A Book Aboard Blackbeard’s Flagship

Here’s my favorite new archeological discovery, as reported by National Geographic and the Salisbury (N.C.) Post.

The flagship of the pirate Edward Thatch, best known as Blackbeard, ran aground off Beaufort, North Carolina, in 1718. Twelve years ago salvagers found that wreck, and state archeologists have been studying it ever since.

Among the artifacts from that ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was a breech-loading cannon or swivel gun. Inside it conservators found “a wet mass of textile scraps” that “may have served as a gasket for the wooden tampion, a plug that protected the cannon muzzle from the elements.”

Within that sludge were sixteen tiny pieces of paper. It’s rare for paper to survive on shipwrecks, for obvious reasons. The technicians carefully unfolded those papers. Some turned out to have legible words printed on them. So the next step was to identify, if possible, where those scraps had come from.

Back in 2014 I looked at a scrap of paper glued inside a picture frame and identified it as coming from a New York newspaper in 1810. So I have a sense of what such a search is like. But I had a much larger scrap of paper to work with. None of the scraps from the Blackbeard wreck was bigger than a quarter.

After “many months of research,” the researchers found a match. The legible fragments came from the 1712 first edition of Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711.

The leader of Cooke’s expedition was Woodes Rogers, who in 1718 became royal governor of the Bahamas with a mandate to crack down on piracy. Blackbeard and his ships were off North Carolina that summer because they wanted to keep away from the fleet Gov. Rogers was leading from Britain.

Some reports on this discovery describe it as giving insight into what pirates read. A copy of Cook’s Voyage to the South Sea was indeed aboard Blackbeard’s ship, but it’s really hard to read a book when someone’s ripped out several pages and used the scraps for wadding in a cannon.

Clearly some Caribbean mariner or traveler was reading about Woodes Rogers’s big voyage—that makes sense. And Thatch’s crew got a hold of a copy, perhaps for reading, perhaps as loot, perhaps just because they needed paper. But Thatch had that book ripped apart to prepare his guns to stave off Rogers’s patrols.

These surviving fragments and other artifacts from Queen Anne’s Revenge will probably go on display this year in an exhibit tied to the tricentennial of Blackbeard’s demise.

(I’ve been reading about Thatch, Rogers, and the other mariners who contended for superiority and wealth in the 1710s Caribbean in Colin Woodard’s Republic of Pirates. That’s why I’m calling Blackbeard “Thatch” instead of “Teach,” an early misspelling of his name.)

Digital Resources from Mount Vernon

Here are some digital goodies from the George Washington National Library at Mount Vernon, which I visited last year for a symposium.

Podcasts: The Conversations from the Washington’s Library podcast usually features a one-on-one chat between the library’s founding director, Douglas Bradburn, and a historian or author who is speaking or doing research at the site.

These are in-depth interviews, most lasting about an hour. Bradburn asks about people’s latest book and ongoing research from the perspective of a fellow historian with an excellent overview of research being done in the field. He often gets into a topic few history podcasts cover: his guests’ careers in and out of academia. Some of the shows are recorded more clearly than others; a couple of times I’ve given up on listening in the car because I couldn’t make out both sides of the conversation.

After a few months’ hiatus, the podcast has just returned with a conversation with Gordon Wood, one of the most influential early American historians of his generation. (During that break, Bradburn became the head of Mount Vernon overall, so he was keeping busy.)

Interactive Map: Washington’s World is one of the many digital resources that Joseph Stoltz oversees for Mount Vernon, a map tracing all of George Washington’s travels. This map shows his known location at every point in his life, pinned with G.I.S. onto a modern map of North America.

We can thus follow Washington’s various journeys, as far west as Point Pleasant on the Ohio River (1770) and as far east as Barbados (1751). One can zoom in to the neighborhood level or out to see the whole scope of his movements. Major events have descriptive explanations and links to Mount Vernon’s growing digital encyclopedia of Washington’s life.

Because the sites are mapped onto a modern map, it’s easy to approximate Washington’s routes along today’s roads. In the case of Boston, however, the city’s modern shoreline isn’t the shoreline that Washington knew and struggled with. Still, it’s interesting to see locations pegged to all three of his visits to the city: in 1756 as a young colonial officer, in 1776 as a victorious besieger, and in 1789 as the elected President.

Lectures: Finally, I just learned that the talk I went to Mount Vernon to deliver can now be watched on C-Span’s American History TV site. It’s called “George Washington’s Cambridge Headquarters.”

The theme of that symposium was “George Washington Slept Here,” and all the talks explored different places where we know Washington spent time. The speakers brought a wide range of perspectives, focusing variously on archeology, farming, politics, surveying, war, and so on. Other lectures recorded by C-Span are:

• Natalie Larson, “George Washington’s Beds”
• Karl Watson, “George Washington in Barbados”
• Thomas Reinhart, “George Washington and Architectural Trends”
• (previous version of one symposium talk) Warren Bingham, “George Washington in the South”

The digital and physical resources at Mount Vernon will no doubt continue to grow.

Benjamin Franklin’s Birthday (and the Washingtons’ Anniversary)

In a letter to her father, Benjamin Franklin, dated 17 Jan 1779, Sarah Bache (shown here in 1793) wrote from Philadelphia:

I have dined at the Ministers, spent an evening at Mr. Holkers, have lately been several times invited abroad with the General and Mrs Washinton, he allways enquires after you in the most afectionate manner and speaks of you highly we danced at Mr. [Samuel] Powels your Birth day or night I should say in company together and he told me it was the aniversary of his marriage it was just twenty years that night—

Franklin was born on 6 Jan 1705/06 in Boston under the Julian Calendar (17 Jan 1706 under the Gregorian Calendar). The Washingtons married on 6 Jan 1759 under the Gregorian Calendar. Thus, Franklin’s birthday and the Washingtons’ anniversary shared a date, even though fifty-three years plus eleven days passed between them.

