Great Barrington Divided Against Itself

Yesterday I started to analyze a letter that Great Barrington militia colonel and politician Mark Hopkins wrote to the Massachusetts Council in March 1776. The town had formed two militia companies and elected militia officers, but a lot of the rank and file were coming to him with complaints about those officers.

Hopkins, little brother of the town’s Congregationalist minister, explained what he saw as the root of the problem:

It must be observed that the town consists of members of the Church of England and Dissenters [i.e., Congregationalists]; the former of which (a few excepted) have been very backward in all our late publick matters, and amongst us are denominated Tories. It is said that by their interest principally, the aforementioned officers were elected. They have never turned any men out for the publick service, which the other party have; and thus, being all present, are able to outvote the Whigs.

I was surprised to read about an Anglican church this far into the New England countryside. Most were in seaside communities where significant numbers of merchants and mariners had arrived after the early-1600s Puritan migration. In contrast, Great Barrington is in Massachusetts’s westernmost county.

It looks like geography was a big factor behind this Anglican outpost in the Berkshires as well: it was so far west that it was close to northern New York, and there was an overlap between Massachusetts’s claims and a patent issued by New York in 1705. The Great Barrington settlement therefore included a community of Dutch descent who had come east from Albany.

Those Dutch families preferred to worship more in the style of the Lutheran churches they had grown up with. The town’s adherents to the Church of England thus included men named Burghardt, Schermerhorn, and Van Deusen. The new church also gained support from some of the local gentry, such as David Ingersoll, Jr., a young lawyer from Yale like Hopkins.

Great Barrington’s Anglicans organized themselves into a parish in 1762 under the guidance of a minister from Connecticut. They started to build a church two years later. Gideon Bostwick, yet another Yale graduate, read the prayers before going to England to receive holy orders and coming back as the church’s Anglican minister in 1770. Five years later, Bostwick and his wardens could list fifty men who usually attended their services, and that was evidently a significant voting bloc in the town militia.

Having described the militia split, Hopkins discussed a possible solution based on what later generations called gerrymandering—but also said most locals weren’t ready to take that step:

A petition has been presented to me, signed by fifty-four persons, requesting an alteration in the division of said companies into East and West Companies [instead of north and south]. By the proposed new division, the main of those called Tories will be in the West Company. The petitioners imagine that, upon a choice according to this division, such officers would be chosen as would give general satisfaction. The other party say that this proposed division will give as great uneasiness as the present, and they, to the number of eighty-seven, have petitioned against the proposed new division.

The Field-Officers, upon the present appearance, are of opinion that, if the now proposed division had been made at first, it might have been for the best; but after we had proceeded to make a division, and a choice of officers has been made accordingly, thought ourselves hardly warranted to make a new division without the direction of the honourable Council; and the rest of the Field-Officers directed me to write to your Honours upon the matter. William Whiting, Esq., the Representative from the town, can fully inform your Honours of the difficulties and circumstances attending the whole matter, to whom we refer for that purpose.

I beg leave further to mention, that a part of this town, called the Hoplands, containing about thirty-eight men, is separated from the rest of this town by mountains, in such a manner that the people there cannot get to the place of parade here without travelling eight or ten miles. They lie contiguous to a part of Tyringham; we therefore determined that they should join that part of Tyringham, and so make a company; but upon notice, the said Hoplanders refused to join with Tyringham. They are so few that, by the act, they cannot be formed into a company by themselves; so that, as matters now stand, they must be obliged to join the North Company in this town; and yet they have had no voice in the choice of the officers, it not being known but that they would be willing to join with Tyringham till after the choice here.

We look to your Honours for direction in these matters, not doubting but the people will acquiesce in what your Honours shall direct in the premises.

I suspect this was the sort of problem that the legislature liked locals to work out for themselves, especially when they were on the far side of the province. But Hopkins wanted the authority of the General Court to act.

TOMORROW: Taking steps.

“The soldiers appear to be very uneasy with the officers elected”

Yesterday I quoted briefly from a letter that Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington sent to the Massachusetts Council on 30 Mar 1776. Hopkins’s whole report (as transcribed in Peter Force’s American Archives) is an interesting snapshot of how the New England militia system worked—and didn’t work.

Hopkins, born in 1739, was a young Yale-educated lawyer who had already represented his town in the General Court. In the spring of 1776 he became a militia colonel in Berkshire County, but, as he described, that regiment had problems:

Upon the receipt of the Militia Bill, and the order of the honourable Council conformable thereto, the Field-Officers of the Regiment which I have the honour to command, met, and divided the same into companies; and, amongst the rest, divided this town of [Great] Barrington into two companies, by a line running east and west through the middle of the same, having first taken off some of the out corners of the town, and placed them to other companies for their convenience.

After which division, the companies were brought to a choice of their officers, and chose those named in the list now sent to the Secretary. The Captains of each company were chosen by a bare majority of votes, and the Lieutenants but by a few more.

New Englanders probably had more elections than anyone else in the English-speaking world: for town officials and laws, representatives to the General Court, Congregationalist ministers, and, as in this case, militia officers. But they wanted to see strong majorities pointing to community consensus. A “bare majority” was troubling.

Since the choice, a large number of the soldiers appear to be very uneasy with the officers elected. Those of the South Company say that Captain Peter Ingersoll was broke last fall by the sentence of a Court-Martial in the Continental Army, and was then declared incapable of sustaining any office in the Continental service. The First Lieutenant, Timothy Younglove, they say is a Tory, and during the whole of our troubles has manifested himself unfriendly to the common cause, and openly opposed all the measures that have been recommended by the Congress; therefore that he ought not to have any command in the Militia.

Those in the North Company say that the Captain, Hewit Root, is advanced in years, and by frequent fits of the gout, or rheumatism, is rendered incapable of doing the duties of his office. They also object against the moral character and general conduct of the First Lieutenant; and the uneasiness in both companies has risen to that height, that they say they never will bear arms under these officers, so long as they are able to earn enough to pay their fines.

Hewitt Root was born in 1724, thus turning fifty-two in 1776. Despite being “advanced in years,” in 1777 he marched with his men to Fort Edward and back. As for Root’s first lieutenant, that appears to be William Pixley (1734-1800). I can’t find anything about his “moral character and general conduct.” Pixley lost his first wife and two children that fall. He later remarried and continued to fill political offices in Great Barrington during the war.

Ingersoll, Younglove, Root, and Pixley all owned taverns in Great Barrington. That reflected both how magistrates preferred to give licenses to well established property owners and also how tavern-keepers became popular in the community. David Conroy’s In Public Houses explores the cycle of influence those patterns produced.

Younglove’s tavern, “at the fork of the roads just west of Green River,” was remembered in local history as the “headquarters and place of rendezvous” for Loyalists, which helps to explain why people called him “a Tory.” That also raises the question of how the locals chose him to be a militia officer in the first place. (Younglove’s 1796 gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.)

Hopkins saw the explanation lying in a deeper split within his regiment and his town.

TOMORROW: “an alteration in the division.”

“Capt. Ingersoll was tried by a Court Martial”

In 1766, at the age of thirty-one, Peter Ingersoll opened a tavern and inn in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. (It still exists in greatly expanded form as a bed-and-breakfast called the Wainwright Inn, shown here.) He was from one of the town’s leading families, though not from one of its leading branches.

