“An underrated part of Wheatley’s story”

This year seeing the Sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, we continue to see more discussion of her.

Here’s an extract of Deborah Kalb’s interview of David Waldstreicher, author of the new biography The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley:

Early on I decided I needed to read anything and everything Phillis Wheatley read, especially anything she referred to or I could be sure made an impression on her.

That meant getting myself an education in Greek and Roman classics that I never had previously (and which I now think of as a gift that Phillis gave me).

At a certain point, listening to the Fagles translation of Homer’s The Odyssey on a cassette tape in my old car while commuting, I realized that this Mediterranean world, replete with a traffic in women, long dangerous voyages, shipwrecks, and poets who tell the tale, may have seemed to her not so much ancient and strange as familiar.

As I put it eventually, “the classical revival provided her with a way of talking about her experience as an enslaved woman without talking about it directly.”

I knew that an underrated part of Wheatley’s story was that she propelled herself, much like a Homeric bard, into interactions with leading men of her day: Lord Dartmouth, Franklin, George Washington, leaders in Boston, and others she wrote poems about, such as the evangelist George Whitefield (the elegy she wrote after his death made her famous outside Massachusetts).

But the book really came together when I began to read the Boston newspapers. Knowing when she wrote various poems, I began to be able to plot her responses to events in real time.

Waldstreicher proposes that over a dozen poems in those newspapers might have been written by Wheatley.

Also recently, the Newport Historical Society shared Amelia Yeager’s essay on reading between the lines of Wheatley’s letters to Obour Tanner to learn more about that enslaved resident of Newport than sparse home-town records supply. Tanner was about the same age as Wheatley, also born in Africa and kidnapped across the ocean, and the two young women appear to have bonded quickly.

Wheatley died young, with her second book manuscript and any letters she’d saved soon lost. In contrast, Tanner lived for a long time and kept her letters from Wheatley. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, the Massachusetts Historical Society discussed Wheatley’s life and letters, and those documents are now part of the M.H.S.’s collection.

“The ever-memorable Anniversary”

The Boston Gazette published on Monday, 17 Aug 1767, included this local report:

Friday last being the ever-memorable Anniversary of the 14th of August, a great Number of Gentlemen met at Liberty-Hall, under the sacred Elm, which was decently decorated, and drank the following Toasts.

1. The King.
2. The Queen and Royal Family.
3. The Sons of Liberty.
4. All Mankind.
5. Friends to America in Great-Britain.
6. May an Abhorrence of Slavery still and ever remain the best Criterion of a true British Subject.
7. None but Tories Slaves.
8. America.
9. The 14th of August 1765.
10. May the 26th of August 1765, be veil’d in perpetual Darkness.
11. May every House of Respresentatives in America strenuously defend what they have wisely resolv’d.
12. Union, Stability and Fidelity among the Sons of Liberty throughout America.
13. May the Man who will not defend the Cause of his Country, in Case of Danger, be held in universal Contempt by every Son of Virtue and Liberty.
14. May that Day which sees America submit to Slavery, be the last of her Existence.

That Friday, 14 August, was the second anniversary of Boston’s first public protest against the Stamp Act, which inspired a wave of similar protests all along the North American coast and even into the Caribbean. Boston’s political organizers were proud of that.

They weren’t proud of the mob that had nearly destroyed Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s house twelve days later. In these toasts they mentioned that event once, but they thought they got away with it all right.

As for the numerous mentions of “Slavery,” these gentlemen meant political slavery, or giving up their traditional British rights. They didn’t mean, you know, slavery slavery.

Black Reviews White’s Revolutionary Things

H-Early-America has just shared Jennifer M. Black’s review of Ashli White’s new book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

White looks at “the material culture that shaped French, American, and Haitian political contests between 1770 and 1810,” covering “diverse objects such as military clothing, maps, ceramics, wax figures, and politically charged accessories.”

Black writes:

Part 1 examines everyday items that became politically charged due to who procured them, where, how, and why. . . .

Part 2 examines clothing and accessories to show how revolutionary individuals understood, demonstrated, and interpreted their own political alignments and those of others. . . .

Part 3 turns to visual culture, especially maps, prints, and wax figures, to understand how contemporaries shared news about the ongoing revolutions.

The review sums up:

In her focus on the objects’ production, distribution, use, and context, White departs from typical material culture histories of this period, which tend to focus on how certain objects conveyed status or represented cultural and intellectual themes for contemporaries. In this way, White provides a fresh and interesting discussion of these highly politicized objects. But the approach may be somewhat frustrating for material culture scholars accustomed to close readings of particular objects’ attributes and symbolism—there are few of these, and mostly toward the end of the book. . . .

Still, this book makes several important contributions to the extant literature. White’s transnational and comparative focus allows her to isolate racial difference as a factor that shaped individual experience and, for example, affected contemporaries’ reactions to revolutionary violence. . . . Moreover, White’s transnational focus allows her to trace objects that moved across the Atlantic and circulated among varied revolutionaries. Thus, the book is as much a history of material culture in the military as it is about politics and revolutions.

Some of the most knowledgable and diligent researchers into Revolutionary-era material culture I know are reenactors since they literally use the objects of the time or the closest replicas they can make or obtain. It sounds like this book might be useful for exploring the cultural context of those goods and how that changed with events.

Lt. Inman and the Hector

Antoine Vanner at the Dawlish Chronicles website just highlighted how Lt. Henry Inman (1762–1809) of the Royal Navy ended his Revolutionary War.

He was on shore duty in the West Indies in April 1782 and thereby missed participation in the large fleet action, The Battle of the Saintes, off Dominica. This had culminated in a crushing British victory over the French.

In the course of this engagement, the French “74” line-of-battle ship Hector was captured. Though badly damaged in the action she was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Hector. Under the command of Captain John Bourchier (approx. 1755–1819) she was ordered to return to Britain. Henry Inman joined her as First Lieutenant.

