Quock Walker Day and Juneteenth

Back in June 2006, just weeks after I launched Boston 1775, I shared my thoughts on whether Juneteenth should become a Massachusetts holiday.

Juneteenth would be a synecdoche for the end of slavery in the U.S., I wrote. The 19th of June was the date in 1865 when slavery ended in some parts of Texas, but it stood for the process of liberation over a broader range of space and time.

As Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book On Juneteenth relates, some African-American citizens have celebrated that date for generations.

Most of my 2006 posting focused on the end of slavery in Massachusetts, more than seventy-five years before the U.S. Civil War. I quoted state Chief Justice William Cushing‘s charge to the jury in one of the legal cases arising between Quock Walker and the man who claimed him, Nathaniel Jennison.

Publicizing the full history of slavery in Massachusetts was, I argued, more important for this state than observing Juneteenth, which shifted the problem to another corner of the country.

Last year the Massachusetts legislature voted to make the 8th of July Quock Walker Day, commemorating the end of legal slavery in this state. This is the first year to observe the holiday, and the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington is hosting a community celebration online this evening at 7:00 P.M.

In addition, last month the U.S. Congress voted to make Juneteenth the national celebration of the end of slavery. All too predictably, the far right opposed that. The only votes in Congress against the resolution were from fourteen Republican members of the House.

Many progressives also noted the irony that endorsement of the holiday was coinciding with a push in many states to make voting more difficult. The current U.S. Supreme Court said that state legislators can impose obstacles to voting even when they know those measures don’t solve serious problems and would affect African-American citizens most.

TOMORROW: A question of timing.

Expanding the Team of “Revolutionary Superheroes”

A few years back, Lee Wright of The History List showed me the art he’d commissioned for a T-shirt called “Revolutionary Superheroes.”

It posed five people in the resolute manner of a team fighting injustice. Those people were Abigail Adams, John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton—all major figures at Founders Online.

The online retailer needed a “hang tag” to attach to that T-shirt when museum stores carried it, and Lee asked me to write the copy. I came up with a line about each figure (treating the Adamses as one), aiming to be accurate and thought-provoking.

Now The History List has a whole line of “Revolutionary Superheroes” items, including stickers, notebooks, and shirts of various styles.

Meanwhile, some customers were asking about other Founding figures beyond those five. It was time, Lee decided, to commission another set of “Revolutionary Superheroes”—but who?

The History List collected suggestions through social media—more than fifty in all. Then Lee commissioned me to write capsule biographies summarizing what each person did notably during the Revolution. You can see all the crowd-sourced candidates at this webpage.

Anyone can read those bios and consider the people’s lives. Some names are far more famous than others. Some folks did a lot more to further the American Revolution than others. I had to dig hard for information on a few while cutting off large post-Revolutionary careers of the most famous. I learned a lot in the process, and I hope people exploring the page learn, too.

People who buy “Revolutionary Superheroes” merchandise can vote on which five figures should be added to the line next. The voting is by ranked-choice, and the result will be democratic—i.e., the historical figures with the most aggregate points will win, and all voters will have to live with the result.

If this proves popular, The History List might invite more nominations for a third batch of notables, including the public didn’t nominate this time around.

Listening in on Pope Night with The Dollop

A friend alerted me that the Dollop podcast recently cited my name.

The Dollop is a conversation about history between two comedians, Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. Anthony reads up on a topic and presents the facts to Reynolds, and they both riff on the implications. It’s been going strong since 2014.

In Episode 480 Anthony and Reynolds discuss “Pope Day,” a topic I’ve had a lot to say about. Anthony notes my observation that the 5th of November celebration evolved into Halloween, an observation others have also made. (My main thesis is how the holiday’s overt patriotism licensed the raucous violence.)

All in all, this Dollop episode offers a detailed, grounded introduction to a weird colonial tradition. I’d add two important points about Pope Night in the mid-1700s:

• Colonial New Englanders were expending all that anti-popery energy when there were no practicing Catholics anywhere closer than Canada. They weren’t really intimidating a local Catholic minority; they were showing off for themselves.
• By the 1750s the Boston processions added a contemporary villain in place of the Pretender: Adm. John Byng, Charles Paxton, John Mein, and so on. That gave the holiday a link to current politics even before the Stamp Act, and then it grew stronger.

One less conceptual correction involves the leader of the North End gang in 1765. That year’s anti-Stamp protests made Ebenezer Mackintosh, the South End gang’s captain, internationally notorious. His North End counterpart didn’t become a concern for the royal governors or the ministers in London, so all the surviving contemporaneous sources mentioned only his last name: Swift.

For a long time authors decided that must be the most visible man named Swift in pre-Revolutionary Boston: Samuel Swift. He was friendly with the Whigs, especially John Adams.

The fact that Samuel Swift was a political moderate, a Harvard-educated attorney, and fifty years old during the Stamp Act crisis should have made people skeptical that he was the leader of a working-class youth gang. Plus, it turned out he lived on Pleasant Street in the far South End.

In The Boston Massacre (1970), Hiller Zobel argued that a far more likely candidate was Henry Swift, a shipwright. He:

• was a mechanic, like Mackintosh.
• was born in 1746, thus in his late teens during the Stamp Act rumbles.
• lived in the North End.
• was indicted for rioting after the fatal Pope Night of 1764.

I’ve therefore always named Henry Swift as the North End captain.

However, some books continue to point the finger at Samuel Swift, and the Dollop gents must have relied on those sources. Given the class distinctions in the eighteenth century, I think the genteel attorney would have been horrified to be linked to the Pope Night disorder. Now that’s comedy!

Before leaving the topic of digital appearances, here’s a reminder that History Camp America is coming up this Saturday, 10 July. Registration closes on Thursday.

“I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town”

In the Washington Post, Prof. Andrew Wehrman wrote about Massachusetts and Boston’s official response to the threat of smallpox in the summer of 1776:

Abigail Adams…learned of the Continental Army’s failed invasion of Canada. Smallpox had broken out among the soldiers, dooming the campaign. Returning soldiers threatened to bring the disease back with them. Exasperated, John wrote to Abigail: “The Small Pox! The Small Pox! What shall we do with it?” He answered his own question by remarking, “I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town in New England.”