In 1775, Ingersoll was one of the town’s militia captains. News of the fighting at Lexington and Concord reached Berkshire County on 21 April. Ingersoll and his men assembled, and they marched east five days later. When Massachusetts organized an army for service to the end of the year, Ingersoll and many of the men signed on as part of Col. David Brewer’s regiment.

That regiment ran into problems in the fall. Col. Brewer was tried by court-martial and dismissed on 23 Oct 1775 for insisting that his son, also named David, be ranked and paid as a lieutenant. Such nepotism wasn’t uncommon, but in this case David Brewer, Jr., was back home in Berkshire County while his father was still collecting his pay. So that left the regiment leaderless, and perhaps resentful.

In early December, Capt. Ingersoll was brought up before another court martial—apparently at the regimental level since it’s not mentioned in Gen. George Washington’s general orders. Lt. Gamaliel Whiting of Great Barrington wrote in his diary, transcribed in Charles J. Taylor’s History of Great Barrington: “Dec. 4. Peter Ingersoll try’d by Court Marsh’ll.”

A more detailed account, and a different date, appear in the diary of Pvt. Samuel Bixby:

Dec. 7th, 1775. Thurs: Capt. Ingersoll was tried by a Court Martial for spreading false reports about the Country, tending to defame the General. He was fined £8, and dismissed the service. —

8th. Friday. The same Court fined one man £8.7s., and sentenced him to two years imprisonment in the New Gate Prison in Simsbury [Connecticut], for stealing & deserting; and another man, John Smith, for similar offences, was fined £8, and sentenced to six months at Newgate.

A third diarist, Sgt. Henry Bedinger of Virginia, also recorded court-martial verdicts on 7-9 December, overlapping with Bixby’s account, but not exactly. (He wrote that one man was named John Short.) So it’s not clear whose diary is most reliable. Yet it does seem significant that Bedinger didn’t mention Ingersoll’s case, nor have I found references to it elsewhere. Mike Sheehan was kind enough to look for the captain’s name in Summer Soldiers, James C. Neagles’s listing of more than 3,000 courts-martial in Continental Army records, and it’s not there. So was this proceeding deliberately kept quiet?

Perhaps manuscript records of this proceeding survive in some unexpected archive. They could offer details of what “false reports” Ingersoll spread and how they tended to “defame the General”—namely Washington. Was the tavern-keeper frustrated by the slow pace of the siege? Angry about Brewer’s dismissal? Pessimistic about the Patriot cause?

Whatever the details, Ingersoll went home to Great Barrington, probably in a huff. He went away without filing the paperwork the state would need to pay his men. Since it was already December, and people’s enlistments were up at the end of the year, his early return might not have been that conspicuous. (After all, David Brewer, Jr., had come back much earlier.)

Still, word got around town. The next March, after one of Great Barrington’s militia companies narrowly elected Ingersoll their captain, some men complained. New colonel Mark Hopkins described the problem to the Massachusetts Council:

a large number of the soldiers appear to be very uneasy with the officers elected. Those of the South Company say that Captain Peter Ingersoll was broke last fall by the sentence of a Court-Martial in the Continental Army, and was then declared incapable of sustaining any office in the Continental service.

By July, Ingersoll was out of Hopkins’s regiment and in another, still a captain. But I don’t know how long that lasted. Ingersoll died in 1785.

Local histories—even the one that quoted a neighbor and fellow officer saying he went before a “Court Marsh’ll”—treat Capt. Peter Ingersoll as an admirable contributor to the American cause. They say nothing about how he was cashiered for defaming Gen. Washington.

TOMORROW: Trouble in the Berkshire County militia.

“Rhode Island’s Revolutionary Artillery” in Newport, 8 Dec.

On Thursday, 8 December, I’ll speak at the Newport Historical Society on the topic “The Launch of Rhode Island’s Revolutionary Artillery.” I wrote about that development in The Road to Concord, but for this talk I’m assembling more information and analysis.

Here’s the event description:

In December 1774, the Rhode Island Assembly voted to move almost all of the cannons in Newport’s Fort George to Providence in order to, as the governor stated, “prevent their falling into the hands of the King.” The Assembly also formed a new “Train of Artillery,” a military company assigned to use those cannon to defend the colony. Oddly, however, the train’s commanders were from Boston. Within a few months, Rhode Island’s artillerists became one of the most respected units of the new Continental Army.

What links the Boston Tea Party, Providence’s First Baptist Meetinghouse (shown here),  and Rhode Island’s new Train of Artillery? That’s one of the new topics I’ll discuss. I may even venture an explanation about why Rhode Island suddenly promoted Nathanael Greene from a mere private in the Kentish Guards militia company to general in command of its “Army of Observation” around Boston.

This talk will start at 5:30 P.M. in the society’s Resource Center at 82 Touro Street. Admission is $1 for members and active and retired military personnel, $5 for others. To reserve seats, visit this webpage or call 401-841-8770. I’ll happily sign copies of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War afterward.

Oney Judge and “the President’s Wishes”

As I reported yesterday, George Washington has been our richest President so far. Most of his property consisted of land, both plantations in Virginia and unsettled claims to the west, and slaves. A lot of those slaves had come to his wife Martha or her children, inherited from her first husband’s family, and George felt obliged to preserve that wealth.

When the federal government moved to Pennsylvania in 1791, that state’s law gradually ending slavery posed a problem for the Washingtons. If they brought their household servants to Philadelphia—and how could a rich couple live without their household servants?—then those people were entitled to be free after six months in the state.

On 24 April Washington’s plantation manager, Tobias Lear, wrote to him about what the U.S. Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, had said about that law:

But he observed, that if, before the expiration of six months, they could, upon any pretence whatever, be carried or sent out of the State, but for a single day, a new era would commence on their return, from whence the six months must be dated for it requires an entire six months for them to claim that right.

Lear then discussed the specific situations of several enslaved people, including: “Mrs Washington proposes in a short time to make an excursion as far as Trenton, and of course, she will take with her Oney & Christopher, which will carry them out of the State; so that in this way I think the matter may be managed very well.”

Oney Judge was Martha Washington’s personal maid. She had been born at Mount Vernon around 1774. Judge was part of Martha’s property, and the First Lady planned to bequeath her to a granddaughter. So the Washingtons made sure that she was never in Pennsylvania for six months at a stretch.

Five years after Lear’s letter, on 21 May 1796, Judge slipped away from the Presidential mansion. She later told an interviewer, “I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.” Frederick Kitt, the President’s steward in Philadelphia, placed an advertisement seeking Judge in the 24 May Philadelphia Gazette.

At the end of June, Thomas Lee, Jr., wrote from New York to President Washington in response to, as he wrote, “the desire you expressed that I should make enquiry about your runaway Woman.” Lee reported a cook saying that Judge had gone north to Boston, and he planned to make inquiries there. Washington knew multiple men named Thomas Lee, and I’m not sure which one this was, but he appears to have been pursuing Judge as a private favor.

Later that summer Elizabeth Langdon, daughter of Sen. John Langdon, recognized Oney Judge on the street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Slavery was already unenforceable in that state. According to Washington’s understanding, Langdon “was about to stop and speak to her, but she brushed quickly by, to avoid it.”

