Insurance on the High Seas

Common-Place just published an article about eighteenth-century marine insurance that, because it comes from Hannah Farber, author of the new Underwriters of the United States, is actually quite interesting.

“Insurance for (and against) the Empire” discusses a legal case involving John Brown of Providence and a voyage in 1760.

That was, of course, during the Seven Years’ War. Despite the dangers of sea travel, Brown (and his uncle) sent a ship to the French colony of Saint Domingue under an official flag of truce in order to exchange prisoners.

Brown also took out insurance from the Philadelphia brokers David and William McMurterie, opting for their more expensive comprehensive coverage.

The Brown ship was captured by a privateer—a British privateer rather than a French or Spanish one. Which in a way made sense because the ship was sailing back to Providence full of French molasses and sugar. And as for the prisoner exchange, the ship hadn’t carried any French prisoners to Saint Domingue at all (though it was bringing two British prisoners home).

The McMurteries argued in court that they weren’t obligated to pay for the lost cargo because Brown had clearly lied about the purpose of the voyage, which was really “illicit and contraband Trade” with the enemy.

Brown responded by arguing that:

• Whatever their ship was carrying, it did sail under an official flag of truce from Rhode Island governor Stephen Hopkins.
• The expensive insurance policy explicitly said the insurers couldn’t ask questions about what happened.

The supreme court of Pennsylvania decided in favor of Brown, saying the McMurteries had to pay out.

That dispute then went to the Privy Council in London. That body had to balance competing goals: discouraging smuggling, encouraging privateers in wartime, supporting the insurance industry, maintaining the rules of war, honoring the precise wording of contracts.

What did the Privy Council decide? Read Hannah Farber’s article.

The Deep Roots of New England’s Pope Night

The Journal of Religious History recently made Luke Ritter’s article “Pope's Day and the Language of Popery in Eighteenth-Century New England” open for all here in the Wiley Online Library.

While eventually focusing on New England, this article begins with the reason eighteenth-century Britain celebrated the 5th of November. Unfortunately, that explanation mixes up dynasties:

The paradox of papist ambition and secrecy became powerfully instantiated in the commemoration of Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in England annually after 1605 on 5 November. A Catholic by the name of Guy Fawkes and several other Jacobite conspirators desired to usurp the Hanoverian, Protestant monarch, James I, to restore a contending Stuart, Catholic family line. Englishmen who supported James I called the Stuart claimant a “pretender.”

James I was a Stuart—indeed, founder of the Stuart dynasty. His grandson, James II, was also a Stuart but not also a Protestant, causing Parliament to replace him with Protestant Stuarts. When that supply ran out in the early 1700s, Parliament invited in the line of Georges from Hanover. That’s when Stuart pretenders started to pose a continental, Catholic, and “Jacobite” threat to the Hanoverians.

The error, though unfortunate, is actually an apt reflection of the shifty nature of England’s established religion over two busy centuries. While the celebration of the 5th of November was rooted in the early 1600s, it took off as a holiday in New England more than a century later. Until then, the region was too often at odds with the British monarchy and Parliament to get behind celebrating their deliverance. But once the causes of anti-Catholicism, imperial pride, and respect for the king were firmly united, New Englanders were all in.

Ritter’s article digs up lots of evidence about the intellectual environment in which the holiday flourished. One of the values that united most Britons in the 1700s was that Roman Catholicism was a Bad Thing. (British Catholics didn’t hold that view, of course, but British law literally excluded them from full participation in British society.) New Englanders, with their culture’s Puritan roots, held that idea even more strongly.

As a result, during theological and political disputes New Englanders on both sides tended to accuse the other of acting too like the Catholics. Ritter quotes a New Light pioneer, the Rev. Elisha Williams, complaining in 1742 that traditionalists displayed the “true Spirit of Popery” by imposing their “Determinations on all within their Power by any Methods which may appear most effectual…in Matters of Religion.” Meanwhile, the Rev. Charles Chauncy, an Old Light leader, said even “POPERY itself han’t been the mother of more and greater blasphemies and abominations” than the New Light revivals.

As Ritter describes, Guy Fawkes was never really the focus of how New England celebrated Pope Night. Indeed, one surviving broadside about the holiday from the early 1760s misdated the Gunpowder Plot to 1588, showing how little people cared about those ancient details. Rather, the New England holiday came to lambaste contemporary enemies, starting with the Pope (not that many revelers could have told you what the current pope’s name was) and Stuart Pretender.

Eventually the “Pretender” became the name for the villain of the year being hanged in effigy. Boston’s “Pretenders” in the 1750s and 1760s included Admiral John Byng, Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton, and Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Thse effigies in turn offered meme for the Stamp Act protests of 1765 and the nonimportation pickets of 1770.

Ritter focuses a lot of attention on Massachusetts and Boston laws meant to keep Pope Night revelry from becoming too rowdy and violent, citing “tensions between elite Massachusetts-Bay legislators” and the celebrants.

While civic leaders undoubtedly worried about the violence and social disorder of Pope Night—a child was killed in 1764, after all—it’s significant that they never tried to end the celebration entirely, simply to keep it within bounds. And from the other side, I think it’s a mistake to see the holiday’s appeal for young males simply as upending authority. Rather, it was a day of misrule sanctified by also being both patriotic and pious.

As the article notes at the end, Pope Night lost its respectable rationale during the Revolutionary War. It was no longer patriotic to praise king and Parliament, and no longer politic to complain about everything Catholic when France was helping win the war. Pope Night imagery proved useful when Americans wanted to show their contempt for Benedict Arnold, but that tradition faded fast.

Mid-autumn misrule still had its appeal, though. Some Pope Night rituals hung on long enough to evolve into Halloween. But that vastly popular American holiday never regained an overt political or religious justification, despite the best efforts of UNICEF.

Reviewing Resisting Independence

Benjamin Anderson just reviewed Brad A. Jones’s Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic for H-Early America.

One can download the review in P.D.F. form here.

Jones doesn’t define Loyalists just as the people in colonial America who supported the Crown over local, Patriot authorities and, in many cases, left the thirteen breakaway colonies because of that.

Rather, this book studies people anywhere in the British Empire who chose the Crown over the Americans. Thus, Jones examined newspaper reports and essays from Glasgow, Halifax, Kingston, and New York City.

By this method, Jones sought to move beyond studies of individual Loyalists like Thomas Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall, whose voluminous writings, both personal and public, let us trace their thinking and experiences.