While John Adams and 55 other men in Philadelphia debated the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, on July 3, 1776, the people of Boston declared their independence from smallpox. Fearing further outbreaks, the Massachusetts legislature voted to once again shut down the entire city for a general inoculation.

The people of Boston cheered the news. Ezekiel Price, a local businessman and court official, declared on July 4: “Liberty given for to inoculate for the small-pox; many begin upon it this afternoon.”

Abigail Adams took her four children to her uncle’s house to inoculate with the families of her two sisters. Guardhouses were built to warn anyone entering the city of the presence of smallpox and to prevent anyone from leaving the city during the general inoculation without a certificate from a doctor.

On July 18, 1776, Col. Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence for the first time to the people of Boston from the balcony of the State House. Abigail Adams joined the “multitude into King Street to hear the proclamation.” The assembled crowd was composed of recently inoculated Bostonians and those with previous immunity who had stayed behind to take care of the rest. . . .

Boston’s “freedom summer” ended on Sept. 18, 1776, when the city ordered the guardhouses closed and the city to reopen for business. Although statistics were not immediately published, 20 years later, Thomas Pemberton, a businessman and member of the newly founded Massachusetts Historical Society, compiled the numbers. In the summer of 1776, Boston saw 29 deaths from 304 cases of natural smallpox. By contrast, only 28 deaths were reported with 4,988 Bostonians inoculated. Ninety percent of Boston’s nonimmune population was inoculated, saving hundreds of lives.

The implications for how our population should respond today are obvious. Some choose to reject them.

“A version of its origin story it can love?”

This weekend the New York Times published Jennifer Schuessler’s dispatch “The Battle for 1776,” about the relationship between the ongoing political battle over historical memory and the upcoming Sestercentennial.

Schuessler asked, “does America still need a version of its origin story it can love?”

I think that’s the wrong question. Nations develop origin stories that they love, even if those stories are mythological, exclusionary, or incomprehensible to outsiders. (Indeed, there’s an argument that some degree of incomprehensibility is a plus because acceptance of the story regardless helps to distinguish insiders from outsiders.) The American nation will naturally have an origin story.

The bigger question is whether that story will serve the needs of our nation going forward. In my opinion, that requires deep grounding in historical evidence, including acknowledgment of what might even be considered national embarrassments, as well as commitment to shared ideals. Is that easy? No.

The article then asks if the “complexity, context and contingency” that academic historians emphasize might get in the way of an origin story rather than enrich it. Fortunately, Schuessler goes on to quote some historians who offer ways to deal with such complexity.

Americans have been fighting over the history — and mythology — of the Revolution from almost the moment it ended. “There’s no one memory of the Revolution,” said Michael Hattem, the author of “Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution.” “And the way we remember it has always been shaped by contemporary circumstances.”

As its public mythology evolved, various groups laid claim to its memory and symbols, as a way of defining the nation and anchoring themselves to citizenship. It was Black abolitionists of the 1840s who first promoted the story of Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race Black and Native American sailor said to be the first to die for the Revolution in the Boston Massacre. . . .

Philip Mead, the chief historian of the Museum of the American Revolution, which opened in Philadelphia in 2017, said he hoped the 250th anniversary would help move past the perception of American history as either hagiographic or iconoclastic. . . . What we need from 1776, he said, isn’t an origin story, but a transformation story. “We learn who we are by understanding how we have changed,” he said. “And the Revolution was a huge inflection point in that change.”

With that perspective, the U.S. of A.’s origin story isn’t set in 1776. It’s older, and ongoing, and still to be written.

[The photo above was taken by Charles Rich in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, in 1976. Check out his whole collection here.]

“The Marriage was a nullity”

Yesterday I followed Sarah Gore and the uncle who raised her, the Rev. Henry Caner, from Boston to London after the end of the siege of Boston.

In April 1777 Caner gladly married the young woman to a Englishman named Richard Manser. The minister anticipating leaving her in Britain with her husband while he returned to America as soon as all the troubles were over.

However, by the summer Caner was referring to his niece once again by her first married name, as in his 5 August leter to Dr. John Jeffries: “Mrs. Gore & Nurse desire to be remembered in this.”

Finally on 10 Jan 1778 Caner broke the news to Sarah Gore’s father, deacon Thomas Foster of Boston:

By a Line from your Son Wm inclosing a Letter to our Dear Sally, I am inform’d of the Death of your Son John. I sincerely condole with you & Mrs. Foster on so melancholy an event. And am sorry that I must add to your affliction by acquainting you with an expected misfortune that had befallen your & our dear Child.

In a former Letter I acquainted you that Sally was married, & we thought happily to a Gentleman of very promising appearance, but to my grief has turn’d out a villain.

They had been married but 5 Weeks, when Lord Dartrey [an Irish baron, shown above as painted by Mather Brown] called upon me & acquainted me that Mr. Mansor had a Wife living in a remote part of London at the time when he was married to Sally. This you may believe was like a Thunder Clap to me.

However as soon as Mansor came home I acquainted him with it, & turnd him immediately out of Doors.

The same Evening I made the matter known to Sally in the tenderest manner I was able. She fainted & with much difficulty could we recover her. To be short it went very near to cost her her life. With great Care & Attention, & the Assistance of several kind Ladies of rank & quality, she has in some measure got the better of it. Her health & flesh & strength & spirits are return’d & she is now Sally Gore again.

The Marriage was a nullity, as he had a wife at the time of his marrying Sally, so she has reassumd the Name of Gore, by which she is now known to all her friends & Acquaintance.

The former Wife is since dead & the Villain has had the Assurance to write me several insolent Letters…demanding my Sally as his lawful Wife. A Number of worthy friends have offer’d their service to vindicate her against his impudent Claim. Among others Lord Percy, & particularly the Noble Lord & Lady Dartrey, are so exceedingly obliging that they have offer’d to foot [?] the whole Expence if Mrs. Gore finds it necessary to prosecute the vilain.