Getting the battered HMS Hector seaworthy for the Atlantic crossing involved removal of 22 of her guns and replacement of her masts with shorter ones, presumably so as not to over-strain her hull. Her crew was significantly short-handed, some 300 men, many of whom were invalids. In normal circumstances, a ship of this size would carry a crew of 500 to 700 men and it is therefore obvious that her fighting ability was very seriously impaired. She sailed in late August…

On the evening of September 5th HMS Hector was found by two 40-gun French frigates, L’Aigle and Gloire. These fresh, undamaged vessels quickly perceived HMS Hector’s decrepitude and one placed herself on her beam, and the other on her quarter and began to pour fire into her. Poorly manoeuvrable, HMS Hector was badly placed to avoid several rakings but she returned fire sufficiently to damage both attackers. It was a very creditable performance for a ship so weakly manned and armed. Even so, had the French vessels continued the bombardment from a distance they might have sunk HMS Hector. Instead they made the mistake of attempting to board and their efforts were bloodily repulsed. The action was broken off after six hours and both French ships bore off. . . .

Hector’s survival had been dearly bought. 46 of her crew had been killed or wounded, an especially serious concern when so many of her complement were already invalids. Captain Bourchier had been so badly wounded as to be incapacitated and effective command now passed to the twenty-year-old Henry Inman. The ship herself had been weakened yet further – the hull had sustained more injury, as had the masts, rigging and sails.

It was in this state that HMS Hector was to encounter the massive hurricane that swept through the Central Atlantic on September 17th. Battered by high seas, she lost her rudder and all her masts. Leaks were sprung and incoming water reached a level at which a major portion of the provisions and fresh water was spoiled. Survival now became a matter of continuous pumping, a labour that demanded physical exertion on an open wind and spray-lashed deck which would have been severe for a fit and healthy crew, but almost impossible for one so debilitated.

Go to the Dawlish Chronicles to read about the end of H.M.S. Hector.

“Only the tax on tea retained”

In a conversation earlier this week I shared, and not for the first time, an observation about Lord North’s repeal of the Townshend duties in 1770. Parliament scrapped the duties on everything but tea—yet tea was what accounted for the bulk of the revenue, so it wasn’t that big a change.

That fact had stuck with me since I read this passage in Oliver M. Dickerson’s 1958 article in the New England Quarterly, “Use Made of the Revenue from the Tax on Tea”:

In its original form this act [written by Charles Townshend] included import duties upon glass, white lead, painters’ colors, and paper as well as tea. Total collections on articles other than tea were so unimportant that they were repealed in 1770 and only the tax on tea retained.

Dickerson did more work with Treasury records on American colonial revenue than anyone else in his time, so his remark seemed reliable.

At the same time, I couldn’t help recalling that Dickerson developed a real animus toward the British Customs service, which enforced and collected those tariffs. He revived the Boston Whigs’ accusation that Customs officers had shot at the crowd in King Street in his 1954 paper, “The Commissioners of Customs and the ‘Boston Massacre’,” also published in the New England Quarterly. After 1770, not even the Boston Whigs believed that anymore.

So was Dickerson’s conclusion backed up by data or just his impression? Would his impression be solid? I wanted to see the numbers Dickerson used for his conclusion about the Townshend duties. Unfortunately, the paragraph I quoted above had no citations.

Later in the same paper, however, Dickerson quoted a figure for total collections under Townshend’s revenue act, and then another for “Total reported collections of American taxes from all sources, 1765-1774.” Both those citations pointed to his own book, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution, published in 1951.

Luckily, I have a copy. Even more luckily, I remembered where I’d shelved it.

The data pertinent to the passage above appears in Table 11 on page 198: “Tax Collections Under the Townshend Revenue Act at Four Principal Ports, 1768–70, Exclusive of Paper, Continental Colonies Only.”

The totals for Boston and Salem:

• white glass: £684
• green glass: £169
• lead and painters’ colors: £168
• tea: £5,524

The Massachusetts ports thus accounted for about 31% of all money the Customs service collected on the continent from the Townshend duties, and tea was responsible for 84% of that money.

In New York, tea duties brought in 88% of the total. In Philadelphia, 84%. Only in Charleston, which brought in far more highly-taxed green glass and far less tea than the other three ports, did the other commodities come close to reaping as much revenue as tea.

(The Townshend Act also put a tariff on paper. Or, to be exact, papers. Dickerson wrote frankly ahead of this table: “This omits paper, as the task of computing the tax on sixty-seven kinds of paper at forty-three different ports is more difficult than the results justify. The paper duty at best was a nuisance tax and the yield was small.”)

Thus, Dickerson did present data to support his conclusion. In removing most of his predecessor’s import duties in 1770, Lord North kept more than three-quarters of the actual taxation. I don’t know if the American Whigs were privy to those figures at the time, but the situation helps to explain why they weren’t mollified.

“The public may be assured that this will be his last exhibition”

Yesterday I quoted Jacob Bates announcing that his last display of horsemanship in Philadelphia would be on 23 Sept 1772, and he was pulling out some new tricks for the occasion.

It’s possible Bates left the city and visited some nearby towns, putting on more shows that didn’t make the newspapers.

But that definitely wasn’t his last show in Philadelphia because the 2 November Pennsylvania Packet announced:

To the PUBLIC.

MR. BATES intending in a short Time to leave the Province, and being desirous of manifesting his Gratitude to this City,—proposes to exhibit on Thursday next, (if the weather is good,—otherwise on the succeeding Saturday) at the upper End of MARKET-STREET,—All his various Feats in HORSEMANSHIP,—having Confidence in the generous Attendance of the Citizens; as the Sum which may be then collected, shall be deposited in the Hands of three Gentlemen of Reputation, who will apply it in the advancing inclement Season, to the Relief of such modest Poor, as have experienced better Days.

