The Museum of the American Revolution Hosts a Film Premiere, 9 Oct.

In August I visited the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, which opened to great fanfare earlier this year.

Like the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, which I wrote about here, the Philadelphia museum combines the historical artifacts of an older, traditional collection with new technology. For the M.O.A.R., the parent institution was the Valley Forge Historical Society.

The museum also inherited the site of a visitor center built for the Bicentennial, close to Independence Hall and other historic sites in old Philadelphia. Like the Yorktown museum, it pays particular attention to the events that happened in the region. It thus offers the best treatment of the Trenton and Princeton maneuvers that I’ve seen as well as some about Brandywine, which didn’t turn out so well for the Continentals.

But the M.O.A.R. aims to tell the full story of the Revolution, starting with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the political disputes of the late 1760s and early 1770s, and the campaigns all over eastern North America. The exhibit designers took pains to include the perspectives and choices of poor men and women, African-Americans free and enslaved, sailors, and other people not always included in the narrative. It becomes hagiographic, I thought, only in the final exhibit, the unveiling of Gen. George Washington’s campaign tent. And that really is a neat artifact.

One hallmark of the M.O.A.R. are life-size figures recreating dramatic moments, such as Israel Trask’s memory of the snowball fight in Harvard Yard, the tearing down of George III’s statue in New York in July 1776, and a charge by Col. Banastre Tarleton’s horsemen. But there are also plenty of electronic interactive exhibits and genuine artifacts to intrigue all sorts of visitors.

I felt some special jolts of recognition. Some folks in the films and dioramas looked quite like reenactors I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. The introductory film shows the “No Taxation without Representation” phrase printed as I wrote about it here. And the museum has a large portrait of Capt. William Crosbie, the likely owner of the pistols captured at Lexington that I wrote about here.

The M.O.A.R. has a gallery dedicated to explaining the Oneida contribution to the Continental cause. The Oneida Indian Nation was also one of the institution’s major benefactors. That space may feel out of proportion to the influence the Oneida had on the war, but it serves as a metonymy for all the Native American groups on both sides, for whom the War for Independence proved terribly significant.

Tomorrow, in commemoration of Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the museum will host the first showing of “People of the Standing Stone,” a film about the Oneida nation in American history. Directed by Ric Burns and narrated by Kevin Costner, the 25-minute film explores the Oneida alliance with the Continental Congress and what followed in the early republic—the unjust appropriation of much of the nation’s land.

This weekend, ahead of the movie, Darren Bonaparte of the Mohawk community at Ahkwesáhsne is performing in the museum’s Patriots Gallery. On Monday at 11:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. dancers from the Oneida Indian Nation will perform traditional Haudenosaunee social dances there.

The movie will be shown at 6:00, followed by “a panel discussion on how the roles of many of our country’s multiethnic ancestors have often been misrepresented in—or altogether excluded from—the telling of our nation’s history.” The panelists will be:

• Kevin Gover, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
• Ray Halbritter, Oneida Nation Representative, Nation Enterprises CEO, and a M.O.A.R. Board Member
• Rosalyn J. McPherson, president of The ROZ Group, which managed community relations and oversaw historical content for The President’s House Project in Philadelphia
• R. Scott Stephenson, the M.O.A.R.’s Vice President of Collections, Exhibitions and Programming

Tickets to the special screening and discussion are $15 for general admission, or $5 for Museum members and students.

John Adams on the “Hancock” and “Adams”

James Lloyd was born in Boston in December 1769 and named after his grandfather, a respected physician. During the early 1770s, Dr. Lloyd sided with the royal government, but he remained in Boston when the British military evacuated. Eventually he regained his popularity and standing in society.

Meanwhile, the younger James Lloyd proceeded through the Boston Latin School, Harvard College, and a mercantile career in close connection to the Lowells. He entered politics in 1800, winning a seat in various legislatures. He served twice as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, succeeding John Quincy Adams and Harrison Gray Otis when they resigned and later resigning himself. Lloyd got to be one of the last Federalists in Congress.

In the 1810s Lloyd began a lengthy correspondence with John Adams, picking the older man’s brain for information about the Revolution. Those letters, published later in the century, are one of the main sources of Adams recollections that subsequent historians mined for details. Not that Adams’s memory was always complete or accurate.

On 24 Apr 1815, for example, Adams wrote to Lloyd about how the American military started the war:

The Army at Cambridge, had poor Arms, no cannon, but the Hancock and Adams, no Tents, no Barracks, no provisions but from day to day, no cloathing for change, no Magazines, very little powder and but few balls.

That was the standard line for Americans in the nineteenth century, emphasizing the shortages that the nation’s first army faced, especially in military equipment. The “Hancock and Adams” that the former President referred to were two small brass cannon that came back to Massachusetts after the war engraved with the names of John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

In fact, as I detail in The Road to Concord, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and individual towns had collected dozens of cannon by the start of the war in April 1775. Those were mostly old iron guns, many badly mounted, but they included some large siege weapons. Not having been a member of the Massachusetts committee of safety and supplies, Adams might not have known all the details of that ordnance, but he surely knew his side had more than two cannon. (Even the engravings on the “Hancock” and “Adams” said there were two more.) But John Adams, and Americans at large, preferred to remember their side as even more of an underdog than it really was.

I’ll speak about the secret work of collecting those cannon and what the British commander, Gen. Thomas Gage, did about them to the Billerica Historical Society on 12 October. That event will start at 7:00 P.M. in the Billerica Public Library, 15 Concord Road in the center of town. It’s free and open to all.

Providence College’s Seminar on the History of Early America

The Department of History & Classics at Providence College in Rhode Island is launching a Seminar on the History of Early America.

Participants in these sessions “will discuss pre-circulated works in progress, including chapters of doctoral dissertations, book projects, and article drafts on any aspect of early American history.”