In short, I am greatly comforted under this misfortune to find that the dear Child is restor’d to her health & spirits again.

In the end, the Rev. Mr. Caner never returned to America. Though strapped for funds without a pulpit, he took a second wife and settled in Cardiff in 1778; she was notably younger, but then he was in his late seventies, so she almost had to be. Later he moved to a town near Bristol and died in 1792.

Sarah Gore and her young son John did return to Boston, as did her father-in-law, John Gore. The younger John grew up to be a merchant, factory investor, and Federalist. In 1805 he managed to get three volumes of King’s Chapel records back from Caner’s heirs. He died in 1817.

(Incidentally, the “Lady Dartrey” who offered help to Sarah Gore in her time of trouble was a granddaughter of William Penn with the given name of Philadelphia Hannah Freame.)

“My Daughter, which she really is, tho’ but an adopted one”

This story came up (in my head at least) during yesterday’s online presentation from King’s Chapel about how the Revolution affected members of that Anglican congregation. I realized I hadn’t shared it here before. 

The minister of that church was the Rev. Henry Caner. He raised a niece named Sarah Foster, whom he called Sally. I don’t know how that arrangement came about since Sarah’s father, a deacon of Boston’s First Meetinghouse named Thomas Foster, was alive. Perhaps he had remarried.

The minister was very fond and protective of his niece, telling Earl Percy that he “took the Liberty of introducing [her], as my Daughter, which she really is, tho’ but an adopted one.”

In March 1768 Sarah Foster married John Gore, Jr., a dry goods merchant. His father had risen from the trade of decorative painter to become a paint merchant, militia captain, and Overseer of the Poor—moving from the ranks of mechanics to the ranks of gentlemen.

John and Sarah Gore had a baby, also named John, in 1769. He was baptized at the West Meetinghouse, which the Gore family attended. Evidently being raised by an Anglican minister hadn’t made Sarah an Anglican.

In 1771 John, Jr., unexpectedly died. That left Sarah Gore as a young widow with a baby son. I don’t know if Sarah Gore moved back in with her uncle then, but the Caner household was undoubtedly less crowded than the Gore household.

Then came the Coercive Acts and the war. The Rev. Mr. Caner was always one of the strongest supporters of the royal government. When the lines were drawn in 1774, Capt. John Gore also declared himself loyal to the king while most of his family, including son Samuel and son-in-law Thomas Crafts, were not only Patriots but active Patriots.

In March 1776, the British military evacuated Boston. Among the Loyalists leaving at the same time were Henry Caner, John Gore, Sarah Gore, and her little boy. “I was crowded with my Daughter & an old Houskeeper on board a small Vessel with forty people,” the minister wrote.

That extended family then moved on to London. The letters of Henry Caner, which were collected and published in 1972, show that in London Sarah Gore lived with Caner and that “old Houskeeper.” John Gore shared space with his friend Adino Paddock.

Caner spent a lot of effort trying to find a new income for himself as an Anglican cleric. Sarah Gore explored high social circles, visiting Lady Rockingham, meeting the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. Her uncle hoped these connections would lead to a living, but in July 1776 complained, “I meet with many ‘good Morrows’ & compassionable expressions, but that is all except a share of the Donations…for the suffering Clergy.”

On 22 Apr 1777, the Rev. Mr. Caner had big news for Deacon Thomas Foster:

Sally, who will write you by this Opportunity, has never been from me a Day since we left Boston. She had far’d as well as my Self, & has been fully attentive to me as to her Father, having never taken a step which I did not approve.

I have preserv’d her from a Connection with the Army, which I knew would be disagreeable to you, & in right of a Guardian or Father am about to dispose of her within a day or two to a Gentleman here in London, one Richard Manser, who appears to be a sober, well-bred young man, with whom I hope she will be happy.

They will live in the same house with me while I stay in England, & when we return to America I assure you I shall leave her behind me with regret.

A postscript to that letter reports the deed had been done: “Yesterday I parted with your Daughter, my dear Child & companion, Sarah Gore, having married her to Mr. Richard Manser, of London. I performed the Ceremony myself at St Martin’s Church, Westminster.”

That’s the famous church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, rebuilt in the 1720s and shown above in a photo by Robert Cutts. [It has a lovely café in the crypt.]

However, by 30 June the Rev. Mr. Caner was once again referring to Sally as “Mrs. Gore.”

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

A Collection of Art from Bengal via Berwickshire

Last month the Herald in Scotland reported on a collection of Indian art coming to the National Museums Scotland:

Brought back from India in 1766, the collection, which features paintings and lacquer work, was formed by Captain Archibald Swinton while he was in Bengal in north-east India between 1752 and 1766. . . .

The large paintings depict the Nawabs who were ruling Bengal at that time. When Capt Swinton, an army surgeon, first met them, they were the local rulers under Mughal sovereignty but subsequently came under British rule.

The paintings are believed to have been given as diplomatic gifts during this period of transfer of power. . . . An Edinburgh-trained surgeon, Capt Swinton, who lived from 1731 to 1804, travelled to Madras (now Chennai) in 1752 and secured a position as an army surgeon. He served in the East India Company’s army at the beginning of its military expansion in India and subsequently, with his Persian language skills and familiarity with local customs, became an interpreter for the East India Company.

Here’s a biography of Capt. Swinton from the Daily Star of Bangladesh. That article includes the Swinton family painting above, made by Alexander Naysmith in the 1780s.

Evidently the Nawabs gave this art to Capt. Swinton shortly before the East India Company and then the British military forcefully took over India. Indeed, the donors were probably showing off their wealth and power for political advantage.

As a result, this collection doesn’t carry the baggage of art objects and cultural artifacts that came to western countries through looting, conquest, or purchase in a manifestly unfair society.