Anderson seems to echo Jones’s argument that those newspaper reports, often anonymous, are “one of the very few places that a common colonist’s thoughts can be found.” However, while newspaper pages weren’t confined to the elite, they certainly learned toward the genteel. Anderson notes “Jones’s inability to bring African Americans and Native Americans into his analysis.”

Among the Loyalist writers he could access, Jones found they shared “a collection of Protestant Whig beliefs, ‘like free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom,’ and considered this representative monarchy to be the protector of liberty and Protestantism from Catholicism, France, and Spain.” That raises a couple of questions in my mind:

• Did these British subjects differ in those values from the American Patriots, or did almost all politically-minded Britons claim to be driven by “free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom”?
• How did Britons, both loyal and breakaway, deal with the contradictions between “free trade” and imperial mercantilism, “religious freedom” and anti-Catholicism, “political liberty” and community or national loyalty?

I suspect the ways people balanced and reconciled those values determined their political philosophies more.

Anderson writes:

…he appears to argue that this Protestant Whig argument was the sole motivator in leading Loyalists to choosing their allegiance. He criticizes historians for focusing “on [the] Loyalists’ personal interest to describe their political allegiances” (p. 11); yet, self-interest is an intrinsic theme in Resisting Independence.

In chapter 5, for example, he effectively demonstrates that local self-interests determined how the Loyalists reacted to the increasing tensions between the Patriots and Britain: Glasgow merchants recognized the profits they could gain from lucrative contracts to supply the British Army; white slave owners in Kingston saw Britain as their security against a slave rebellion on the island, thus ensuring their profits remained intact; and Haligonians saw the revolution as an opportunity to limit the authority of Nova Scotia’s unpopular governor. Only in New York, he explains, was there much more passionate support for British representative monarchy and Protestant Whig values because the Loyalists’ had experienced the Patriots’ violence firsthand.

Indeed, it seems there is an urge to treat political ideals and self-interest as two distinct motivations that were incapable of working in tandem with one another, but, in reality, this was not the case for many colonists. In Vermont, for example, Ethan Allen combined these Protestant Whig values with his own self-interests that lay in his land empire, which led him to open negotiations with the British Empire about Vermont returning to it.

The investigation of self-interest is a relatively new topic among historians of the American Revolution, who have predominantly confined their studies to towns and communities in New York and the southern backcountry that experienced multiple occupations by the Continental and British armies. Jones makes an excellent contribution to this field by elevating it from the North American colonies to the British Atlantic world.

The phrase “relatively new” seems to write out the Beardian approach to analyzing the Revolutionaries’ motivations, which is now over a century old and has never fully gone away.

Frith as “Madman” and “unfortunate stone-thrower”

Although John Frith expressed his grievance against the British government using the language of rights and social contracts, his cause was personal, not political.

That didn’t stop his case from being mixed into the factional politics of 1790, however.

Ten days after Frith threw a stone at King George III’s gilded carriage, the caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank issued the print shown above, titled “Frith the Madman Hurling Treason at the King,” shown courtesy of the Yale Centre for British Art.

King George is at the right, riding by obliviously. A small fiddle-playing demon rides on his carriage and mounted guards follow.

In the middle of the picture, two men are seizing a third who holds a hatful of rocks. That central figure doesn’t look like Firth, however. Instead, it’s a caricature of the elderly Edmund Burke, bald, bespectacled, and ragged from being out of power. One of the men stopping him is dressed as a Bow Street Runner. The other looks like George, the Prince of Wales, as the British Museum expounds.

At the left are figures of a sailor and a woman carrying a basket, dismayed at the arrest. The woman’s five-o’clock shadow reveals her to be a lampoon of Charles James Fox, another opposition leader. The sailor looks like Fox’s ally Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

The message of this image is therefore that the opposition Whigs in Parliament metaphorically throwing rocks at the king.

Another, cruder image came from William Dent, shown here through the British Museum. It contrasted Frith “the unfortunate stone-thrower,” making “a follish throw for full pay” as an army officer, with the impeached India administrator Warren Hastings. As a “fortunate stone thrower,” Hastings is tossing diamonds as bribes “for a full P-rd-n.”

In this print Frith labeled is “Gulliver the little in Brob-dignag,” confronting the giants of the king and his bodyguards. In contrast, Hastings is “Gulliver the great in Lilliput,” lording over the grasping king and queen and Baron Thurlow, the former attorney general and lord high chancellor. George III and Thurlow were supporting Hastings in his ongoing impeachment trial.

The Member of Parliament who led the case against Hastings was Edmund Burke—the same man Cruikshank depicted as Frith in his print. Thus, artists on opposite sides of the political debate used Frith’s attack on the king’s carriage to convey contradictory messages.

“I believe absolutely that he is totally deranged”

One goal of the attorneys defending John Frith against the charge of treason, as yesterday’s recap showed, was to let him express his own delusional ideas in the courtroom. To give him enough rope to not hang himself, as it were.

The other was to expose members of the jury to respectable people saying they believed Frith was insane. To that end they called:

• Rev. John Villette, ordinary of Newgate Prison: “The first time I saw him I really thought from the appearance he had, that he was deranged in his mind.”
• Sheriff William Newman: “I believe absolutely that he is totally deranged, and not in the use of his senses for ten minutes together; every day I saw him he was so, and of that there is not a doubt.”
• Mr. Fuller, who spent Christmas Eve two years before listening to Frith: “I thought that the speech of a madman.”

The defense counsel also asked Frith about his thoughts on the auctioneer David Burnsall, apparently a family friend who had helped the defendant obtain his army commissions. Frith replied:

he took an extraordinary liberty in putting into the Public Advertiser, the third of February, a letter, dated the first, declaring me insane, a most extraordinary liberty; I thought it prudent to keep a copy: I have made memorandums, but they have been taken from me by Colonel [Jeffery] Amherst, the same as Mr. [John] Wilkes’s papers were seized, a kind of alteration of the laws of the land, a kind of scheme to make a man appear insane, to totally disguise, to undo the liberty of the British subject; in fact it is such a concealed evil that I do not know where it will end.

[Counsel:] Had Mr. Burnsell any ill will to you?

None at all; he was only employed to hide the mutiny that those applauses of the clergymen had occasioned; he went to a person that lives with Mrs. Dowdswell, in Upper Brook-street; he had a letter, and was perhaps see’d; the clergyman declared me as a God, the body of the people as a man insane; myself applying to the King merely to get my birth [berth] again; when I went to my friend Mr. Burnsell, I spoke of no powers of God or Christ.

That exchange had the effect of putting Burnsall’s opinion on the record along with those of the witnesses in court.

