“A comma in the middle of a phrase”

Here’s one last posting about Angelica (Schuyler) Church, for now. In the early years of the republic, she exchanged letters with a lot of American political men, and some of those letters seem flirtatious. Among those correspondents was Thomas Jefferson, whom Church met through the artist Maria Cosway.

Some authors writing about Church’s brother-in-law Alexander Hamilton take it as a near certainty that the two of them had a sexual affair: Willard Sterne Randall in Alexander Hamilton, Arnold Rogow in Fatal Friendship, Warren Roberts in A Place in History. Other authors say they just played at flirting, or never acted on their attraction, or that it’s simply impossible to know.

Me, I’m not sure Hamilton was even in Angelica Church’s league—not when her husband John Barker Church was around to supply both money and excitement. And if they were having a secret affair, I’d think they’d be less flirtatious in the letters each probably shared with his or her spouse. But it’s impossible to know.

The Hamilton show on Broadway presents the two in-laws’ relationship as an unconsummated yearning, mostly on Angelica’s part. That comes through most in a number titled “Take a Break,” in which Angelica sings:

In a letter I received from you two weeks ago
I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase
It changed the meaning. Did you intend this?
One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days
It says:
“My dearest Angelica”
With a comma after “dearest.” You’ve written
“My dearest, Angelica.”

In his surviving correspondence Hamilton never wrote “My dearest Angelica,” with or without a comma. (He did write “my dear Angelica” in three letters between 1794 and 1803.)

The inspiration for that verse clearly comes from an exchange between Angelica Church and Alexander Hamilton in 1787. In the first letter, Church wrote:

You had every right my dear brother to believe that I was very inattentive not to have answered your letter; but I could not relinquish the hopes that you would be tempted to ask the reason of my Silence, which would be a certain means of obtaining the second letter when perhaps had I answered the first, I should have lost all the fine things contained in the Latter. Indeed my dear, Sir if my path was strewed with as many roses, as you have filled your letter with compliments, I should not now lament my absence from America: but even Hope is weary of doing any thing for so assiduous a votary as myself. I have so often prayed at her shrine that I am now no longer heard. Church’s head is full of Politicks, he is so desirous of making once in the British house of Commons, and where I should be happy to see him if he possessed your Eloquence.

Hamilton wrote back in December:

You ladies despise the pedantry of punctuation. There was a most critical comma in your last letter. It is my interest that it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental. Unriddle this if you can. The proof that you do it rightly may be given by the omission or repetition of the same mistake in your next.

So Mr. Church resolves to be a parliament-man. I had rather see him a member of our new Congress; but my fervent wish always is that much success may attend all his wishes. I am sincerely attached to him as well as to yourself.

Hamilton signed that letter “Adieu ma chere, soeur” (Adieu my dear, sister), to drive home the joke about punctuation. Or was it a joke?

In any event, it was Hamilton, not Church, who read meaning into a misplaced comma and wondered what it meant about the other’s affections. Hamilton even invited Church to repeat the “the same mistake” in her next letter. If she did, that document is lost. The next letter we have is from late 1789, and Church wrote:

Adieu my dear Brother, may god bless and protect you, prays your ever affectionate Angelica ever ever yours. . . . Adieu my dear Hamilton, you said I was as dear to you as a sister keep your word, and let me have the consolation to beleive that you will never forget the promise of friendship you have vowed. A thousand embraces to my dear Betsy, she will not have so bad a night as the last

No commas out of place there, plus a mention of his wife and of “the promise of friendship…as a sister.”

Angelica Church wrote that letter just as she finished a visit to New York without her husband, and some authors think that was when she and Hamilton consummated an affair. But it’s impossible to know.

John Barker Church: “the mere man of business”?

So was the marriage of Angelica Schuyler (shown here) and John Carter/John Barker Church happy? We don’t have a body of correspondence between them as we have for, say, John and Abigail Adams. But their marriage lasted until their deaths, and they certainly enjoyed good circumstances.

In 1780 Carter became partners with former Continental Army commissary general Jeremiah Wadsworth (1743-1804) of Connecticut as the main supplier for Gen. Rochambeau’s troops in North America. The French needed food and supplies for thousands of men.

Unlike the Continental Congress, whose paper money was rapidly losing value, France could pay in specie. Wadsworth and Carter got a cut of everything they supplied. They also gained excellent credit they could use for their other ventures, and money they could lend other businessmen. As a result, by the end of the war, Wadsworth and Carter were very rich.

In August 1782 James McHenry wrote to Alexander Hamilton from Baltimore:

Mr. Carter is the mere man of business, and I am informed has riches enough, with common management, to make the longest life very comfortable. Mrs. Carter is a fine woman. She charms in all companies. No one has seen her, of either sex, who has not been pleased with her, and she has pleased every one, chiefly by means of those qualities which make you the husband of her Sister.

The next July, the Carters and Wadsworth headed to France to collect their final payments. Sometime in 1783, Carter revealed his real name: John Barker Church. There’s no evidence of when he told his wife about that part of his past. By that fall, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay knew about it, though the couple still went by “Carter” for a few months longer.

Finally, the family headed to Britain, and at that point they came out permanently as the Churches. At the end of 1784, Abigail Adams wrote to a sister from London, “Mr. and Mrs. Church are here too, alias Cartar. Mrs. Church is a delicate little woman. As to him, his character is enough known in America.”

Back in Britain, Church quickly paid off the debts that he had left behind in 1774 and reestablished himself in business. He bought a house on Sackville Street in London. He bought a country house near Windsor. The couple entertained widely, not just among the American community—one of John Barker Church’s gambling friends was the Prince of Wales.

We might think that a rather boring, aristocratic life compared to the drama of nation-building that brother-in-law Hamilton threw himself into in America, but John Barker Church was also interested in politics. He was part of the radical Whig faction, causing George III to call his principles “avowedly enemical.” In 1787 he ran for Parliament and lost. The following year, Church took another approach: he bought a rural estate which came with a parliamentary seat, and put himself up for that seat in 1790.