National Museums Scotland has displayed some of the Swinton collection before. Now those artworks are becoming national property to settle a massive tax bill.

From The Scotsman I learn that the estate at issue belonged to the late Major-General Sir John Swinton, K.C.V.O., O.B.E., D.L., laird of Kimmerghame House and father of the actress Tilda Swinton.

Governance at James Madison’s Montpelier

James Madison’s estate Montpelier was a slave-labor plantation. 

In fact, Madison appears to have been comfortable with that. He didn’t wrestle with the morality of slaveholding like his friend Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t even acknowledge the contradictions as frankly as Patrick Henry (“I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct.”).

The historic site of James Madison’s Montpelier had been owned since 1983 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1998 the Montpelier Foundation was formed “with the goal of transforming James Madison's historic estate into a dynamic cultural institution.” Which of course means raising money.

More recently the Montpelier Descendants Committee formed as a “nonprofit organization devoted to restoring the narratives of enslaved Americans at plantation sites in Central Virginia, including but not limited to James Madison’s Montpelier.”

This month the Montpelier site announced a significant step in its governance, making the Descendants Committee and the Foundation co-equals in governing the historic site.

This is the latest step in a long process that included a National Summit on Teaching Slavery convened at Montpelier in 2018. One product of that gathering was the report “Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites” (P.D.F. download).

Every historic site is in a different situation, but it will be interesting to see how other sites associated with slave-owning Founders approach the questions Montpelier has been talking through.

A Peek at Peale’s Mastodon

Earlier this month, Ben at Extinct Monsters shared a report on Charles Willson Peale’s mounted mastodon skeleton, now on exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Ben wrote:

Exhumed in 1799 near the banks of the Hudson River and unveiled to the public on Christmas Eve, 1801, this was the very first mounted skeleton of a prehistoric animal ever exhibited in the United States. . . .

After Peale’s Philadelphia museum closed in 1848, the mastodon was sold and wound up at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. There it remained for over 170 years, largely forgotten in its home country, until SAAM senior curator Eleanor Harvey had the idea to include it in a new exhibition. . . .

I spoke to Advait Jukar, a Research Associate with the National Museum of Natural History, about his involvement with the mastodon. He inspected the skeleton in early 2020, shortly after it arrived in Washington, DC. As a fossil elephant specialist, Jukar was able to determine that the mastodon was an adult male, and that about 50% of the mount was composed of real, partially mineralized bone.

Fascinatingly, most of the reconstructed bones were carved from wood. This was the handiwork of Rembrandt Peale (Charles’ son), William Rush, and Moses Williams. Most of the wooden bones were carved in multiple pieces, which were locked together with nails and pegs. The craftsmanship is exquisite, and the joins are difficult to make out unless you stand quite close. The mandible is entirely wood, but the teeth are real. These teeth probably came from a different individual—one tooth on the right side didn’t fit properly and was inserted sideways!

The mastodon at SAAM differs from the original presentation at Peale’s museum in a few ways. The missing top of the skull was once modeled in papier-mâché, but this reconstruction was destroyed when the Landesmuseum was bombed during the second world war. It has since been remodeled in plaster.

While the mastodon was never mounted with real tusks, the mount has traditionally sported strongly curved replica tusks, more reminiscent of a mammoth. While Rembrandt Peale published a pamphlet in 1803 suggesting that the mastodon’s tusks should be positioned downward, like a pair of predatory fangs [shown above], it’s unclear if the tusks on the skeleton were ever mounted this way. At SAAM, the mastodon correctly sports a pair of nearly straight replicated tusks, which curve gently upward. 

The exhibit that includes this mastodon, which is actually about the scientist Alexander Humboldt, will be up at the Smithsonian American Art Museum only until 11 July.

The Mystery of “Our Old Friend”

Among the toasts at the Royal Welch Fusilier officers’ dinner on 1 Mar 1775 that I described back here was: “Our old friend.”

Most of the toasts that day were to people or historical events. Though the allusions could be stark—“Plume of Feathers. (August 26th 1346.)”; “The 1st of August 1759.”—Google and Wikipedia offered up explanations.

At first I thought “Our old friend” was the same sort of allusion, but I couldn’t find a standard explanation for it. When I searched for other examples of a toast to “Our old friend,” they almost always also named a specific old friend.

I found two exceptions to that pattern, which left me suspecting that the phrase was an inside joke, and perhaps a dirty one.

First, in the book Monstrous Good Songs, Toasts & Sentiments, for 1793, published in London by J. Parsons for sixpence, the very last toast in the book is: 

Our old friend, and her worthy companion Thomas. 

Second is an anecdote from The New Bon Ton Magazine, or Telescope of the Times, in 1818. That appears to have been a lads’ mag for its era, and its story was:

AMONGST our convivial customs at table, one stands mainly prominent, which is drinking a certain toast immediately upon the ladies’ retiring. We give it many designations, “Our old friend” being the most common.

At a meeting of Bon Ton in the City of Edinburgh, when the ladies had retired, the honorable and beautiful Miss Elphinston being the last, she heard the chairman give a toast, “Here’s to what the ladies carried out with them.”

When the gentlemen assembled in the tea-room, she with true simplicity and artless innocence, asked Colonel [John] Anstruther [shown above], “Pray what did you mean by that toast given just as we went out; we took nothing out with us; I’m sure I had only my work-bag in my hand.”

“It was your work-bag we toasted,” said the Colonel, “from mere whim and humour, as being the work of so accomplished a young lady.”

To this day in Edinburgh the first toast after the ladies retire is
“Miss ELPHINSTON’S WORK-BAG.”

M.B.

Alternative explanations welcome.

Visiting the American Republics

Two historians I follow on Twitter published reviews of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 last week.

