Hunter has more than thirty-five years of experience in prehistoric and historical archeology. He was the founding director of the College of William and Mary’s Center for Archaeological Research and served as Assistant Curator of Ceramics and Glass in the Department of Collections at Colonial Williamsburg. He received the 2007 Award of Merit from the Society for Historical Archaeology and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Hunter’s talk will begin at 6:00 P.M. at the Skinner Boston Gallery, 63 Park Plaza. This event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served. Reserve a space here.

On the same night, the Lyman Estate in Waltham, owned by Historic New England, and the Waltham Historical Society are co-sponsoring a lecture by local historian Jack Cox on “Waltham in the Early Republic: A Time of Transition, 1789-1825.”

When George Washington was inaugurated as our nation’s first president in 1789, the Town of Waltham was a small agrarian village located along the Great Country Road just nine miles west of Boston.

Over the next forty years, economic and social developments fundamentally transformed Waltham, creating a community inhabited by yeoman farmers, factory workers, small business owners, and wealthy Boston families.

This talk will examine those changes and the forces behind them.

Cox is scheduled to speak from 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. The Lyman Estate is at 185 Lyman Street in Waltham. Admission is $5 for members, $10 for others. Registration is recommended. Waltham Historical Society members must call 617-994-5912 to register.

The Gunpowder and William Gamage

In my talk on Thursday, I related the Powder Alarm of 2 Sept 1774 from the point of view of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver.

He was in Boston when that town’s radical leaders arrived out at the gathering of thousands of Middlesex County militiamen on Cambridge common. Therefore, Oliver didn’t hear, and I didn’t get to describe, how those gentlemen tried to take control of the situation.

The Boston committee was anxious to prevent the crowd from becoming violent about how Gov. Thomas Gage’s regulars had removed gunpowder from the storage house in Charlestown. So William Cooper, Boston’s town clerk, told the assembled men that the powder was so old and caked that it hadn’t been any use anyway. William Molineux repeated that message.

Of course, those gentlemen had no connection to the Middlesex County militia regiment and its supplies. They were politicians saying what they wished were true and hoping no one in the crowd would call them on it.

In the 5 September Boston Gazette, however, this letter appeared:

As it is publickly reported that the Powder which was taken out of the Powder-House at Charlestown last Thursday Morning is a consolidated Body, and of no Consequence—I think it my Duty, (as I have for a Number of Years had the Care of it as to sunning and turning it,) to declare, that it appeared to me to be as good and free from Dampness, or any Damage, as any could be. The last Time I sunned it, was last June.

Wm Gamage.

William Angier, Stephen Palmer, James Read, Samuel Gamage, the Names of those who assisted the last Time it was aired, are ready to testify to the above-written.

Cambridge, September 3, 1774.

The Gazette didn’t report who had “publickly reported” that falsehood about the powder. Printers Edes and Gill were, after all, on the same political side as Cooper and Molineux. But Gamage and his friends clearly wanted to restore his own reputation for diligent care of the public powder.

“At distance, thou, Columbia! view thy Prince”

Here at last is the poem whose authorship I’ve been considering, the one numbered XXIX in the Boston publication Pietas et Gratulatio Collegii Cantabrigiensis apud Novanglus.

As you recall, the two goals of that book were to:

• praise King George III and his bride, Queen Charlotte (shown here), and
• demonstrate how Harvard College graduates could create poetry in Latin, Greek, and English at the same level as scholars from Oxford or Cambridge.

Unfortunately, the result was still pre-Romantic, non-satirical eighteenth-century poetry.

Tho’ from thy happy shores, Britannia! far
Remov’d, where Phoebus slopes his golden orb
Down western sky, to Europe; while high Noon,
From midst his radiant path, on us he pours:
Yet, sharing in the noble British vein,
We feel, and, feeling, sing the common bliss;
Bliss wide diffus’d thro’ Britain’s wide domain,
And swelling in each breast to ecstasy.