• The Doors to be opened at Three o’Clock, and to mount precisely at Four.

There’s no sign of where Bates spent the winter and spring. He surfaced next in the second largest British city in North America, New York.

On 17 June 1773, an advertisement in the New-York Journal announced:

HORSEMANSHIP,
By Mr. BATES,
The Original PERFORMER;
Who has had the honour of performing before the Emperor of Germany, the Empress of Russia, the King of Great-Britain, the French King, the Kings of Prussia, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland, and the Prince of Orange; also, at the courts of Saxony, Bavaria, Brunswick, Mecklenbergh, Saxe-Gotha, Hilbourghausen, Anspach, and every other court in Germany; at all which he received the greatest applause, as can be made manifest by the CERTIFICATES from the several courts, now in his possession, and is allowed, by the greatest judges in the MANLY ART he professes, to excel any Horseman that ever attempted any thing of the kind.

THIS AFTERNOON, at Five o’clock, he will perform at the Bull’s-Head, in the Bowery Lane.

The doors will be opened at four o’clock, and he will mount precisely at five.

The seats are made proper for Ladies and Gentlemen.

He will take it as a particular favour, if Gentlemen will not suffer any dogs to come with them.

TICKETS for the first place, at One Dollar each; and for the second, Four Shillings; to be had at the bar of the Coffee-House, at Mr. Rivington’s, and at the place of performance. No money will be taken at the doors, nor admittance without tickets.

Bates advertised several more performances in the New York papers over the following weeks, usually stating that he planned only one or two more shows.

Earlier this month Carl Robert Keyes, who studies advertising in the colonial press, posted an essay on one of those ads, dated 5 August. That one stated it “was intirely the Printer’s mistake in advertising last week that Mr. BATES would perform only once more.” Was it really? Prof. Keyes asks.

One detail to add to that consideration: The printer whom Bates was throwing under a wagon for supposedly misreporting his schedule was James Rivington, who’d sold tickets to his first performances in June. (Later Bates also sold through another printer, Hugh Gaine.)

Another wrinkle: Bates announced he had “changed his tickets,” and none “of the old tickets should be taken at the door.” Does that suggest a falling-out with his printer? Or had he just ordered another batch of tickets printed?

On 9 August the New-York Gazette repeated:

Mr. BATES,
WILL perform on Tuesday next, if the weather should permit,—if not, he will ride on the Friday following. The public may be assured that this will be his last exhibition, and that he will leave the town on his way to Boston, the day after his finishing performance.

COMING: A warm Boston welcome.

The Celebrated Mr. Bates

This picture is a detail from a print produced in Nuremburg in 1766, showing “IACOB BATES, The famous English Horse Rider.” Click on it to go to the full image on the British Museum website.

In the 1760s Bates entertained crowds across Europe with his trained horses and equestrian skills. He performed in St. Petersburg in 1763 or 1764. The year after this print appeared, he became the first man to exhibit a large outdoor horse show in Paris.

An 1820 profile stated, “It does not appear he ever publicly exhibited in England.” That seems odd, but I haven’t found any more recent study of Bates that contradicts that statement by citing a British show.

In 1772 Bates decided to take his act to the New World. An advertisement in the 2 September Pennsylvania Journal announced:

Mr. BATES,
Who has finished a tour of Europe, is arrived at Philadelphia, and intends to perform his surprising feats in
HORSEMANSHIP,
At the upper end of Market-street, on Monday, the 7th of September. The doors to be opened at four o’clock, and he mounts precisely at five.

SEATS are made proper for Ladies and Gentlemen, that they will not be in danger of receiving any damage from the horses. Mr. Bates will take it as a particular favour if Gentlemen will not suffer any Dogs to come with them. No money to be taken at the doors, nor admittance without a ticket.

• TICKETS to be had at the Bar of the London Coffee-House, the Indian King, the place of performance, and at the Center House: For the first place five shillings, and the second two shillings and six-pence.

In another ad a week later, Bates clarified the nature of his performance:

different feats in
HORSEMANSHIP,
On One, Two, and Three HORSES

He also found a way to note how popular his first appearance was:

• Mr. BATES is extremely sorry that the Ladies and Gentlemen were disturbed by the MOB; but for the future, there will be such methods taken that they will not be incommoded.

On 23 September, Bates announced that on that afternoon “(Weather permitting)” he would perform in the city “for the LAST TIME.” For that occasion he added “Several NEW PERFORMANCES.” 

TOMORROW: But that wasn’t Bates’s farewell to Philadelphia.

“Nothing less than a global conspiracy against liberty”

More from David Armitage, this time from a History Today round-up of historians discussing conspiracy theories that had real-world results:

Starting during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 and gathering steam in the following decade, white settler rebels dusted off 17th-century slogans to decry popery and, above all, ‘slavery’ in the evil designs of Westminster and even – in the most perfervid imaginings of Thomas Jefferson – George III himself.

After armed resistance broke out in British America, the Continental Congress issued a series of documents laying out nothing less than a global conspiracy against liberty directed first against the American colonies, then spreading to Ireland, the British Caribbean and South Asia. In response, many Britons believed a parallel conspiracy: that excitable descendants of Puritans and Roundheads were hellbent on independence from the British Crown and Parliament.

The collision of conspiracy theories inflamed and propelled divisions on both sides of the Atlantic, to form what the great early American historian Bernard Bailyn called ‘the ideological origins of the American Revolution’. The colonists’ fears may have been overblown and their invocation of ‘slavery’ hypocritical; meanwhile, metropolitan Britons’ prophesies became self-fulfilling in July 1776. Yet both showed that not every conspiracy theory is necessarily a con: to be actionable it just has to be credible.