By then the French Revolution was roiling Europe, and Church was decidedly on the side of reform. He opposed Britain’s war measures and hosted French exiles at the height of the Terror. In addition, he:

• financed Charles James Fox, leader of the Whig left, with big loans he was never able to collect on.
• bankrolled an attempt to break Lafayette out of a Prussian prison on 1792. (One of these days I’ll tell that story.)
• helped Talleyrand sail to America in 1794 after Britain suddenly expelled him.

After six years in Parliament, Church gave up his seat, sold his estate, and headed back to the U.S. of A.

In 1797 Robert Morris went bankrupt. Church was one of his creditors, and to settle the debts he took over a great many of Morris’s western land claims. A few years later, the Churches’ oldest son Philip went to a tract in western New York and founded the town of Angelica, named after his mother. John Barker Church himself commissioned a mansion in Belmont called Belvidere.

Meanwhile, Church kept busy in the New York business world. He underwrote loans and was a director of the Manhattan Company and the Bank of North America. The Churches had eight children between 1778 and 1800, most of them living a long time. And still their life was full of drama. John Barker Church fought a duel with Aaron Burr five years before Hamilton did. In fact, Church was the family expert on affairs of honor, supplying the pair of pistols that his nephew Philip Hamilton and his brother-in-law used in their fatal confrontations.

Angelica Church died in 1814. John Barker Church returned to his native Britain and died four years later. He wasn’t a brilliant writer or political theorist, but he certainly wasn’t boring.

TOMORROW: A last word, and comma, from Hamilton.

“Even the Carters could not shut their hearts against us”

As I described yesterday, John and Angelica Carter moved from Albany, New York, to Boston in late 1777, John aiming to go into the business of supplying the Continental Army.

Another large group of people made a similar journey a few weeks later: the “Convention Army” of British and Hessian prisoners of war after the Battles of Saratoga. Gen. John Burgoyne and his troops marched to the outskirts of Boston, where Gen. William Heath and the civil authorities scrambled to find them housing.

Among those prisoners was Baroness Frederika von Massow Riedesel (shown here), wife of Gen. Friedrich Adolph Riedesel of Brunswick, and their three youngest daughters. In Albany that family stayed with Gen. Philip Schuyler. After traveling to Cambridge, the baroness looked up Angelica Carter, the Schuylers’ eldest daughter.

In her memoir, translated from the German and published in America in the early nineteenth century, the Baroness Riedesel wrote:

None of our gentlemen were allowed to go into Boston. Curiosity and desire urged me to pay a visit to Madame Carter, the daughter of General Schuyler, and I dined at her house several times.

The city, throughout, is pretty, but inhabited by violent patriots, and full of wicked people. The women, especially, were so shameless, that they regarded me with repugnance and even spit at me when I passed by them.

Madame Carter was as gentle and good as her parents, but her husband was wicked and treacherous. She came often to visit us, and also dined at our house with the other generals. We sought to show them by every means our gratitude. They seemed, also, to have much friendship for us; and yet, at the same time, this miserable Carter, when the English General [William] Howe had burned many hamlets and small towns, made the horrible proposition to the Americans to chop off the heads of our generals, salt them down in small barrels, and send over to the English one of these barrels for every hamlet or little town burned down; but this barbarous suggestion fortunately was not adopted.

I haven’t found confirmation that Carter actually said this, but the baroness clearly believed he had. And if he’d said it in her presence, even as a joke, as the wife of a general working for the British king she had every right to be alarmed.

On the 3d of June, 1778, I gave a ball and supper in celebration of the birthday of my husband. I had invited to it all the generals and officers. The Carters, also, were there. General Burgoyne sent an excuse after he had made us wait till eight o’clock in the evening. He invariably excused himself, on various pretenses, from coming to see us, until his departure for England, when he came and made me a great many apologies, but to which I made no other answer than that I should be extremely sorry if he had gone out of his way on our account.

We danced considerably, and our cook prepared us a magnificent supper of more than eighty covers. Moreover, our court-yard and garden were illuminated. As the birthday of the king of England came upon the following day, which was the fourth, it was resolved that we would not separate until his health had been drank; which was done with the most hearty attachment to his person and his interests.

Never, I believe, has ”God save the King” been sung with more enthusiasm or more genuine good will. Even both my oldest little daughters [Gustava and Frederica, ages six and four] were there, having staid up to see the illumination. All eyes were full of tears; and it seemed as if every one present was proud to have the spirit to venture to do this in the midst of our enemies. Even the Carters could not shut their hearts against us.

As soon as the company separated, we perceived that the whole house was surrounded by Americans, who, having seen so many people go into the house, and having noticed, also, the illumination, suspected that we were planning a mutiny, and if the slightest disturbance had arisen, it would have cost us dear.

The house where the Riedesels lived in Cambridge and hosted this occasion still stands on Brattle Street, though it’s been moved and remodeled.

TOMORROW: Back to the Carters’ marriage, and the unveiling of John Barker Church.

“There is no undoing this gordian knot”

We left Angelica Schuyler and John Carter in the house of her mother’s family near Albany, New York, in July 1777.

They had just eloped and were hoping that her father, Gen. Philip Schuyler, would accept their marriage.

The couple had apparently asked the general in advance for his permission to wed, and he had refused. He complained that he knew almost nothing about Carter, a young Englishman in exile who had come to his home the year before to audit army accounts for the Continental Congress.

If Gen. Schuyler had known all about Carter—that he was really named John Barker Church, that he had left Britain to escape a scandal, that that scandal was a duel or a bankruptcy, or maybe even both—he probably wouldn’t have been any more pleased.

But there were limits to patriarchal authority, even then. Schuyler had plenty on his mind already with Gen. John Burgoyne marching an army down from Canada. He had several other daughters and sons to worry about. His wife’s family seems to have supported the young couple. So the general gave in.

In the same letter in which he revealed the marriage to William Duer, Schuyler wrote:

But as there is no undoing this gordian knot, I took what I hope you will think the prudent part: I frowned, I made them humble themselves, forgave, and called them home.

The Carters returned to the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, shown above.

In September, John Carter wrote to the Congress asking that he be replaced as one of the auditors for the Continental Army’s Northern Department. He said that “important business requires his immediate presence in Boston.” The Congress probably saw that it wouldn’t do to have a man checking the books created in part by his own father-in-law, so it quickly gave him leave to resign. The Carters moved to Boston, and John went into business supplying the army.