Hence, jarring discord, tumults, carnage, wars;
Embattled nations! cease a while to deal
Destruction; Peace! on balmy wings, descend;
Let Hymen and the Paphian Goddess hold
Imperial sway, soft’ning each heart to love.

Behold, Britannia! in thy favour’d Isle;
At distance, thou, Columbia! view thy Prince,
For ancestors renown’d, for virtues more;
At whose sole nod, grim tyranny aghast,
With grudging strides, hies swift from British climes;
While liberty undaunted rears her head:
Whose mind superior bears, as Atlas Heav’n,
The weight of kingdoms; and with equal ease,
As some Intelligence, of order high,
Directs yon circling orbs, by laws exact,
Th’ unweildy empire guides thro’ mazy paths:---
Made happy.--How? By nuptial tie.--With whom?
Thy Pride, Germania! whom to form combine
The Graces all, and all fair virtue’s train.
Whate’er ennobles or adorns the Fair,
Of line, of form, of wit, of sense, unite
Their lovliest charms, and centre all in Her.
For such a Prince the only Princess meet;
Of such a Princess worthy only He!
Can heart conceive, imagination paint,
Or fancy frame more finish’d happiness
Below?—Ye Powers above! your blessings shed,
And genial influence, on the royal Pair.
From such embrace, a progeny of kings
Shall rise, to rule the world, and bless mankind.

Long let Britannia’s Prince, in wisdom's lore
Deep read, with sapient hand her sceptre wield;
Long may his other self, with converse mild,
With looks with air, with port, that whisper love,
Speak sweetness to his heart ineffable,
Sooth all his cares, and foretaste give of Heav’n.

A number of literary scholars say this poem was the earliest English use of “Columbia” as a term for America.

I’ve found a couple of earlier examples of “Columbia” in the Archive of Americana database, but they’re not so straightforward as this one. On 30 Nov 1741 the Boston Evening-Post reprinted an item from the Gentleman’s Magazine:

The SPEECH of his Grace the Duke of A[rgy]le, on the Motion made in the H[ou]se of L[or]ds, for addressing his Majesty to dismiss the Rt. Hon. Sir R. W[alpol]e; for as it relates to the Management of the War. Note, Columbia must be taken for America, Lilliput for Eng[lan]d, Iberians for Spani[ar]ds, and Grablitra for Gibr[alta]r.

Publishing Parlimentary addresses, especially any that contained critical remarks, was still legally iffy then. The word “Columbia” offered pseudonymous protection for the printers and/or the duke, much like the letters replaced with hyphens. And that term was still unfamiliar enough to readers that the article required a key for understanding.

The term’s next American appearance came in 1749 when Dr. William Douglass (best known for opposing Dr. Zabdiel Boylston and the Rev. Cotton Mather’s effort to introduce smallpox inoculation to Boston) published A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America. That book suggested that “Columbia” would be a better name for the continent than “America” since Columbus had discovered it for Europe. Again, the term came with an explanation, not just appearing as a parallel to “Britannia” and “Germania.”

So whoever wrote Pietas et Gratulatio’s poem XXIX indeed introduced a term into the American language.

The Mystery of Poem XXIX

Yesterday I described the 1761 collection of poems titled Pietas et Gratulatio, designed to show off the learning of Harvard College in praise to King George III.

Although the college announced a competition for students and recent graduates, surviving copies of the book with handwritten notes indicate that many of the poems came from men well past their undergraduate days. That list included grammar-school master John Lovell, merchant and scholar James Bowdoin, the Rev. Samuel Cooper, and Dr. Benjamin Church. To be fair, those men all had received Harvard educations.

Several of the poems, particularly those in Latin and Greek, came from Stephen Sewall (1734-1804), who was a recent Harvard graduate. He was also on his way to becoming the college’s professor of Hebrew and other languages.