The President moved to track Judge down—but instead of continuing his efforts through private channels, he began to use the resources of the federal government. On 1 Sept 1796 he wrote to his Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott:

Enclosed is the name, and description of the Girl I mentioned to you last night. She has been the particular attendent on Mrs Washington since she was ten years old; and was handy & useful to her, being perfect a Mistress of her needle. . . .

Whether she is Stationary at Portsmouth, or was there en passant only, is uncertain; but as it is the last we have heard of her, I would thank you for writing to the Collector of that Port, & him for his endeavours to recover, & send her back: What will be the best method to effect it, is difficult for me to say. If enquiries are made openly, her Seducer (for she is simple and inoffensive herself) would take the alarm, & adopt instant measures (if he is not tired of her) to secrete or remove her. To sieze, and put her on board a Vessel bound immediately to this place, or to Alexandria which I should like better, seems at first view to be the safest & least expensive. But if she is discovered, the Collector, I am persuaded, will pursue such measures as to him shall appear best, to effect those ends; and the cost shall be re-embursed & with thanks.

The “Collector” was Joseph Whipple (1738-1816, shown above), the head of the Customs service in Portsmouth and thus a federal employee who answered to Wolcott. He had held the same position for the state of New Hampshire until 1789, and the new President had reappointed him on John Langdon’s recommendation.

Whipple wrote back to the Treasury Secretary on 10 September, “I shall with great pleasure execute the President’s wishes in the matter.” The next month, on 4 October, he wrote again, telling Wolcott that Judge had expressed “a thirst for compleat freedom” as well as “great affection & reverence for her Master & Mistress”; she was (at least initially) willing to return to Mount Vernon if the Washingtons guaranteed her freedom on their deaths.

The President replied directly to Whipple on 28 November, rejecting those terms. He also told the Collector:

…you would oblige me, by pursuing such measures as are proper, to put her on board a Vessel bound either to Alexandria or the Federal City; Directed in either case, to my Manager at Mount Vernon, by the door of which the Vessel must pass; or to the care of Mr Lear at the last mentioned place, if it should not stop before it arrives at that Port.

I do not mean however, by this request, that such violent measures should be used as would excite a mob or riot, which might be the case if she has adherents, or even uneasy sensations in the minds of well disposed Citizens. rather than either of these shd happen, I would forego her services altogether; and the example also, which is of infinite more importance. The less is said before hand, and the more celerity is used in the act of Shipping her, when an opportunity presents, the better chance Mrs Washington (who is desirous of receiving her again) will have to be gratified.

Again, this wasn’t government business. Washington was asking Whipple to do him a big favor, one gentleman for another. But Whipple was a federal government employee, and he owed his position to Washington. Today that would strike us as a clear conflict of interest.

There’s more to Oney Judge’s story, and the Washingtons’ pursuit of her. Today I’m just looking at how having the resources of government presents a great temptation to a President with private interests.

How Rich Were the Early Presidents?

Wikipedia’s entry on the wealth of U.S. Presidents has been updated with an estimate—and, in the absence of full financial disclosure, it can only be an estimate—of President-elect Donald Trump’s wealth.

The original source for the other estimates is this article and chart from 24/7 Wall St.

Until 2017, these articles say, the richest U.S. President by far was George Washington. He had extensive land holdings, many slaves, and uncommonly successful plantations. Other southern planters—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson—are also high on the list.

More recent very wealthy Presidents include several men who inherited large fortunes, such as Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, though none as large as the one Trump received on the death of his father. In the twentieth century we also see men who rose from modest upbringings to fortunes through business or marriage, such as Herbert Hoover and Lyndon B. Johnson.

This list estimates the net worth of Presidents at their height. In this modern media age, that height for some Presidents came after they left office as they earned money from memoirs, speeches, and other rewards of celebrity. In the case of Bill Clinton, his wife’s earnings are bundled with his own—which takes us back to how Washington became rich in the first place.

Lyndon B. Johnson was the first President to create a “blind trust” to insulate himself from his businesses—primarily radio stations that came to him through his wife. But biographer Robert Caro found that Johnson secretly stayed in touch with the both the general manager of the station and the primary manager of that trust.

After Watergate, Congress passed laws requiring government employees to either put their assets into a true blind trust or to divulge all those assets publicly, so that the public and press can look for conflicts of interest. Since 1989 the President is no longer liable to criminal prosecution for breaking that law, but it’s still an important ethical guideline.

After all, even George Washington faced the temptation to use the assets of the federal government for his own private benefit, as I’ll discuss next.

TOMORROW: The Treasury Department and Oney Judge.

Weather Report for 4 December 1775

Last month Timothy Abbott shared on Facebook a glimpse of life in the British camp on Bunker’s Hill in late 1775. After the battle of 17 June, the British army had fortified those heights, securing the whole Charlestown peninsula from the Continentals.

On 26 Jan 1776, Abbott found, the Derby Mercury of Britain ran a brief “Extract of a Letter from an Officer in the Camp on Bunker’s Hill, dated Dec. 4”:

You would be amazed how I am able to write at this Instant, for it Hails, Rains, Snows, and blows very bleakly on my Canvass House. The Regulars and the Provincials squint at one another like wild Cats across a Gutter, and it is very probable we shall keep our Distance till the Cessation of the Winter enables us to open the Campaign.

I decided to look for how the American troops were experiencing the same weather on 4 Dec 1775. Did they complain about how it “Hails, Rains, Snows, and blows very bleakly”? Were they huddled in their barracks and around their fires?

And I found Pvt. Daniel McCurtin of the Maryland riflemen writing:

December 1st, 1775. 1, 2, 3. I have seen nothing of note,…Yet those 3 days were fine days and clear weather.

10. From the 3rd untill this day I heard nothing material…During this time the weather has been very favourable.

Hmm. Well, Pvt. James Stevens of Andover noted a little poor weather the morning before:

Sunday Des the 3 I workt on the Baruk it raind som in the fore nune

Down in Plymouth, on 4 December the Continental naval agent William Watson reported “warm weather” to the commander-in-chief’s aide Stephen Moylan. So warm that it “had a very happy influence on the minds of the people” on board a ship who had refused to sally out against the Royal Navy; “The brig sailed Sunday afternoon [3 Dec] and has had fine weather ever since.”

So the officer writing from Bunker’s Hill wasn’t huddled up against the snow and wind. He was actually experiencing a fair, warm day in his “Canvass House.”

To be sure, the two armies had experienced far worse weather in the preceding month. Here’s how McCurtin reported those days:

• 12 November: “A very blustering cold frosty day”
• 17 November: “monstrous deep frost. This day its as good as 5 inches deep and very blustering winds. Last night I stood Picquet, I never yet felt such cold.”
• 18 November: “Cold frosty weather and snow.”
• 19 November: “Desperate cold weather, snow, frost and high winds.”
• 25 November: “Still continues colder and colder.”
• 26 November: “a severe cold day, frost, snow, high winds, and rain sometimes.”
• 27 November: “Very cold weather.”

So that British officer had experienced a New England chill up on Bunker’s Hill—just not when he actually wrote. He had saved up that story to tell the folks back home.

New Education Center at the Paul Revere House

Years back, I gave a teachers’ workshop at the Paul Revere House in the North End. It took place upstairs in the neighboring Pierce-Hichborn house.

As I recall, we had about two dozen people crowded into a small, irregularly shaped room with sloping ceilings. It really gave one a sense of what it must have been like to live in that neighborhood in a family of fourteen.