The material scheduled for the upcoming academic year is:

13 October
Susan Branson, Syracuse University
“Flights of Imagination: The Air Balloon as a Symbol of National Promise”

7 December
Lorri Glover, Saint Louis University
“‘An All Accomplished Woman’: Eliza Pinckney in the Age of Revolution”

1 March 2018
Julie Fisher, George Washington University & National Park Service
“What is Roger Williams?”

9 April
George Elliott, Brown University
“Gershom Bulkeley and Alchemical Experimentation in Colonial New England”

3 May
Melissa Morris, Bridgewater State University
“Across the Channel, Across the Atlantic: Anglo-Dutch Collaboration in the Seventeenth Century Americas”

The seminar will meet in the Liberal Arts Seminar Room (room number 202) of the Ruane Center for the Humanities at Providence College in Providence, a couple of miles west of downtown. Each meeting will run from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M. For more information, contact Prof. Sharon Ann Murphy of Providence College.

(The photograph above shows a sack-back gown made for Eliza Pinckney around 1750 from silk harvested on her South Carolina plantation. It is now in the collection of the Smithsonian.)

Early American Scientists and Anthropogenic Climate Change

On Tuesday, 10 October, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a session of the Boston Environmental History Seminar series.

James Rice of Tufts University will present a paper on “Early Environmental Histories,” and Chris Parsons of Northeastern University will comment on it. The seminar description says:

This essay speaks to questions raised in a recent workshop at the Huntington on early American environmental history. How do timespan and scale change our understanding of historical relationships between people and their environments? What new light does environmental history shed on topics such as race, gender, or law? What can early Americanists contribute to the field of environmental history as a whole?

That discussion will start at 5:15 P.M. Sandwiches will be available after the formal discussion. Reserve a seat in advance through the seminar series webpage.

I’ve been thinking about how some of the more scientifically minded Americans of the eighteenth century conceived of environmental change. They had no difficulty with the concept that human activity could affect the climate. Indeed, they might have been too optimistic about that possibility.

Many Americans of that period were anxious to refute the European perception that North America’s climate was too extreme—too cold in winter and too hot in summer—to be healthy. Winter was changing, they declared, as the European population spread. For example, the Rev. Cotton Mather wrote in The Christian Philosopher in 1721:

our Cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our Woods, and the Winds do not blow such Razours, as in the Days of our Fathers, when Water, cast up into the Air, would commonly be turned into Ice e’er it came to the Ground.

Benjamin Franklin was more scientific in his approach, telling the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles in 1763 that Mather’s belief needed to be tested with systematic measurements over a range of time and space:

I doubt with you, that Observations have not been made with sufficient Accuracy, to ascertain the Truth of the common Opinion, that the Winters in America are grown milder; and yet I cannot but think that in time they may be so. Snow lying on the Earth must contribute to cool and keep cold the Wind blowing over it. When a Country is clear’d of Woods, the Sun acts more strongly on the Face of the Earth. It warms the Earth more before Snows fall, and small Snows may often be soon melted by that Warmth. It melts great Snows sooner than they could be melted if they were shaded by the Trees. And when the Snows are gone, the Air moving over the Earth is not so much chilled; &c. But whether enough of the Country is yet cleared to produce any sensible Effect, may yet be a Question: And I think it would require a regular and steady Course of Observations on a Number of Winters in the different Parts of the Country you mention, to obtain full Satisfaction on the Point.

Mather, Franklin, and their contemporaries inherited the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, but their view of time and space were still limited. Scientists of the nineteenth century made the crucial breakthrough of conceiving of Earth’s age in millions and then billions of years, not just thousands. We have the benefit of a much broader perspective and a whole lot more data. The seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society asks what the more detailed environmental insights we have today can tell us about Mather and Franklin’s time.

Daen on Van Horn’s The Power of Objects

Laurel Daen recently reviewed Jennifer Van Horn’s The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America for H-Net. Here’s an interesting extract from that review:

Van Horn uses portraits of young women in Charleston that feature masks and dresses worn to masquerade balls to consider women’s contested relationship with civility and changing imperial identity in the 1760s. Although no masked galas were ever held in America, colonists knew about them due to their popularity in London. Charlestonian women wore masquerade garb in their portraits, Van Horn suggests, not only to display their awareness of British trends, but also to assert a degree of sexual power that was otherwise prohibited in polite society.

Masquerades were associated with licentiousness. By adopting the style in their portraits, young women celebrated the phase of their lives in which they engaged in courtships and thus retained some control over the future social networks of their families. Elite men argued that women’s masked likenesses exposed the passions that threatened their civility, but they nevertheless tolerated the trend, knowing that women’s urges would soon be contained within marriage.

Van Horn also notes how the masquerade served as a symbol of the impending imperial conflict. While patriots used masks to signify British duplicity and represented America as a courting woman who held power over her suitor, British military officers literally employed masks to transmit secret information and loyalists depicted America as a bride to Britain.

Daen also highlights Van Horn’s discussion of the wooden legs that Gouverneur Morris used—different styles in Europe and in America.

Lt. Lindsay Lives Through the Battle of Pollilur

Once the French entered the war against the British, the fighting expanded around the globe to wherever those two empires were in conflict.

In India, the British army supported the British East India Company, which recruited local troops. The French allied with Hyder Ali, sultan of Mysore. The result was the Second Anglo-Mysore War.

Last month I stumbled across the memoir of that conflict from the Hon. John Lindsay, a lieutenant in the British army at the age of nineteen. Here’s his description of the end of the first Battle of Pollilur on 10 Sept 1780, which was more costly to the British forces than Bunker Hill.

Lindsay was a younger son of a Scottish earl, but his recollections work best when read in an upper-class British voice.