In 1809 the Monthly Anthology magazine of Boston used Prof. Sewall’s own copy of Pietas et Gratulatio to attribute the poem numbered XXIX to “Thomas Oliver, afterwards judge and lieutenant governour.” Thomas Oliver (1734-1815) would have qualified as a recent Harvard graduate, and he did become the last royal lieutenant governor.

However, Oliver was never a judge. In fact, no one matches that magazine’s description. The other candidates are:

• Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor but not judge.
• His brother Peter Oliver, judge but not lieutenant governor (shown above).
• Their brother-in-law Thomas Hutchinson, judge and lieutenant governor—and more prominent as governor.

I’ve seen different authors identify all four of those men as the author of poem XXIX.

But there’s more. Soon after publishing that article, the Monthly Anthology received letters from two people in Maine disputing and filling out its attributions. One was the Rev. Dr. Samuel Deane of Portland, the last surviving contributor to Pietas et Gratulatio. The other, left unnamed, said he (or she) had a copy of the book with poem XXIX attributed to Prof. Sewall.

The magazine’s editors accepted what that letter said, even though that reattribution created another question: If Sewall had composed that English poem, why didn’t his own copy of the book say so? Why did it evidently name some other man as author?

In an 1879 issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, Justin Winsor tallied up the evidence from all the copies of and reports on Pietas et Gratulatio he could find. He wrote that copies owned by the Rev. Jeremy Belknap, Samuel A. Eliot, the Rev. John Lowell of Newbury, college president Edward Holyoke, and Prof. John Winthrop all named the author of poem XXIX as Stephen Sewall. However, five other copies named either Peter or Thomas Oliver.

Sewall definitely wrote poetry, though he was best known for work in Greek and Latin, not English. Peter Oliver wrote newspaper essays and a delightfully sarcastic account of the coming of the Revolution. In contrast, I’ve never come across Thomas Oliver writing anything but justifications for his actions on 2 Sept 1774 (the topic of my talk at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters tonight).

Therefore, though I’m still unsure about who wrote that poem, Thomas Oliver is one of the least likely of the named candidates.

TOMORROW: Poem XXIX at last.

Gov. Bernard’s Book of Poetry

In 1760 George III ascended to the throne of Great Britain, and the following year he married Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Also in 1760, Francis Bernard (shown here) became governor of Massachusetts, coming from the same post in New Jersey.

His career dependent on making a good impression in London, Bernard started sucking up to the king and the new royal establishment. He proposed that Harvard College run a contest for the best poems about George III, his new bride, and the death of his grandfather, George II.

According to the 1855 Cyclopaedia of American Literature:

A proposal was set up in the college chapel inviting competition on these themes from undergraduates, or those who had taken a degree within seven years, for six guinea prizes to be given for the best Latin oration, Latin poem in hexameters, Latin elegy in hexameters and pentameters, Latin ode, English poem in long verse, and English ode.

Oxford and Cambridge had similar competitions, which was no doubt where Bernard got the idea.

The resulting best poems were collected with some prose addresses as Pietas et Gratulatio Collegii Cantabrigiensis apud Novanglos. The print shop of Green and Russell produced a handsome volume at quarto size, and in early 1762 the college corporation voted to send a presentation copy to the king himself. The Cyclopaedia says George III “does not appear to have made any special acknowledgment of it.”

There was a generally positive review of Pietas et Gratulatio in the July 1763 Monthly Review in London, though the praise was sometimes faint:

It must be acknowledged, after all, that this New England collection, like other publick offerings of the same kind, contains many indifferent performances; but these, though they can not be so well excused when they come from ancient and established seats of learning, may, at least, be connived at here; and what we could not endure from an illustrious university, we can easily pardon in an infant seminary.

The original volume didn’t identify any authors of the poems, but a number of copies with credits written in by hand circulated around Massachusetts. A detailed retrospective in the Monthly Anthology for June, 1809, used a copy owned by Harvard professor Stephen Sewall to identify the poets, including himself.