With all that evidence, the jury’s decision is no surprise, though Frith continued to try to waylay the process:

Court. Gentlemen of the Jury,…the question the Court proposes to you now, is, Whether he is at this time in a sane or an insane state of mind?

Prisoner. Permit me to speak, the physician is the most principal person, who has visited me as a friend, he can tell more than from any other private person’s declarations what ever; I appeal as a British subject.

Jury. My Lord, we are all of opinion that the prisoner is quite insane.

Court. He must be remanded for the present.

Prisoner. Then I must call on that physician, who said, on the 19th, I was perfectly in my senses.

The prisoner was then removed from the bar.

John Frith’s trial at Newgate had involved Britain’s lord chief justice, two other judges, the attorney general, the solicitor general, and half a dozen more London lawyers. In contrast, after Rebecca O’Hara and Margaret Nicholson lunged at King George III in 1778 and 1786, respectively, the authorities quickly deemed them insane without trials and clapped them inside Bethlem Hospital (shown above).

I think the major difference is that John Frith, for all of his obviously delusional talk, was a gentleman—raised in wealth, well connected, a former army officer. O’Hara and Nicholson were not only women but working-class. The legal system put a lot of resources into respecting Frith’s rights as an Englishman.

According to Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s All Things Georgian, Frith continued to benefit from his genteel status. The judges sent him from Newgate to Bethlem, but on 17 December “he was released to his friends and disappeared from view except for his inclusion in the army lists as a half-pay officer up and including the 1806 list after which, presumably, his death occurred.”

COMING UP: The political side.

“A most extraordinary sermon upon me, as if I was a God”

As I described yesterday, John Frith refused to let his lawyers delay his trial for treason in April 1790, so the judges decided to start by making the session a trial of Frith’s sanity.

Even before the jury was sworn in, Frith started talking about how various authorities had met him: “the king’s physician,” “Lord Camden” of the privy council, an “apothecary,” and “my own physician, Dr. [William] Heberden.” Those men said he was “fit to meet my trial.” He’d made memorandums of all those visits.

Justice John Heath replied simply, “The jury will take notice of that.” Whether he meant the reported opinions of those experts or Frith’s behavior in the courtroom is not clear.

Frith’s attorneys Samuel Shepherd and William Garrow then asked him some questions and let him express himself at more length. For instance:

Mr. Garrow. Will you have the goodness, Mr. Frith, to state to the jury the circumstance that took place on your arrival at Liverpool, about the clergyman.

Prisoner. When I first arrived at Liverpool I perceived I had some powers like those which St. Paul had; and the sun that St. Paul gives a description of in the Testament; an extraordinary power that came down upon me, the power of Christ; in consequence of my persecution and being ill used, the public wanted to receive me as a must extraordinary kind of a man; they would have received me in any manner that I pleased; when I went to St. Thomas’s church I was there surprised to hear the clergyman preach a most extraordinary sermon upon me, as if I was a God: I found my friends wanted me to support that kind of fanaticism in this country; this sermon was printed afterwards by [William] Eyre, the printer at Warrington; when I came to London to the king concerning some military business, I told him nothing about any supernatural abilities, or the power of God; when I went to the Infirmary over Westminster-bridge, to the Asylum, I was surprised to hear General [George] Washington’s late Chaplain, Mr. [Jacob] Duche, he said, I remember the words he said, “see him clothed in grace,” pointing to me; there were some supernatural appearances at that time, therefore I could wish the privy council, when I came to England, or the Parliament, might be witnesses that I did not want to set up any kind of powers to the public; but there are such extraordinary appearances that attend me at this moment, that it is singular; and all I do daily is to make memorandums, daily to prove myself in my senses: some friends in Cheshire wanted me to set up some kind of fanaticism, some new branch of religion.

The Rev. Jacob Duché (shown here) preached to the First Continental Congress, which included Washington. In July 1776, the Second Continental Congress elected him its chaplain. However, when Gen. William Howe seized Philadelphia, Duché switched allegiances and wrote to Washington at Valley Forge, urging him to surrender. The minister soon moved to Britain and stayed there until 1792. Though he had never been Washington’s personal or military chaplain, Duché was evidently known in Britain for that link. 

Frith’s counsel was particularly eager to have him speak about a pain in his ear:

Mr. Garrow. Would you be so good, Mr. Frith, to inform the Court, as you have an opportunity now, of the complaint you made to me of the effect your confinement has upon you, and the pain in your ear?

Prisoner. In respect to the body of people, St. Paul when he was at Jerusalem, the same kind of power then came down on the public; there is both a kind of good and evil power which we are all liable to in this world; in consequence of that I feel myself in a particularly disagreeable situation in confinement; I am under a state of suffocation almost, the divine ordinances weighing so very low down that I am entirely reduced to a shadow almost, that is all to me as if it was a death seemingly, I am so in a state of confinement.

Garrow asked twice more about the ear pain before Frith finally explained:

I supposed it merely as a triffling thing, but that complaint arises from a power of witchcraft, which existed about a hundred years ago, in this country; there is a power which women are now afflicted with; there is a power that rules now, that women can torment men, if they are in a room; over your head, they may annoy you by speaking in your ear; I have had a noise in my ear like speech; it is in the power of women, to annoy men publickly, even throughout the whole continent.

Mr. Garrow. Could you satisfy one of the Jury, that such a noise exists in your ear at this time?

Prisoner. That there is a noise in my ear at this time?

Mr. Garrow. Yes.

Prisoner. No, I am free from it now.

Mr. Garrow. Oh! you are free from it now?

Prisoner. Yes, but it is the power and effects, of what they call witchcraft, or some kind of communication between women and men; but I have remained such a chaste man for these four years, that it has fallen upon me particularly…

The defense attorneys thus established what modern psychiatrists would call multiple delusions.

TOMORROW: Hearing from other witnesses.

“Justice could not be attained without reasonable delay”

Last month I left John Frith in Newgate prison, about to be put on trial for treason after people had seen him throw a rock at King George III’s coach on 21 Jan 1790.

As you recall, Frith had been a lieutenant in the royal army during the American War and after, but was cashiered after he had a divine revelation that Jamaica wasn’t real. Or, if we adopt his commanders’ narrow perspective, after he went mad.

Frith’s trial began on 17 April. Three judges presided: Baron Kenyon, the Lord Chief Justice of England (shown here); John Heath, known for handling criminal trials; and Sir Beaumont Hotham, who was a baron of the exchequer but would eventually become a baron in the House of Lords, just to confuse matters.