The other authors in this column discuss the “Popish Plot,” the “Papal Octopus,” and a pair of mysterious deaths in the time of Tiberius.

(Shown above is Paul Revere’s 1774 version of “The Mitred Minuet,” copied from a British original. On either side of the Atlantic, this cartoon expressed wariness about the British government countenancing Catholicism as the established religion in Québec. In Boston, there was paranoia not just about Catholic bishops but Anglican ones as well.)

“More than ever, historians must write to the present”

The Royal Historical Society’s Historical Transactions website recently shared David Armitage’s essay “The Impulse of the Present,” on “the value of presentist thinking for historical debate.”

Like politicians deploying the term “revisionist,” historians use “presentist” as a pejorative label for historical arguments that grate on them. But exactly what the problem is can vary from one observer to another. “Whatever presentism is,” Armitage writes, “historians generally agree on one thing: that they’re against it.”

Of course, one person’s presentism is another’s perspective, and changing perspective often leads to insights. Most people reading history, professional or not, can spot the folly of imposing one’s own understandings or outlook on people of the past. But historians use “presentist” to criticize other approaches, sometimes including being overly motivated to study certain questions because of current concerns—even if the study itself is rigorous.

Armitage rejects that, writing:

More than ever, historians must write to the present because people in that present demand accounting for the past and, by necessity, want historical answers to contemporary questions. ‘Like funerals, history-writing is for the living,’ remarks the historian of science Hasok Chang.

That aphorism is one among many signs that historians of science are ahead of most other historians in the sophistication and pragmatism of their attitude towards presentism. For example, my Harvard colleague Naomi Oreskes (‘Why I am a Presentist’) and the French historian of biology Laurent Loison (‘Forms of Presentism in the History of Science‘) have recently argued for what they variously call substantive, empirical, critical and motivational presentisms.

Substantive presentism assumes continuities between past and present that make at least some elements of the present usable as keys to unlock the past; this in turn empowers empirical presentism where, say, current scientific understandings of the aetiology of bubonic plague allow historians to analyse past epidemics using knowledge unavailable to past actors.

Critical presentism reverses the arrows of Whig history—’Tory’ history, perhaps?—by deploying historians’ sense of the complexity and contingency of the past to dethrone the pretensions of the present. This may dampen dogmatism by admitting all flesh is grass and this, too, shall pass.

Finally, what Oreskes has dubbed motivational presentism is the admission that how we choose our historical questions, as well as how we answer them, are far from innocent or disinterested acts: ‘What matters to us about the past,’ Oreskes argues, ‘has everything to do with who we are, where we live, and what we think is important—to us, here and now, in the present.’ Such frankness about our own motivations will not only allow historians to scrutinise our motivations more closely: it can equip us with more empathy for the swelling publics who demand understanding and accountability for past injustices.

My take on “presentism” has long been that it’s inescapable, so we should acknowledge our perspective from this time while doing what we can to understand how people of the past viewed the world. I take comfort in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. He has more to say in his chapter “In Defence of Presentism” in History and Human Flourishing, edited by Darrin McMahon and published by Oxford University Press this year. Among his several previous books is The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.

What to Expect at the Battle of Camden

Later this month a new book will appear in the Emerging Revolutionary War series: All That Can be Expected: The Battle of Camden and the British High Tide in the South, August 16, 1780, by Rob Orrison and Mark Wilcox.

With the Battle of Camden, Britain seemed to find a strategy to win back the rebellious southern colonies. Crown forces took Savannah, Georgia, in the fall of 1779, then Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1780. The king’s army, which hadn’t penetrated far inland from the northern ports, now began to set up outposts in the Carolina backcountry.

The Continental Congress assigned Gen. Horatio Gates, victor at Saratoga, to rebuild its army in the south from Continental regiments in the middle states and militia from Virginia and North Carolina. He moved against Gen. Cornwallis’s troops near Camden, South Carolina. The two forces met on 16 Aug 1780.

The title of this new book comes from a report by Lt. Col. Benjamin Ford of Maryland: The British “have done all that can be expected of them; we are outnumbered and outflanked.” Gates’s career would never recover.

At 7:00 P.M. this Sunday, 6 August, Orrison and Wilcox will chat about All That Can be Expected with series editor Dan Welch live on the Emerging Revolutionary War Facebook page. The recorded conversation will be posted on the allied YouTube and Spotify a week later.

Obelisks Being Repaired

The National Park Service is preparing for the Sestercentennial, which means sites with Revolutionary roots are being spruced up.

The agency maintains a list of “deferred maintenance” projects with a total cost that’s now more than $22 billion.

The 250th anniversary of the Revolution, and the crowds that’s expected to bring to those parks, has sent some money toward those maintenance projects. That’s a Good Thing.

There is an immediate downside, however: In the next couple of years that work might affect access to or views of some sites.

At Minute Man National Historical Park, for instance, the obelisk erected at the site of Concord’s North Bridge in 1863 and the nearby Minute Man Statue were recently conserved, shrouding them briefly.

A larger and longer project has started at the Bunker Hill Monument. Restoring the upper exterior of that stone tower means putting up lots of scaffolding, which will surround the monument and affect the views from its windows.

For safety, the area immediately around the tower and lodge are fenced off, though both buildings are still open to the public. I believe one of the small cannon traced in The Road to Concord is still on display in the lodge.

That work is scheduled to be done by the end of this year, keeping the tower in good shape for its spotlight in 2025.

Folks eager to see a towering Revolutionary obelisk this summer and fall might instead take a trip to the Saratoga Monument in Victory, New York. It will be open on weekends from 12 August to 15 October.

The Saratoga Monument is 155 feet tall, with 188 steps, compared to the Bunker Hill Monument’s 221 feet and 294 steps. However, it also offers more decoration to look at, including statues of Continental leaders Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, and Daniel Morgan on three of its four sides.