I’ve noted before how Americans struggled to figure out when to celebrate Washington’s birthday—the O.S. date or the N.S. equivalent. Eventually we settled on the Gregorian date, as advised by the President’s private secretary, Tobias Lear.

Franklin seems to have been ambivalent about which date served as his birthday. On 6 Jan 1773, he wrote to his wife, Deborah Franklin:

I feel still some Regard for this Sixth of January, as my old nominal Birth-day, tho’ the Change of Stile has carried the real Day forward to the 17th, when I shall be, if I live till then, 67 Years of Age.

As Sarah Bache’s letter shows, she thought of her father’s birthday as 6 January, even though Pennsylvania started using the Gregorian Calendar when she was nine years old.

On 17 Jan 1781, Franklin started to write “My Birth-Day” in his journal but then crossed it off. On 6 Jan 1782 he wrote to Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy about his challenges writing in French without a dictionary:

Il y a soixante Ans que les choses masculins & feminines (hors des Modes & des Temps) m’ont donné beaucoup d’Embarras. J’esperois, autrefois qu’à quatre vingt on peut en etre libre. Me voici à quatre fois dix-neuf, qui est bien prés: & neantmoins ces feminines francoises me tracassent encore.

[For sixty years things masculine and feminine (not to mention the modes and tenses) have given me a lot of trouble. I once hoped that at eighty I would be delivered of them. But here I am four times nineteen, which is very close to that, and nevertheless these French feminines still exasperate me.]

Under the Gregorian Calendar, Franklin was still eleven days away from being 76 years old (or 4 times 19) when he wrote. But I suppose that was close enough.

A Second Look at the Corporal Who Stole a Horse

Last week (and last month) I shared an item from Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress preparing for war. Isaiah Thomas of the Massachusetts Spy declared that story “A d——d lie.”

In the same column Loyalist printer James Rivington shared another story about a British “corporal of the 38th regiment” pretending to desert and making off with a Patriot’s horse, saddle, and clothing. To me that sounded like the plot that the unreliable Samuel Dyer had described to a British admiral back in July 1774; wouldn’t it be awfully risky to put a deserter on horseback and ride him past his own barracks? Yet Isaiah Thomas didn’t have anything to say about that tale.

It turns out Don Hagist, author of The Revolution’s Last Men and British Soldiers, American War, did have something to say. So here’s his note as a “guest blogger” posting:

I encountered the story of the corporal of the 38th Regiment who stole a horse in an issue of the Hibernian Chronicle dated 23 January 1775, which gave the name of the letter writer, of the corporal, and of a private soldier…

Copy of a letter from Captain Maginis of the 38th regiment in Boston to his brother in Drogheda, dated Dec. 14, 1774.

“…We often see here in the English papers accounts from America, not one of which contain a word of truth; they mention a great deal about the desertion from our troops, some are gone off, but not the tenth part of what they say, for our whole army, consisting of 105 companies, have not lost 120 men, although the people make use of every stratagem to make them desert, and supply them with horses and carriages to go off.

But I believe that will be a good deal stopped by the good behaviour of a young lad, a corporal in my company; he with another of the company went to a public-house, where they met some countrymen, who advised them to desert, and that they would supply them with disguises, that they might escape the easier, whereupon the corporal put on a disguise, stuffed his regimentals into one of the men’s saddle bags, and after settling their expedition, the countryman offered to take the corporal behind him, but he told him he could not ride without stirrups, so he got on the saddle, and took the countryman behind him, and set a galloping towards the nearest barrack, which, when the other observed, he leaped from behind him, and made his escape, swearing he would not wait to be shot, the corporal drove on to his own barrack with the whole prize, and no one dare to own the horse or cloaths; the corporal is thanked by the whole army, and the horse given up to him; there was no horse for the other, or he would have done the same.

The corporal is one Baker, a Yorkshire-man; and the soldier’s name is Drenning a Heart of Steel from the county of Antrim.”

In his blog post on this letter, Don asked, “Is this letter a piece of propaganda fabricated by the publisher or a legitimate record of an event in Boston?” Follow that link to his website to see what Don found in the 38th Regiment’s muster rolls.

Thanks again, Don!

“So suited to the New-Year’s day” in Québec?

The Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses that I discussed last year includes a section of Canadian examples both before and after the Revolution.

The carriers of the Quebec Gazette/Gazette de Québec had both English and French verses. One from 1781 appears on the Canadian Poetry website in a section headed “Poems in Early Canadian Newspapers”:

NEW-YEAR’S VERSES
Of the PRINTER’S BOY, who carries about the
Quebec Gazette to the CUSTOMERS.

JANUARY 1, 1781.

SERIOUS and solemn be the song
Which hails this still-returning day;
Let measure guide the rhyme along,
And gratitude inspire the lay!

When Spring, in all her blooming charms,
And Summer, in her richest dress;
When Autumn fills the lab’rer’s arms,
Nor coily yields her vast increase:

Oh then! let mortals grateful deem
Of all the blessings God has sent;
And, in deep Winter’s dread extreme,
Rejoice in plenty and content.

And, while they joy in bounty given,
Still to the poor their hands extend:—
The first great delegate of Heaven
Is he—the wretch’s firmest friend.

Now long, and dark, and dark the night,
And short the blessings of the day;
Yet soon the sun’s resplendent light
Shall hail us with a brighter ray!

And soon shall Winter’s blast be o’er,
And soon returning Spring arrive;
And then, oh then! the happy poor
Shall thank you they are still alive.

Grateful to Heaven their vows will rise,
For blessings you may now bestow;
And lab’ring breasts, and streaming eyes,
Their sense of obligation show.

And who, that feels the genial sun,
And owns the God that points his ray,
Would leave the grateful task undone,
So suited to the New-Year’s day.