Now the Paul Revere House has a lot more space. This weekend it opens its new Education and Visitor Center at Lathrop Place. The museum bought another neighboring building—an old tenement put up in 1835—and fixed it up into new exhibit, meeting, sales, and office space. In the process, the Revere house became wheelchair-accessible as well.

All told, this project required raising more than $4 million and overseeing extensive construction. As museums have to do these days, several of the new spaces are named for donors. Thus, there’s an Revere Education Room, a Curtis Classroom, and a Citizens Bank Enrichment Center [get it?].

I visited the new building last night along with other friends of the site. It’s a very impressive expansion—all the more impressive when one sees photographs of the same rooms before renovation. Lathrop Place will be open to the public all this weekend. There will be refreshments, music, and demonstrations of tinware and basketmaking.

This diorama is part of a new permanent exhibit about Revere’s many businesses, including as a silversmith, engraver, and dentist. It shows pre-industrial production in Revere’s shop.

Ben Edwards, Boston tour guide and Revere descendant, told me that this scene was originally made for the Boston Museum of Science maybe fifty years ago. After years on display there, the diorama was retired. Later, when that museum decided to throw it out deaccession it, a manager called to ask if the Paul Revere House wanted it. The scene spent several more years in storage until the house had just the right spot to display it, and now it does.

To go with its new building, the Paul Revere House also has a new website with good resources for people who can’t get to the North End.

Putting Down Rebels

The first ten issues of the Rebels comic book have been collected in a single volume from Dark Horse.

The series was conceived and scripted by Brian Wood on the model of his Northlanders series about Vikings: a variety of stories—different characters, different points of view, different lengths—all drawn one from extended historical conflict.

Most of this volume consists of a story titled “A Well-Regulated Militia,” illustrated by Andrea Mutti; it tracks a soldier from Vermont through the war. Then come much shorter stories following two women, a Native American, a British soldier, and (as seen through the eyes of the hero of “A Well-Regulated Militia”) a black Loyalist; each of those stories has art from a different artist.

I looked at the first issue of Rebels back in August 2015. I hoped the comic’s depiction of Revolutionary events would improve. It didn’t.

In a word, the historical content of this book is godawful. Wood presents such events as the conflict over land grants in Westminster, Vermont; the mission to bring heavy cannon from Lake Champlain to Boston; and the battles of Bunker Hill, Harlem Heights, Saratoga, Cowpens, and more. He mixes real people in with his original characters. But very little is accurate.

The errors aren’t at the level of “The author hasn’t read the latest scholarship” or “He hasn’t read Don Hagist’s guest posting about Pvt. Mathew Kilroy leaving the British army in 1776.” They’re more like “He didn’t bother to check Wikipedia for basic information.” Or if he did, he ignored it.

For example, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill, with Gen. George Washington and Benedict Arnold nearby. Henry Knox heads out to Fort Ticonderoga in the summer of 1775, already a major general. A sergeant, not an officer, commands an artillery company. The Continental Navy flag of late 1775 (the “Grand Union Flag”) flies over a British fort in the Ohio Valley in 1755. Every long firearm is called a “rifle.”

Many errors reveal not just carelessness but basic misunderstandings about the Revolutionary conflict and the society in which it took place. Sometimes those arise from old nationalist assumptions. Thus, we see army regulars getting involved in real-estate disputes in the New England backcountry. The one British soldier we meet in depth is forced to enlist to avoid prison. Sometimes the problems grow out of modern inclusive preferences, not acknowledging how different society was. A woman of color owns a printing press in Boston, operates it entirely on her own, and posts anti-Stamp Act placards years after the Stamp Act has been repealed—which causes the British army to lock her up in Connecticut’s New-Gate Prison. And some errors are just plain errors: U.S. military officers interview people about government pensions instead of distant civil bureaucrats making the decision as they almost always have.

The art is quite good, in a range of realistic styles. Wood often gives the artists free rein for dramatic pages, sometimes wordless. But there are visual anachronisms blazing on every spread. Eighteenth-century British-American men appear with sculpted beards, mustaches, and sideburns. Women wear modern hairstyles and no caps. Civilians often appear in nineteenth-century clothing. Mounted hussars with tall, furry caps charge up Breed’s Hill. An 1802 dining room features furniture, fenestration, and houseplants out of the 1980s.

Even forcing myself to read this collection as stories from another universe, not rooted in Revolutionary history, left me unimpressed. In the first episode the hero and his father shoot at a group of redcoats. One teenager in uniform makes the choice to desert and ends up part of the hero’s family—but we’re just told about that change in a caption. We never see that character make a decision. We never see the family decide to take him in. And we never see major consequences from that arrangement—the character and the potential drama fall away.

A second volume of the Rebels series is slated for next year, following the son of the hero of “A Well-Regulated Militia” through the naval conflicts of the early republic. At this point, I don’t expect much better.

John McMurtry: “He did not know it was loaded”

On 1 Dec 1775, Pvt. Aaron Wright, stationed in Cambridge, wrote in his diary about a fellow rifleman:

John M’Murtry, in Capt. [James] Chambers’ company, killed John Penn, by his rifle going off, when, he says, he did not know it was loaded. He was cleaning the lock, and put it on and primed it to see how she would “fier.” It shot through a double partition of inch boards, and through one board of a berth, and went in at Penn’s breast, and out at his back, and left its mark on the chimney. Penn put his hand on his breast, and as he turned round, fell down dead, and never spoke more.

I haven’t been able to find out anything more about John Penn.

John McMurtry was in his early twenties. He grew up in Somerset County, New Jersey, but went to Pennsylvania to sign up with a rifle company after the Continental Congress started to raise troops for its newly adopted army in June 1775.

After the shooting, McMurtry reenlisted in the Continental Army for the following year. In fact, he was promoted to corporal on 1 July 1776. According to his pension application, he saw action at White Plains, Trenton, Brandywine, Paoli, and Germantown.

McMurtry recalled becoming a sergeant major and then an ensign on 1 Oct 1779. He resigned from the army on 1 Aug 1780. But then, he said, he went to Philadelphia and signed aboard a privateer named the Fair America under Capt. Stephen Decatur.

McMurtry and his new wife settled in what became Tennessee. He died in 1841. His pension application did not mention John Penn or any other event of note during the siege of Boston.

“On the floating zephyrs of heaven”

When we left off the 1859 book Twelve Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams, the spiritual medium Joseph Stiles had just channeled Adams’s meeting in the afterlife with George Washington.

Washington’s presence leads to another discussion of the evils of slavery. The spirit of Charles Follen, Harvard professor and abolitionist, joins in.

Having brought on Washington, where could the book go next? The next message puts Adams back into conversation with the spirit of Peter Whitney. Who? He was a minister in the Adamses’ home town of Quincy from 1800 to 1843. The two longtime acquaintances have a longer discussion about the spiritual world. A much longer discussion.

Message XI then shows us jubilant freed slaves, Jesus forgiving Judas, and James Monroe—which seems like a bit of an anticlimax.

The spirits divide into four groups. The leaders of the first three groups are, naturally, Josephine, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon. Adams says, “The Commander of the Fourth Division now arrests my attention. He was an intelligence. of invincible will and firmness, yet ever yielding when convinced he was in the wrong”—Thomas Paine!