Two Wheatley Biographies, Compared and Contrasted

The Los Angeles Review of Books just ran Hollis Robbins’s assessment of what the headline calls “Two New Books About Phillis Wheatley.”

One of those books is David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, published earlier this year. The other is the new edition of Vincent Carretta’s biography, originally titled Phillis Wheatley in 2011 and now revised and expanded as Phillis Wheatley Peters.

By some measures Carretta’s book wouldn’t count as new, though it certainly has new material. Its inclusion in this review not simply as a foil for Waldstreicher’s book but in sharing the spotlight seems to reflect how Robbins, dean of humanities at the University of Utah, prefers Carretta’s approach:

Getting to know Wheatley via Carretta means being immersed in the material facts of life of one portion of the globe between the years 1750 and 1800: colonial America, the slave trade, shipping lanes and trade between Europe and the colonies, merchant and church life in Boston, what books were available, who read what, and what political revolutions were brewing. . . .

Getting to know Wheatley via Waldstreicher is far easier—his book brings Wheatley to the present and to present-day readers, presuming that she would think and speak as we think and speak. . . . He offers a Phillis Wheatley ready for her TikTok close-up.

As examples of the different approaches, Robbins presents passages showing how the two books discuss the same subjects. One of those is the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” which I discussed last month.

Here are extracts from that contrast:

When, nearly 70 pages in, Carretta’s readers finally get to Wheatley’s first published poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” (1767), about a schooner laden with whale oil that survived the most terrible gale in memory, sufficient details about the key players (Nathaniel Coffin was an Anglican Boston merchant and an enslaver of a young girl named Sappho while Hussey was one of several sons of a prominent and prosperous Nantucket Quaker merchant and owner of whaling vessels) have been offered to support Carretta’s claim that “Phillis was already commenting on transatlantic economic and political subjects by the time she was about fifteen years old.” . . .

Waldstreicher opens his book with this very poem, to begin his argument that Wheatley’s poetic expressions must be a matter of what she personally experienced and felt. . . . [W]hile it is not at all wrong to wonder whether the trauma of the poet’s Middle Passage sparked her drive to write so forcefully and so well, it is a question, not a certainty. . . . But Waldstreicher’s readers don’t really have a choice to agree or not with his conjectures and conclusions that “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” was more about Wheatley than about Hussey and Coffin. Waldstreicher does not mention that Coffin was an enslaver in talking about the poem. An endnote disputes Carretta’s claim, saying that “there were many Coffins and Husseys” in the area. But shouldn’t readers be told it is a possibility?

Later in the review Robbins brings in a third author, of sorts. She asked ChatGPT’s GPT-4 “what might modern readers assume Phillis Wheatley was thinking when she wrote ‘On Messrs. Huffey and Coffin’ in 1767.” This appears to be a way to saying that even a machine can make assumptions about Phillis Wheatley’s thoughts and feelings, with the tacit implication that Waldstreicher’s book may do that in a more convincing (and better written) way but Carretta’s “careful archival research and scrupulous historical accuracy” is more valuable.

Now as I read Waldstreicher’s endnotes about that early poem, he identifies Coffin not as Nathaniel Coffin of Boston but as Richard Coffin of Nantucket—and I found that identification convincing. Did Richard Coffin enslave people? I don’t know. He’s not as well documented as the rich merchant from Boston, but there’s no evidence that merchant was in danger of drowning in September 1767.

Carretta’s connection between “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” and slaveholding thus seems more strained than Waldstreicher’s linkage of maritime danger and the teen-aged Phillis’s memory of her own Atlantic crossing. And that assessment is based on researching the historical context of the event, which is indeed Carretta’s strong point but which Waldstreicher has managed as well.

“Unable to be at the expense of removing themselves”

On Monday, 1 May 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, having declared that Loyalists could move into Boston, turned to the bigger question of how to handle families who wanted to move out of the besieged town.

The previous day, the congress had named five members to a committee to consider that issue. After seeing that group’s report in the morning, the body added four more delegates to revise the plan.

In the afternoon, having meanwhile codified the language for commissioning officers in the new army, the congress approved the enlarged committee’s amended report:

IN PROVINCIAL CONGRESS, Watertown, May 1, 1775.

Whereas, the inhabitants of the town of Boston have been detained by general Gage, but at length, by agreement, are permitted to remove, with their effects, into the country, and as it has been represented to this Congress that about five thousand of said inhabitants are indigent, and unable to be at the expense of removing themselves:

Therefore, Resolved, That it be, and it is hereby recommended to all the good people of this colony, and especially to the selectmen, and committee of correspondence most convenient to Boston, that they aid and assist such poor inhabitants of said town (with teams, waggons, &c.,) as shall procure a certificate from the committee of donations, that they are unable to remove themselves;

and it is further recommended to the selectmen of the several towns specified in the schedule annexed, to provide for said inhabitants in the best and most prudent way and manner, until this, or some future congress, shall take further order thereon, and that the said selectmen receive, support and employ their proportion of said inhabitants assigned them in said schedule, and no other; and render their accounts to this, or some future congress, or house of representatives, for allowance, which reasonable accounts shall be paid out of the public treasury:

and it is further recommended, to the committee of donations, to apply said donations for the removal of said inhabitants, and for their support whilst removing; and in case that is insufficient, it is further recommended to said committee of donations, that they make up said deficiency, and lay their accounts before the Congress for allowance, which reasonable expense shall be paid out of the public treasury of the colony:

and it is further Resolved, that the inhabitants of Boston thus removed shall not, in future, be considered as the poor of said town into which they remove; and it is to be understood, that if the number of the poor who shall be removed in consequence hereof, should surpass, or fall short of the number herein calculated, the distribution of them shall be increased or diminished, in proportion according to this regulation: …

There followed a list of towns in Suffolk, Middlesex, Plymouth, Bristol, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Worcester Counties with the number of refugees each was thought capable of supporting, from 4 in Leverett to 129 in Rehoboth.