Here’s the thing, though. That poem had appeared in the London Magazine in 1778 with only one small difference. In the magazine it was about the winter solstice. The Quebec printers changed “the Shortest-day” to “the New-Year’s day,” thus creating Canadian poetry.

When Did the British New Year Begin Before 1752?

The earliest examples of a poetic address from colonial American newspaper carriers to their customers on New Year’s Day are all from the fast-growing city of Philadelphia. The first three date from the years 1720-22. No broadsides of those addresses survive, but they were included in a 1740 collection of verse by the Philadelphia printer with the delightful name Aquila Rose.

Then comes another in 1735, and a third from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette in 1739. Those do survive as flyers, and the second is dated “Jan. 1, 1739.” The Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses catalogues twenty-nine more between then and 1752, the year that the British Empire shifted from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.

Part of that shift was settling the first day of January as the start of the year. Before then, the English year officially turned over on the Feast of the Annunciation, or 25 March. So when were those pre-1752 New Year’s greetings distributed, around 1 January or around 25 March?

According to that checklist, every address but one that bears a date in its headline was pegged to 1 January, and the exception was dated 31 December. Others discuss winter. None treats 25 March as the start of a new year.

It turns out that most of the British Empire was counting years two ways. The “historical year” ran from January to December. The “civil or legal year” started on 25 March. Parish records often had headings for new years in both January (“New Style”) and March (“Old Style”). From January to March, literate English people designated the year with what looks like a fraction: “1707/08.” (Scotland had officially decided back in 1600 that the new year started in January, so it didn’t need such tricks.)

In daily life, people recognized the discrepancy. I looked at the published diary and correspondence of Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall. On 1 Jan 1701, he wrote a mediocre poem that starts “Once more! Out God, vouchsafe to shine,” which certainly sounds like he was counting off a year, but he never labeled the poem as such. Richard Henchman responded to Sewall, however, with his own poetic lines which do refer to “our New-year” and “A New-Year’s Day.”

Later remarks from Sewall:

• “Monday, Jany 1. 1704/5 Col. Hobbey’s Negro comes about 8 or 9 mane and sends in by David to have leave to give me a Levit [trumpet blast] and wish me a merry new year.”
• “Jany. 4, 1704/5… My Service to your Lady; I wish you both a good New Year.”
• “Jan’y 21, 1716/17… January begins this New Year (the Julian Year) with almost every body but Englishmen.”
• “April 1, 1718… Now that upon all Reckonings, we are come to the beginning of a New year, I wish it may be a good and Joyfull one to you.”

Likewise, Sewall’s contemporary the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather delivered a sermon titled “A New Year Well-Begun: An Essay Offered on a New-Years-Day” on 1 Jan 1719 (as we’d number the year)—but on the title page the date was “1718/19” because officially he wasn’t in a new year yet. In correspondence between Sewall and Mather there’s at least one letter dated “11th month”—but when had they started counting?

Newspapers reflected that confusion. In March 1720, Gov. Samuel Shute proclaimed that the last day of the month would be a fast day. The Boston News-Letter presented that news in its issue dated 7-14 Mar 1720.

The Boston Gazette printed the same proclamation in its issue dated 7-14 Mar 1719.

Look real close at the Gazette’s date and you’ll see that someone has crossed out the “19” and penciled in “20,” perhaps for later cataloguing.

Another newspaper example: The famous John Peter Zenger free-press case took place in 1734, by our reckoning, but the newspaper in question carried a date of 18 Feb 1733 because Zenger still used O.S. dates.

The English calendar(s) thus provided two days for reflection on the passage of time and opportunities to do more in the next twelve months. That system also required more mental calculation about how a person should write the date and what other people might have meant by a date. The calendar reform of 1752 wasn’t just about catching up with the rest of Europe on the Gregorian Calendar; it was about nailing down the official turn of the year.

Francis Wrigley, Philadelphia Journeyman

Yesterday I shared the New Year’s greeting for 1783 that Philip Freneau composed specifically for Francis Wrigley to share with his customers.

Wrigley was a journeyman printer working for the Philadelphia newspaper Freneau edited, The Freeman’s Journal. Wrigley’s death notices say he was eighty-five years old when he died in October 1829, meaning he had been born in 1744.

According to William McCulloch, a younger Philadelphia printer who corresponded with Isaiah Thomas, Wrigley was born in England. In Some Degree of Power: Preindustrial American Printing Trades, 1778-1815, Mark A. Lause suggested that Benjamin Franklin himself sent Wrigley across the Atlantic with a letter of recommendation. (But again, we Americans like to credit Franklin with everything.)

During the Revolutionary War, according to Wrigley’s obituary, he “printed for the Old Congress while [it was] sitting in Philadelphia, and accompanied them from this city to Baltimore [in 1776], where he printed the ‘Old Continental Money,’ which was at that time in circulation.”

In 1785 Wrigley set up his own print shop and sold ink and stationery on South Street in Philadelphia. The following year, he supported a strike by the city’s journeymen printers demanding a wage of six dollars per week. That effort was successful, and shortly afterward he and other printers formed the Franklin Society, a mutual-aid society for the profession.

Wrigley worked with various partners in the subsequent decades. In the early 1790s Philadelphia was the national capital, and that brought a boon of printing jobs, both governmental and political. At other periods he worked from less prominent, and probably cheaper, addresses. Wrigley specialized in printing books rather than newspapers and periodicals.

Hezekiah Niles noted his passing in Niles’s Weekly Register:

Died, on the 28th ult. at Philadelphia, our venerable friend Francis Wrigley, printer, in the 86th year of his age. He printed for the old congress, was one of the best pressmen of his day, and, perhaps, performed as much personal labor in the printing business as any man that ever lived. He was remarkable for the goodness of his heart, and fidelity and kindness to all men, but especially to those of the craft—very gentle and patient with young apprentices, as the senior editor of the Register experienced, and affectionately remembers.