Gen. Schuyler didn’t forget the brief estrangement from his eldest daughter. Three years later, on 8 Apr 1780, he wrote to the young American colonel who had asked for his daughter Betsy’s hand:

Yesterday I had the pleasure to receive a line from Mrs Schuyler in answer to mine on the subject of the one you delivered me at Morris town [New Jersey]; she consents to Comply with your and her daughters wishes. You will see the Impropriety of taking the dernier pas [last step—i.e., the actual wedding] where you are. Mrs. Schuyler did not see her Eldest daughter married. That also gave me pain, and we wish not to Experience It a Second time. I shall probably be at Camp In a few days, when we will adjust all matters.

Col. Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler married on 14 December at the Schuyler Mansion.

TOMORROW: A glimpse of the Carters in Boston.

“I have found a wealthy husband”?

Folks who spotted the name of Angelica Schuyler in yesterday’s posting might immediately have thought of last year’s Broadway sensation Hamilton.

Angelica is a major supporting role in the play. Renée Elise Goldsberry first played the role and won a Tony Award for it. (Another notable performance came from Joshua Colley in the “Miscast” benefit concert, shown here; click on the picture for the video.)

In that show, Angelica is the first Schuyler sister to meet Alexander Hamilton in 1780. She steps away when she realizes her younger sister Eliza is more interested. As she explains in a number titled “Satisfied”:

I’m a girl in a world in which
My only job is to marry rich
My father has no sons so I’m the one
Who has to social climb for one
So I’m the oldest and the wittiest and the gossip in
New York City is insidious
And Alexander is penniless
Ha! That doesn’t mean I want him any less

Later Angelica marries a rich, boring man, though she’s full of silent regrets about not pursuing Hamilton. In “Non-Stop” she sings:

I am sailing off to London
I’m accompanied by someone who always pays
I have found a wealthy husband
Who will keep me in comfort for all my days
He is not a lot of fun, but there’s no one
Who can match you for turn of phrase
My Alexander

So if that’s Angelica Schuyler’s story, her elopement with the mysterious English adventurer “John Carter” (actually John Barker Church) couldn’t have lasted, right?

In fact, Schuyler family is one of the parts of history that Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda took the most liberties with. To begin with, Gen. Philip Schuyler had three sons. All three married into other wealthy, politically active Dutch New York families—the Van Rensselaers, the Ten Broecks, and the Rutsens. One became a U.S. Congressman. The family fortunes didn’t depend on Angelica’s marriage.

In notes on “Satisfied” Miranda wrote:

I actually forgot that Phillip had 15 children. But I think that my brain wanted me to forget because it’s stronger dramatically if societally she can’t marry you. And in reality, she was married when they met.

She was married when Hamilton came into the Schuyler sisters lives. Moreover, “Helpless” and “Satisfied” are a microcosm for the whole story which entirely depends on who tells it.

To me, it’s extremely effective to see the courtship from Eliza’s perspective, then rewind the whole thing and then tell it again. Angelica, while she and Hamilton are soul mates, she reads him in a second and knows she can’t marry him so she lets her sister marry him to keep him in her life. I definitely had to take a dramatic license.

But here’s the rub: In a world not centered on Alexander Hamilton, one could hardly find more drama than Angelica Schuyler deciding to run off with John Barker Church in 1777. His past was even more shadowy than Col. Hamilton’s, his behavior more dangerous, and his prospects more dubious.

TOMORROW: So will that marriage be saved?

“Carter and my eldest daughter ran off”

On 26 July 1776, the Continental Congress commissioned three men “to liquidate and settle the accounts in the northern department” after the unsuccessful invasion of Canada.

The three men the Congress selected were “Mr. James Milligan, Mr. John Carter, and Mr. John Wells.” I don’t know anything about Milligan and Wells, but Carter was an interesting choice for this job. He’d come to America from London less than two years before.

Obviously, the twenty-seven-year-old had convinced members of Congress that he had the accounting skills they wanted and was loyal to their cause. The New York politician William Duer, who himself had arrived from England in the early 1770s, was telling people that Carter “though young in years is an old fashioned english Whig.”

As of 31 October, according to a letter from the Congress’s auditor general to the New Hampshire assembly, the three commissioners were in Albany. There they worked closely with Gen. Philip Schuyler, the commander of the Continental Army’s Northern Department (shown above). Schuyler hadn’t gone into Canada himself, but he’d overseen the logistics of that campaign.

In March 1777, the commissioners sent the general a letter, possibly wrapping up their audit. The same month, the Congress entrusted Carter with $1,380 to deliver to Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., the deputy paymaster for the northern army. In May the Congress considered all three men’s salary, approving payment to them of $3,444—“26 July to 9th May, inclusive, 287 days, at four dollars each per day.”

That summer, Carter was back in Albany, possibly flush with Continental cash. We know that because on 3 July Gen. Schuyler wrote to Duer:

Carter and my eldest daughter [Angelica] ran off and married on the 23d inst. [i.e., of this month]. Unacquainted with his family, his connections and situation in life, the match was exceedingly disagreeable to me, and I had signified it to him.

This letter is usually interpreted as saying that the couple eloped on 23 July. But Schuyler couldn’t have written on the 3rd about an event that would surprise him three weeks later. Perhaps the couple married on 23 June, and Schuyler mistakenly wrote “inst.” instead of “ultimo”—last month. Or perhaps Schuyler wrote this letter on 30 or 31 July and Benson Lossing got the date wrong when he published it in 1873.

Right after the marriage, Angelica and John Carter went to stay with her mother’s family, the Van Rensselaers, hoping her father would change his mind. Gen. Schuyler was upset that he didn’t know about his putative new son-in-law’s “family, his connections and situation in life.” He would probably have been even more angry if he’d known that John Carter wasn’t even John Carter.

Carter’s real name was John Barker Church. He was indeed a well-born English businessman, and there are competing stories of why he’d left London:

• According to descendants, Church feared he’d killed a man in a duel or brawl; “wishing to avoid arrest, he left his hat and broken sword in the street and fled by ship ready to sail to America.”
• Church had gone bankrupt as a grocer (i.e., wholesaler), as shown by contemporaneous notices in the London Gazette and Gentleman’s Magazine in 1774. Later an anonymous book called The Whig Club claimed that “after several mornings spent unsuccessfully at the Stock Exchange, and as many nights passed equally unpropitiously at A——n’s coffee-house, in F—t-street [gambling], he found himself a considerable sum worse than nothing.”
• Finally, there’s a suggestion in a letter to Gen. Horatio Gates that Church had absconded from his London partners with a huge sum in gold, “leaving his hat and sword in a London field, from which his friends were to assume that he had been murdered.” (Those are the words of Schuyler biographer Don Gerlach.)