The defense attorneys were Samuel Shepherd and William Garrow. They both turned thirty that month, but they were well regarded; each would eventually serve as attorney general of the U.K. They started by asking for a postponement, saying, “we think there is some very important evidence which might be procured before the next sessions.”

However, when the lawyers broached that idea with Frith himself, he responded, “I object to it, on account of my health, being in a bad state through long confinement. I should rather meet it now: it is depriving a subject of his liberty, and endangering his health.”

The attorney general, Sir Archibald McDonald, said he was fine with a postponement: “I shall have no objection to give the gentlemen such time as will enable them to collect such evidence as they may chuse.” He was being assisted by the solicitor general, Sir John Scott; the appropriately named attorney Edward Law; and John Silvester, soon to be made a judge in London. Both Scott and Law eventually became Britain’s lord chief justice.

Frith still insisted on going through with the trial. He added, “whoever dares to oppose me in that respect, I will represent him to the legislature, or some member of parliament; either to General North, or some gentleman whom I have the honour of knowing.” (I can’t identify “General North.”)

The judges themselves then stepped in and ruled, “because justice could not be attained without reasonable delay interposing, therefore it must stand over till next sessions.”

And Frith declared:

I do not admit of it. And I shall make an application to parliament, that I have been here three months in disagreeable confinement; and the king has broke the mutual obligation between him and the subject: and the assault is of such a simple kind of manner; and what I have met with is of such a nature, that I desire to speak by way of extenuation, and to plead guilty or not guilty to the facts. I then shall make an application as being illegally detained in prison, that you will not admit a British subject to plead to the indictment: I therefore shall make an application to the legislature, that you are violating the laws of this kingdom. I will not put it in the power of the gentlemen that are employed for me to put it off.

A significant portion of the kingdom’s top legal minds were in that courtroom agreeing that the trial should be delayed for the defendant’s sake, and Frith absolutely refused. So the judges took another approach. Lord Chief Justice Kenyon stated:

I think there ought now to be an enquiry made, touching the sanity of this man at this time; whether he is in a situation of mind to say what his grounds of defence here are. I know it is untrodden ground, though it is constitutional: then get a jury together to enquire into the present state of his mind: the twelve men that are there, will do.

The criminal trial thus turned into an inquiry on whether Frith was sane.

TOMORROW: Testimony.

(Incidentally, Wikipedia tells us that Sir Archibald Macdonald was the first baronet of his line, as well as the son of a seventh baronet and brother of an eighth. How was that possible? Because Macdonald’s brother, father, and ancestors were baronets of Nova Scotia, but for his services Sir Archibald was given the same title within the English peerage.)

A Hoax about a Hoax

On 29 Mar 1781, a blacksmith named Benjamin Montanye (1745–1825) was detained near Haverstraw, New York, by a Loyalist squad under Lt. James Moody.

Moody discovered Montanye was carrying several letters from Gen. George Washington to Philadelphia. He had Montanye hauled into New York City and jailed.

Eventually Montanye was released and became Baptist preacher in Orange County. He talked about his experience in a fashion that led to this story as a footnote in Benson J. Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution:

[Washington] directed the messenger to cross the river at King’s Ferry, proceed by Haverstraw to the Ramapo Clove, and through the Pass to Morristown.

Montaigne, knowing the Ramapo Pass to be in possession of the Cow-boys and other friends of the enemy, ventured to suggest to the commander-in-chief that the upper road would be the safest. “I shall be taken,” he said, “if I go through the Clove.”

“Your duty, young man, is not to talk, but to obey!” replied Washington, sternly, enforcing his words by a vigorous stamp of his foot.

Montaigne proceeded as directed, and, near the Ramapo Pass, was caught. A few days afterward he was sent to New York, where he was confined in the Sugar House, one of the famous provost prisons in the city.

The day after his arrival, the contents of the dispatches taken from him were published in Rivington’s Gazette with great parade, for they indicated a plan of an attack upon the city. The enemy was alarmed thereby, and active preparations were put in motion for receiving the besiegers.

Montaigne now perceived why he was so positively instructed to go through the Ramapo Pass, where himself and dispatches were quite sure to be seized. When they appeared in Rivington’s Gazette, the allied armies were far on their way to the Delaware.

Montagnie admired the wisdom of Washington, but disliked himself to be the victim.

The frightening experience of being captured by the enemy thus became part of a clever ruse by the great Gen. Washington.

Except, as Jeffrey L. Zvengrowski wrote in an article for Washington’s Papers in January, that story of a hoax was itself a hoax.

James Rivington did print one of Washington’s intercepted letters in his Royal Gazette on 4 April, a message to his cousin and plantation manager Lund Washington dated 28 March, but it didn’t mention any attack plans.

The Papers of Gen. Henry Clinton contain other Washington letters, apparently from the same mailbag:

• 23 March to Francisco Rendon, a Spanish diplomat in Philadelphia.
• 27 March to Continental Congress delegate Benjamin Harrison. (This was at least the second time the correspondence between those two Virginians was waylaid.)
• 29 March to dentist John Baker.

None of those documents say anything about a plan to attack New York. Indeed, in the letter to Harrison, Washington said that even with reinforcements he would “have an Army barely sufficient to keep the Enemy in check in New York.”

Zvengrowski writes: “Washington’s letter to Harrison was not printed for fear among British commanders at New York City that knowledge of its contents would generate pressure upon them to launch an invasion of New Jersey!” Thus, the general using those letters to manage opinion was actually Clinton.

Another reason to doubt the story printed by Lossing is that Washington didn’t make plans with the French general Rochambeau to leave the New York theater and besiege Gen. Cornwallis in Virginia until several weeks later. At that point the Continentals probably did try to fool the enemy about their plans. But not back when Lt. Moody captured Montanye.

The Lord of the Manor Americanized

The new issue of Colonial Williamsburg’s Trend & Traditon magazine offers an interesting article by Jon Kukla about a 1781 copy of the play The Lord of the Manor.

That copy is also featured in this online exhibit from Stanford University, the current owner.

The Lord of the Manor was a loose adaptation of the French comic opera Sylvain. It opened at “the Theatre Royal Drury-Lane” in 1780 and was a hit.

William Jackson of Exeter Cathedral had composed the new score, and once the play was a success the author of the libretto came forward: John Burgoyne, home from his flop in America.

Burgoyne arranged for his script to be published with a preface. A copy of that publication crossed the Atlantic to the household of Patrick Henry, who wrote his name on the title page.

But that wasn’t all. Kukla guesses that some of the many Henry children put on their own production of The Lord of the Manor and that, before they did so, their father edited the text for them.