Those biographical details help to explain why in late 1782 Freneau wrote one New-Year’s verse for Wrigley and another for “the Lad who carries” the Freeman’s Journal. In his late thirties, Wrigley was no longer a “Lad.” And he was also notable for being a nice guy.

A New Year’s Greeting from Philip Freneau

Philip Freneau (1752-1832) graduated from Princeton College in 1771, already in the habit of writing poetry. He tried teaching and studying for the ministry, but all he really wanted to do was write, which was a nice lifestyle but not a lucrative one.

Despite supporting the Patriot cause on paper, Freneau spent the first years of the Revolutionary War in the Caribbean, writing nature poems. In 1778 he sailed back to the U.S. of A., landing only after being captured and released by the Royal Navy.

After publishing more poetry, Freneau enlisted as supercargo on a ship to the Azores. That trip required evading British vessels. In May 1780 he set out again for the island of St. Eustatia, this time as a paying passenger.

That ship started its voyage by seizing a small sloop from Crown hands in Delaware Bay. Its captain therefore had no leg to stand on when British ships counterattacked the next day. I mean that literally: Freneau wrote that “a twelve-pound shot…struck Captain Laboyteaut in the right thigh, which it smashed to atoms.”

Freneau expected the British would again set him free as a non-combatant passenger. Instead, his captors shoved him in with their other prisoners. His treatment wasn’t as bad as it could have been because he was soon treated as an officer. Nonetheless, Freneau found himself on one of the infamous British prison-ships in New York harbor.

And he stayed on that ship for six weeks before falling quite ill and being released. Freneau spun that experience into more fervid Patriotism and his most famous poem, The British Prison-Ship. (Michelle Porter discussed that composition at the Journal of the American Revolution.)

In April 1781 Freneau began to edit the Freeman’s Journal, published in Philadelphia by printer Francis Bailey. In that capacity he wrote two verses for the newspaper’s carriers at the end of 1782, plus another for the apprentices of the Pennsylvania Evening Post. Here’s one of those:

To those Gentlemen who have been pleased to favour
Francis Wrigley, News Carrier, with their custom.
January 1, 1783.

ACCORDING to custom, once more I appear
With the verse you expect at the dawn of the year:
For at length we have got into EIGHTY AND THREE;
And in spite of proud Britain, are happy and free.
If the times have been hard, and our commerce gone wrong,
We still have been able to struggle along.
If some, through misfortunes, are slack in the purse,
It is not so bad but it might have been worse.—
Great things, the year past, were reveal’d to our eyes:
The Dutch have confess’d us their friends and allies,
And humbled the pride of our haughty invaders,
By fighting their fleets and destroying their traders,
If the English succeeded in taking the COUNT,
To what, in the end, did their conquest amount?
With their boasts, and their brags, and their shouts of applause,
It but sav’d them from ruin—not ruin’d our cause.

BUT leaving the weight of political cares
To those, who are plac’d at the helm of affairs,
To the humours of fortune in all things resign’d,
I mean by my visit to put you in mind,
That, as true as a clock, both early and late,
With the news of the day I have knock’d at your gate,
And gave you to know what the world was a doing,
What LOUIS intended, or GEORGE was a brewing.
If sometimes the papers were trifling and flat,
And the news went against us,—I cou’dn’t help that;
If parties were angry, and vented their spite,
I bro’t you their wranglings—not help’d them to write.
I therefore presume (and not without reason)
You’ll remember your NEWSMAN, and think of the season;
The markets are high, and the weather is cold;
No party I serve, and no pension I hold.
We Hawkers are men, and have children and wives
To comfort our hearts, and to solace our lives:
But if I say more, you’ll think it is stuff;
And a word to the wise is, in reason, enough.

Freneau wrote similar verses to celebrate the start of 1784 before that spring quitting the Freeman’s Journal to take another trip to the Caribbean. Two years later, Bailey collected his erstwhile editor’s poetry, including six carrier verses. Freneau wrote a couple more in later life, and he included those poems in the editions of his work that he oversaw himself, indicating that he didn’t see his carrier verses as mere occasional ephemera.

COMING UP: Who was Francis Wrigley?

A Checklist of Carrier Verses

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition at the turn of each year to share at least one carrier verse or address.

Back in eighteenth-century America, apprentice printers would make those flyers and distribute them to customers around New Year’s Day as a way of asking for tips. The flyers offered a poetic review of the past year’s news, wishes for the customers’ prosperity, and reminders of the tough life of a newspaper carrier.

In 2000, Gerald D. McDonald (who that year turned ninety-five), Stuart C. Sherman, and Mary T. Russo published A Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses, 1720-1820. I treated myself to a copy this holiday season.

This book lists 1,001 carrier verses known from broadsides or republication in newspapers or books. The earliest appeared in New York in 1720, copying an English tradition. The custom continued after 1820, at least as late as the U.S. Civil War. The German-language newspapers of Pennsylvania provided their own examples. The book also lists 61 examples from Canada in both English and French.

As a bibliographic checklist, this book gives the basic details of each carrier address, including first lines if the text survives, but no more. Illustrations show several examples in full. That doesn’t replace the Readex Early American Imprints database that I used to be able to mine for interesting addresses, but it’s given me enough leads to fill a few more years.

A fraction of the addresses name the newspaper carriers who delivered them, and may have written them as well. Seven years ago I quoted the example from the Essex Gazette’s Job Weeden and traced his subsequent career. Five years ago I explored the life of Polly Beach of the American Telegraphe. Alas, I couldn’t find out anything more about Tobias Bond and Benjamin Welch, who delivered the Maryland Journal in 1780.