For The New Criterion, Daniel N. Gullotta of Stanford and the Age of Jackson podcast wrote:

Taylor’s history incorporates Canadian, Mexican, and Native American perspectives to recount the birth of the early Republic and the rise of American democracy. Taylor’s sources, which also include material from European diplomats and foreign travelers, offer unique insights on episodes routinely covered in similar books. International events loom particularly large in the mind of his antebellum American subjects, such as the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic in 1804, the various Latin American revolutions that erupted throughout the early nineteenth century, and the United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

While other works have shown how involved Americans were in regional events and national politics, Taylor demonstrates their keen awareness of foreign events and global changes, too. They were, for instance, angry that Canadians and Britons thought of the United States as a nation of irresponsible drunks, ill-tempered ruffians, and hypocritical slavers. . . .

Even the Americans who did want to expand the nation’s borders rarely did so out of a national sense of shared destiny, but rather out of regional self-interest. The absence of early American nationalism in this period might surprise readers, who will find more figures proudly willing to call themselves Virginians, Georgians, or New Yorkers than Americans. This regionalism and the issue of slavery made for a young nation full of anxiety and built on fragile alliances, ready to break out into civil war at almost any moment.

The Washington Post commissioned its review from Colin Woodard, author of American Nations and Union and journalist at the Portland Press Herald:

The takeaway is that this era of conquest and expansion was a time of anguish and acrimony for U.S. leaders — manifest uncertainty — and terrible tragedy for many of the continent’s inhabitants. In an effort to achieve security for its White citizens — to protect them from imperial rivals, native nations and enslaved-person uprisings — the United States aggressively expanded. The effort instead triggered the Civil War, as the balance of power between slave and free states became impossible to maintain. . . .

For Americans used to the comforting myth of an exceptional union boldly leading humanity in a better direction, this account may sting. Taylor doesn’t seek to salve such pain, but neither has he written a polemic. Diligently researched, engagingly written and refreshingly framed, “American Republics” is an unflinching historical work that shows how far we’ve come toward achieving the ideals in the Declaration — and the deep roots of the opposition to those ideals.

In addition, Taylor did a podcast interview with Lewis Lapham.

The Latest on the Adams Academy

Last August I wrote about John Adams’s bequest to the town of Quincy intended to create a school, which would become owner of his extensive library, and a church.

As I reported then, it took decades for the Adams Academy to be built, and it never actually housed Adams’s books. Those books were sent to the new Boston Public Library in 1893, an act widely reported as a “gift” from the city of Quincy.

After the academy closed, other organizations used its stone building, most recently the Quincy Historical Society. The Adams Temple and School Fund remained, eventually charged with benefiting a nearby school. The city’s management of those assets became a subject of litigation in this century, and eventually the courts told Quincy to pay the school $2 million.

What prompted my posts was a proposal by Quincy mayor Thomas Koch to turn the Adams Academy building into a John Adams Presidential Library. Not the type of presidential library that houses a former President’s papers, since those are at the Massachusetts Historical Society, but Mayor Koch did ask the Boston Public Library to send back Adams’s books.

My South Shore friend Patrick Flaherty just sent me a Quincy Patriot Ledger article reporting the latest developments in this story. In December the Massachusetts court system ruled that the Adams Academy is the property of the Adams Temple and School Fund, not the city of Quincy. That fund’s trustee thus had the legal right to sell the building and land for the benefit of the surviving school.

Mayor Koch then announced that Quincy would exercise its power of eminent domain, buying the Adams Academy and two nearby properties for a “fair market price.” The city’s most recent assessments of the three buildings total to almost $4.1 million. However, since the neighboring properties were going to be redeveloped into larger buildings containing more than sixty residences, that could well affect their market value.

The Quincy city council’s finance committee just approved a plan, already approved by the Community Preservation Commission, to spend $9 million from the Community Preservation Act to settle the lawsuit, buy the three properties, and presumably pay legal fees. The immediate goal appears to be preventing that development around the academy building. What will become of the building is still up in the air.

The city’s current plan, which still needs a full council vote, doesn’t cover the creation of a presidential library. Not all the councilors who approved spending the $9 million are on board for spending more on that idea. For his part, the mayor told the newspaper, “I don’t expect to build that with city money.” 

Founders Feeling Homesick—and Using That Word

At this posting earlier in the month, I said that the first documented use of the English word “homesickness” was in 1756 and that the adjective “homesick” followed.

I was relying on Etymology Online, but that turns out to be mistaken.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that “homesick” first appeared in 1748 in a collection of Moravian Brethren hymns printed in London. That word was a direct translation of the German “heimweh.”

Likewise, the earliest appearance of “homesickness” in 1756 was a direct translation of “heimweh” in an edition of the travel writings of Johann Georg Keyssler.

One might assume the word was still working its way into English at that time, starting in the imperial capital. But I came across an example of the word being used in a remote corner of the British Empire. On 2 Dec 1756, none other than Col. George Washington reported to Gov. Robert Dinwiddie about provincial conscripts under his command:

I have used every endeavour to detain the Drafts, but all in vain. They are home-sick, and tired of work.

The young colonel wrote from Fort Loudoun (recreation shown above) in what in now south-central Pennsylvania. He obviously expected his superior to understand the word.

In addition (and this example is noted in the O.E.D.), in November 1759 Gen. Jeffery Amherst wrote in his journal: “As soon as the homesick were getting in the boats they were immediately half recovered.”

The second appearance of “home-sick” listed in the O.E.D. is from the journal of Philip Vickers Fithian on 21 Nov 1773. By that point some familiar correspondents were also using the term:

• Benjamin Franklin to his son William, 30 Jan 1772: “I have of late great Debates with my self whether or not I should continue here any longer. I grow homesick, and being now in my 67th. Year, I begin to apprehend some Infirmity of Age may attack me, and make my Return impracticable.”
• Franklin to Jonathan Shipley, June 1773?: “But I grow exceedingly homesick. I long to see my own Family once more. I draw towards the Conclusion of Life, and am afraid of being prevented that Pleasure.”
• Abigail Adams to John, from Weymouth, 30 Dec 1773: “The Time I proposed to tarry has Elapsed. I shall soon be home sick. The Roads at present are impassible with any carriage. I shall not know how to content myself longer than the begining of Next week.”