After my company had delivered their fire amongst the multitude of the enemy that were around us, the [enemy] horse immediately rushed in, and, the ranks being now irretrievably broken, every one threw down his arms, and used every means to preserve his life; whilst, all around us, no object presented itself but the enemy, with drawn sabres, cutting and hacking the miserable wretches that were at their mercy.

As my company was (from their being lately sent to the assistance of the rear-guard) the last body of troops that were in the field, they were nearly all cut to pieces; the greatest part of the soldiers and officers of the line came running down towards me, and the enemy’s horse galloping after them; they were driven to a hollow piece of ground, which had been the means of sheltering my company pretty well during the action; there were therefore five or six hundred people in this place, crowded together, which the horse surrounded, who, by the length of their weapons, could plunge them into the middle of the crowd.

Our situation was now become beyond all description dreadful, from the screams of the wounded and dying people on the side of the hollow, and from the vast numbers that were smothered in the middle of it, owing to the extraordinary pressure. In this situation I was so unfortunate as to be near the centre, and in a few minutes I should have suffered the same fate as a number of others, if at that time I had not called out to two men of my company who were near the edge, and, though they were both desperately wounded, yet by great exertions they dragged me out of the dreadful pressure.

Good show, men! Sorry about those wounds, but at least your lieutenant is out of a tough spot caused by his being as far from the enemy weapons as possible.

Then, reflecting that the superior appearance of my dress might be fatal to me, I recollected that I had in my pocket two hundred pagodas [gold coins], being the subsistence of my troop, and which, it immediately struck me, would be the means of preserving my life.

Such a hardship being an officer, having to wear “superior” dress. But at least one does get to carry the company’s money and use that to bribe one’s way out of being killed.

I therefore looked around me to observe the different countenances of the horsemen, and, thinking that I had distinguished one whose look was less ferocious than the rest, I pulled out my bag of pagodas, and beckoned him to approach me, which he instantly did, put up his sword, and dismounted. I immediately delivered him the bag; he seemed much surprised and pleased at the magnitude of its contents, which gave me the most sanguine expectations.

After he had put it up, he demanded my accoutrements, which I instantly took off and presented to him; I now thought he would have gone no farther, but (one after the other) he stripped me of everything except my breeches and one half of my shirt,—having torn off the other to tie up my other shirts in a bundle.

Though much concerned at being thus stripped naked after the part I had acted towards him, I however made no doubt but that he would grant me his protection, especially when I saw him mount his horse; which he, however, had no sooner done, than he drew his sabre, and, after giving me two or three wounds, instantly rode off, leaving me stung with rage, and laying the blame upon myself for having called him towards me.

The nerve to ride off with the company’s money that way!

After some minutes, what with the loss of blood and the intense heat of the sun, I fainted away, fully convinced that I was expiring, and pleased to think my last moments were so gentle. I do not know how long I remained in this situation, but I was roused from it by a dreadful pain in my left shoulder-blade. I now found that I was nearly driven into the centre again, and that a dead man was lying upon me, and a pike that had passed through his body had penetrated into my shoulder, and caused me the severe pain.

Severe pain, I say! From a pike sticking through another man’s body.

In this manner I lay for some minutes, when John Kelman, of my company, called out, upon observing me, that I was dead; upon which I answered, “Not yet, but near about it.” At this moment he observed three French hussars, and desired me to go to them; I answered him that I was so weak I could not walk, and, besides that, I was so jammed in the crowd that I could not move myself; upon which, being a very strong man, he reached out his hand towards me, and, my head being the only part he could touch, he dragged me out by the hair, and carried me to the French, when I once more fainted; however, one of them put some arrack [liquor] into my mouth, which soon revived me, and I told them in French I was an officer, and requested that they would protect me, which they assured me in the strongest manner they would do. They accordingly drew their swords to keep off the horse, who were every moment endeavouring to cut me down. At this time my preserver, John Kelman, was by some accident separated from me, and I afterwards found he was cut to pieces.

Oh, tough luck, Kelman!

The British had gone into battle with more than 3,800 fighting men. Lindsay was one of only 50 officers and about 200 private soldiers who survived to be taken prisoner. The rest of his memoir is about his captivity. That experience was, needless to say, difficult.

Events on Archeology in Minute Man Park

October is Massachusetts’s Archaeology Month, and Minute Man National Historical Park is offering two programs on the field.

Saturday, 7 October, 1:00 P.M.
Parker’s Revenge: The New Evidence
Minute Man Visitor Center on the Lincoln/Lexington line

Archaeologist Dr. Meg Watters will share details about the Parker’s Revenge Archaeology Project that was successful in locating a key Lexington battle site from April 19, 1775. Following the presentation, Park Ranger Jim Hollister, joined by His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot, will lead a walk out to the scene of action. The reenactors will demonstrate how, based on the project’s findings, we believe the battle was fought. This program will feature musket firing.

Saturday, 21 October, 1:00 P.M.
Archaeology Finds of Minute Man National Historical Park
Maj. John Buttrick House, 174 Liberty Street (across from the North Bridge Visitor Center parking lot), Concord

Join Nikki Walsh, Museum Services Northeast Region of the National Park Service, for a presentation of various artifacts found throughout the park, from Concord to Lincoln to Lexington. See the artifacts and learn the stories behind where the items were found and the use of them in their historical context.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Philadelphia Programs in October

A couple of intriguing academic conferences are happening in Philadelphia this month. I’m sharing links to the programs for people who are in the area and those interested in current scholarship.

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania is hosting a graduate student conference titled “Lenses and Contacts: Framing Early America” on 5-7 October.

In recent years, scholars have questioned traditional boundaries and envisioning new frontiers. The advent (and departure?) of the Atlantic World has sparked new ways of framing the field and mapping the space of early America. Scholars have polished off traditional lenses of analysis such as politics, economics, and intellectual history.