Henry “deleted three passages with dialogue referring to prostitution or adultery—as well as the sleazy remarks of an upper-class character lusting after a servant girl.” (Not that Virginia aristocrats didn’t lust after their servants—they just didn’t remark about it in front of the children.)

Also edited out were two scenes satirizing British customs that didn’t pertain to America. One went on about hunting laws, and the other portrayed an army recruiting officer. The latter, Kukla says, was already “extraneous” to the plot, created by Burgoyne for some laughs.

Most interesting, Henry made changes to Americanize a few lines, though the play still seems to be set in Britain. He replaced “old Britons” with “our Fathers,” removed the words “king and” from the phrase “enemies of my king and country,” and added a speech about one’s “birth-right as a free man.”

Henry also took out Burgoyne’s criticism of the French—a long-standing national habit made especially acute in wartime. The line “though I hate the French in my heart, as a true Englishwoman, I’ll be friends with their sunshine…” became “though I never was in France, yet I’ll be friends with their sunshine…” After all, in the 1780s France was America’s far-off friend.

Campaigns for Two Portraits in the U.K.

A couple of news stories about British art caught my eye recently.

In 1727 Sir Robert Walpole, then defining the post of prime minister, commissioned the thirty-year-old engraver William Hogarth to paint a portrait of his youngest son, Horace.

The result is “the earliest-known commissioned picture of an identifiable sitter by Hogarth and his first-known portrait of a child.” The painting’s creator, subject, and commissioner were three of the century’s most notable Britons.

Horace Walpole grew up to design and commission his Strawberry Hill mansion, a pioneering Gothic Revival structure. He also pioneered the Gothic in fiction with The Castle of Otranto.

Horace Walpole’s childhood portrait is still in private hands, and Strawberry Hill House & Garden, now a museum, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to buy it. The trust that runs the museum says:

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has generously awarded the Trust £115k and Art Fund has kindly offered £90k, but we now need to raise the final £25k by 14 April 2022, to meet the total cost of £230k.

For a look at the portrait and the fundraising campaign, go to this page.

In 1774, a young man called Omai (Mai to his compatriots) from Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, arrived in London. He had traveled on H.M.S. Adventure, commanded by Capt. James Cook, and was introduced to London society by the naturalist Joseph Banks.

Several leading British artists made portraits of Omai. In 1776 Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a full-length picture of the young man in robes and turban (shown above). In 1777 Omai returned to the South Pacific, and he reportedly died two years later.

In 2001 the Earl of Carlisle sold the Reynolds portrait of Omai to an Irish horse-racing magnate, John Magnier, for £10.3 million ($15 million). A few years later the British government sought to buy the painting for £12.5 million for the Tate Museum, but Magnier declined. He was able to have the picture displayed in Ireland from 2005 to 2011. Since then it has been in a “secure art storage facility” in London.

According to ArtNews, it’s unclear if Magnier still owns the painting, but last year the owner applied to export the picture from Britain again. The U.K. government temporarily barred its removal, designating Raynolds’s portrait as of “outstanding significance in the study of 18th-century art, in particular portraiture,” and “a signal work in the study of colonialism and empire, scientific exploration and the history of the Pacific.”

The latest estimate of the painting’s market value is £50 million ($65 million). Under British law, if any of Britain’s public museums commits by 10 July to try to raise that money, the painting will stay in the U.K. until next March to allow time for that campaign. But the Art Newspaper says, “it is unlikely any cash-strapped national museum can afford the hefty price tag.”

“By the assistance of a 355”

I liked this Smithsonian article throwing cold water on the idea that the Culper spy ring included a woman known as “355.”

As Bill Bleyer writes, the number 355 was in the ring’s codebook as the symbol for “lady,” but that number appears on the record of the spy network only once:

Of the 193 surviving letters written by members of the ring, only one contains a reference to any woman. A coded letter from chief spy [Abraham] Woodhull to [Gen. George] Washington, dated August 15, 1779, includes this sentence: “I intend to visit 727 [Culper code for New York] before long and think by the assistance of a 355 [lady in the code] of my acquaintance, shall be able to outwit them all.”

There’s no evidence of how this lady might help Woodhull, what her real or putative relationship to him was, or what came of that visit—if it ever took place. We do know the codebook had different entries for “lady,” “woman” (701), and “servant” (599), indicating that Woodhull referred to an upper-class woman.

Woodhull and other long-time agents had pseudonyms because they made many appearances in the letters. There was no pseudonym for a woman, and, again, this is the only mention of a 355.

Bleyer discusses the various ways authors have imagined “355” while claiming to write nonfiction. Morton Pennypacker, who first identified the Culper codebook and figured out the ring members, described a lady who was “Townsend’s mistress…arrested, imprisoned on the infamous British prison ship Jersey and given birth to Townsend’s illegitimate son onboard before dying.”

In their book with no citations, Fox talking head Brian Kilmeade and writer Don Yaeger placed “355 in the social circle of British spymaster and legendary party-thrower John André.“ Once again, she ends up on the Jersey. As historian Todd Braisted has noted, we have the names of everyone detained on the Jersey because the Royal Navy kept careful records, and there were no women.

In Washington’s Spies, Alexander Rose portrayed Anna Strong as active in spying out of Setauket, New York. Pennypacker had been the first to bring Strong’s name into the story, printing family lore about her signaling Patriot boats with her laundry in a way I’ve never understood the logic of. Strong was related to Woodhull. But the evidence she took part in spying is beyond thin, much less that she was the 355 of August 1779.

Claire Bellerjeau in Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth proposed that 355 was a woman who escaped slavery on Long Island named Elizabeth or Liss. But the only mention of “a 355 of my acquaintance” came from Woodhull while that woman had been enslaved to the family of another Culper ring spy, Robert Townsend. Also, an upper-class white man like Woodhull wouldn’t identify Elizabeth as a lady.

The many stories about 355 reflect our own society’s wish to imagine an active, daring female spy—and to solve the mystery of that number.

Frictions at James Madison’s Montpelier

Back in June 2021, I noted a news story that the Montpelier Foundation was changing its bylaws to ensure that descendants of people enslaved at the plantation would be on its board.

Under that change, the sixteen-member board has included five descendants of enslaved people, two chosen by the Foundation and three by the Montpelier Descendants Committee, formed by people whose ancestors were enslaved at the site. At the time, that was widely hailed as a progressive step by the site and its supporters, ahead of any other former slave-labor plantation linked to a famous Founder.