Essex and Barnstable Counties had no allotment, nor did any seacoast towns elsewhere. Likewise, the towns along or close to the siege lines weren’t on the list, though the congress did ask them to supply teams and wagons for moving people. Presumably the authorities thought those communities were already stretched thin supporting the military and maintaining their coastal defenses.

The Maine counties and the islands were also left off, probably because those would be too hard for refugees to get to.

In all, the congress found space, at least theoretically, for 4,903 poor war refugees. That was nearly a third of Boston’s prewar population.

Other families came out by their own means and went to places left off the congress’s list. I discussed Abigail Adams’s July struggle to host George Trott’s family on her farm in Braintree back here. In this article Katie Turner Getty reports that Concord eventually housed “as many as 130 Bostonians” though its initial allotment of poor refugees was 66.

COMING UP: The agreement breaks down.

“To pass unmolested into the town of Boston”

On Sunday, 30 April, the Massachusetts committee of safety:

• heard from Col. Benedict Arnold of Connecticut about artillery up along Lake Champlain.
• ordered Maj. Timothy Bigelow to move weapons from Worcester to the siege lines.
• hired an express rider.
• urged its subcommittee of Azor Orne, Richard Devens, and Benjamin White to “form a plan for the liberation of the inhabitants” of Boston now that Gen. Thomas Gage was allowing them to leave.

So this committee wasn’t idle.

Probably after being stung by the letter from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress quoted yesterday, the committee appointed its chair, Dr. Joseph Warren, along with Joseph Palmer and Orne, to take their resolution out to that body in Watertown.

The committee’s recommendation was:

Whereas, proposals have been made by General Gage to the inhabitants of the town of Boston, for the removal of their persons and effects into the country, excepting their arms and ammunition:

Resolved, that any of the inhabitants of this colony, who may incline to go into the town of Boston with their effects, fire-arms and ammunition excepted, have toleration for that purpose, and that they be protected from any injury or insult whatsoever. This resolve to be immediately published.

The following orders were delivered to Col. Samuel Gerrish:

You are hereby empowered, agreeably to a vote of the Provincial Congress, to grant liberty, that any of the inhabitants of this colony, who may incline to go into Boston with their effects, fire-arms and ammunition excepted, have toleration for that purpose; and that they be protected from any injury or insult whatsoever, in their removal to Boston.

The following form of a permit is for your government, the blanks in which you are to fill up with the names and number of the persons, viz.:

Permit A. B., the bearer hereof, with his family, consisting of persons, with his effects, fire-arms and ammunition excepted, to pass unmolested into the town of Boston, between sunrise and sunset. By order of the Provincial Congress.

Dr. Warren signed that report “clerk pro tem.,” indicating he had taken on yet another job.

The committee of safety addressed only the question of how to reciprocate to Gen. Gage’s decision and let Loyalists enter Boston. It left the bigger question of how to help refugees who had left their homes in that town up to the congress.

The provincial congress made some amendments to the committee’s recommendation, so this is what went out officially:

In PROVINCIAL CONGRESS, Watertown, April 30, 1775.

Whereas an agreement has been made between General Gage and the inhabitants of the city of Boston, for the removal of the persons and effects of such of the inhabitants of the town of Boston, as may be so disposed, excepting their fire arms and ammunitions into the country:

RESOLVED, That any of the inhabitants of this colony, who may incline to go into the town of Boston with their effects, Fire-Arms and Amunitions excepted, have toleration for that purpose; and that they be protected from any injury and insult whatsoever, in their removal to Boston, and that this resolve be immediately published.

P. S. Officers are appointed for the giving permits for the above purposes; one at the sign of the Sun at Charlestown, and another at the house of Mr. John Greaton, jun. at Roxbury.

Ordered, That attested copies of the foregoing resolve be forthwith posted up at Roxbury, Charlestown and Cambridge.

Resolved, That the resolution of Congress, relative to the removal of the inhabitants of Boston, be authenticated, and sent to the selectmen of Boston, immediately, to be communicated to general Gage, and also be published in the Worcester and Salem papers.

Ordered, That Doct. Taylor, Mr. Bailey, Mr. Lothrop, Mr. Holmes and Col. Farley, be a committee to consider what steps are necessary to be taken for the assisting the poor of Boston in moving out with their effects to bring in a resolve for that purpose; and to sit forthwith.

The congress delegates, having given up their whole Sunday waiting for the committee, then adjourned for the day.

By the time the congress’s resolve was published in the 3 May Massachusetts Spy, the Rev. John Murray had stepped down as its president pro tempore and James Warren of Plymouth had declined the post. So the resolution was published over the name of the new president pro tem., Dr. Joseph Warren. As if he didn’t already have plenty to do.

TOMORROW: Spreading out the refugees.

“With respect to the liberation of our friends in Boston”

Last month I left off a discussion of Boston’s first town meetings during the war with the agreement that Bostonians reached with Gen. Thomas Gage.

In exchange for lodging all privately owned firearms with the selectmen, the military authorities promised to let people leave the besieged town with their other goods.

Henderson Inches, a merchant and former selectman who had helped to negotiate that pact, brought news of the general’s approval to the Patriot committee of safety on 28 April. That group, chaired by Dr. Joseph Warren, was headquartered in Jonathan Hastings’s house in Cambridge (shown above).

That committee answered to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which was out in the Watertown meetinghouse. Its president, John Hancock, was away at the Second Continental Congress, and other men were serving as president pro tempore. On 24 April that job had fallen on the Rev. John Murray (1742–1793) of Townsend/Boothbay, Maine, who had previously filled in as secretary.