Adams praises his mother, recalling how they watched the smoke from the burning of Charlestown in 1775. Abigail responds at equal length, describing how America needs good mothers.

Finally we reach the twelfth message. It starts with a look at “The Sphere of Prejudice and Error,” which includes “The Circle of Intolerance,” “The Circle of Bigotry,” and so on. The people who carried out what the book calls the “Massacre of St. Bartholomew” are there, for instance. Reflecting a deep misunderstanding of Islam, Muslims are in “The Circle of Idolatry,” though “the once partially inspired Spirit of the Prophet Mohammed had long since unfolded into the blessed Religion of the Only True God,—the Ever-living Jehovah.” And thus we conquer intolerance and bigotry.

But there’s still more to learn.

Helping Franklin to produce the defecated electricity are Isaac Newton and other scientists. They feed its charge to a circle of Native Americans including Samoset, Osceola, and Pocahontas.

Adams then turns back down to visit George Jeffreys, Lord Chancellor during the “Bloody Assizes” of the 1680s. We read another critique of the Fugitive Slave Act. Adams sees the martyr Jane Grey leading spirits to enlightenment. He describes welcoming “Calhoun, Clay, and Webster” to the afterlife. And after checking off all those boxes the former President offers readers a closing exhortation:

Ye who are travelling the ways of darkness, come forward, and aid us to start this Juggernaut of Truth on its glorious march of victory, until the Demon of Error, and its hideous children, Ignorance, Superstition and Bigotry, are crushed out of existence, beneath the ceaseless rotations of its ponderous wheels!

But that’s still not all! Just as Stiles finished writing Adams’s last message, “another spirit…immediately took possession of his arm.” He wrote out a letter to Adams from another spirit in a different handwriting. This is none other than George Washington again, expressing regret at slavery:

I am aware that the holding of human beings in bondage was incompatible and at war with the mighty cause for which I was so vigorously contending. And gladly would I have rid myself of this incubus to my happiness,—this source of deep mental anxiety. But the strong prejudices of that age were not easily surmounted, and they wound around me a fortress which my better feelings and impulses could not then storm.

After Adams’s brief reply, Stiles wrote out the signatures of “five hundred and forty individuals,” all in different handwritings and some in unintelligible scribbles so we know they must come from ancient cultures. And anyone who can write out five hundred different people’s signatures has got to be trustworthy.

Now it turns out that the notebooks in which Stiles originally wrote all this out survive in the Library of Congress. (To get there, by the way, they passed through the hands of Harry Houdini.) John Benedict Buescher has investigated those documents and shared his findings in this P.D.F. report.

Sadly, Buescher discovered that the text Stiles wrote under the influence of John Quincy Adams’s spirit is quite different from what was published. Material was moved around, shortened, lengthened, and reworded. Hancock, Henry, Warren, Arnold, and others originally made no appearances in Adams’s messages. So I’m sorry to say that the published book is not a reliable account of the afterlife.

Buescher also explored the reception for the book. William Lloyd Garrison, who actually gets a shout-out of praise from Adams’s spirit, responded with less than enthusiasm in The Liberator:

While, with unfeigned respect and good-will to Mr. Stiles…, we feel constrained to pronounce the claim set up for the spiritual origin of this work as preposterous and delusive, we are nevertheless highly gratified with its many excellent and fearless sentiments on the subject of slavery, war, the rights of woman, universal reform, and everlasting progression…

The Spiritual Telegraph, which we might expect to praise these revelations, stated:

We rather regard them as coming from that mid-region of dreams and phantasmagoria which is made up of the exuviae and odds and ends of all celestial, infernal and mundane spheres, agglomerated into mental and visual forms correspondent with the predominant associative spirit-thought and desire, and with the existing mediative susceptibilities.

And The Spiritual Age stated:

In fact, so markedly is the style throughout that of an uncultivated youth, and so different from what we should expect from the “Sage of Quincy,” the “Old Man Eloquent,” that it is difficult to believe he had any hand—or anything more than a hand—in it.

But then the Civil War broke out, and the parts of the book that warned of national division over slavery—particularly the parts said to come from Washington himself—gained new respect. “Had the people of this country been sufficiently enlightened to investigate these messages fairly, they would have seen that there was sufficient evidence that this warning really came from Washington,” wrote Joseph Rodes Buchanan in 1887.

Joseph Stiles went on to a long career as a performing medium. He died in Weymouth in 1897 at the age of sixty-nine.

The Afterlife of John Quincy Adams

There’s a pretty fierce competition for the strangest Revolution-related book that I’ve encountered this year, but one very strong competitor is Twelve Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams, through Joseph D. Stiles, Medium, to Josiah Brigham, prepared for the press by Allen Putnam and published in Boston in 1859, eleven years after Adams’s death.

At the beginning of the book Brigham attested:

The messages contained in this book, coming from the immortal spirit of John Quincy Adams, were written out in manuscripts, at various times, at my house in Quincy, Mass., and at the house of my son-in-law, C. F. Baxter, Boston, during the last four years, through the hand of Joseph D. Stiles, medium, when in an entranced state, and who, at the time of writing them, was unconscious of what was being written.

The whole was written in an almost perfect fac-simile of that peculiar, tremulous handwriting of Mr. Adams in the last years of his earthly life,—a handwriting which probably no man living could, in his natural state of mind, so perfectly imitate, and which is wholly unlike the usual handwriting of the medium.

The writing of these messages in manuscript was commenced in August, 1854, and closed in March, 1857. The medium (in trance] commenced copying and revising them for publication about the first of April following, and finished in June, 1858, making some additions and some omissions.

So what did the spirit of John Quincy Adams have to say? The book explains that he has discovered a “Celestial Telegraph” which works as “a thin line of clarified electricity” extending from a “Spiritual Circle” and lets him visit Earth through various mediums. (Media?)

Other figures from the American Revolution show up in the book, rather like the Florentines whom Dante meets in Hell. None other than John Hancock welcomes Adams to the afterlife. John and Abigail Adams are pleased to see him as well but don’t say anything particularly parental at first—they must have moved beyond earthly concerns.

Then two more spirits appear “in full military costumes, similar to those worn by the soldiers during the Revolutionary War”—none of those white robes. One comes forward and turns out to be…Lafayette! Adams was President when Lafayette made his return tour of America in the 1820s, after all.

Adams gets to meet Christopher Columbus and “Americus Vespucius,” which leads to a long discussion of scientific discoveries, such as spiritualism. For example, “The so-called Salem Witchcraft” turns out to have been “the attempt of spirits to manifest their presences to earth’s children.” Too bad about the people who were hanged and crushed to death.

Back to Revolutionary celebrities: John André, “dressed, not in a flowing robe, but in a British uniform”! Joseph Warren! Patrick Henry! Benedict Arnold!

Benedict Arnold? “Desiring to eradicate, as far as possible, the sins of his mortal career, and to become a useful member of Celestial Society, he earnestly sought the instruction of Higher Minds, and other means necessary to insure happiness and a perfect unfoldmept of his spiritual faculties.” So this book offers hope for everyone.

And the sight of a repentant Arnold leads swiftly to a condemnation of “the Fugitive-Slave Bill” and what it says to people seeking freedom:

No! Massachusetts cannot give
The boon thy soul doth fondly crave;
The poor and panting fugitive
Must on her soil Remain a slave!