One last tidbit: That Keyssler translation from 1756 said people from “Bern are especially afflicted” with homesickness or nostalgia. As I wrote before, the earliest medical description of the condition came from a Swiss medical graduate, and physicians from his country were among the first to discuss it. That gave rise to the belief that the Swiss were especially subject to homesickness.

We see that idea reflected in the way John Adams wrote of his own homesickness on 28 Mar 1783.

• To Abigail: “No Swiss ever longed for home more than I do.”
• To C. W. F. Dumas: “No Swiss was ever more homesick than I am.”

More to See at History Camp America 2021

Yesterday I shared the video preview of my presentation at History Camp America 2021, coming up on 10 July.

There are seven more video previews of sessions at this page, ranging from Fort Ticonderoga in the north to the Buffalo Soldier National Museum in ths south.

Here are more scheduled History Camp America sessions with some link to Revolutionary New England:

• Video tour of Fort Ticonderoga
• Video tour of Buckman Tavern in Lexington
• “Reimagining America: The Maps of Lewis and Clark” by Carolyn Gilman
• “The Amphibious Assault on Long Island August 1776” by Ross Schwalm
• “Saunkskwa, Sachem, Minister: native kinship and settler church kinship in 17th and 18th-century New England” by Lori Rogers-Stokes
• “‘Thrown into pits’: how were the bodies of the nineteen hanged Salem ‘witches’ really treated?” by Marilynne K. Roach
• “Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates” by Eric Jay Dolin
• “Inconvenient Founders: Thomas Young and the Forgotten Disrupters of the American Revolution” by Scott Nadler
• “Slaves in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Colonial Sudbury” by Jane Sciacca
• “Surviving the Lash: Corporal Punishment and British Soldiers’ Careers” by Don Hagist
• “Saving John Quincy Adams From Alligators and Mole People” by Howard Dorre
• “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour and National Coherence – The Lafayette Trail” by Julien Icher
• “Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern: The Headquarters of the Revolution” by Andrew Cotten
• “The Fairbanks House of Dedham: The House, The Myth, The Legend” by Stuart Christie
• “First Amendment Origin Stories & James Madison Interview” by Jane Hampton Cook & Kyle Jenks
• “Historic Marblehead – A Walking Tour” by Judy Anderson
• “The Second Battle of Lexington & Concord: re-inventing the history of the opening engagements of the American Revolution” by Richard C. Wiggin
• “To Arms: How Adams, Revere, Mason, and Henry Helped to Unify their Respective Colonies” by Melissa Bryson

Plus, there are a hefty selection of other sessions about history farther afield, before and after.

Again, registration costs $94.95, and for another $30 folks can receive a box of goodies from History Camp sponsors and participating historical sites. Registrants can watch videos and participate in scheduled live online discussions on 10 July, and will have access to the entire video library for a year.

A Preview of History Camp America 2021

Via Vimeo, here’s a preview of my video presentation “Washington in Cambridge and the Siege of Boston” prepared for History Camp America 2021, an online event coming up on 10 July.

I’ve presented at History Camp Boston since its beginning and at a couple of Pioneer Valley History Camps as well. They’re fun events that bring together academic historians, public historians, living historians, independent historians, and unabashed history buffs (often overlapping categories) to learn about all sorts of topics and research.

Unfortunately, for the last two years the Covid-19 pandemic has made large public get-togethers risky. In 2020 the History Camp organizing team produced America’s Summer Road Trip instead.

This year, the team invites people to register for History Camp America, gaining access to over two dozen video presentations covering a wide range of subjects (listed here). Registration costs $94.95, and for another $30 folks can receive a box of goodies from History Camp sponsors and participating historical sites. Households who register can watch videos and participate in scheduled live online discussions on 10 July, and they’ll have access to the entire video library for a year.

When I first thought about presenting at History Camp America, I pictured another live Zoom talk. But we’ve seen a lot of those, right? Then Lee Wright of History Camp and I developed a way to take better advantage of the video format by recording segments at more than half a dozen historical sites linked to Gen. George Washington’s mission in Massachusetts in 1775 and 1776.

We still have stuff to learn about making such videos, from wardrobe choice and collecting good sound next to traffic to remembering which of the four lessons I talk about is number two. But overall I’m pleased with the way this video turned out. I’ll tune in on 10 July to offer commentary and answer questions in the session chat room. I hope you folks will join me!

The Regimental Goat and “Memory Creep”

The stories of the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ goat and the Battle of Bunker Hill are a good example of what I call “memory creep.”

As one writer picks up a story from another, he or she can change it slightly—either through error or through wishfully reading sources in a more dramatic or meaningful way. And then the next writer changes it further. The earliest sources can get buried or stay hovering in brief quotations or citations, lending an air of reliability, when in fact they don’t say what the latest writer says they said.

Thus, a man who was serving in the provincial army during Bunker Hill becomes a soldier who fought in the battle—even if he was stationed on the other end of the siege lines. A man turning out for several short-term militia activations over the course of the war becomes a Continental soldier who served the length of the war. A plausible but undocumented travel route gets marked with stones and steel signs that seem beyond doubt.

In the case of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the British casualty lists after the Bunker Hill battle included many officers from the flank companies of that 23rd Regiment, but none from the other companies. For decades authors assumed that all the companies suffered losses at the same rate but some records weren’t available. That made the American fire more effective, the regiment’s sacrifice more gallant—both sides won.

In fact, British army sources were very good at reporting the names of all killed and wounded officers. (Enlisted men, not so much.) The less dramatic but more accurate interpretation of the evidence is that the rest of the 23rd Regiment’s companies just didn’t fight in that battle.

Likewise, the solid evidence that by 1775 the 23rd Regiment was in the habit of “passing in review preceded by a Goat” became a picture of the regiment marching into battle on 17 June 1775 behind that goat. That’s a very striking picture which can be hard to resist once one thinks of it.