None of those stories looked good, of course. It’s striking how Church or his family seemed to prefer the story of the duel over that of bankruptcy, but if the bankruptcy also involved embezzlement or accusations of it, that might make sense. It’s also conceivable that all stories hold some truth, that Church’s financial problems brought on violent clashes, or vice versa, with angry accusations to follow. Whether Church’s twenty-year-old bride Angelica Schuyler knew any of that history is unclear.

COMING UP: Can this marriage be saved?

The First Step in Preserving the Jason Russell House

The Massachusetts Historical Commission and the town of Arlington just granted the Arlington Historical Society a $15,000 grant to study what is necessary to preserve the Jason Russell House.

The society explains:

The Jason Russell House is listed both on the State Register of Historic Places and the National Register, and has both local and national significance as the site of the most intense fighting between retreating British soldiers and local civilians on April 19, 1775. It is currently interpreted as a historic house museum, owned and operated by the Arlington Historical Society. This captivating story is interpreted for the public through docent-led tours and a robust education program for area schools.

Not only does the Jason Russell House present the story of an important event in American history, but is also a tangible connection to the past. Successive owners did little to alter the original house. As a result, the house retains much of the original historic features, including musket ball holes from 1775.

The Society purchased the home in 1923, and has been able to maintain the home for intervening decades, however some urgent preservation needs have arisen and a considerable amount of restoration work is needed. This Study will become the core planning document, guiding and prioritizing projects, and ensuring that all conservation and rehabilitation projects are within standards for historic preservation.

More specifically, Russell built a two-room house in 1740, then added two more. “Decorative changes around the windows and front door and an ell were added in the 19th Century,” the house’s webpage says. The Russell family lived in the house until 1896, and many of its current furnishings come from them.

“Life, liberty, land, to each other begrutch”

Here to celebrate the New Year is the verse that the newsboys of Boston’s Independent Chronicle created at the end of 1797.

It’s an interesting example of the dynamic Leon Jackson described in the essay I quoted yesterday. The boys wanted money. They appealed to their customers’ sense of charity. Yet they also represented that money as part of a gift exchange, in which they offered their donors entertainment and a blessing.

The CARRIERS
of the
INDEPENDENT CHRONICLE,
to Their
Patrons and Friends!

Independent, dependent, depending,
The CHRONICLE lads, for once, are seen bending;
Not bending like party, that’s bent on one side;
But bent like Tom Bowling who curves to the tide;
That is in plain English, or French, if you chuse;
We BEG once a year, for hat, coat, and shoes;
Not caring, as beggars, who gives us the pence;
Both Beggar and Chooser, is want of good sense.

Since Custom ordains, that good wishes must greet,
Our PATRONS and FRIENDS, in or out of a seat;
And blessings and prayers from the mill grinding rhyme,
Like mill-stone and wheel move in musical time;
We, therefore, complying with custom’s old law;
The cat-gut well rozin’d; the fiddle see saw;
Thus strike at a tune—Your CASH quick to follow;
The beast-moving bard resolv’d to beat hollow:—

And first we implore, that the world of mankind,
In FREEDOM, and PEACE may their happiness find;
Nor Briton, nor Frenchman, nor Spaniard, nor Dutch,
Life, liberty, land, to each other begrutch;
While the States of the Union and Union of States,
War, faction, plague, famine remov’d from their gates;
Belov’d; beloving, respected, and fear’d;
May last, till Time’s razor shaves off the world’s beard.

Amen, to these wishes, the world must reply;
And say you can leave us to perish and die?
To perish in stockings, and die in old shoes!
Why, who would a nine-pence, or shilling refuse?
’Tis but little we ask; that little impart
And added to prayers, we’ll bless you in heart.

CHRONICLE-OFFICE, Boston, Jan. 1, 1798.

“Tom Bowling” was the name of an archetypal British sailor as portrayed in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and a song by Charles Dibdin (1788).

Carriers’ New Year Messages—“often tip the newsboy”

Longtime Boston 1775 readers know that every year ends and/or begins with some “carrier verses”—the doggerel that newspaper apprentices wrote, printed, and distributed at the turn of the year to earn a few coins for themselves.

The library at Brown University has a website devoted to those broadsides, though almost all are from the early 1800s and not the Revolutionary era. In addition to good digital images of those pages, the site includes helpful introductory essays by Mary T. Russo and Leon Jackson.

Jackson’s essay, which was also published in Common-Place, explains the form in both literary and commercial terms:

The typical newspaper carrier’s New Year’s address—as they were known—began with a salutation to the customer; mythologized the newsboy as the embodiment of Hermes or Mercury, messenger to the Gods; summarized the news of the year in brisk and vivid couplets; and concluded with a plea for money. Appearing first in the 1720s in sporadic numbers, the vogue for addresses caught on in the 1760s, and by the end of the eighteenth century almost every newspaper issued one. . . .

The challenge of the addresses lay in identifying precisely the sort of economic arrangement of which they were a part. Was it a form of extortion, a kind of gift exchange, an instance of charity, a variety of purchase, or some other part of the economic repertoire? . . . The monies associated with carriers’ addresses…were not quite a payment for delivery, since this was included in the cost of the paper; they were not quite charity, since something was given as well as received; and they were not extortion, because of the ongoing nature of the relationship between the carrier and the customer, both of whom knew one another; yet they could not be considered gifts either, since they were not exchanged between equals but given to lower-class men by their social betters. The concept of the tip would seem to capture perfectly the nature of the carriers’ transaction in its ambiguity, its scripted, ritualized nature, its awkwardness, and its potential for social transgression, and I was at first quite happy to call the money the carriers’ received tips. That seemed easy enough.