Last week the Washington Post reported that the Montpelier Foundation was preparing to unilaterally alter that arrangement after frictions between the Foundation’s current leadership and the Descendants Committee.

Under the new arrangement, the Montpelier Descendants Committee would no longer choose any new board members. The Foundation board says it will still consider the committee’s nominations and still work toward a goal of half of board members being descendants of enslaved people—but only descendants of the board’s choosing.

According to the Post article, the Montpelier Descendants Committee’s lawyer submitted the names of forty prospective board members whom that group would support, but the Foundation still wants to cut the committee out of the process.

The Post added, “Outside mediators brought in last year eventually quit, criticizing the foundation for taking actions ‘entirely inconsistent’ with a commitment to seek board parity.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which actually owns Montpelier, urged the Foundation not to proceed with this change. Most of the site’s full-time employees signed a petition against the change, made public at a new website.

On Sunday, the Montpelier Foundation announced that it had gone ahead with the vote, which it termed a “broadening” of the pool of descendants of Montpelier’s enslaved eligible to be on the board. Of course, everyone had been eligible before—the only change is that the Descendants Committee can’t choose board members.

The Foundation’s press release quoted one anonymous member of the site’s staff in support of the change and led with a supportive statement from “the Jennings family of Montpelier,” no individual identified. Presumably these people are descended from Paul Jennings, who published a memoir about being enslaved to James and Dolley Madison in 1865.

The Art of War in Two Short Videos

As long as I’m linking to videos, here are two from museums about eighteenth-century military art.

The British National Gallery is restoring Joshua Reynolds’s portrait (shown here) of Capt. Robert Orme, one of Gen. Edward Braddock’s aides during the ill-fated expedition west. 

Reynolds didn’t make cleaning easy, as conservator Hayley Tomlinson explains in this behind-the-scenes video. Reynolds’s technique of mixing resin into his paints, especially later in his career, makes it hard for a cleaner to distinguish the original colors from varnishes overlaid in the decades since and now misting the intended view.

On this side of the ocean, the American Revolution Institute at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., shared a short video of collections manager Paul Newman showing off a powder horn carved for Capt. Thomas Kempton.

As Newman shows, this horn was made in Roxbury during the siege of Boston and includes simple images of some local landmarks, such as Castle William.

In 2013 I researched Capt. Kempton and spoke about the horn at Anderson House, as I discussed back then. (I keep meaning to write up my notes in a more presentable form.)

One curious aspect of this horn is that it was originally carved to say “carved by” Kempton. That was changed to “carved for,” with the alteration still visible. There were professonal horn-carvers plying their wares along the provincial lines, and apparently this one thought Kempton would like full credit for the horn, but the captain preferred otherwise.

Revolutionary Lectures from Five Different Years

This has been a busy week in video events for me. I delivered two live talks, video-chatted with the Mount Vernon Book Group, and recorded a story for an upcoming National Park Service project.

Meanwhile, videos of several older events got posted. So if you have nothing else to watch on this weekend—after all, it’s just the basketball and the movie awards—here are some video links.

The Dedham Museum & Archive recorded the talks that Katie Turner Getty, Christian Di Spigna, and I delivered earlier this month on 6 March. Katie spoke about women at the Boston Massacre, Christian about Dr. Joseph Warren’s career, and I about the evidence and unanswered questions about Crispus Attucks. We also fielded audience questions. So be aware, the video of this “Revolutionary Martyrs” program runs about an hour and forty-five minutes.

The Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site has posted the videos of four lectures I delivered around Evacuation Day in recent years. The National Park Service works to ensure all its videos are accessible to people with limited sight or hearing, so these include captions and descriptions.

I started delivering Evacuation Day lectures at Washington’s Headquarters several years ago when I was working on a historic resource study for the agency. At first I drew on chapters from that study. Later I started to pull out stories spread out over several chapters, or topics on which I’d found new material. Looking back, I’m surprised I’ve found so much to say.

• 2017: “Washington’s Riflemen: Heroes or Headaches?”
• 2018: “Myths and Realities of Col. Henry Knox’s First Mission”
• 2019: “When John & Abigail Met George: The Adamses’ Encounters with Washington”
• 2020: “Native Americans at the Siege of Boston”

Each of these presentations was about an hour long, with questions at the end. They were made possible by the Friends of Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters and the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati. Enjoy.

“Lifetime Tenure” When the Supreme Court Began

The U.S. senate is holding hearings on the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice. Some senators have come out against giving this nominee a “lifetime appointment” despite having previously approved her lifetime appointment as a federal judge at two levels.

Social-media discussions of this issue got me thinking of what a “lifetime appointment” meant when the U.S. Supreme Court first met.

Lifetime judicial appointments were common in the British and thus British-American legal systems. Although overall life expectancy was lower in the eighteenth century, that’s largely due to childhood mortality, so once a mature man was appointed to the bench he often served for many years.

(Colonial Rhode Island was an exception to that system of lifetime appointments. Under its eighteenth-century constitution, judges were elected for one-year terms, though they could be reelected. Which just shows how anomalous Rhode Island was.)

I decided to look at the Supreme Court justices appointed in the 1790s to see how long they stayed alive and stayed on the court.

• John Jay / 6 years on the court / 40 more years of life after appointment 
• John Rutledge / 1 one year on the court, then another stint of a few months four years later / 11 more years of life 
• William Cushing / 20 / 20 
• James Wilson / 9 / 9 
• John Blair / 5 / 10 
• James Iredell / 9 / 9 
• Thomas Johnson / 2 / 28 
• William Paterson / 13 / 13 
• Samuel Chase / 15 / 15 
• Oliver Ellsworth / 4 / 11 
• Bushrod Washington / 31 / 31 

Thus, from early on we see Supreme Court justices serving for a decade or more. Six of these eleven men sat on the bench until they died, with an average tenure of over fifteen years. Three more justices nominated by the Presidents active in the Founding—John Marshall, William Johnson, and Joseph Story—also served more than thirty years.

That said, while the first generation of U.S. politicians could conceive of Supreme Court justices serving for decades, the number of jurists who actually do so has gone up. As of today the historical average tenure on the court stands at sixteen years, but no justice has left the bench before that time since the late 1960s.

The other career model we see these days, a justice serving for decades and then retiring, was less common in the 1790s. Indeed, the three early justices who resigned citing reasons of health—John Blair, Thomas Johnson, and Oliver Ellsworth—did so after only a handful of years. The job was more physically demanding when Supreme Court justices still rode the circuit to hear federal cases rather than staying in the capital.