That sight should also have been striking to the men who fought that battle, especially the provincials. Yet no eyewitness ever reported seeing a goat on the field, much less one leading a redcoat company or butting its way into the redoubt. Left without supporting evidence, authors quoted James Fenimore Cooper’s otherwise-unread novel for support, even though his character didn’t even say the goat was in the battle.

Significantly, claims that the Royal Welch Fusiliers marched into the fight behind a goat appear almost exclusively in books and articles about the regiment. It’s a claim that requires good evidence and comes with little to none. I haven’t found a single mention of the animal in books about the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In 1777 a British officer, Maj. Robert Donkin, set down a story that the regimental goat had bucked off its rider at the 1775 St. David’s Day dinner. A version of that anecdote was reprinted many times in the nineteenth century. But for one train of authors, the story became more meaningful after they interpreted Donkin’s words to mean that the the rider had died. That made a comic moment into something portentous. But no drummer was actually killed in the making of that anecdote.

I can’t trace the story of the Royal Welch Fusiliers adopting a “wild goat” on the Bunker Hill battlefield the same way, but I think it arose in recent years through the same process. Someone saw that the historical record of the regiment’s goat goes back only to 1775, and claims that a goat led the Fusiliers at Bunker Hill, and put those ideas together to create an entertaining story: The 23rd adopted their first goat on the Bunker Hill battlefield!

Again, the historical sources actually say the Royal Welch Fusiliers was known for parading with a goat before 1775, even if no one had bothered to write it down. But no one testified to seeing a goat, wild or saddled or gilt-horned, during the Battle of Bunker Hill. The mascot of the 23rd Regiment must have sat out the battle in Boston with most of the Fusiliers. The real question is how it survived the hungry weeks of the siege that followed.

“A poor drum-boy, killed by the goat on St David’s Day”

In 1832 the United Service Journal, and Naval and Military Magazine ran an unsigned article titled “Record of the Services of the Twenty-Third Regiment, or Royal Welsh Fusileers."

In describing that regiment’s losses at the Battle of Bunker Hill, the writer said:

If it may be permitted to quote a work of fiction as an authority, it may be observed, as a confirmation of the severe loss of the regiment, that an American novelist, after describing the battle of Bunker’s Hill, states, “The Welsh Fusileers had not a man left to saddle their goat.”

The article didn’t name the American novelist (though, to be fair, there weren’t that many back then, so it was a lot easier to guess). It also didn’t explain the goat. Apparently readers of this magazine were supposed to know.

Eighteen years later, in 1850, the British military clerk Richard Cannon (1779-1865) borrowed that sentence for a footnote in the Historical Record of the Twenty-Third Regiment that he’d been assigned to compile. Cannon identified the source of the line as “J. Fennimore [sic] Cooper, in his work entitled, ‘Lionel Lincoln’.” Cannon also quoted from Francis Grose quoting from Maj. Robert Donkin to explain the goat.

Another thirty-nine years later, in 1889, a reviewer in the United Service Magazine (the latest name for the United Service Journal) criticized Cannon for using such “apocryphal sources of information” as Cooper‘s fiction and a letter from Abigail Adams setting down rumors. That critic pointed out that the 23rd Regiment’s records show that only the grenadier and light infantry companies were ordered onto Bunker Hill. Most of the Royal Welch Fusiliers stayed on the Boston side of the river and suffered no casualties.

But by then the idea that the Royal Welch Fusiliers had lost so many men they couldn’t even saddle their goat had moved from a remark by a character in an American novel into an official British military history.

And that wasn’t the only elaboration. In Famous Pets of Famous People (1892), Eleanor Lewis cited “an officer [who] wrote at some length in the London Graphic” as quoting the description of the 1775 St. David’s Day in Francis Grose’s Military Antiquities and adding:

the same goat which threw the drummer accompanied the regiment into action at Bunker’s Hill, when the Welsh Fusileers had all their officers except one placed hors de combat. What became of the Bunker’s Hill goat, we do not know; nor can we say how many successors he had between the years 1775 and 1844.

That same year, an article in The Cornhill Magazine titled “A Wreath of Laurels” offered another variation on the sources from the 1770s:

The death of a poor drum-boy, killed by the goat on St David’s Day, just before the outbreak of the American War, must have seemed an omen of the disaster of ‘Bunker's Hill,’ when, according to Fennimore Cooper, ‘the Welsh Fusiliers had hardly men enough left to saddle their goat.’

This author cited Richard Cannon’s regimental history about the death of the drummer. In fact, Cannon had simply quoted the report of the goat bucking the drummer onto a table. No source mentioned any children killed at that dinner, and that’s the sort of detail people mention.

Given such exaggeration, it was relatively restrained for The Navy and Army Illustrated to state on 12 Nov 1898: “At any rate, we know that the regiment had a goat with them at Bunker’s Hill in 1775.”

But do we know that?

TOMORROW: Wrapping up the goat story.

[The photograph above comes from the 1898 story in The Navy and Army Illustrated.]

“Hardly men left enough to saddle their goat!”

Francis Grose (1731-1791, shown here) had a short career in the British army, filling the lowest officer’s rank of cornet during the 1740s. He later became a militia captain and adjutant. But his heart was in historical research.

Grose, a hard-working if not particularly talented draftsman, published four volumes of images of Britain’s medieval ruins from 1772 to 1776. 

During the American War, Grose’s militia unit was activated to defend the home country, and that caused him trouble in two ways. First, he couldn’t spend his summers traveling and sketching, as he’d come to like. Second, he had to administer the finances of camp, which he did poorly, putting him into debt.

As a result, Grose had to publish a lot more books in the years after the war. In addition to more sketchbooks, he came out with his oft-cited Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787).

Grose also drew on his military experience. In 1783 he was the anonymous author of Advice to the Officers of the British Army, an acerbic satire on how the army operated in the recent war. And in 1786 he collected stories from many sources into Military Antiquities Respecting a History of the English Army.