The congress responded to the news out of Boston that afternoon with this resolve:

Ordered, That the committee appointed to introduce the honorable delegates from the convention at Exeter, in New Hampshire, to the committee of safety, apply to said committee for an authentic account of what transactions have certainly taken place, with respect to the liberation of our friends in Boston, and report as soon as may be.

The next morning, the committee reported they had delivered the message and “brought from the committee of safety a number of papers, which contain the proceedings of the town of Boston with general Gage, in respect to moving the inhabitants and their effects.” The committee asked that the larger legislature not take any action until they had come up with a recommendation.

On 29 April, the committee of safety appointed a subcommittee to draft that recommendation. The delegates named were Azor Orne of Marblehead, Richard Devens of Charlestown, and Benjamin White of Brookline—men from two communities neighboring Boston and the province’s second-largest port. Their towns would be among the first to receive refugees.

However, the committee of safety was managing many martial and political efforts, such as reorganizing the militia companies that had turned out on 19 April into an army enlisted till the end of the year and propagating the Patriot version of the fighting so far. Those subcommittee members were handling other tasks. They didn’t produce a quick plan.

The provincial congress in Watertown got antsy. On the morning of 30 April that body sent delegate John Grout of Petersham to ask for the committee of safety’s result. Delegates also discussed “an addition to the committee of safety”—i.e., adding more members so as to spread out the work.

There was still no response from Cambridge after the midday dinner break. The congress then sent John Mosely of Westfield “to procure their result with respect to moving out the inhabitants of Boston” with a letter that demanded a response:

IN PROVINCIAL CONGRESS, April 30, 1775.

SIR— I am directed to inform you, that it is with regret, this Congress find themselves obliged to send to the committee of safety a third messenger, to request their immediate report on the subject of the removal of the poor inhabitants of Boston.

To wait for that report, the Congress have suspended all proceedings on that matter, and sat in almost impatient expectation, by several adjournments, since seven o’clock this morning. I am obliged to request your answer by this express, without loss of time, that the Congress may then see what it is their duty to conclude on.

I have the honor to be, with great respect, Sir,
Your most obedient humble servant,
JOHN MURRAY.

TOMORROW: Resolutions at last.

Behind Watson and the Shark

The National Gallery of Art recently shared Alysha Page’s article about an unusual figure in John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark.

Copley actually made three versions of this picture for merchant Brook Watson, the oldest now in the National Gallery. A second copy, also from 1778, is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. A smaller version painted in 1782 is in the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Page’s essay focuses on one figure, writing: “The Black man stands upright at the top of the pyramid-like composition of this busy harbor scene.” I think the apex of the pyramid is clearly the right hand of the white sailor beside that man, about to thrust a lance down toward the shark. At the very least that white sailor’s head is at the same level as the black man’s.

It seems significant that the black sailor in the boat is positioned behind all the white men. Though he loosely holds the rope tossed to Watson, we don’t see him throwing out that life line. Instead, other sailors are frozen in dramatic action: spearing the shark, leaning down toward the water to grasp Watson.

All that said, the mere presence of a black sailor among Watson’s rescuers is clearly significant. As Page points out, Copley’s sketch for the scene showed that man as white, so he made a conscious effort to change that detail.

Among Copley’s other canvases is a study of a black man’s face, usually assumed to be the model for this figure in Watson and the Shark. I think the study is much more individualized and expressive than the figure in Watson and the Shark. But it was so rare for paintings to show black men among white men that the final figure doesn’t have to be most lively, or at the apex of the people shown, to be meaningful.

Memories of “A Bee Line for Boston”

Earlier this month at the Emerging Revolutionary War blog, Kevin Pawlak described the impressively fast journey of the Virginia rifle companies to the siege of Boston:

On June 14, the Continental Congress declared that “six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia.” Once formed and equipped, “each company…shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”

The Virginia companies went to Daniel Morgan, who organized his company in Winchester, and Hugh Stephenson, the leader of the company rendezvousing at Mecklenburg. Joining soldiers signed one-year enlistments. . . .

It took less than seven days to raise each company to the strength of 100 men. Only the delay in getting enough rifles to arm the entire Mecklenburg company prevented them from leaving immediately after filling the ranks.

Once mustered, Stephenson and Morgan agreed to meet in Frederick, Maryland, and march to Boston together. On July 15, Morgan’s men marched first, stealing a step on the Mecklenburg men, who left Morgan’s Grove on July 17. “Morgan having the start we used every exertion to overhaul him, in Vain, altho’ we marched (always in single file) from 30 to 36 miles a number of days,” said [company lieutenant Henry] Bedinger.

Food and cheering citizens greeted Stephenson’s men along the march and kept their marching feet moving at the blistering pace needed to catch Morgan. Only two men failed to make the entire march (one was court-martialed, and the other was accidentally wounded).

On August 11, after a march of over 500 miles in 25 days and just behind Morgan’s men, Stephenson’s company halted in front of General George Washington in Cambridge.

In 1860 Rep. Alexander Robinson Boteler of Virginia referred to the men from his state as having made “a bee-line for Boston.” He used this phrase both in a speech in the House of Representatives and in the anonymous book My Ride to the Barbecue, or Revolutionary Reminiscences of the Old Dominion. He was trying to make a case for national unity, arguing that slavery wasn’t a divisive issue in 1775 so it shouldn’t be now.

The U.S. Civil War followed. The town where the riflemen’s march started, Shepherdstown, Virginia, became Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But Boteler’s phrase survived in writings of the late 1800s and became the root of the label Pawlak used for the Virginia soldiers’ feat, “the Beeline March.”

“Bawdy Bodies” Online from Yale

In 2015–16, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale hosted an exhibition of eighteenth-century British prints called “Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women,” co-curated by Dr. Hope Saska and Dr. Cynthia Roman.