In a few cases, this checklist told me, famous authors wrote the verses for the carriers. Not just printers who became well known like Benjamin Franklin (he gets credit for the early Pennsylvania Gazette verses, but of course we give him credit for everything). Rather, gentleman poets like John Trumbull and Joel Barlow tried out the form. So I’m going to share one of those examples.

TOMORROW: A New Year’s greeting from the “Poet of the Revolution.”

The Best of Boston 1775 in 2017

This week I looked back on the year and chose the postings that please me most, especially if they braided together sources to present new information or correct misinformation.

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It.” A famous anecdote about the Constitutional Convention has Benjamin Franklin saying that to a lady. The anecdote goes all the way back to 1787. But the politician who recorded it also reshaped it for his purposes in the press, as have many later authors. Start here.

Samuel Adams’s Philadelphia Oration. The speech was published in London. But it was never delivered in Philadelphia. Who was behind it, and what does it say about “fake news” during the war? Start here.

Jane Crother and Joseph Whitehouse. She was one of the few women to witness the Boston Massacre. He was a British soldier stationed in town. A few days after the fatal confrontation, they married. Explore their lives, with help from Don Hagist, starting here.

The Unpopular Charles Paxton. How might issues of gender and sexuality have figured into Bostonians’ dislike for a Customs officer? Start here. (Paxton shown above, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

A Conspiracy Rumor from Nantucket. In 1738 a Boston newspaper warned about a Native uprising on Nantucket. With help from Nat Philbrick, start here.

The “Edenton Tea Party.” Plenty of evidence it happened in North Carolina. Plenty of inaccurate quoting of the women involved. Start here.

Getting to Know John Barker Church. The musical Hamilton depicts Angelica Schuyler marrying a man who’s “not a lot of fun” but rich and steady. In real life, her husband was even more of a firecracker than Alexander Hamilton. Start here.

The Killing of Henry Sparker. Sorting out quite different accounts of a fatal fight in 1768 Newport, plus what happened to the accused. Start here.

Jacob Frost and “The Young Provincial.” How a provincial soldier’s experience in and after the Battle of Bunker Hill became a magazine story, and how Nathaniel Hawthorne had nothing to do with it. Start here.

“Curer of Bacon.” Why did Loyalists apply that epithet to Samuel Adams? My best guess.

The Easiest Way to Carry Two Pails of Water. Use a hoop, historic sources say. (I’d love to see this tested at a summer reenactment.)

Newspaper Economics. How much did colonial American newspaper printers charge for advertisements and subscriptions? Start here.

The Massachusetts Legislature in Print. All the journals of the Massachusetts House in the Revolutionary period are online, along with the Provincial Congresses of 1774-75 and the last sessions of the Council. But you have to know where to look.

Extracts of Letters from Boston?

On 29 Dec 1774, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer ran the following items:

Extract of a letter from Boston.

“Every thing is at present quiet here, and the governor takes all possible precautions to keep things so. The people are continually tampering with the soldiers to desert; a corporal of the 38th regiment was last Monday addressed by one of their Agents, he pretended to consent to go off with him, upon which the fellow took him to a house, gave him a suit of plain cloathes and put his regimentals into the saddle-bags, he then put the corporal upon his horse and got up behind; they rode on together till they came to the Fusileers barrack, into which the corporal turned, the fellow instantly jumped off and made his escape, leaving the horse, saddle-bags and clothes, all of which have been given to the corporal as a reward for his wit and spirit.[”]

A Gentleman in Boston, writes to his friend here, of the 12th instant;—

Two ships of the line, viz. the Asia and Boyne, are arrived here, and the Somerset is now firing guns in the offing. The day before yesterday it was moved in Provincial Congress, that arms be immediately taken up against the King’s Troops; but one of the members got up and told them such a move was infamous, when at the same time the Members knew, that neither Connecticut nor any of the southern colonies meant to oppose his Majesty’s arms, on which account the Congress immediately dissolved, and a new one is to be chosen, to meet the tenth of next month.

At Plymouth they are now beating up for volunteers to attack the troops; the parties sent for a parson to pray for them, who refused to comply; but he was obliged to attend on being sent for a second time, on penalty of being shot.

James Rivington was then a strong supporter of the Crown, on his way to being put out of business by a Patriot mob and then sponsored by the royal government in occupied New York through the war.

On 1 Jan 1774, Nathaniel Mills and John Hicks reprinted the entire article in their Boston Post-Boy. In the preceding May they had taken over from Green and Russell and turned the Post-Boy into a strongly pro-government paper.

On 5 January, Isaiah Thomas printed the part about plans to attack soldiers instead of to suborn them in the Patriot Massachusetts Spy, crediting “the New-York Gazette,” but he added at the bottom:

[A d——d lie.]

And indeed there’s no evidence supporting the article’s claims about the congress. If Rivington had actually seen a letter from Boston with that story, he fell for an alarmist rumor—and it’s quite possible he just made it up.

Even so, the letter from “A Gentleman in Boston” was reprinted in several British magazines in early 1775, helping to shape public opinion there.

[ADDENDUM: Follow-up from Don Hagist.]

Receiving A Cold Welcome

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America by Sam White looks at early American history outside my usual timeframe. I picked it up looking for answers to a question that’s puzzled me for a while.

White focuses on the first decade of the seventeenth century when European powers made permanent settlements in North America. The Spanish established Santa Fe to go with their Florida outpost of St. Augustine. The French founded Québec. And the British, after failures at Roanoke and Popham, just barely created a permanent base at Jamestown. (In the following decades, the Dutch would come to Manhattan and the Swedes to Delaware, but they’re not part of this story.)