Our panelists challenge accepted perspectives by offering their own insights into topics such as: spatial lenses, including Atlantic, continental, global, and local; people, places, and ideas on the margins; histories from above and below; perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexuality in early America; ways of knowing, including religion, environmental, scientific, and medical histories; and networks and crossings, disciplinary and otherwise.

The American Philosophical Society has posted the program for its “The Art of Revolutions” conference on 26-28 October:

The tumult and transformations resulting from the Age of Revolutions (1770s-1840s) created a trans-Atlantic body of art and material culture that reflected and inspired new ideas and actions. “The Art of Revolutions”, co-sponsored by the American Philosophical Society, Museum of the American Revolution, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, explores the role of imagery in influencing and giving meaning to the political revolutions that defined the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

The symposium covers the American Revolution, French Revolution, Circum-Caribbean Revolutions, and the Revolutions of 1848. We hope the chronological scope and transatlantic breadth of the conference will stimulate an interdisciplinary dialogue that crosses traditional geographic barriers and transcends the limitations of strict periodization.

Both conferences are free of charge.

“Life of Thomas Paine” at Faneuil Hall, 7 Oct.

On Saturday, 7 October, Ian Ruskin will perform his one-person play To Begin the World Over Again: The Life of Thomas Paine in Faneuil Hall.

Ruskin wrote this play with advice from “a distinguished group of Paine scholars,” he says. This will be its Boston debut. Ruskin has performed it in various venues around the world, including most recently in Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York. A filmed version aired on P.B.S. on Independence Day weekend.

Ruskin’s description for his play says:

No other Founding Father was anywhere close to Thomas Paine in his vision of democracy. Paine’s book Common Sense sold hundreds of thousands of copies and everybody read it or had it read to them. It was the spark that ignited the American Revolution and remains in print today over 200 years later. He helped shape our national character and inspires us to be better guardians of that legacy.

Paine based his beliefs on one simple yet powerful idea, “justice for all.” This call resounds in America now, echoing the words of Martin Luther King [actually Theodore Parker]: “the moral arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Today’s political environment, while never specifically mentioned in the play, reminds us to revisit Paine’s words with his calls for the end of slavery and voter suppression, and for a government that cares for its citizens and provides equality for women. In this time of division and despair, we need, more than ever, to hear Paine’s words.

Tickets cost $10-15 and are available through this site. The show is scheduled to run from 7:30 to 9:00 P.M. on 7 October.

The Dangers of the Electoral College

At Politico, Matthew Olsen and Benjamin Haas published an essay titled “The Electoral College Is a National Security Threat”:

In Federalist No. 68, his pseudonymous essay on “The Mode of Electing the President,” Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College could shield the United States “from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” Because of the “transient existence” and dispersed makeup of the electors, he argued, hostile countries would find it too expensive and time-consuming to inject “sinister bias” into the process of choosing a president. . . .

In Hamilton’s day, as he argued, it would have been nearly impossible for a hostile power to co-opt dozens of briefly chosen electors flung across 13 states with primitive roads. But in the social media age, the Electoral College system provides ripe microtargeting grounds for foreign actors who intend to sabotage presidential elections via information and disinformation campaigns, as well as by hacking our voting infrastructure. One reason is that citizens in certain states simply have more voting power than citizens in other states, such as Texas and California. This makes it easier for malign outside forces to direct their efforts.

But what if the national popular vote determined the president instead of the Electoral College? No voter would be more electorally powerful than another. It would be more difficult for a foreign entity to sway many millions of voters scattered across the country than concentrated groups of tens of thousands of voters in just a few states. And it would be more difficult to tamper with voting systems on a nationwide basis than to hack into a handful of databases in crucial swing districts, which could alter an election’s outcome. Yes, a foreign entity could disseminate messages to major cities across the entire country or try to carry out a broad-based cyberattack, but widespread actions of this sort would be not only more resource-intensive, but also more easily noticed, exposed and addressed.

As practical as those arguments are, I think there’s a clearer way that the Electoral College weakens the American republic. Our democratic system is based on what the Declaration of Independence called “the consent of the governed.” That requires every person’s vote to be of equal weight and the aggregate votes to determine the winner.

Out of all the elections in America, only one is set up so that the person who has demonstrably less popular support than an opponent can take office. While that outcome is relatively rare, when it happens the government lacks the consent of the governed and thus the strength of democracy. Faith in the political system weakens, especially if the system offers no way to fix the problem.

Hamilton and his fellow Federalists also argued that the Constitution’s impeachment clause was an important protection for the republic. In Democracy, law professor Sanford Levinson recently discussed problems with how that’s worked out and proposed another approach:

What the United States Constitution needs, and unfortunately does not have, is a provision that allows Congress, by a two-thirds vote, to register their “no-confidence” in an incumbent President that would serve to fire him immediately, without needing a crime or an incapacity as justification. It would be enough to say basically that Congress, no doubt representing their constituents, had become terrified of the lack of judgment displayed by the President.

He or she would most likely be replaced by the Vice President. Even better would be the selection of the new President by the congressional caucus of the President’s own party, followed, perhaps, by a new presidential election the next time we elect members of the House and Senate. This would assure that an opposition party could take over the White House only by winning an election.

That’s a limited form of parliamentary government which would go some way toward making Congress the top branch of the U.S. government again, as the Framers imagined.

Examining Abigail Adams Smith’s Breast Cancer, 3 Oct.

On Tuesday, 3 October, the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy will host a panel discussion on “Abigail Adams Smith and the Evolution of the Treatment of Breast Cancer from Colonial America to Today.”

Historical background for the event:

Abigail and John Adams’s daughter Abigail (“Nabby”) Adams Smith, born in Braintree (now Quincy) in 1765, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1810, undergoing a radical mastectomy in 1811. Despite the surgery, cancer spread throughout her body, causing her death at age 48 in 1813. Abigail Adams expressed her grief at the loss of her daughter with the words, “The wound which has lacerated my Bosom cannot be healed.”