That display has now been turned into an online exhibit, available here.

The introductory page says:

The works on display focus in particular on images that ridicule the highly accomplished and creative women who dared to transgress or test the boundaries of propriety that circumscribed their gender.

While late eighteenth-century commentators often celebrated the florescence of graphic caricature and satire that openly lampooned political figures—including the royal family—many of the satires exhibited here expressed trenchantly conservative views concerning social roles and manners. Loath to celebrate new-found intellectual, social, and political freedoms and empowerment for women, graphic satirists instead harshly ridiculed female liberties and accomplishments to the delight of largely male audiences.

Among the examples is Thomas Rowlandson’s satire “Breaking up of the Blue Stocking Club,” shown above. Though that phrase initially meant all the people who came to Lady Elizabeth Montagu’s salons, male or female, by the late 1700s it was gendered and pejorative.

I didn’t see material on Catharine Macaulay, but this exhibit provides context for the prints satirizing her intellectual output, personal life, and distinct appearance.

“Both fell into the Water”

This week I found myself discussing significant details that Boston newspapers left out of their reports:

• what captain nearly lost his ship on Cape Cod.
• which gentleman owned a poetry-writing girl named Phillis.

Presumably if Bostonians really wanted to know the missing information, they could ask around the town of 16,000 people and find out.

Here’s another example from the same month. The same 1 Oct 1767 Boston News-Letter report on the storm that beached Capt. Richard Coffin’s ship also included this detail:

A Gentleman and his Lady who had just landed on one of the Wharves from a Boat that had been below, was by the extreme Darkness of the Night, led to the edge of the Wharf and both fell into the Water, and would probably have been drowned, had not some of the Company immediately assisted and got them out.

What unlucky couple was that? What was their story?

Fortunately, I have some people I can ask. Here’s John Rowe’s diary from 24 September:

We had A Very Severy Storm it Blew as hard as I ever heard it, Accompanied with Thunder Lighting & very heavy Rain.

Mr Walter & Wife had Like to have been drownd at pecks Wharf

And 27 September:

After Noon I went to Church

Mr Walter Read prayers & preachd from the 103d. Psalm & the 19th Verse, The Lord hath prepard his Throne in the Heavens and his Kingdom Reigneth.

Over all, this was A very Pathetick & Good Discourse & very Applicable to Mr Walters Late Misfortune—in which Wee All Rejoyce for Gods Remarkable Deliverance of him & Wife—

William Walter was the rector at Trinity Church. So it wasn’t just any gentleman who fell off the wharf; it was one of the town’s handful of Anglican clergymen.

And his wife? Just shy of a year before that storm, the Rev. Mr. Walter had married Lydia Lynde. Her early-1760s portrait by John Singleton Copley appears above.

That sent me to the diary of Lydia Walter’s father, Massachusetts chief justice Benjamin Lynde (the second chief justice of that name). His entry for 23 September says:

A fine morning, but a great storm by night. My daughter Walter with her husband by wind carryed off the wharfe into the water, where she sank, and in most hazardous state, but got out, and thro’ God’s great goodness not hurt, tho’ then within 2 months of her time.

So the lady who fell off the wharf was seven months pregnant!

And here’s the happy ending from Lynde’s diary of 13 November:

My daughter Walter (notwithstanding her fall into the water), safely delivered of a son, baptized the 16th, Lynde; [Recompense Wadsworth?] Stimpson and wife Godfather and mother, Sheriff [Stephen] Greenleaf ye. other.

The Walter family left Boston in the evacuation of 1776, but William and Lydia Walter came back after the war when he was named rector of Christ Church.

Young Lynde Walter married in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1791, then again in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1798. Eventually he returned to Boston, where he died in 1844 at age seventy-six. His namesake son was the first editor of the Boston Evening Transcript.

But all that was possible only because people had helped fish his grandmother out of Boston harbor on a stormy night in September 1767.

Call for Essays on “Wheatley in London”

Speaking of Phillis Wheatley, Studies in Romanticism has issued a call for articles for a special issue of the journal with the theme “Wheatley in London.”

The call says:

Phillis Wheatley traveled to London in the summer of 1773, prior to the September publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The literary-historical implications of this fact are far reaching, touching on Wheatley’s place in the canons of African-American, Black Diasporic, American, and British literature. The aim of this forum is to situate Wheatley’s career in relation to British studies, shoring up the significance of London, and of Britain more generally, as one of the multiple contexts she negotiated during her short and remarkable life.

Wheatley’s writing addressed audiences in the metropole as well as the American colonies, but she is still largely taught as a founding figure for African-American literature. “Wheatley in London” asks what happens when we return her to a context in which she also flourished: transatlantic evangelical English-language print culture of the 1770s. . . .

Attention to the British context reminds us that there were Black intellectuals in 1770s London; that there was a thriving abolitionist movement and an array of evangelical Christian sects that intersected with that movement in complicated ways. Thanks to the publication of laboring-class poets, “natural genius” was in vogue. Still, no matter how skillful and innovative Wheatley’s use of conventions like the heroic couplet, those conventions retain their association with white British poets, sometimes posing a dilemma for readers and critics.

Adding to the flood of publications about Wheatley as we approach the sestercentennial of her book, this project aims to “focus on the view from London in 1773.”

The editors of this issue of the journal will be Bakary Diaby of Skidmore College and Abigail Zitin of Rutgers University. They’re seeking essays between 3,000 and 6,000 words long, and the submission deadline is 1 Feb 2024.

(The picture above shows the Earl of Dartmouth, the British government’s secretary of state for the colonies in 1773. Wheatley met with him in London. A hereditary earl, one of the most powerful individuals in the British Empire, conversing with an enslaved woman probably only twenty years old. That wide disparity of legal power and stature shows what an extraordinary event Wheatley’s trip to London was.)