Her Bunker Hill, where patriot blood
In freedom’s cause was freely spent,
Cannot a shelter give to thee
Beneath its tow’ring monument!

There’s a lot of anti-slavery rhetoric in this book, and a lot of poetry, too. Which makes perfect sense, since John Quincy Adams did devote a lot of time to both activities.

After some mild adventures, Adams and Lafayette ascend higher, thus reaching the same sphere as “William Penn, Shakspeare, Mary Washington, Augustine Washington, Martha Washington, Hannah More, Felicia Hemans, Jane Grey, Josephine, Elizabeth Frye, John Howard, Peter Whitney.” Followed by “Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, Israel Putnam.”

Then Napoleon, the Duke D’Enghein, Joan of Arc, Peter Melanchthon, William Ellery Channing, Confucius, François de Fenelon, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Elias, and, high above the others, Christ. Followed by Mary and Joseph.

But whom haven’t we heard from yet? Finally in the ninth message George Washington appears to speak to Adams—though their conversation gets interrupted by Martin Luther, of all people. Adams rhapsodizes about Washington:

Can any one doubt but that spirits from the immortal world sustained him through all the disheartening trials and almost unendurable sufferings of Valley Forge,—cheered his heart, and those of his desponding soldiers when they were so heroically laboring to release their dear native land from the clutches of a tyrannical potentate and his myrmidons?

Myrmidons including, you know, André.

TOMORROW: But wait, there’s more! We’re only up to Message IX.

Between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen

Today instead of writing about books I’ll write about a podcast about books.

Earlier this year Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the British magazine The New Statesman, hosted six conversations for its podcast Hidden Histories. That first series of recordings is titled “The Great Forgetting,” and it focuses on the early history of the British novel.

The standard summary of that topic presents a progression through Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and a few other authors before getting to Jane Austen. And there’s nothing wrong with those novelists. (Well, except Richardson.)

Yet in that eighteenth century most British novels were written by women. Likewise, people expected women to be the main audience for most novels, so many if not most novels were about women. So how does that usual list of British novelists before Austen contain nothing but men?

“The Great Forgetting” aims to unearth the female novelists who worked before Austen, and the female literary society that existed in 1700s Britain. Lewis’s interlocutors are Sophie Coulombeau, Elizabeth Edwards, and Jennie Batchelor, scholars at different British universities. Their six conversations are on these topics:

• Re-writing the Rise of the Novel: whom do conventional accounts of the era overlook?
• Bluestocking Culture: how did women become writers?
• Sociable Spaces: what did it mean to have a magazine by women?
• Unsex’d Females: women writers and radical politics
• Fight Club: who’s the most interesting female writer of the eighteenth century?
• The Great Forgetting: why are the authors we remember mostly men?

For people who enjoy exploring eighteenth-century fiction (as well as essays, histories, biographies, poetry, plays, and other literary forms), the conversations will provide some long reading lists. The podcast page also includes links to supporting articles, such as this article about the Whig historian Catharine Macaulay. The recordings can all be downloaded from iTunes. I enjoyed them.

Studying Musket Balls with Daniel M. Sivilich

One of the folks who contributed expertise to the “Parker’s Revenge” project I discussed yesterday is Daniel M. Sivilich, president of the Battlefield Restoration and Archaeological Volunteer Organization and author of Musket Ball and Small Shot Identification.

Starting on the Monmouth battlefield in the late 1980s, Sivilich has been collecting musket balls and other metal shot—which isn’t that hard in New Jersey, the “crossroads of the American Revolution.” But he’s also analyzed and categorized those artifacts in ways that shed more light on them, and thus on the lives of soldiers and the action of battles.

The “Parker’s Revenge” project found 32 musket balls; 31 showed signs of having been fired, and the last one was pristine enough to have been dropped. Sorting the fired balls by weight produced a clear pattern: those found at the expected British position were on average lighter than the balls found around the provincial position. That data matched the hypothesis of the Lexington militiamen firing at the British with smaller-caliber muskets and then withdrawing under fire from the regulars’ heavier shot.

I got to hear Sivilich speak about his work toward the end of this project. Among other topics, he spoke about chewed musket balls. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers accused their enemies of chewing musket balls in an attempt to poison whomever they wounded, as shown in quotations here. Later, as Sivilich wrote in his first paper from 1996 (P.D.F. file), authors came to associate biting on a musket ball with soldiers undergoing painful surgery.

Sivilich has indeed found some balls with the imprints of human teeth. But more often, he’s concluded since publishing that paper, the very chewed-up balls found on battlefields came out of pigs’ mouths, not humans’. This page from Jefferson Patterson Park in Maryland discusses some of the evidence. Another way Sivilich investigated that question? Chewing on a piece of shot to test how much distortion a human jaw could cause. (Not that much.)

Musket Ball and Small Shot Identification doesn’t stop there. In his review of the book for the Journal of the American Revolution, Don Hagist wrote:

Several chapters of this book are devoted to the different ways that spherical lead projectiles were misshapen: imprecise casting; impressions made by ramrods, multiple projectiles, and fabric patches during loading; and the wide range of deformation caused by impacts. If you’ve wondered how a ball that struck a fence rail different from one that hit a tree, or how to distinguish a ricocheted ball from a spent one, this book will explain it with words and pictures.

Over 300 pictures, in fact. Let’s face it: this book is a detailed dive into a technical subject. But for folks working on eighteenth-century battlefield archeology, it’s a must.

The Final “Parker’s Revenge” Archeology Report

Last month the Friends of Minute Man National Park published the final report on the Parker’s Revenge Archeological Project. I first posted about this project back in 2012 when it was just getting started, then shared periodic updates based on lead archeologist Meg Watters’s public presentations.

Now Watters has finished her formal report, and anyone can download it from this page. The Friends announced:

Technologies utilized in the research informed formal excavations and 1775 battlefield reconstructions. These methods included: 3D laser scanning, GPS feature mapping, and geophysical surveys including metallic surveys, ground penetrating radar, magnetic gradient and conductivity/magnetic susceptibility.

Taken together, the technologies enabled researchers to locate a farmhouse that figured prominently in the battle terrain, to recreate the actual 1775 battlefield landscape and battlefield features and even to model exactly what combatants could and could not see at various positions along the battle road.

Artifacts discovered included 29 British and colonial musket balls from the battle. The location and spatial patterning of the musket balls recovered enabled archaeologists to interpret the exact positions where individuals were standing during the battle—and then outline battle tactics most likely deployed.

The findings appear to validate the local tradition—stated early but without detail—that Lexington militiamen took some shots at the British column as it returned to their town from Concord. Since many of those same militiamen had been on the town common under Capt. John Parker that morning, when the regulars fired the first fatal shots of the war, a twentieth-century historian dubbed the skirmish “Parker’s Revenge.”

For folks who want to read the report, be aware that in P.D.F. form it comprises 35 megabytes of data. My download from the Friends of Minute Man site stopped several times, so I had to keep an eye on it to poke the restart button.

The report contains over 300 pages with more than 100 illustrations, most in color. Those illustrations include photographs of artifacts and researchers, maps of the field, and charts. Unfortunately—and this is the biggest shortcoming of the report in P.D.F. form—many of those maps have blurry text and lines, making them hard to interpret.