The only problem is that even though the word tip was used in its modern sense as early as 1733, at precisely the same time that the carriers’ addresses were starting to appear, tip does not appear in even one of the seven hundred or so addresses at which I looked. The money for which the carriers asked was, rather, described as a “boon,” a “bounty,” “a gift,” a “blessing,” “a present,” “a reward,” a form of “charity,” and much else. Indeed, every economy other than tipping was invoked. This surfeit of names led me to three provisional conclusions. Firstly, even as they bestowed addresses on their customers, the carriers were seeking to define the transactions in which they were engaged in terms of economies other than tipping. Secondly, such acts of economic designation obscured the precise—which is to say tipping—nature of the transactions in question. And lastly, this obfuscation was designed to give what was essentially a discretionary bestowal the force of an obligatory act. While tipping, in essence, demanded something for nothing, the economic labels invoked by the carriers’ addresses, as one of them explained, required “something for something.” . . .

In eighteenth-century America, Christmas gift exchange was marked by a powerful reciprocity: one gave a present and received one back, or on the other hand, one received a present and then offered a counter-gift. In arguing that what they were due from their customers was nothing more than a gift well-earned and deserved, the carriers often described a number of gifts they had, or would, offer in return. Typically, the carriers pointed to the broadside poem itself, which they depicted as a gift to their patrons and for which they expected a gift of money in return. . . .

The carrier for the 1791 Baltimore Gazette exploited the reciprocity inherent in this form of exchange still more when he concluded his address by writing,

Then Masters kind reward the Boy,
Whose labours brings the News
To oblige you is his chief employ
The GIFT you’ll not refuse.

His careful use of syntax helps to obscure whether the gift that will not be refused is the broadside the carrier is handing to his customer or the money the customer is giving him in return.

More common still was the practice of making the traditional seasonal gift of a blessing. “I wish you a happy new year,” wrote one Massachusetts diarist in 1838, “is sounded from all most all lips.” Benedictions likewise run rampant through the carriers’ addresses, in which customers receive an endless barrage of May you alwayses, May you nevers, and May you oftens. A typical carriers’ blessing took the form of the hope that the customer would always be rich, never be poor, and often tip the newsboy.

TOMORROW: A few lines from the boys of the Independent Chronicle.

What the United States Are/Is

In the U.S. Constitution, “United States of America” is a plural noun, as in:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. . . .

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Today we refer to the “United States” as a singular entity. And lots of people trace that change to the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s. That idea got a big boost in 1988 when historian James McPherson write in Battle Cry of Freedom:

Before 1861 the two words ‘United States’ were rendered as a plural noun: “the United States are a republic.” The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun.

Two years later, historian Shelby Foote gave that statement an even bigger boost by echoing it in Ken Burns’s Civil War television series and accompanying book.

In 2005 Ben Zimmer at Language Log dug back into the record, finding expressions of the idea as early as the 24 Apr 1887 Washington Post:

There was a time a few years ago when the United States was spoken of in the plural number. Men said “the United States are” — “the United States have” — “the United States were.” But the war changed all that. . . . The surrender of Mr. Davis and Gen. Lee meant a transition from the plural to the singular.

In 1902 the U.S. House of Representatives’s Committee on Revision of the Laws decided that henceforth Congress should refer to “the United States” as singular.

In 2009 (after Language Log got a new design), Marc Liberman started exploring the idea through historic newspapers, Presidential speeches, and Supreme Court decisions. He saw usage evolve but didn’t find a clear-cut change around the Civil War.

I decided to use the less sophisticated tool of the Google Books Ngram Viewer, looking for “United States is/was/are/were” across its database of publications from 1780 to 2000.

That method brings up a lot of false hits because it doesn’t distinguish between phrases in which “United States” is the actual subject of a sentence and phrases in which it’s helping to modify the subject, such as “The laws of the United States are based on British traditions” or “The President of the United States is an idiot.” But if those other constructions appear at a steady rate, then the comparison is still meaningful.

Here’s the graph that the Ngram Viewer produced for me.

There was a definite shift toward singular usage, but the big change came a couple of decades after the Civil War, and it really took off in the first decades of the twentieth century—coinciding with the U.S. House’s official choice. So the Civil War might have changed Americans’ thinking about the country, but it took a while for that thinking to be clearly reflected in our language.

Also interesting, the peaks in appearances of any form of “United States is/was/are/were” within the corpus of publications coincide with U.S. entry into the two World Wars and the Vietnam War.

“George, be King”

John Nicholls (1744-1832) was a Member of Parliament from 1783 to 1787, and again from 1796 to 1802.

Politically, Nicholls leaned to the left, opposing Edmund Burke and then the younger William Pitt and eventually his early ally Charles James Fox. He saw good in the early French Revolution, opposed British war measures, and championed electoral reforms.

Nicholls’s father had been physician to George II, so he was privy to court gossip from an early age. But of course his political views colored how he interpreted gossip about that monarch and his grandson and successor. In his Recollections and Reflections Personal and Political as Connected with Public Affairs during the Reign of George III, published in 1820, Nicholls profiled the new king this way:

The young King (for he was at that time little more than twenty-two years of age) was of a good person, sober, temperate, of domestic habits, addicted to no vice, swayed by no passion—what had not the nation to expect from such a character? . . .

I recollect the expression used to my father by Mr. [Charles] Pratt, at that time Attorney General, afterwards better known by the name of Lord Camden, within four months after the King’s accession: “I see already, that this will be a weak and an inglorious reign.”

I recollect also the relation which a friend of my father’s gave to him of a conversation which he had had with Charles Townshend: “I said to Charles Townshend, I don’t want to know any state secrets, but do tell me what is the character of this young man?” After a pause, Charles Townshend replied, “He is very obstinate.”

It was also observed that the Princess Dowager of Wales had kept the young Prince from having any confidential intimacy with any person except herself and the Earl of Bute: the pretence for this was the preservation of his morals. In truth, they had blockaded all approach to him. A notion has prevailed, that the Earl of Bute had suggested political opinions to the Princess Dowager; but this was certainly a mistake. In understanding, the Princess Dowager was far superior to the Earl of Bute; in whatever degree of favour he stood with her, he did not suggest, but he received, her opinions and her directions. The late Marquis of Bute told me, that at the King’s accession, his father, the Earl of Bute, had no connexion beyond the pale of Leicester House [the late Prince of Wales’s residence]. He added, “I never lived with my father, nor did any of his children.” Could such a man be fit to be a minister?