That article stated that the English poem numbered “XXIX.” was by “Thomas Oliver, afterwards judge and lieutenant governour.” A number of literary reference books repeated that information over the next century.

Since I was studying Lt. Gov. Oliver for my talk on Thursday, I was struck by this attribution. Because nothing else I’d read about Oliver suggested he was at all interested in poetry.

TOMORROW: Digging deeper.

The Powderhouse: Public Resource or Private Property?

One of the places that plays a significant role in “The End of Tory Row,” as I’ve entitled my free public lecture on Thursday evening, is the gunpowder storehouse that still stands on a hill in Somerville.

Originally that spot was in Charlestown, and in 1703 John Mallet bought the hilltop and built the cylindrical stone structure that still stands there. In A Century of Town Life, James F. Hunnewell wrote:

Its walls, built of rough broken stones, perhaps 30 ft. high, form, as measured by the writer (April 15, 1886), a nearly exact circle 60 3/4 feet in circumference on the outside. At the one door (towards the north) they are 2 1/3 feet thick, and the diameter of the interior directly thence is 14 ft., 2 in. Both outside and inside they curve slightly inward towards the top, which is covered by a tall conical wooden and shingled roof with curved outlines. Across the interior, until recently, there were heavy beams, and flooring, all of late broken, but these have been removed, leaving the whole space clear; the floor is the earth; the doorway unclosed, as also is a window opposite; and the interior is dirty. Otherwise the structure is in tolerably good condition. Its roof was painted, and its walls were whitewashed on the outside, a few years ago.

The structure Mallet built was a windmill for grinding grain. It had four big sails and a roof that turned to face the wind. According to Wikipedia, it’s the oldest stone building in Massachusetts.

In 1747 the province of Massachusetts bought the “stone edifice, formerly a windmill,” and the quarter-acre of surrounding land from Mallet’s heirs. The government converted the structure into a gunpowder storehouse, replacing the windmill and grinding apparatus with a relatively light wooden roof. If the gunpowder inside ever blew up, the thick walls would direct most of the explosion up into the air, away from nearby buildings or people.

The powderhouse remained part of Massachusetts’s militia infrastructure until 1818. At that point, New England culture was probably less excited about military readiness. Massachusetts no longer faced the danger of invasion from inland. The region had soured quickly on the last war and wouldn’t get excited about another one for almost forty years.

The state therefore sold the quarter-acre and the powderhouse to Peter Tufts, a local farmer. He kept the building, probably because it was too solid to tear down and possibly because he could use it. The Tufts family eventually became merchants and professionals. In the 1870s, according to a brochure from the city of Somerville, they leased the stone tower to pickle maker George Emerson, who used it as a storehouse and marketed an “Old Powder House Brand.”

Hunnewell’s description above indicates the building was deteriorating by 1886. Four years later, it once again become government property as the Tufts family donated the land and building to Somerville. The city officially named the site Nathan Tufts Park, landscaped it with paths and plantings, and added benches and statuary. And everyone calls the neighborhood Powder House Square.

“The very Time of the Convulsion” in Shrewsbury

On Thursday I’ll speak at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site about “The End of Tory Row,” the events that led to drastic changes in that neighborhood in September 1774. (Here’s more information.)

Here’s part of a description of that day, which the Rev. Ezra Stiles of Newport took down from an Irish businessman named McNeil a few days afterward:

Mr. McNeil told me he proceeding from Springfield journeyed towards Boston and on Thursday the first Day of Sept. reached Shrewsbury in the Evening and lodged there. I asked him where he met the public Tumult? he said at Shrewsbury a few miles nearer Boston than Worcester.

He went to bed without hearing any Thing. But about midnight or perhaps one oClock he was suddenly waked up, somebody violently rapping up the Landlord, telling the doleful Story that the Powder was taken, six men killed, & all the people between there & Boston arming & marching down to the Relief of their Brethren at Boston; and within a qr. or half an hour he judges fifty men were collected at the Tavern tho’ now deep in Night, equipping themselves & sending off Posts every Way to the neighboring Towns. . . . The Men set off as fast as they were equipt.