This is a scientific report and a government report (not produced by the government, but for a government agency). As such, it includes a lot of information that’s necessary for future study but may not interest more casual readers. There are a lot of blank pages, a list of every artifact found in the study, and transcripts of discussions among experts assembled a year ago.

The portions I found most interesting are:

• pages 51-65, on the original verbal sources about the event and how historians have described and interpreted it.
• the detailed recreation of the skirmish based on the new evidence, pages 153-197.
• for technical details, descriptions of the field work (pages 81-99 and 140-150) and the recreation of land use in 1775 (pages 103-121).

This project was a big undertaking. We should be grateful to Watters, the Friends and their donors, Minute Man National Historical Park, and all the enthusiastic volunteers who made it happen.

(The image above, by Kyle Zick, appears in the report. It shows the British column moving east into Lexington. See that rock outcrop at the rear center? That’s going to be trouble.)

Book Talk at the Massachusetts State Library, 29 Nov.

I’m pleased to report that The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War is now available in digital form for both the Kindle and Nook readers, as well as through iBooks.

I suppose that as a modern author I should add a plea to people who have enjoyed the book to post reviews of it at those online retailers or others, or at Goodreads. But I’m very slow at rating and reviewing products at such sites myself. So all I can say is that if you’re already in the habit of posting book reviews on a website you like, please consider addressing The Road to Concord as well. Thanks!

On Tuesday, 29 November, I’ll speak at the State Library of Massachusetts inside the new State House. (The one with the dome, not the one with the lion and unicorn.) That’s a lunchtime talk, noon to 1:00 P.M., on Beacon Hill, and I’ll sign books afterward.

Given the venue, and given how I already spoke about Boston’s militia cannon at the State House in 2013, I couldn’t resist titling this talk “Overthrowing the Government of Massachusetts: The Bottom-Up Revolution of 1774.” Our event description:

Published earlier this year, The Road to Concord explores the confrontations in New England that led up to the Revolutionary War. It starts with the action-packed days of September 1774, when a spontaneous rural uprising overthrew the royal government of Massachusetts outside of Boston. In the following months, the colony’s Patriots worked to build up a military force. Meanwhile, the British military, under the leadership of General Thomas Gage, tried to thwart those efforts. Central to this story are four small brass cannon belonging to the colonial militia that were smuggled out of Boston by radical Patriots and subsequently located by British spies on a farm in Concord. For different reasons, both the Patriots and Gage strove to keep these guns out of their public reports. In his thoroughly documented book, Mr. Bell argues that these little-known episodes sparked the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

This talk will focus on the “Powder Alarm” that opens the book and sets off New England’s “arms race.” I’ll look forward to seeing folks on Tuesday in Room 341 of the Massachusetts State House.

“Half a dozen cooks were employed upon this occasion”

In the spring of 1761 there was an argument in the pages of Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette over whether the dinner to celebrate the installation of a new minister at the Old South Meeting-House had been too elaborate.

The initial report called the celebration “very sumptuous and elegant,” and declared “many poor People were the better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a Feast.”

But then a correspondent identifying himself as from the countryside declared the event a “disgusting” contradiction of ministers’ disapproval of “Feasting, Jollity and Revelling.” On 11 May 1761 that writer described what he understood of the meal itself:

There were six tables, that held one with another 18 persons, upon each table a good rich plum pudding, a dish of boil’d pork and fowls, and a corn’d leg of pork, with sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of mutton with caper sauce, a piece of roast beef, a roast line [loin] of veal, a roast turkey, a venison pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter.

Half a dozen cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine, punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit.

The cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money.

Which was, indeed, an awful lot.

Caroline Cox’s Young Continentals

Caroline Cox’s Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution was published earlier this year by the University of North Carolina Press.

Unfortunately, Cox, a professor at the University of the Pacific, passed away in 2014. She hadn’t finished writing all the book’s introductory material and may not have polished the text as much as she’d planned after feedback from her colleagues.

Cox’s friends pushed the book through to completion. Robert Middlekauff, author of The Glorious Cause, provided a foreword to take the place of the preface and acknowledgments Cox never got to write.

As published, the book shows no obvious yawning gaps, but there are some potholes. The most obvious glitch is on page 52: in the middle of a long quotation appears “(CHK),” Cox’s note to herself to go back and confirm that transcription. (I’m likewise dubious about the five exclamation points on page 144.) Daniel Granger of Andover, who served in the siege of Boston, is referred to as “David.” And I came away from the book wondering if Cox might have added a further layer of analysis to pull everything together if she’d just had more time with this manuscript.

Cox’s earlier book, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army, explored the class differences between officers and enlisted men in the Continental Army. She returned to the same main set of sources—Revolutionary War pension applications—for Boy Soldiers, focusing on pensioners who had joined the army at the age of sixteen or younger. In addition, Cox drew on a few memoirs of long-lived soldiers, the recollections from men of the same age who didn’t go to war, the experiences of American boys who fought in other wars before and after the Revolution, and general studies of childhood.

Many young Continentals were musicians, others became servants for officers, but some were (at least nominally) infantrymen. Smaller muskets, lighter drums, and the introduction of fifes into martial music made it possible for boys to fill those roles in the eighteenth-century military, Cox wrote. At the same time, British-American society was raising the age at which it expected males to do such work, so there would be far fewer under-seventeen soldiers in the War of 1812.

Often boys enlisted with their older brothers, fathers, or other relatives. Even if they were the only family members to go to war, the way the Continental Army was organized meant soldiers usually served in a company with their neighbors. “Boys rarely served without being near someone they knew,” Cox concluded.

During the Seven Years’ War, the book reports, soldiers had a poor reputation and American families had tried to keep their young sons out of the army. The Revolutionary War was different, perhaps because the cause seemed more immediate or more noble. Many veterans recalled their fathers or even their mothers encouraging them to enlist. And perhaps the Continental enlistment terms were better.

On privateers, boys usually earned half of a man’s share. In farm work, they tended to be paid about two-thirds of a man’s wages. In contrast, the Continental Army made no distinction between a fifteen-year-old soldier and a twenty-five-year-old—they got equal pay. (For many young soldiers that pay remained abstract, however; the money went to a relative or guardian.)

After the first years of the war, local drafts were the usual way for young soldiers to enter the Continental Army. A household would become responsible for supplying a soldier, and an adolescent with a greater sense of adventure and lesser responsibilities seemed like the best candidate, even if he was under seventeen. Cox wrote, “When young boys of any race substituted for their fathers and other male relatives or friends, they gave no indication later that they felt exploited. Indeed, the vast majority of substitutes, men or boys made no comment upon it other than that it happened.”

We can catch glimpses of distinctions based on age or size. At Fort Plank in New York’s Mohawk Valley, two fourteen-year-old boys had to do soldiers’ duty while a thirteen-year-old didn’t. On the other hand, Capt. Thomas Price brought his ten-year-old Thomas along to war on the Carolina frontier because he was so tall that his father feared Tories might treat him as a legitimate target at home.

Every so often Boy Soldiers shows us its subjects in all their naïveté. Two fourteen-year-olds finished their Continental enlistments at the end of 1777 and headed home. Unfortunately, their families lived in Philadelphia, which the British army had just occupied. The royal authorities quickly detained the young veterans, interrogated them, and even threatened to hang them as spies. Ultimately, the Crown let those teens go, apparently deciding that they really were stupid enough to expect they could simply go back to being boys.