The surgeon who performed the operation was Dr. John Warren, whose older brother Joseph had been the Adams family’s physician before the war.

Smith’s case and modern treatment of her condition will be discussed by experts in medicine and the history of medicine:

• David Jones, M.D., Ph.D., the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard University.
• Suniti Nimbkar, M.D., FACS, medical director of the Breast Care Center at South Shore Hospital.

This event has been organized by the Abigail Adams Historical Society, stewards of the birthplace of the second First Lady, in partnership with South Shore Hospital's Breast Care Center and the Thomas Crane Public Library.

The discussion is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. in the library’s Community Meeting Room, on the ground floor. It is free and open to the public.

Capt. Thomas Preston in Retirement

I’ve been considering this statement about the Boston Massacre, which Caleb Bates, born in Hingham in 1780, gave to the librarian of Harvard University in 1856:

He said he was well acquainted with Miss Troutbeck who resided in Hingham, daughter of the clergyman in Boston, & that they went to Halifax at the evacuation of Boston by the British & that he had many of her letters.

She told him many times that she knew Capt. [Thomas] Preston well when in Halifax, that as newspapers from Boston often came, containing very severe reflections on his conduct on the evening of the 5th of March 1770, he repeatedly said that the Bostonians “wronged” him, he never gave the order to “Fire,” that when the riot broke out he was in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire, that he immediately went, at the peril of his life, & did all he could to suppress it, that the truth was there was a great tumult among the people, the rabble calling the troops damned lobster-backs & other hard names, & from the mass went out the word “Fire”, by whom given it was not known, & such was the noise that it could not be known where it originated, some supposing it was given by one person, others by another, & that he had nothing to do with it.

The Troutbeck family did go to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1776, before moving on to Britain. And they did live in Hingham in the early 1800s. Yesterday I discussed two sisters in that family. The most likely informant was Sarah Troutbeck (1760-1840), who was in her mid-teens during the evacuation.

But was Capt. Thomas Preston in Halifax in 1776? He’s not easy to track after he left Boston, but there’s no sign he was ever in Nova Scotia.

Preston was acquitted of ordering the shooting in the fall of 1770. In the first week of December, Boston newspapers reported, he sailed for London on H.M.S. Glasgow. On 5 Mar 1771, the first anniversary of the Massacre, Secretary of War Barrington wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage, “Captain Preston has had all his expences paid and a Pension of £200 a Year bestowed upon him. He is a perfectly satisfied Man, which is a thing not to be found every Day.”

That might simply have been a promise of a pension since the Parliamentary Register dates Preston’s annual payments (“during pleasure”) from 29 Sept 1772. Edmund E. Everard’s history of the 29th Regiment echoed that figure: “In November [1772] Captain Thomas Preston was granted a pension of £200 a year upon the military establishment of Ireland, in consideration of his faithful services.” Everard also stated that Preston was Irish in origin, aged 43 in December 1773 with eighteen years of army service.

Preston continued to be listed on British Army Lists as a captain in the 29th Regiment until 1774, but by then he must have sold his rank and retired. And he probably retired to Ireland. Sometime between 1783 and 1787 Preston submitted testimony to the Loyalists Commission on behalf of the Boston merchant Gilbert Deblois; at that time he was living on Merrion Street in Dublin.

“Captain Preston” was still receiving £200 per year on the Irish establishment in January 1790, according to a list published in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine.

In 1822, speaking to descendants of Josiah Quincy, Jr., John Adams said that he had once passed Preston on the street in London. That would have been in the 1780s, when Adams was an American diplomat. However, Adams didn’t say that Preston spoke to him about their earlier acquaintance, so the former President could have been mistaken about whom he saw. Adams never mentioned such a meeting in his own writings.

In any event, there’s no evidence to corroborate that Preston was in Halifax during the short period when the Troutbeck family was there, or ever. Perhaps Troutbeck heard these statements from someone else, perhaps she met Preston somewhere else, perhaps Bates’s memory wasn’t as accurate as he thought. But the provenance of this information doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Furthermore, the internal evidence of the Troutbeck story renders it dubious. Capt. Preston was “captain of the day” on 5 March 1770, and thus on duty. He would not have been “in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire” that evening.

(In addition, the term “lobster-backs” doesn’t appear in authentic sources from Revolutionary America, so far as I can tell. It became popular in histories written in the mid-1800s.)

The basic political points of the Troutbeck anecdote are true: There was fighting between locals and soldiers earlier that night. Capt. Preston did arrive on King Street to find another violent confrontation. He didn’t give the soldiers any order to fire. (After the trial, Pvt. Edward Montgomery reportedly admitted he yelled out the order.) The “loose gown & slippers” is the only aspect of this anecdote that’s new, and that’s the most dubious detail.

Tracking Miss Troutbeck

Yesterday I quoted a description of Capt. Thomas Preston, the British army officer tried for the Boston Massacre, credited to “Miss Troutbeck who resided in Hingham, daughter of the clergyman in Boston.”

I found two women who fit that description, both daughters of the Rev. John Troutbeck, assistant rector at King’s Chapel in Boston from 1755 to 1776, and his wife Sarah. They had seven daughters baptized at the chapel between 1760 and 1774, four dying at young ages.

The extended Troutbeck family evacuated with the British military in March 1776, and the minister died three years later. His widow was unusually active in applying for support as a Loyalist, pursuing debts, and seeking to recover property left by her father in Massachusetts. She came back to the state for a visit in the 1785 and eventually settled permanently, bringing her oldest daughter Sarah, baptized in 1760. According to the Annals of King’s Chapel:

About 1803 or 1804 they found a home in Hingham, occupying the house of General [Benjamin] Lincoln, then collector of the port of Boston; and again, five years after, resided there in the Beal house, and later removed to Dr. [Thomas] Thaxter’s, where they lived till the mother’s death in 1813, at the age of seventy-seven.