One of those sources was Maj. Robert Donkin’s Military Collections and Remarks. In a footnote on pages 265-6 of his 1788 London edition, Grose quoted (though inexactly) what Donkin’s book said about the Royal Welch Fusiliers, their gilt-horned goat, and the disrupted St. David’s Day dinner of 1775. Grose’s reprinting of that anecdote ensured it remained available to readers into the next century even when Donkin’s book became rare.

In 1818 Samuel Swett published his first essay on the Battle of Bunker Hill as an appendix to an edition of David Humphreys’s short biography of Gen. Israel Putnam. In a footnote he provided a somewhat garbled explanation of the 23rd Regiment’s goat tradition:

From a tradition that a former Prince of Wales had ridden from his principality into England on a goat; a very large one, with gilded horns, was always maintained by the corps, and they celebrated the anniversary of the feat by a procession, rejoicing and exultation.

As the sources from the 1770s indicate, the fusilier officers observed St. David’s Day, but perhaps this was how some old Bostonians understood the ritual.

The next figure in the spread of 23rd Regiment goat lore was James Fenimore Cooper, the New York novelist. Three of his first five books—the three that were most successful—were stories of eighteenth-century America. Cooper made a plan to write thirteen more novels about the Revolution, using actual historical figures and events, one for each original state in the union.

The first of those books was Lionel Lincoln, or The Leaguer of Boston, published in 1825 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war. Cooper put a lot of effort into depicting historical events such as the Battle of Bunker Hill, but the plot was his usual overcooked melodrama. That might not have been a problem except that for some reason Cooper thought that his public wanted to read about an aristocratic Loyalist antihero.

Lionel Lincoln was a critical and sales failure, and remains so to this day. Cooper abandoned his plan to write more books like that. His next novel was The Last of the Mohicans.

In Lionel Lincoln one character discussing the British casualties at Bunker Hill says: “the Fusileers had hardly men left enough to saddle their goat!” Cooper then showed off his research with a footnote:

This regiment, in consequence of some tradition, kept a goat, with gilded horns, as a memorial. Once a year it celebrated a festival, in which the bearded quadruped acted a conspicuous part. In the battle of Bunker-Hill, the corps was distinguished alike for its courage and its losses.

Cooper probably relied on Grose’s Military Antiquities or Swett’s footnote, or both, for his information, which is notably vague on the particulars. Either way, it’s clearly an allusion to how the Royal Welch Fusiliers celebrated, not how they entered battle.

But that’s not how people chose to read it.

TOMORROW: Putting a goat on the battlefield.

“Mounted on the goat richly caparisoned for the occasion”

Robert Donkin was born in 1727 and by the eventful year of 1745 was an officer in the British army. In the Seven Years’ War he served as an aide to Gen. Thomas Fowke and Gen. William Rufane.

In 1772 Capt. Donkin married Mary Collins, daughter of a clergyman. They had their first child, a son they named Rufane Shaw Donkin, in early October, with two daughters to follow. 

Then came the American War. In 1775 Donkin was assigned to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, or 23rd Regiment. He was one of the officers present at the regiment’s St. David’s Day dinner on 1 March reported yesterday.

By 1777 Donkin held the rank of major in the 44th Regiment of Foot, stationed in New York City. He decided that was the right time and place to publish what he called a “collection and remarks of a late general officer of distinguished abilities, in the science of war, in every possible situation of an army.” That probably meant Gen. Rufane, who had died in 1773. Donkin supplemented that collection with his own material.

The major collected £290 in subscriptions, mostly from his fellow officers. He stated that he “published for the benefit of the children and widows of the valiant soldiers inhumanly and wantonly butchered when peacefully marching to and from Concord, April 19, 1775, by the rebels.”

Donkin made a deal with Hugh Gaine (1726-1807), a Belfast-born printer who had supported the Patriot cause in his New-York Mercury newspaper until late 1776. Then Gaine had decided the British would probably win, slipped back into the occupied city, and resumed publishing his paper with a new editorial slant.

Donkin’s Military Collections and Remarks offered a livelier description of the 1775 St. David’s Day dinner:

The royal regiment of welch Fuzileers has the privilegeous honor of passing in review preceded by a Goat with gilded horns, and adorned with ringlets of flowers; and although this may not come immediately under the denomination of a reward for Merit, yet the corps values itself much on the ancientness of the custom. 

[Footnote:] Every 1st of March being the anniversary of their tutelar Saint, David, the officers give a splendid entertainment to their welch brethren; and after the cloth is taken away, a bumper is filled round to his royal highness the Prince of Wales, (whose health is always drunk the first that day) the band playing the old tune of, “The noble race of Shenkin,” when an handsome drum-boy, elegantly dressed, mounted on the goat richly caparisoned for the occasion, is led thrice round the table in procession by the drum-major. 

It happened in 1775 at Boston, that the animal gave such a spring from the floor, that he dropped his rider upon the table, and then bouncing over the heads of some officers, he ran to the barracks with all his trappings, to the no small joy of the garrison and populace.

Donkin’s text thus explains that mysterious sentence from the Boston News-Letter article on this event: “St. David, mounted on a Goat, adorned with Leeks, presented himself to View.” A young drummer played the part of St. David while riding on a goat. (A goat who, on this date, didn’t want to be ridden.)

These sources from the Revolutionary years show that the claim I quoted back here, that the Royal Welch Fusiliers adopted a “wild goat” that trotted onto the Bunker Hill battlefield, to be bunk. The regiment already had “a Goat with gilded horns” months and probably years before the battle.

As for Maj. Donkin, he continued serving in the British army. In 1778 he put his son, then aged five, on the roster of the 44th Regiment as an ensign, and the following year promoted him to lieutenant. Meanwhile, the boy was studying at the Westminster School in London.

Donkin became lieutenant colonel in charge of the Royal Garrison Battalion from 1779 to 1783, then colonel in 1790, major general in 1794, lieutenant general in 1801, and general in 1809. The picture above shows him in the Pump-Room at Bath in 1809. Donkin died in Bristol in 1821. By then his son was a decorated major general and acting governor of the Cape Colony.

TOMORROW: How the goat story bounced.