One path we haven’t seen for a long time was a justice resigning from the top bench because he preferred a different government role. John Jay left the court to be governor of New York, having already run for that offce in 1792 and gone overseas as President George Washington’s treaty negotiator in 1794.

Finally, there’s a storyline we really don’t want to see repeated. John Rutledge (shown above) resigned from the U.S. bench to become chief justice in the home state of South Carolina. Then President George Washington put him back on the Supreme Court as chief justice, only for the senate to decline to confirm him. Rutledge attempted suicide, withdrew from public life, and died five years later.

Giving a Pass to the Jepson Family

Yesterday I gave a presentation about how the Revolutionary War disrupted the lives of women in and around Boston.

Among the documents I used was this item from the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collections—a pass authorizing “Margarett Jepson” and her family to leave Boston in May 1775.

On the back of that pass is a list of names, evidently the family members it covers, as shown in the detail here. Those names are:

Mary Jepson
Margt. Jepson her Mother
Mary Jepson her Aunt
Margt. Jepson Junr.
Benja. Jepson
Mary Jepson her Sister
Mary Jepson Junr.
Mary Jepson her Daugr.

Thus of seven or eight names in this family group, five were named Mary Jepson. How was that possible?

A History & Genealogy of the Descendents [sic] of John Jepson, published by Dr. Norton W. Jipson in 1917, offers the answer.

In 1726 William Jepson (1702–1745) married Margaret Sumner, making her Margaret Jepson. William had a sister named Mary, born in 1710. He also had a brother, Benjamin, who fathered a girl named Mary (c. 1735–1790).

William and Margaret Jepson had ten chldren, including another William, another Margaret, another Mary, and another Benjamin.

In 1761 that second Benjamin Jepson (1734–1811) married Mary Sigourney (1736–1818), making her another Mary Jepson. They had two children, whom they named, of course, Benjamin and Mary.

Thus, the list on the back of the pass appears to start with Mary (Sigourney) Jepson and then adds:

• her husband’s mother, Margaret (Sumner) Jepson
• her husband’s unmarried paternal aunt, Mary Jepson (b. 1710)
• her husband’s unmarried sister, Margaret Jepson (b. 1730)—crossed off, so she may not have made the trip
• her husband, Benjamin Jepson (unless this was her husband’s uncle, born in 1750, or her husband’s nephew, born in 1766)
• her husband’s unmarried sister, Mary Jepson (b. 1745) 
• her husband’s unmarried first cousin, Mary Jepson (c. 1735–1790)
• her daughter Mary Jepson (1763–1797)

I’m pleased to report that although Benjamin Jepson had four brothers who married, none of their wives was named Mary. Because that could have been confusing.

“Dr. Joseph Warren” Tour, 1-4 June

America’s History, L.L.C., is offering a tour of “The Revolutionary World of Dr. Joseph Warren” on 1-4 June.

The leader will be Christian Di Spigna, author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero, and founder of the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation.

Christian will be assisted by Bruce Venter, proprietor of America’s History, L.L.C., who has years of experience organizing tours like this.

The tour description says:

On Day 1 we will start in the city of Boston to see how the Revolution evolved over the course of a decade and a half with a special emphasis on Dr. Warren’s experiences. Our first stop will be the Roxbury Latin School which Warren attended before going to Harvard; the school has an original Warren letter. We’ll see Boston Common where British troops encamped prior to their ill-fated excursion to Lexington and Concord; you’ll also see the site of the Boston Massacre site and the Boston Tea Party.

Next, Faneuil Hall has Warren’s weskit. We’ll drive along Hanover Street where Warren lived, but his homes are now long gone. We will visit the Old South Meeting House (1729) where Warren delivered two Boston Massacre orations and Patriots deliberated before heading to Griffin’s Wharf for a famous tea party in 1773. We’ll finish the day with a visit to the Old North Church where the “two if by sea” lanterns in the belfry signaled Paul Revere on the 18th of April in ’75. Time permitting, we’ll walk to Copp’s Hill where General John Burgoyne viewed the battle of Bunker Hill.

On our second day we will start at the iconic Lexington Green where local Patriots challenged Lt. Col Francis Smith’s expeditionary force of regulars sent by Maj. Gen. Thomas Gage to capture military supplies on April 19, 1775. In Lexington, we’ll visit the Masonic Museum which has an original Joseph Warren clock. We’ll also visit the Munroe Tavern in Lexington which was used as Lord Percy’s HQ when he brought up a relief column to save Smith’s command.

After lunch in Lexington, we’ll drive to Concord to see the Old North Bridge where the shot heard ‘round the world was fired, other famous sites in Concord and the Barrett House which has recently been restored. Along the way, we’ll stop at the Minuteman Visitors Center. We’ll trace the British retreat route though Menotomy (Arlington) where it is believed that Dr. Warren joined the fight before the Redcoat column disintegrated. We’ll also visit the Lincoln Masonic Lodge which displays a Warren painting in Masonic garb.

On our final day we will start with a tour of the Paul Revere House in North Boston, a must-see historic site. Then we’ll visit the Bunker Hill battlefield, monument and museum in Charlestown. The full story of Dr. Warren’s death will be discussed. After lunch we will visit King’s Chapel where Warren was eulogized after lying in state at the Old State House. Warren’s body was brought to Old Granary and buried. We’ll visit St. Paul’s Church where Warren was reburied in the family crypt in 1825. Exhumed again in 1855, Warren’s body was finally laid to rest in the Warren family plot where a statue was erected in 2016.

The tour fee covers motor coach transportation, three lunches, beverage and snack breaks, a map and materials package, all admissions and gratuities, and the services of the knowledgeable guides. Participants are responsible for reserving and paying for their own hotel rooms (if they don’t have accommodations nearby), getting to the hotel, and finding their own dinners.

This tour has been in the works for a long time, delayed by the pandemic. Given Warren’s place near the center of Boston’s Revolutionary movement, especially in the crucial year before his death, tracing his activity is a way to explore a great deal of the area’s Revolutionary history in a coherent narrative.

“Wishing you Every Blessing in Time and Eternity”

Among the documents in the Samuel Adams Papers at the New York Public Library is a letter from the politician’s second wife, the former Elizabeth Wells (1735–1808), on 12 Feb 1776.

Small portions of this letter have been transcribed and published, sometimes with an erroneous date and other errors. Here’s my best rendering at the whole text (with added paragraph breaks for easier reading).