That decade of 1600-1609 was at the trough of the Little Ice Age that lasted from about 1300 to about 1850. “One of the steepest declines in Northern Hemisphere temperatures in perhaps thousands of years took place in the half century leading up to the founding of Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe,” White writes. In fact, due to volcanic eruptions, the climate was even harsher than that around 1600, with cold winters, cool summers, and droughts. “The timing of this volcanic weather could not have been worse for European expeditions in North America.”

That concatenation has been well established. It exacerbated the European explorers’ bafflement at how the North American climate didn’t conform to their expectations. Québec is well south of Paris, but its winters are colder—yet summers in North America were hotter than in Europe. On top of that mystery, White writes, the Europeans were encountering conditions that were worse than a few decades before when the Spanish first explored the Americas.

My question was, given that the Europeans arriving in North America in the 1600s encountered the most difficult conditions in decades, why did those settlements succeed? Isn’t that like finding the best time to climb a mountain is during a blizzard?

White presents several factors to explain that pattern, one of which I’d thought of and others that were new to me. First, the Little Ice Age also put enough pressure on the European powers to make those societies and the people in them a little more desperate, more willing to take chances across the ocean. “Climate-driven sustenance crises in France and England left some in those countries looking for ways to dispose of hungry, poor, and vagrant subjects.” In the same way, evolutionary leaps take place when species are under pressure to survive, not when they’re happily propagating as they are.

In particular, the harsh conditions leading up to 1600 weakened the Spanish Empire through famine and epidemics in Castile. The Spanish crown had enjoyed over a century of gold and silver from South America, but forays into North America hadn’t been so lucrative. With resources at home becoming scarcer, the Spaniards were less inclined to guard North America against their European rivals to the north.

Furthermore, the changing climate also affected the North American powers, albeit in less documented ways. The Native nations experienced droughts and harsh winters, as well as the diseases they hadn’t yet developed immunity to. So for the English and French, there were openings in the early 1600s despite the climate.

Finally, White notes the importance of chance events. We wouldn’t be talking about Jamestown as the seed of Britain’s North American empire unless a resupply fleet had arrived off the coast at just the right time in 1610. Samuel de Champlain survived calamities at two French settlements and learned from them in order to establish a third. As White points out, even in the Little Ice Age North America wasn’t inherently unlivable; the new humans from Europe needed to survive just long enough to adapt.

Knox Museum May Close in 2018

The Knox Museum in Thomaston, Maine, built to honor Gen. Henry Knox, has announced that it may close next year if it can’t quickly raise $150,000.

The museum is a replica of Knox’s 1794 mansion, called Montpelier. The original fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1871, just two years before the first biography of the general was published. The current building was put up in 1929.

Likewise, most of the artifacts in the building linked to the general and his family appear to be reproductions.

Until 1999, the state of Maine owned the building and surrounding thirteen acres. Finding the site didn’t pay for itself, the state government sold the museum to a non-profit group called the Friends of Montpelier while retaining an easement on the property.

As first reported by the Portland Press Herald, the museum has been running deficits since then, but large donations and grants filled the holes. The Free Press Online identified those sources of money. No source of such funds is lined up for coming years.

The Friends of Montpelier could turn the property back over to Maine, but the state doesn’t view the replica building as historic and wouldn’t keep the museum open. As WABI reported, the collection could be dispersed and the building left empty or sold.

Tom Desjardins, Director of Maine’s Bureau of Parks and Lands, told the Press Herald that the Friends had “done an amazing job” with the programs and website, but “There just isn’t enough of a draw of people to generate the revenues” that the site would need to sustain itself.

The Friends of Montpelier will assess the results of the current fundraising campaign and its staff and programming costs in the new year.

Digital Wallpaper at the Schuyler Mansion

Earlier this year Susan Holloway Scott of the Two Nerdy History Girls shared a look at the wallpaper of the Schuyler Mansion in Albany.

Philip Schuyler was, of course, a wealthy man. He wanted the mansion he commissioned in 1761 to look good. And that meant choosing fashionable wall coverings. Scott’s posting focused on the paper that Schuyler bought for his halls, upstairs and down.

Unlike most 18thc wallpaper which was block-printed, or “stampt”, this paper was painted entirely by hand in tempera paint in shades of grey – en grisaille was the term – to mimic engraved prints. In fact, the entire scheme of the papers was an elaborate trompe l’oeil to represent framed paintings and cartouches, all custom designed for the walls and spaces they would occupy.

This was, of course, extremely expensive, and as much a sign of Philip’s deep pockets as his taste. The wallpaper he ordered featured romantically scenic landscapes by the Italian painter Paolo Panini, and was called “Ruins of Rome.” The “Ruins of Rome” wallpaper was so rare and costly that there are only two examples of it known to survive in America: in the Jeremiah Lee Mansion in Marblehead, MA, and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, which has installed the paper taken from the now-demolished Rensselaerwyck, the home of Stephen Van Rensselaer II, also near Albany. . . .

The scenic wallpaper had long been removed. But over the last few years, the state’s Peebles Island Resource Center, led by Rich Claus and Erin Moroney, has painstakingly recreated a high-quality digital reproduction of the “Ruins of Rome” based on the wallpaper from both the Lee Mansion and the Van Rensselaer installation in the Met, but redesigned to fit the Schuyler Mansion’s walls and woodwork as perfectly as the original once did. The new wallpaper was completed and hung as part of the Mansion's centennial celebration this year.

Both the Schuyler Mansion and the Lee Mansion are now closed for the season but well worth a visit in warmer months. The Met is of course open year-round.

Moses Brown’s Malden Christmas

In December 1775, Moses Brown led a delegation of Quakers from Rhode Island up to the Boston siege lines to bring relief to the suffering poor.

Brown and his comrades went to Gen. George Washington in Cambridge and explained how they wanted to go into Boston with money they had collected. A siege is of course an attempt to deny resources to the enemy, so the commander-in-chief couldn’t have been enthused about this idea.