The Princess Dowager of Wales was a woman of a very sound understanding, and was considered as such by all who had occasion to converse with her. But she had been educated in the Court of her father, the Duke of Saxe Gotha. . . . When the Princess of Wales came to the Court of St. James, she found the British Sovereign a very different character from that which she had seen at Saxe Gotha. She found him controlled by his Ministers, indulged in petty gratifications, but compelled to submit to their opinions on all important subjects. We cannot be surprised that she was disgusted at this; and it is well known that she ever impressed upon the King from his early years this lesson, “George, be King.”

In his History of the Life and Reign of George IV (1831), William Wallace cited Nicholls and repeated his analysis, but turned that quotation from the Princess Dowager into “George, be a king.”

George III indeed tried to influence the ministries that governed under him. But he also sincerely believed in the British constitutional notion of Parliament’s sovereignty. After Gen. Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown, he accepted the defeat of Lord North’s ministry—a major step away from monarchical supremacy.

“To become private secretary to General Washington”?

The Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842) grew up from a poor childhood to regain his family’s place in the cultural establishment of greater Boston. He was the librarian at Harvard College for several years before becoming a Unitarian minister in Dorchester.

And whenever I read the man’s early life life story, I come away feeling dubious.

All the profiles of Harris seem to derive from a letter that the Rev. John Pierce wrote on 1 Mar 1849. One of the anecdotes in that letter is:

On leaving College, he taught a school for a year at Worcester; and, at the end of that time, was applied to, to become General [George] Washington’s Private Secretary. He had consented to serve; but, in consequence of taking the small pox, he was prevented from entering at once on the duties of the place, and it was filled by Tobias Lear.

Using Pierce’s letter, the Rev. Nathaniel L. Frothingham wrote a longer reminiscence for the Massachusetts Historical Society. Here’s his version of the same anecdote:

He was graduated at Harvard College in July, 1787, at the age of nineteen. . . . After completing his collegiate course, he became the teacher of a school in Worcester. In this service he remained for a year; and here he formed the acquaintance of Miss Mary, the only daughter of Dr. Elijah and Mrs. Dorothy Dix, who was to be the partner of his whole life.

Immediately on leaving this pleasant town, he was honored by an application to become private secretary to General Washington. His heart leaped at such a proposal, which promised to bring him into connection with the greatest man of his nation and time, and with the leading events of a wonderful era in the fortunes of his country and the destinies of the earth. His patriotism and his skill with the pen, his love of history and of poetry both, conspired to recommend such a preferment, and promised to open a career for his highest aspirations. Now the course of his life seemed to be beaten out for him in high places, and the motto of his ring was translating itself into distinct prophecy.

But no sooner had he signified his acceptance of the appointment than he was struck down with that terrible malady, the small-pox, which at that time had been relieved of only the smaller half of its original terrors. Public affairs cannot wait for the slow recoveries of sickness and for private convenience; and before he was able to arrive at his post the place was filled by Tobias Lear, a gentleman who left the University the same year that young Harris entered it, and who afterwards went through a long course of diplomatic service as Consul-General at St. Domingo and at Tripoli.

In 1788, Lear had already been Washington’s secretary for four years; he wasn’t second choice to Harris. Lear also remained in Washington’s employ through 1793, moving with the first President to New York and Philadelphia, so there’s no sign of an opening.

I’ve seen no mention of Harris in Washington’s correspondence. And if someone at Mount Vernon wrote to Harris asking him to become the general’s closest employee, as Pierce and Frothingham understood, that would surely have left a paper trail.

“Reckoning with Slavery” Conference in 2017

The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library, has issued a call for papers for its inaugural conference, “Reckoning With Slavery: New Directions in the History, Memory, Legacy, and Popular Representations of Enslavement.” The conference will be held at the Schomburg Center on 17-18 Nov 2017.

The announcement says:

We seek proposals from scholars whose work may throw new light on the history of slavery, the slave trade, and abolition and opposition to slavery, as well as engage with contemporary debates over the legacies of enslavement, reparations, and the significance of popular depictions of slavery in film, television, and digital platforms.

Papers that address current scholarly debates over the political economy of slavery and its relationship to capitalism, the significance of slave resistance, gender, childhood studies, enslavement in transnational contexts, and digital humanities are particularly welcome.

Established scholars will offer mentoring sessions to graduate students and junior faculty.

This call asks interested researchers to send an abstract of 250-350 words and a one-page curriculum vitae to lapiduscenter@nypl.org by 15 January.

The Crucial Days After Trenton

The Battle of Trenton on 26 Dec 1776 was just the beginning of the Continental Army’s strike back against the British in central New Jersey after a very rough campaign season.

Revolutionary New Jersey, the Crossroads of the American Revolution, explains:

After ferrying their Hessian prisoners across the Delaware to Pennsylvania on December 26, Washington’s troops returned to New Jersey to engage the British at Trenton once again on January 2, 1777. Fighting along the Assunpink Creek ended at dusk. During the night, Washington led his troops along a back route to Princeton, where he attacked General Cornwallis’ rear guard on the morning of January 3, 1777.

While the second Battle of Trenton (also known as the Battle of the Assunpink) had no military outcome, it enabled another American victory, at Princeton. In the ten days succeeding Christmas, Washington had engaged the enemy in three battles and by winning two had restored belief in the possibility of ultimate victory.

The Ten Crucial Days organization offers videos, maps, and other information about those events. Its tours cover the Washington’s Crossing sites on both sides of the Delaware, the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, and the Princeton Battlefield.

The small local publisher Knox Press, linked to Ten Crucial Days, offers David Price’s book Rescuing the Revolution: Unsung Patriot Heroes and the Ten Crucial Days of America’s War for Independence.

(Above is Boston’s own slice of Washington’s crossing, “The Passage of the Delaware” by Thomas Sully at the Museum of Fine Arts.)

“Washington’s Christmas Party” by Ada Simpson Sherwood

Ada Simpson Sherwood (1861-1959) was a teacher, education professor, and prolific author of the sorts of poems that schoolchildren learned to recite or sing around the last turn of the century. She was especially diligent in writing about Revolutionary history.