Cambridge Feb 12, 1776

My Dear

I Receivd your affectinate Letter by Fesenton [express rider Josiah Fessenden], and thank you for your kind Concern for My health and Safty. I beg you Would not give your self any pain on our being so Near the Camp. the place I am in is so situated that if the Regulars should Ever take prospect hill (which God forbid) I should be able to Make an Escape, as I am Within a few stones Cast of a Back Road Which Leads to the Most Retired part of Newtown.

if a Large Reinforcement should Come in to Boston I propose to send the Best of my things into the Country, and have My Self Nothing but a bed and a few Necessarys, and be in Readiness to Move at an Minutes Warning—

Mr. [John] Adams made me a visit after I Wrote to you, so I Must aquit him of treating me with Neglect. I Should have sent a Letter by Him, but I was unexpectedly sent for three days to dine at Cambridge, With Samey [?] and was treated by General Washington and his amiable Lady With great Friendship.

I hadn’t included Elizabeth Adams on the list of people who visited the Washingtons in Cambridge before, but this letter shows she did.

I’m not sure about the name “Samey” or, if that’s the right transcription, who it referred to. Samuel Adams’s son by his first wife was also named Samuel, but at this point he was a grown man and a doctor serving in the army, and he and Elizabeth were usually more formal with each other.

I was in hopes I should had the opportunity of Returning the Compt. by inviting them to dine with you at our house, but by what Fesenton tells Me I fear I shall not see you so soon as I Flatterd My self. I beg (My dear) you would try to Come if the visit is Ever so Short——

I saw the Doct. [I think this is Dr. Samuel Adams, Jr.] this day he is Well and says he Wrote to you last Week. Jobs Father and his family is come out of Boston, but I have not seen him so that I Cannot tell what he has done with the things we left in his Care.

Job was a servant boy the Adams family had hired a couple of years before. I’ve written about wanting to identify him. This paragraph adds a clue: Job was from Boston, not a rural town, and his father was still alive in 1776.

a great Number of the poor Come out Every Week, and are taken good Care of by the Committe Chose for that Purpose——

I Supose you have heard that a great Number of tories are gone to England, old gray among them. young Mr [William] Peperell has lost his Wife. [Thomas] Flukers youngest Daughter [Sally] is an actress on the stage in Boston, and her Father and Mother gone home. Mr. [James] Otis daughter [Elizabeth] is Married to an Regular officer [Leonard Brown].

they have pulled down a great many houses for fire Wood among nothers in our Neighbourhood are old Mr. grays, Blairs Coles [?] and Walcuts and an Number in long Lain. you see that I Write you all the News however trifling.

that house that Mother Lived in of Mrs. Carnes is Burnt, and and [sic] all her goods taken away by the soldrs. I saw her last Week, she is Well, and Boards at one Mr Sanders at Waltham where she is treated very kind. She has her Board and Hannahs paid out of the donations. She sends you her best Love and Blessing.

Elizabeth Adams’s mother, Susanna Wells, was evidently accompanied by her daughter Hannah (c. 1755–1803), then unmarried.

In the following paragraph, “Polly” was someone Samuel Adams sent greetings to as “Sister Polly,” so I’m guessing she was Mary Checkley (b. 1721), sister of his late first wife. “Surry” was an enslaved woman given to the family, whom at some point Adams freed.

Polly desires her particular Regards to you and thanks you for the kind manner you Mention her in your Letters. We are all in good health. Surry and Job send their duty—after Wishing you Every Blessing in Time and Eternity, I subscribe My self yours
Elizah. Adams

PS. I beg you to Excuse the very poor Writing as My paper is Bad and my pen made with Scissors. I should be glad (My dear) if you should not come down soon, you would Write me Word Who to apply for some Monney for I am low in Cash and Every thing is very dear
—adieu

Back in June 1775, Samuel had closed a letter to Elizabeth, “when I am in Want of Money I will write to you.” The family’s only source of income was the Massachusetts government, which of course was in some flux.

“So much for smug assumptions”

Earlier this year the Yale Alumni Magazine ran a feature headlined “A reckoning with our past,” reexamining the university’s historic ties to slavery in America—and in India, where Elihu Yale made his fortune.

That prompted a striking letter from Chuck Banks, a member of the college’s class of 1959:

I was very struck (if that’s the right word) by the series “A Reckoning With Our Past” in your January/February issue. When I was a freshman, I took classes in Connecticut Hall without any notion of the role of enslaved persons in its construction, and I’ve recently become aware of the role of slaves in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century public projects, including the White House.

Now I can’t look at these buildings without being reminded of what we owe to generations of slave labor.

Nevertheless, I’ve spent much of my life regarding slavery as a regrettable, tragic historical artifact, but one that didn’t personally affect me or my 11 generations of Yankee ancestors, all farmers and tradesmen. Surely none of them, who lived their entire lives in New England, could have been directly involved in exploiting slave labor.

Or so I thought. Some years ago, a friend who is a colonial history buff brought me a facsimile copy of a colonial-era newspaper which featured an “escaped slave” notice. The fugitive was described not by his name, but by his mutilations: a nick taken out of an ear, and a missing finger joint. The slave owner posting the notice was my fifth great-grandfather James Banks, who lived in the Greenwich/Banksville area of Connecticut in the 1700s.

So much for smug assumptions. Thanks for bringing the series to our attention.

This letter apparently refers to an advertisement that appeared in Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer for 15 Sept 1774, the New-York Journal on the same date, and the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury for 26 Sept 1774, as well as subsequent issues.

James Banks of North Castle, New York, was seeking “A NEGRO MAN, Named WILL, about 27 years of age.” Will had “part of his right ear cut off” and “a mark on the back side of his right hand,” the latter not necessarily an injury but close to the description in the letter. North Castle contains a neighborhood called Banksville, which also spills over into Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut.

According to James Banks, Will was “very talkative.” In searching for this item, I found 160 advertisements using that phrase in 1774 and 1775 alone. It appears to have been a trope, and a trait that masters of slaves and indentured servants considered hard to change and thus identifying.

The 2022 George Washington Prize Finalists

Last week the Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Mount Vernon announced the finalists of the 2022 George Washington Prize.

This prize was created to honor the “best works on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.” It comes with a significant cash award for the author.

In alphabetical order, this year’s five honored authors are:

• Max M. Edling, Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution
• Julie Flavell, The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America
• Jeffrey H. Hacker, Minds and Hearts: The Story of James Otis, Jr. and Mercy Otis Warren
• Bruce A. Ragsdale, Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery
• David O. Stewart, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father

As usual, the selection includes books about Washington himself but also books that examine the Revolutionary era more broadly.

Mount Vernon would be happy to sell copies of these five books.