To her regret, Cox did not find much information about non-white combatants. Around one in ten Continental soldiers was African-American, she estimated, but she found few examples of black boys serving in the army. Perhaps those veterans didn’t live long enough to apply for pensions. Perhaps their ages aren’t so clear from the records.

In her effort to provide context for the young soldiers’ lives, Cox mined other sources on eighteenth-century American childhood—sometimes without making a clear connection to those soldiers. There’s a long paragraph on charitable schools, for example, even though none of the book’s examples attended one. Boy Soldiers discusses violence as part of child-rearing in the eighteenth century, but it remains unclear how young soldiers compared military discipline to what they were used to at home.

To get inside her subjects’ heads, Cox chose a novel interpretive technique that just didn’t work for me. In each chapter, after quoting and analyzing some sources about a particular boy, she launched into a new section headed “Perhaps it was like this:”. Then three or so pages offer an attempt to recreate that young soldier’s experience through his eyes based on various suppositions.

Thus, Cox wrote, young fifer John Piatt “had never seen so many people in one place” as when he came to camp. But we don’t read that from Piatt himself. Such details could indeed add drama in historical fiction, but while reading this book I keep imagining other possible scenarios. “They all had to learn to play their fifes,” Cox wrote, and I couldn’t help but recall how John Greenwood learned to play for militia training days years before he ran off to join the army. Cox posited that as busy officers John Piatt’s father and uncle had no time for him, but other fathers who took their young sons to war kept them close.

Sometimes that approach even seems to get in the way of the evidence. Cox discussed John Jenks enlisting as a drummer in the 5th Connecticut Regiment in 1780, so small that he was assigned a special drum. (In this book Cox said Jenks was ten years old while her chapter in James Marten’s Children and Youth in the New Nation described him as twelve; Jenks wasn’t sure himself, according to his pension documents.) Because of Jenks’s unusual youth, and an awkward accusation of forgery, the U.S. government suspended his pension. In response, Jenks “repeatedly explained how he came to enter the army at such a young age” to various authorities. Instead of seeing his words on that topic, however, we shift into a “Perhaps it was like this:” section.

Of course, there’s only so much that those pension records can tell us. I’m particularly interested in the coming-of-age process and boys’ efforts to prove themselves as men. Memoirs may simply have more room to expound on those themes than pension applications, which focused on the basic details of service. Cox’s Boy Soldiers mines that set of sources well, and will be invaluable for future study of the topic, but I think there’s more to be gleaned about those young Continentals.

Tom Feelings and Revolutionary Black History

I had the honor of meeting the artist Tom Feelings shortly before his death in 2003 when I drove him to a writers’ conference in New Hampshire.

Feelings was then speaking about his monumental book of drawings depicting the transatlantic slave trade, The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo. He had earlier illustrated such award-winning children’s books as To Be a Slave by Julius Lester and Moja Means One by Muriel Feelings.

Feelings’s career as an illustrator spanned nearly half a century. On returning from service in the Air Force in 1958, he created a comic strip for the New York Age, a Harlem weekly. At a time when mainstream American culture ignored almost all of African and African-American history, Tommy Traveler: In the World of Negro History put those stories in front of young black readers.

In 1991 Black Butterfly Books collected several series of Feelings’s strip, had them colored and relettered, and published them in picture-book form. The new title was Tommy Traveler in the World of Black History. That volume is now out of print, but some libraries still have copies.

Tommy is a young black boy who’s read all of his local library’s books on black history. The librarian sends him across town to Doctor Gray, who has an extensive library. Tommy starts reading, and “with his active imagination he quickly slides into another world,” ending up alongside various historical figures. Two stories in the Tommy Traveler collection take place during the American Revolution.

The strip began by taking Tommy to New York in 1776 for an eight-page story set at the Fraunces Tavern. In the mid-1900s there was a widespread belief that its proprietor, Samuel Fraunces, was of African descent. That was evidently based on his nickname, “Black Sam”; his birth in the Caribbean; and his work as a caterer. But at a time when black men were labeled “Negro” in legal documents, there’s no corroboration that Fraunces was black, and his portrait shows a pale man.

The story starts with Tommy meeting the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Phoebe. Again, there’s no evidence Samuel Fraunces had a daughter of that name. She first appeared in a story in the January 1876 Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, inspired by a tale that Benson J. Lossing had told sixteen years earlier. Thus, in depicting Samuel and Phoebe Fraunces as part of African-American history, Feelings was retelling a myth, but one that many earlier authors had already presented as true.

In Feelings’s version, Tommy sees that Phoebe has fallen in love with a soldier named Tom Hickey, a deserter from the British Army to the Continentals. Gen. George Washington is also staying at Fraunces’s inn (as in Lossing, but not in historical sources). Hickey gives Phoebe a poisoned pear to feed to the general, but—warned by Tommy—she knocks it out of the general’s hand just before he eats it. (Lossing wrote that the poison was in a dish of peas.) Hickey goes to the gallows, as his real-life equivalent did in 1776.

Later in this collection, Tommy travels to 1770 for a fourteen-page story. Working on a ship called the Romney, he meets Crispus Attucks. This black man turns out to be a political leader on the streets of Boston, calling meetings and announcing such things as: “Otis is right. Stand up and fight for your rights!” The crowd roars back, “Lead us and we’ll follow!”

Again, Feelings’s depiction reflects how the few African-American history books published at that time portrayed Attucks. They showed him as a leader of the crowd—which he was on the night of 5 Mar 1770, according to other men’s testimony, but which he probably wasn’t when it came to political organization. The comic strip doesn’t mention Attucks’s Native American heritage. Indeed, the character speaks of being “sold into slavery when I was just a young boy.”

Attucks’s protests against Crown taxes lead to a fight against mitred grenadiers. Captain Preston orders a soldier named Montgomery to capture “that tall, dark fellow” as the crowd’s leader. Instead, the soldiers fire their guns, killing Attucks and other men. Tommy identifies his friend by name to Lt. Gov. Hutchinson, adding, “His beliefs won’t ever die. Someday we will have our independence, someday…”

Other stories in this volume profile Aesop, Joe Louis, Frederick Douglass, and Emmet Till (killed only three or four years earlier). In the eighteenth-century tales, the clothing and hair styles (especially women’s) are a hodgepodge of past fashions rather than appropriate for the 1770s. The stories are dreadfully didactic. As for the art, Feelings was talented but not yet practiced. All in all, Tommy Traveller is interesting as a period piece—a snapshot from early in the modern civil-rights era of how African-Americans were making their rightful claim to have been part of western civilization all along.

About a decade after Tommy Traveler ran its course, Feelings returned to the story of Crispus Attucks in the comic book Golden Legacy. Bertram Fitzgerald developed that series, he stated, to “implant pride and self-esteem in Negro youth while dispelling myths in others.” The third issue is titled “Crispus Attucks and the Minutemen.” (Other issues cover Toussaint L’Ouverture, Benjamin Banneker, and figures from other historical eras.) Reprints are still available. I haven’t seen the Attucks issue, but I assume it reflects the same understanding of the Boston Massacre as in Tommy Traveler.

In depicting African-American history, Feelings’s masterpiece remains The Middle Passage.