The 25 Jan 1894 Journal of Education published six poems under the headline “Washington’s Birthday Selections,” for teachers to use in the coming month. Three were by Sherwood. This one is to the turn of “Yankee Doodle.”

Washington’s Christmas Party

Come, all who love a merry tale,
With joke both true and hearty,
We’ll tell you how George Washington
Once made a Christmas party.
Across the Delaware quite plain,
The British flag was vaunted,
His troops ill-clad, the weather bad,
And yet he was undaunted.

“Come, boys,” he said, “we’ll go to-night
Across the raging river;
The troops will be at Christmas sports,
And will suspect it, never.
The Hessians all will keep this night,
With games and feasting hearty,
We’ll spoil their fun with sword and gun,
And take their Christmas party.”

And as they row across the stream,
Tho storms and ice pursue them,
The fishermen from Marblehead
Knew just how to go thru them.
Upon the farther shore they form
And then surround the city,
The Hessians all, after their ball
Were sleeping. What a pity!

And when at last, at call to arms,
They tried to make a stand, sir,
They soon took fright and grounded arms.
To Washington’s small band, sir.
Across the stream they took that day,
One thousand Hessians hearty.
Their fun was spoiled, their tempers roiled,
By this famed Christmas party.

The picture above comes from the same era: “Washington Inspecting the Captured Colors after the Battle of Trenton” by Edward Percy Moran (1862-1935), courtesy of Wikipedia.

“St. A Claus, was celebrated at Protestant-Hall”

In the 20 Dec 1773 New-York Gazette, alongside the first reports of the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor, printer Hugh Gaine ran this little item about a local event:

Last Monday [i.e., 13 December] the Anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called St. A Claus, was celebrated at Protestant-Hall, at Mr. Waldron’s, where a great Number of the Sons of that ancient Saint celebrated the Day with great Joy and Festivity.

(Three days later, James Rivington put the same item in Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, which sometimes gets him credit for the first American mention of “St. A Claus.” But Gaine’s paper was earlier.)

According to James Riker’s Annals of Newtown (1852), Samuel Waldron (1738-1799) was a blacksmith who lived in Newtown on Long Island, which is now part of Queens. In March 1771 Waldron hosted what looks like a similar gathering in honor of St. Patrick. I haven’t found any mention of his house or tavern being called “Protestant-Hall” except in connection with those banquets.

The photo above, from the collections of the New-York Historical Society, shows Waldron’s house in 1923. If he hosted the Sons of St. Nicholas in that building in 1773, then it was a significant location in the development of the American legend of Santa Claus.

“He is an impudent, ill-bred, conceited fellow”

In his diary for December 1758, young John Adams got some things off his chest about Robert Treat Paine, who was four years older and had already been admitted to the bar:

Bob Paine is conceited and pretends to more Knowledge and Genius than he has. I have heard him say that he took more Pleasure in solving a Problem in Algebra than in a frolick. He told me the other day, that he was as curious after a minute and particular Knowledge of Mathematicks and Phylosophy, as I could be about the Laws of Antiquity. By his Boldness in Company, he makes himself a great many Enemies. His Aim in Company is to be admired, not to be beloved.

He asked me what Duch Commentator I meant? I said Vinnius.—Vinnius, says he, (with a flash of real Envy, but pretended Contempt,) you cant understand one Page of Vinnius.—He must know that human Nature is disgusted with such incomplaisant Behaviour. Besides he has no Right to say that I dont understand every Word in Vinnius, or even in [. . .] for he knows nothing of me. For the future let me act the Part of a critical spy upon him, not that of an open unsuspicious friend.—

Last Superiour Court at Worcester he dined in Company with Mr. [Jeremiah] Gridly, Mr. [Edmund] Trowbridge, and several others, at Mr. [James] Putnams [Adams’s legal teacher], and altho a modest attentive Behaviour would have best become him in such a Company, yet he tried to ingross the whole Conversation to himself.

He did the same, in the Evening, when all the Judges of the Superiour Court with Mr. [Samuel] Winthrop [clerk], [Chief Justice Stephen] Sewall, &c. were present, and he did the same last Thanksgiving day, at Coll. [Josiah] Quincies, when Mr. [Anthony] Wibirt [a Braintree minister], Mr. [Richard] Cranch &c. were present. This Impudence may sett the Million a Gape at him but will make all Persons of Sense despize him, or hate him.

That evening at Put[nam]s, he called me, a Numbskull and a Blunder Buss before all the Superiour Judges. I was not present indeed, but such expressions were indecent and tended to give the Judges a low Opinion of me, as if I was despized by my Acquaintance. He is an impudent, ill-bred, conceited fellow. Yet he has Witt, sense, and Learning, and a great deal of Humour, and has Virtue and Piety except his fretful, peevish, Childish Complaints against the Disposition of Things. This Character is drawn with Resentment of his ungenerous Treatment of me, and Allowances must therefore be made, but these are unexaggerated facts.

Adams and Paine had parallel legal careers for many years. Both were the leading lawyers in their rural towns with periodic stints in Boston. Adams gradually eclipsed Paine in politics. They both served in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence, but Paine returned to Massachusetts government during the war and afterward while Adams went on to a national career. They managed to work together but never seem to have become friends. As we might guess.

M. Voltaire and “that civil war between mother and daughter”?

On 12 Dec 1775, Pvt. Aaron Wright, a rifleman from Pennsylvania serving in Cambridge during the siege of Boston, picked up a copy of the New-England Chronicle dated five days before.

You can read a copy of that same newspaper here, from the Harbottle Dorr collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Wright was particularly interested in one of the front-page items, which had been reprinted from the 18 November Constitutional Gazette of New York. It was headlined as a letter from Voltaire to a Dutch friend “after the defeat of the Spaniards before Algiers,” which had happened in July.

Wright copied much of that item into his journal:

Ever since the religious wars ceased, Christian knights have been totally useless. . . .

Algiers, which has 2 men-of-war of 50 guns each, 4 of 40, and 5 frigates of 30 each, is sole master of the Mediterranean, and prescribes laws to the Dutch, English, French, and Spaniards, each of whose navies consists of at least 200 ships of war; that is ridiculous, you will say. But no matter; they say it is politic. I congratulated myself when I found Spain, most Catholic, cutting throats, and fitting out a fleet to destroy Algiers. But, to my surprise, I soon beheld ten or twelve thousand of them lie dead before the batteries of Algiers, and the fleet sailing home as fast as possible.