Quartermaster general Thomas Mifflin was even more negative, thinking that such charity would prove unpopular with the Massachusetts populace.

In consultation with Washington and members of the Massachusetts General Court, the Quakers decided they would meet some of their contacts at the siege lines and hand over the money. But Sheriff Joshua Loring and Maj. John Small came out and told them that the poor in Boston didn’t need money and the town had adequate food.

So the Quakers went off to hand out their money to the poor people they found in Marblehead, Salem, Lynn, Chelsea, and the smallpox hospital at Point Shirley.

Soon enough it was Christmas Day, as Brown described in his report on the journey:

We went to Malden and Lodged at —— where were the Select men upstairs on business and below a Noisey Company of Soldiers fidling and Danceing after supper.

David [Buffum] and I proposed to see the Select Men and Inform them of our Business went up stairs and I spoke to them of the Noise etc not being sufferable it was not only rong in itself but contrary to Every prospect of the present time and Even the Congress Discouraged it by Resolves.

They allowed it was not agreeable but thought as they were Soldiers it must be allowed. It was what they called a Christmas frolich and they had been up all the Night before, were principaly of the Riflemen.

As an eighteenth-century Quaker, Brown didn’t celebrate Christmas. Neither did most New Englanders. But these riflemen were from the Middle Colonies, many of them transplants from Britain, and they didn’t adhere to Puritan customs. And thus we discern the limits of Moses Brown’s charity.

Lt. Martin Hunter Sent to Coventry in Boston

Lt. Martin Hunter did not have an enjoyable Christmas in 1775.

That wasn’t just because he was besieged in Boston with the 52nd Regiment and the rest of Gen. William Howe’s British forces. Having already experienced the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill before he turned eighteen, Hunter was presumably pleased that the fighting had reached a stalemate.

But the lieutenant wasn’t feeling jolly enough to participate in his fellow officers’ holiday revelry on 24 December. Decades later, as a knighted general, Hunter wrote in his memoirs:

On the evening of Christmas Day I was sent to Coventry for not singing, as I was desired. I was kept in Coventry three days, not a member of the mess speaking to me.

The 1793 slang dictionary Blackguardiana defines the term “To send to Coventry” this way:

a punishment inflicted by officers of the army, on such of their brethren as are testy, or have been guilty of improper behaviour, not worthy the cognizance of a court martial. The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one may speak to him, or answer any question he asks, except relative to duty, under penalty of being also sent to the same place. On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled, and welcomed by the mess, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.

After three days, it appears, Hunter’s comrades thought he was sufficiently sorry. He later wrote, “I never refused to sing again.”

(The picture above is a 1752 view of Coventry from the London Magazine, available from Lindisfarne Prints.)

Reprinting the Constitution by Hand

Since I’ve been looking at the effort of starting a new newspaper in pre-Revolutionary Boston, it seems appropriate to share the video on this page from The History List.

Lee Wright recorded Gary Gregory of the Edes & Gill Print Shop in today’s North End talking about how he researched, recreated, and now prints Benjamin Edes’s edition of the new proposed U.S. Constitution. Edes put that out ahead of the Massachusetts ratifying convention in 1788. The only surviving original appears to be at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The photo at right shows Gary holding a previous—and mercifully shorter—document that he’s also recreated: John Gill’s printing of the Declaration of Independence soon after that text arrived from Philadelphia in 1776.

The Boston Chronicle “unbiassed by prejudice or party”?

When in October 1767 John Mein and John Fleeming circulated the proposal to publish a new weekly newspaper in Boston, their plan started with a long list of things “their friends” wanted to see in it.

That list concluded by quoting those advance subscribers as saying:

We sincerely wish you success, and will use our utmost endeavours to insure it to you, but unbiassed by prejudice or party, we will boldly claim the FREEDOM of FRIENDSHIP, and leave you with the following advice, which, we hope, nay, which we are persuaded, you will follow.

We suppose that you intend to study your own interests, if you will do it effectually, be of no party; publish and propagate with the greatest industry whatever may promote the general good.—Be independent;—your interest is intimately connected with this noble virtue;—if you depart from this, you must sink from the esteem of the public, to the partial praise of a party, who, when their purpose is served or defeated, may, perhaps, desert you; and then, how can you expect that those, whom you have reviled, will support you.

The first issue of the Boston Chronicle, dated 21 December, contained no advertising. It was eight pages long—twice as long as a regular issue of its competitors. Those pages were filled with:

• A message to new readers, subscribers, and advertisers.
• The first “Letter from a Farmer in Philadelphia,” already credited to “John Dickenson.”
• A recent description of Constantinople by Lord Baltimore.
• A essay by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on marriage. (This was the longest article.)
• Political news from London.
• A discussion of planting grape vineyards in North America.
• “A Traveller’s opinion of the English in general.”
• A report on Linnaeus’s investigation of “smut in Wheat,” and an English farmer’s response.
• A friendly exchange between the royal governor of Georgia and the legislature there.
• A report on a convention of Anglican clergy in North America.

You can read the entire issue here, courtesy of newspaper collector Todd Andrlik.

The London political news proved problematic. It was dated 19 September, as the Duke of Grafton was trying to hold together a coalition government after Charles Townshend’s unexpected death. Among many other things the article said:

We are told the Dukes of Newcastle, Bedford, Northumberland [that would be Earl Percy’s father] and Richmond, the Marquis of Rockingham, the Earls of Halifax, Sandwich, Gower and Shelburne, the Right Hon. Mr. [William] Dowdeswell, and Mr. [Henry Seymour] Conway, and Isaac Barre and Edmund Burke, Esqrs. are all included in the intended new ministry.