Gen. Lincoln’s house appears above.

Meanwhile, in England the Troutbecks’ other daughter, Hannah (1768-1851) married William Bowes (1771-1850), the son of another Loyalist refugee, also named William Bowes (1734-1805). The Annals says:

Their marriage was a clandestine one, on account of the opposition of his father, formerly a Boston merchant, cousin and joint-heir with John Hancock. Having separated from her husband, she came to this country, where she was known only as Miss Troutbeck. . . .

After her mother’s death Miss Troutbeck went to England, where she had previously rejoined her husband after his father’s death, residing for a time with his mother, Mrs. Bowes, at Otterton.

I can’t find any exact statement of when William and Hannah Bowes married. Their first recorded child was Emily, born in London in 1806, who became the mother of the author Edmund Gosse. Two more children were born in 1808 and 1813.

All the Troutbeck women appear to have moved around a lot, propelled by family crises and genteel poverty. In 1829 Sarah Troutbeck wrote to a friend that “About four months back, by the death of a clergyman who had a large fortune and took an interest in us, I came into possession of a comfortable house, ready furnished, for life; and at my death it is to go to my Sister, and then revert to the family from which we receive it.” She died in 1840.

Thus, the most likely “Miss Troutbeck” to have spoken to Caleb Bates in Hingham was Sarah, who lived in that town for about a decade until 1813 and perhaps later. However, it’s also possible that Bates’s informant was Hannah Bowes, using the name “Miss Troutbeck” while living in America apart from her husband.

TOMORROW: Assessing Miss Troutbeck’s story.

A Secondhand Story of Capt. Thomas Preston

On 17 May 1856, John Langdon Sibley, librarian of Harvard University (shown here), recorded this conversation about the Boston Massacre in his private journal:

Saturday. At the bookstore of the Antiquarian S.G. Drake in Boston I met an aged man named Bates, from Hingham. He said he was well acquainted with Miss Troutbeck [?] who resided in Hingham, daughter of the clergyman in Boston, & that they went to Halifax at the evacuation of Boston by the British & that he had many of her letters.

She told him many times that she knew Capt. [Thomas] Preston well when in Halifax, that as newspapers from Boston often came, containing very severe reflections on his conduct on the evening of the 5th of March 1770, he repeatedly said that the Bostonians “wronged” him, he never gave the order to “Fire,” that when the riot broke out he was in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire, that he immediately went, at the peril of his life, & did all he could to suppress it, that the truth was there was a great tumult among the people, the rabble calling the troops damned lobster-backs & other hard names, & from the mass went out the word “Fire”, by whom given it was not known, & such was the noise that it could not be known where it originated, some supposing it was given by one person, others by another, & that he had nothing to do with it.

Mr. Bales was intelligent, apparently well educated, & on being questioned repeated his statements without any essential modification & without any confusion.

Harvard’s online transcript renders the aged man’s name in two ways: Bates and Bales. But we have more information from Frederic Kidder, who followed up on this story to record a version in his History of the Boston Massacre (1870). He identified the man as “the late Caleb Bates, Esq., of Hingham.”

A man of that name was born in Hingham in 1780 and died in 1857. At a meeting of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society soon after his death, Bates was recalled as “a man of great probity and of marked individuality of character, with a strong love for historical studies, and a great fund of information upon local and general history.” A longer profile appeared in the society’s Memorial Biographies, noting Bates’s “wonderful memory” and “keen relish for historical studies.”

Bates’s story about Capt. Preston was only as reliable as his informant, of course. So who was “Miss Troutbeck”?

TOMORROW: The clergyman’s daughters.

“Fight or Flight” at Loring Greenhough House, 30 Sept.

[ADDENDUM: This event has been canceled because of volunteer organizers’ family responsibilities.]

On Saturday, 30 September, the Loring Greenough House in Jamaica Plain will host “Fight or Flight,” a recreation of householders Joshua and Mary Loring’s departure in 1774.

The event starts at 11:00 A.M. as visitors are invited to tour the Loring Mansion. In the following hour, “Mary and servants consider packing, 18th-century friends and relations (and curious onlookers) will gather on the lawn, offering opinions and pleading their case.’ Visitors can hear and enter into the debate on the state of post-“Powder Alarm” politics and what friends of the royal government like Commodore Loring should do.

At 1:00 P.M. [spoiler!] the Loring family departs for Boston, unaware that they’ll never see this home again. At 2:00 interpreters gather “at the recreated 18th-century Bunch of Grapes Tavern to discuss the fate of the Lorings’ abandoned property.” That is followed by an auction. Children’s games and carriage rides will also be going on.

This event is free to all. It’s scheduled to last from 11:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. The Loring Greenough House is at 12 South Street in Jamaica Plain.

Fall Events at the American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has a full schedule of events coming up. Here are those touching on the eighteenth century.

Tuesday, 26 September, 7:00 P.M.
Politeness and Public Life in Early America—and Today
Steven C. Bullock

Long before current fears about incivility in public life—before anxieties about Twitter-shaming and cable-news name-calling—politeness was very much on the minds of American leaders. Eighteenth-century leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin considered politeness an essential part of a free society, a part of the larger project of challenging authoritarian rule. Drawing upon his new book Tea Sets and Tyranny, this lecture examines why civility seemed so important in early America—and why it seems so problematic today.

Tuesday, 3 October, 7:00 P.M.
A Revolution of Her Own!
Judith Kalaora

In 1782, Deborah Sampson bound her chest, tied back her hair, and enlisted in the Continental Army. This one-person play, written and performed by Judith Kalaora, recreates Sampson’s arduous upbringing, active combat, and success as the first female professional soldier. Judith Kalaora is an actress, educator, and historical interpreter. She has worked on stages from London to Montreal and across the United States.