But will not France, Great Britain, and Holland immediately join Spain and put a period to these little but troublesome States? No! by no means! Their High Mightinesses, the Dutch, must remain neuter, to sell their powder and ball, as also their cheese, to both belligerent States.

Great Britain is just now engaged in a war of more consequence with her own colonies. Doubtless to know the cause of that civil war between mother and daughter, which has already cost the lives of hundreds, and is likely to throw the whole nation into convulsions, it is in one word this: the daughter colonies say, “We will supply you with every thing in our power, cheerfully, freely, and voluntarily.” But the mother country replies; “Because you will give every thing cheerfully, freely, and voluntarily, you are rebels, and your throats must be cut.”

On that Wright commented, “Which is pretty d—— near the case, I think.”

The presentation of Britain as a cruel mother obviously spoke to Aaron Wright, and he probably liked the picture of the big European states as militarily weak. He must have been pleased to see those observations coming from the famous European philosopher Voltaire.

In fact, that letter appears to have been created in America for an American readership, according to A. Owen Aldridge’s paper, “The American Revolution and a Spurious Letter from Voltaire,” published in 1974. Still, it’s an interesting moment, the rifleman reading the philosophe.

Preservation Breakthrough in Princeton

Last week, just before I traveled to Princeton, there was a breakthrough in the long-running controversy over new construction on part of the Princeton Battlefield.

Of course, a lot of Princeton was involved that battle, especially if we include troop movements, but some portions of the area had never been built on.

One of those sections is owned by the Institute for Advanced Study, which famously provided a home for Albert Einstein after he had to leave Europe. The I.A.S. had contributed much of the land for the current Princeton Battlefield State Park, but was planning to build more housing for its faculty on adjoining property it retained.

The Princeton Battlefield Society was convinced that acreage was also historically significant. It opposed that plan, using nearly every tactic short of civil disobedience.

A number of public reports trace the controversy. In 2010 John Milner Associates assembled a report for the Princeton Battlefield Society with funding from the National Park Service’s battlefield preservation programs (P.D.F.). It argued that a road crucial to the battle, now lost, crossed that land.

The I.A.S. asked historians to review that argument. We can read the skeptical responses of Fred Anderson (P.D.F.) and Mark Peterson (P.D.F.).

The I.A.S. later commissioned an archeological review of the area in question by the Ottery Group, released in 2015 (P.D.F.). That reported that the area designated for housing contained some signs of the battle:

Hunter Research was successful at identifying 41 Revolutionary War artifacts from surface soils within the faculty housing area. Their finds include 15 lead balls in various sizes and conditions of deformity, 14 grape shot, lead flint wraps, a short bayonet fragment, a brass ramrod holder, a portion of a cartridge box, and other militaria.

I don’t know how that compares to other parts of the town. Nonetheless, that news seems to have changed the situation, though it may have taken a while for the parties to privately work through possibilities.

This month the parties announced a compromise:

Under the plan, the Civil War Trust, through its Campaign 1776 initiative to protect Revolutionary War battlefields, will purchase 14.85 acres of land from the Institute for $4 million, to be conveyed to the State of New Jersey as an addition to the existing Princeton Battlefield State Park. The acquisition includes approximately 2/3 of the Maxwell’s Field property, along with an additional 1.12-acre tract north of the property that has been identified by historians as part of the battlefield.

For the I.A.S., the housing will change from seven single-family homes to eight townhouses; that new plan still needs approval by a couple of local boards. Campaign 1776 is now raising money for the purchase.

New Study of the Gaspée Incident

The Boston Tea Party of December 1773 produced a forceful response from London: the Boston Port Bill, a new royal governor, army regiments back in town, the Massachusetts Government Act, and other supporting legislation.

To be sure, Bostonians had destroyed more than £9,000 of property belonging to the well-connected British East India Company.

On the other hand, compare that damage to what people in Rhode Island had done over the preceding decade:

• In June 1765, Newporters upset by naval impressment had seized the boat belonging to the Royal Navy warship Maidstone, dragged it to the town common, and set it on fire.
• In July 1769, another Newport crowd saw the unpopular Customs patrol ship Liberty, confiscated the previous year from John Hancock, run aground, so they set it on fire.
• In June 1772, men from Providence and surrounding towns attacked the Royal Navy’s patrol ship Gaspée from rowboats, shooting its commanding officer in the chest. And then, of course, they set it on fire.

According to Rif Winfield’s British Warships in the Age of Sail series, H.M.S. Victory cost £63,176 to build and equip in 1765. So, even though the Victory was a much larger ship than these three, Rhode Islanders did serious damage to the royal government with each ship they destroyed.

But was Newport harbor shut down? Was the colony’s constitution changed? Was anyone brought to trial? No. I suspect the imperial government in London recognized that Rhode Island was a lawless place.

Of course, one might argue that the royal government’s alarm about those mounting attacks, especially the one on the Gaspée, made Parliament more determined to ensure Boston wouldn’t get away with anything of the sort.

The latest title in the Journal of the American Revolution book series is Steven Park’s The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution, published this month. It explores that story in depth:

Between the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party in 1773—a period historians refer to as “the lull”—a group of prominent Rhode Islanders rowed out to His Majesty’s schooner Gaspee, which had run aground six miles south of Providence while on an anti-smuggling patrol. After threatening and shooting its commanding officer, the raiders looted the vessel and burned it to the waterline.

Despite colony-wide sympathy for the June 1772 raid, neither the government in Providence nor authorities in London could let this pass without a response. As a result, a Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by Rhode Island governor Joseph Wanton zealously investigated the incident. In The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution, historian Steven Park reveals that what started out as a customs battle over the seizure of a prominent citizen’s rum was soon transformed into the spark that re-ignited Patriot fervor.

Steven Park, Ph.D., teaches and is the Director of Academic Services at the University of Connecticut’s maritime campus at Avery Point. My copy of his book is on its way to me from Amazon—presuming, of course, that the delivery vehicle doesn’t go through Rhode Island and get set on fire.