In the Morning, being fryday Sept. 2, Mr. McNeil rode forward & passed thro’ the whole at the very Time of the Convulsion. He said he never saw such a Scene before—all along were armed Men rushing forward some on foot some on horseback, at every house Women & Children making Cartridges, running Bullets, making Wallets, baking Biscuit, crying & bemoaning & at the same time animating their Husbands & Sons to fight for their Liberties, tho’ not knowing whether they should ever see them again.

I asked whether the Men were Cowards or disheartened or appeared to want Courage? No. Whether the tender Destresses of weeping Wives & Children softened effeminated & overcome the Men and set them Weeping to? No—nothing of this—but a firm intrepid Ardor, hardy eager & couragious Spirit of Enterprize, a Spirit for revenging the Blood of their Brethren & rescue our Liberties, all this & an Activity corresponding with such Emotions appeared all along the whole Tract of above fourty Miles from Shrewsbury to Boston.

The Women kept on making Cartridges, & after equipping their Husbands, bro’t them out to the Soldiers which in Crowds passed along & gave them out in handfuls to one and another as they were deficient, mixing Exhortation & Tears & Prayers—spiriting the Men in such an uneffeminate Manner as even would make Cowards fight. He tho’t if anything the Women surpassed the Men for Eagerness & Spirit in the Defence of Liberty by Arms. For they had no Tho’ts of the Men returning but from Battle, for they all believed the Action commenced between the Kings Troops & the Provincials.

Remember, this was 2 Sept 1774, more than seven months before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but the people of central Massachusetts “believed the Action commenced” already.

Many of those armed men with “a Spirit for revenging the Blood of their Brethren” ended up on the road from Watertown into Cambridge, passing the house of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver at the southwestern end of “Tory Row.”

“Small woodin and paper houses & Towers”

Last month I wrote about a wooden model of ancient Jerusalem that toured the colonies in 1764 and 1765. The first posting quoted the diary of a young Philadelphia woman who saw the model in Germantown in 1762 and described it as “done by an illiterate shoemaker.” I also noted another possible clue to the creation that I couldn’t follow up.

Sandra G. Hewlett, a certified genealogist in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, kindly decided to check out that lead, and this is her report.

In your 24 February 2016 post you mentioned a footnote in Stephanie Grauman Wolf’s Urban Village, in which she cited a 1761 Philadelphia probate file for Anthony Sultser that held a clue to this story.

Yesterday I visited the Philadelphia Register of Wills office at City Hall where I obtained a copy of Anthony Sultser’s estate inventory dated 17th September 1761. The last line reads:

…..small woodin and paper houses & Towers: a shew to Represent the City and Tempel of Jersusalem £20

This item had the greatest value of anything mentioned in this inventory.

Anthony Sultser’s will mentions only his wife Barbara, no children, so we don’t learn much about him from his probate file.

Some of the inventory appears above. In addition to the model, it notes “some joiners tools,” “some saws Chisels and other old tools,” and “some wooden figures” that might be related to that project. The inventory also lists “all the shoemakers tools” and “some Leather,” indicating that Sultser was the shoemaker the diarist wrote about who carved this Jerusalem. Interestingly, his estate also included (not shown in the section above) some old books, so perhaps he wasn’t illiterate after all. Or maybe he just looked at the pictures for artistic inspiration.

(Another item in the inventory is “a marvell Stone” worth two shillings. I couldn’t find that as a common phrase, so it might just have been a chunk of marble.) 

As I wrote earlier, in 1765 the Boston selectmen found that “—— & his Mother” had brought the model to Boston. Was that Sultser’s widow Barbara and her son? Or had his heirs sold the model to a family who decided to travel and display in other seaports? 

Thanks, Sandi Hewlett!