It is confidently reported that the E. of C[hatham]’s gout is only political, and that notwithstanding his late indisposition he will soon appear on the scene of action and struggle hard to guide the reins of government, but having lost the confidence of the people, whom he has deceived by his contradictions and changes, and never having been a favorite with the nobility, whom he always affected to dispise, he will while he exists be considered by every disinterested man as a miserable monument of wrecked ambition.

That last paragraph was about the elder William Pitt (shown above), who had set up that coalition government and then receded from it in a cloud of depression and gout. The report went on to praise the Marquess of Rockingham to the skies for how he had handled the North American opposition to the Stamp Act—so much so that it’s clear this item was written by someone from his faction. Bostonians thus got to see the maneuvering between two sets of London Whigs: those loyal to Pitt and those loyal to Rockingham.

Boston’s Whigs could have taken that article alongside the Dickinson essay as confirmation the Chronicle was sharing views from different sides. They could have reflected that they preferred Rockingham, despite his government’s Declaratory Act, over either the Tories had instituted the Stamp Act or the latest government’s Townshend duties. But all that Boston political leaders saw in the Boston Chronicle was the criticism of their hero, Pitt.

The Launch of the Boston Chronicle

This is the Sestercentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the first issue of the Boston Chronicle.

For a decade Boston had been a four-newspaper town. The oldest weekly was Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter, founded in 1704 and almost always allied with the royal establishment. It appeared on Thursdays.

On Mondays three other papers came out: Edes and Gill’s radical Boston Gazette and the more middle-of-the-road Boston Evening-Post from the Fleet brothers and Boston Post-Boy from Green and Russell.

The Boston Chronicle joined the crowd on Mondays. It offered people a nicer reading experience with handsome typography and a little more white space on its pages. Starting in early 1769 the paper really shook things up by coming out on both Mondays and Thursdays.

The men behind the Chronicle were John Mein and John Fleeming. Unlike the printers of Boston’s other newspapers, they weren’t from old New England families. They had both moved into the colony from Scotland in 1764. Furthermore, they were both adherents of the Sandemanian or Glasite sect, which New England Congregationalists viewed with suspicion.

Mein was a bookseller while Fleeming was a printer. Together they published pamphlets, almanacs, and other items as well as the newspaper. Mein’s London Bookshop also functioned as a lending library; for “One Pound, Eight Shillings, lawful Money, per Year,” patrons could borrow any volume from his list of 1,200 titles. And by any volume, that meant one volume at a time.

Perhaps because of their closer ties to Britain, perhaps because of their church’s teaching to obey political authorities, perhaps because of political ideology, Mein and Fleeming’s Chronicle supported the Crown more strongly than any other Boston newspaper, even the News-Letter. The very first issue included an essay from London that harshly criticized William Pitt, a darling of American Whigs.

For a while the Boston Chronicle looked like a good business proposition. The Customs house and friends of the royal government supported the paper during the debates over non-importation and the Townshend duties. That support, in the form of printing contracts and advertisements, was probably what allowed the newspaper to start coming out twice a week.

In turn, Mein wrote and Fleeming printed slashing attacks on the Boston Whigs. Eventually Mein lost that fight (physically and fiscally) and had to retreat to Britain. Fleeming closed the newspaper on 25 June 1770 but stayed in town until the evacuation of 1776. Though the Boston Chronicle lasted only two and a half years, in that time it was a crucial voice in Massachusetts’s political debate.

(Front page of the 21 Mar 1768 Boston Chronicle above courtesy of Todd Andrlik’s Reporting the Revolutionary War website.)

Seeing Jeremy Bentham

Several years ago, I took my mother to visit London for the first time. A friend she stayed with and I chose most of the places we visited, but Mom definitely wanted to see something at University College London.

Using a tourist map, I got us to the campus, but I forgot to factor in how a university can cover a lot of real estate. We entered at one corner and walked a long way, trying to find the right spot. As I recall, the hallways looked a lot like a suburban American high school, and they twisted a lot.

Finally we found a welcome desk staffed by what in the U.S. of A. we’d call security guards. Since since this was a British university, I’m going to assume that officially those men were porters.

Mom approached the young man seated behind the desk and said, “We’re looking for Jeremy Bentham.”

In his British way, the man looked torn between wishing to help these North Americans, embarrassment at not knowing how, and deeper embarrassment at having to embarrass us by asking for more information, thus showing that what we had supplied was grossly inadequate. He fumbled in a college directory. “Bentham. Is he a student here?”

“Oh, no—he’s dead,” Mom explained.

This didn’t improve the color of the young porter.

At this moment an older porter standing in a corner, who had rather been enjoying the conversation so far, stepped forward and pointed us toward the South Cloisters. Where indeed we found Bentham, seated in a wooden cabinet in the hallway, posters that students had made by hand and laser printer taped on the nearby walls.

In his will Bentham (1748-1832) insisted that his corpse be preserved and displayed. He wanted to make a point about practicality and the value of surgical dissection, though the method seems quite impractical.

Bentham’s surgeon donated the corpse to the university. By now it’s just a skeleton in a straw-stuffed suit with a wax head. The photograph above shows Bentham’s mummified head on a platter between his body’s feet, but for decades the head was stowed away in a vault.

This fall, Bentham’s head was brought out for display in an exhibit (up through February) titled “What Does It Mean To Be Human?: Curating Heads at UCL.”

And in the spring, Bentham’s body will travel to New York as part of the “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now)” exhibit at the Breuer branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It will consider the evocation of the living, three-dimensional body through approximately 120 works from 14th-century Europe to present, joining artists like Donatello, El Greco, Auguste Rodin, and Louise Bourgeois with historical reliquaries, anatomical models, and wax effigies. Casts of bodies, automated figures involving blood and hair, and clothed sculptures will all examine how art attempts an approximation of life.

This won’t be the body’s first trip away from London; in 2002 it went to a similar museum in Germany. Mom would have been terribly disappointed if it hadn’t been there when we visited.