Thursday, 12 October, 7:00 P.M.
Thundersticks
David J. Silverman

The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America's indigenous peoples—a cultural earthquake so profound that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. This lecture, based upon the book Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, explores how the embracing of firearms by Native Americans transformed their cultures and empowered them to pursue their interests and defend their political and economic autonomy for over two centuries.

Thursday, 26 October, 7:00 P.M.
Minutemen Revisited—the thirteenth annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
Robert A. Gross

In this lecture, A.A.S. member Robert Gross will discuss his 1976 Bancroft Prize-winning book, The Minutemen and Their World. Providing a provocative and compelling look at the everyday lives of New England farmers and their community as they rebelled against Great Britain, The Minutemen and Their World was reissued in a 25th-anniversary edition in 2001. Gross will reflect on the conception of this ground-breaking work and its ongoing impact on scholarship and society.

Tuesday, 7 November, 7:00 P.M.
Second Revolutions: Thomas Jefferson and Haiti
James Alexander Dun

Jefferson’s defeat of John Adams in the election of 1800 represented a peaceful transfer of power and signaled the onset of a more unified polity. This lecture, base upon the book Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America, examines how the Jeffersonian victory took place on more than one front. Other more radical agendas for change were quashed as well at that moment, including that of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the nearly-independent French colony of Saint Dominque.

All these events are free. Parking is on the nearby streets. Seating is first-come, first-served.

Elias Boudinot’s Story of Gunpowder and Spying

In his memoirs of the Revolution, New Jersey politician Elias Boudinot included this ancedote, headlined “Scarcity of Powder at Boston”:

When our Army lay before Boston in 1775, our Powder was so nearly Expended, That General [George] Washington told me that he had not more than Eight Rounds a Man, Altho’ he had then near 14 miles of line to guard, and that he dare not fire an Evening or Morning Gun.

In this situation one of the Committee of Safety for Massachusetts, who was privy to the whole secret, deserted and went over to Genl [Thomas] Gage, and discovered our poverty to him.

This was apparently how Boudinot understood the story of Dr. Benjamin Church’s treachery. Church had indeed been a member of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, and in that position had shared crucial information with Gen. Gage in early 1775. (I wrote about his disclosures in The Road to Concord.)

However, Church didn’t cross to the British side of the siege lines with news of the gunpowder shortfall. Instead, he was exposed and confined in Cambridge around the end of September.

Dr. Church had sent written messages into Boston during the siege, including one that traveled by Washington’s own secret communications channel. But it appears that Church never informed Gage about the Continentals’ gunpowder problem. In the letter that was deciphered and exposed him, Church told a British contact exactly the opposite, exaggerating the Continental supply:

Twenty tons of powder lately arrived at Philadelphia, Connecticut & Providence. Upwards of 20 tons are now in camp. Salt petre is made in every colony. Powder mills are erected and constantly employed in Philadelphia & New York.

Church even used those words at his trial to argue that he was trying to fool the British command, concealing the harmful information. However, Church had written that letter in July, weeks before the gunpowder shortage was recognized.

Of course, Washington and his fellow generals had to wonder if Church had disclosed their crucial secret in another way. Furthermore, Benjamin Thompson, who had been traveling around the siege lines, did desert to the British that fall; he didn’t know about the gunpowder, but the Continentals didn’t know he didn’t know. So Washington had to assume the worst and hope for the best, waiting for the British to act.

Here’s how Boudinot continued the story:

The fact [of the gunpowder shortage] was so incredible, That Genl Gage treated it as a stratagem of war, and the informant as a spy: or coming with the express purpose of deceiving him & drawing his Army into a snare, by which means we were saved from having our Quarters beaten up.—

There was no way for Boudinot or Washington to know how Gage responded to Church’s messages, Thompson, or any other intelligence source. They were, after all, on opposite sides of the war. Boudinot’s story about Gage looks like an assumption made to explain why the British weren’t more aggressive in the fall of 1775.

I was the chairman of the Committee of safety at Elizabeth Town, and had about six or Seven Quarter Casks of Powder, which on urgent application from Genl Washington were sent to Boston, with what could be spared from New York.

Boudinot could thus feel good about helping to prevent the British from “beating up” the Americans around Boston. But in fact by that time both Gage and his successor, Gen. William Howe, had given up on breaking out of Boston by land. Washington feared an attack that would never come, based on a disclosure that never happened.

Charles E. Frye on Rediscovering Colonial Roads

Charles E. Frye is writing the novel series Duty in the Cause of Liberty to share the story of his ancestor Isaac Frye of Wilton, New Hampshire. You can read more about the project in this interview at Written by Veterans.

Frye, a professional cartographer, is taking a very data-driven approach to this story. On his website he’s mapped out his protagonist’s home neighborhood in Wilton and the territory he traveled over as a Continental officer during the war. In this blog post Frye describes how he developed those maps and what he learned by doing so.

An extract:

As I began to trace Isaac Frye’s path during the American Revolution, I needed to know where he had been, and how he got there. I also needed a map to “pin” that information to. To my surprise, many records only showed where he had been, rarely conveyed his mode of travel, and almost never indicated the specific route he took.

Thus, I undertook to find a preponderance of evidence to plausibly describe how and where he traveled. In my years of reading and research, I learned two most important things:

1. Despite not having Google Maps, smart phones, or even a current printed map (which rarely had accurate roads) to get directions, colonial Americans made it their business to know the best and fastest routes between destinations. Time was money back then too, and nobody had enough of either to waste. Time and again journals kept by soldiers and and army suppliers described routes not shown on any maps, though these routes were are often described in town histories in the sections dealing with public improvements.
2. The network of extended family and friends in the places where one often traveled mattered a great deal when it came time to plan to sleep each night with a roof over one’s head and draught animals cared for.

I also learned that roads today are not always where the roads used to be. A great many of today’s roads are possible because of advances in excavation and grading equipment. Thus, colonial roads were not nearly as level or straight as we are accustomed to.

To learn exactly where those old roads were located, there is no substitute for getting out on the landscape and walking the terrain. The remnants of stone walls (usually built in the early 1800s) are often the best clue. Once you know what you’re looking for, a sense for what a wagon or team of oxen drawing a sled could traverse in terms of slope and tightness of curves can be gained.

Frye aligned a modern digital base map with period maps by matching a handful of known points. But those period maps, while valuable, weren’t rigorously accurate or complete. You can compare a printed map of Wilton from 1784, showing four roads from the town center, to Frye’s map, with many more paths that Isaac Frye and his neighbors used.

Finding Revolutionary Massachusetts Legislative Records Online

Back in 2014 I wrote about finally finding online copies of the journals of the Massachusetts House through the HathiTrust.

Though the books themselves were online at long last, it wasn’t that easy to find particular volumes. But HathiTrust is a vast, changing resources. Here are some updated pages to start from.

For the bulk of eighteenth-century Massachusetts House records, volumes 1-50 and 52-55 covering 1715 to 1779, start at this page. Be aware that the system still has trouble searching those volumes because they’re facsimiles of surviving eighteenth-century books, complete with damaged type, lots of italics, and the long s. The indexes are often good entrance points.

What about volume 51? That volume records the legislative year 1775-76, so it’s kind of crucial. Fortunately, the three installments of that year’s journal can be accessed from this page.

From late 1774 to early 1776, there were two rival governments in Massachusetts:

• royal governor Thomas Gage and the mandamus Council in Salem and then Boston, and then Gen. William Howe as military commander of Boston, with the mandamus Council meeting briefly under Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver.
• the Massachusetts Provincial Congress convened outside of Boston, its executive function exercised between sessions by the Committee of Safety, until a new General Court was elected in the summer of 1775.

Each of those governments maintained records in the usual manner to uphold its claim to be legitimate, and those records are also available online.

For the Provincial Congress and its committees, as well as county conventions, the standard source is William Lincoln’s Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, published in 1838. Here’s a portal to that volume. It’s also available in full on Google Books.

As for the royal Council, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts published a transcription of its records in the 1930s, and recently made all its publications available online. Here’s the volume with “Documents Relating to the Last Meetings of the Massachusetts Royal Council, 1774–1776” starting at page 460.

(The picture above also comes courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, sharing this article by the late Abbott Lowell Cummings. It’s a 1751 engraving produced by Thomas Dawes and Nathaniel Hurd of the building where the Massachusetts legislature met for most of the eighteenth century, now called the Old State House.)

Charles Lee and a “distemper’d brain”

In a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia dated 19 Sept 1775, Gen. Charles Lee complained about the Continental Army’s New England troops. And then he complained about Rush’s colleagues at the Continental Congress. And then he complained about how he was supposed to be addressed. Gen. Lee saw a lot to complain about that day.

Lee’s letter started with a mention of action at “Bunker’s Hill,” but he didn’t mean the big battle in June. In late August the wing of the army under his command had pressed forward to fortify Ploughed Hill, closer to the British fort on Bunker’s. That produced some firing back and forth. The fact that the Continentals had taken and held that position was the first significant movement in the siege for weeks, and enough for supporters to celebrate.

Gen. Lee, of course, complained:

I am extremely sorry that your Philadelphians have been buoy’d up with the news of so complete a victory, and more so that I am the Hero who have gain’d it—When men fall from great expectations, They are apt to esteem themselves deceiv’d by those who have been the reputed actors of the things They wish’d, altho’ They had no hand in raising these expectations—Not a syllable of the Bunker’s Hill seduction and victory has the least foundation in truth, indeed from all appearances not all the astutia [cleverness] of Hanibal or Sertorius wou’d draw ’em from their nest—

let me communicate to you my sentiments, but at the same time I must desire you to be secret. I think then We might have attack’d em long before this and with success, were our Troops differently constituted—but the fatal perswasion has taken deep root in the minds of the Americans from the highest to the lowest order that they are no match for the Regulars, but when cover’d by a wall or breast work. This notion is still further strengthen’d by the endless works We are throwing up—in short unless we can remove the idea (and it must be done by degrees) no spirited action can be ventur’d on without the greatest risk—

to inculcate a different way of thinking, to inspire ’em with some confidence pugnando manibus [in hand combat], I first propos’d a body of spearmen for each Regiment at Philadelphia, and I cou’d perceive that the proposal appear’d to many to be the production of a distemper’d brain; but I am afraid They may find to their cost some time or other that the principle was sound, and that They will suffer by not adopting it.

You alarm me extremely in expressing apprehensions of divisions starting up amongst the members of the Congress. Good Gods, I was in hopes that we shou’d reap the full harvest Which We have sown with such infinite pains and labor. (I agree with you entirely in the opinion that they ought (at least half of them) to be changed annually.)

I condemn with you the barbarous, dangerous custom of loading the Servants of the People with the trappings of Court Titles. I cannot conceive who the Devil first devis’d the bauble of Excellency for their Commander in Chief, or the more ridiculous of His Honour for me—Upon my Soul They make me spew—even the tacking honorable to the Continental Congress creates a wambling in my stomack—What cou’d add dignity to the simple title of the Continental Congress of America, as long as they do their duty? And the instant They grow corrupt or slavish from timidity all the rumbling sounds of honorable, serene, mighty, sublime, or magnanimous, will only make their infamy more infamous.

Lee then went on for even longer about John Adams’s recently intercepted comments about him and his dogs, about why dogs were superior, and about an imagined moment of John Dickinson being “pelted with oranges.”

In his recent biography of Lee, Renegade Revolutionary, Phillip Pappas writes that the general “evidenced classic signs of what modern psychiatry would classify as manic-depressive (or bipolar disorder).” This letter appears to be from one of his up moods.