The Constitution, the Post Office, and the Future

Article One, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution says that “Congress shall have power…To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” In fact, the Continental Congress had taken on that power and responsibility even before declaring independence from Britain, appointing Benjamin Franklin to be postmaster general back in July 1775. (He’d held a similar position under royal rule in the 1750s, administering the system at times from London.)

There’s no question, therefore, that the U.S. of A.’s Founders viewed the transmission of letters and packages as an essential part of the national government even though there were also private carriers. Joseph M. Adelman starts at that point in his Publick Occurrences essays about the long history the U.S. Postal Service.

Until forty years ago, the postmaster general was still part of the President’s Cabinet. In that year, Congress enacted a new law that spun off the service as a quasi-independent organization, meant to work like a profit-seeking business and insulated from politics.

Except, of course, that it’s not. If the Postal Service were truly a business, then it wouldn’t have to deliver first-class mail to almost anyplace in the country for the same small price—the requirement of universal service. Furthermore, the agency’s finances are still under Congress’s control. At the Redtape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan ran the math on the results:

Right now, the Postal Service is being forced to pre-pay health benefits for the next 75 years during a 10-year stretch. In the past four years, those prepayments have totaled $21 billion. The agency's deficit during that time is about $20 billion. Remove these crazy pre-payments — a requirement that no other government agency endures and no private industry would even consider — and the Postal Service would be in the black. . . . the Postal Service starts its year in a hole designed to hide a portion of the federal deficit.

Those costs are also linked to two more of the U.S. of A.’s biggest economic challenges: the Bush-Cheney recession and the rise in health costs.

Of course, everyone recognizes that the volume of first-class mail is dropping tremendously because of the internet. Even if the economy hadn’t taken the worst hit since the Great Depression in 2008, the deficit were smaller, and our health-care system weren’t weighed down by unnecessary costs, the Postal Service’s business model would still be outdated.

But the constitutional principle behind that agency still stands. In fact, our modern economy and way of life depend on speedy, reliable, and widespread communication more than ever. So what is the federal government’s responsibility?

Our judicial and political systems have already concluded that our freedom of the press isn’t limited by the fact we no longer use eighteenth-century printing technology. The First Amendment applies to mimeograph machines and offset printers, radio and television, the internet, and so on. Similarly, people who read the Second Amendment broadly argue that the “arms” it refers to include modern firearms. The U.S. Navy has expanded beyond copper-plated wooden ships.

By the same logic, the clause of the Constitution quoted above empowers Congress to establish the service and infrastructure for Americans to exchange messages in the modern fashion—electronically and digitally. By analogy to the Postal Service, that service should reach nearly everyone and come at a minimal cost. In fact, the U.S. government was in on the ground floor of that service, developing the early internet within the Defense Department.

In recent years those systems and services have been established and expanded mostly by private businesses, often but not always regulated by state and local governments as utilities. But there were also private delivery services in 1775 and 1787, and the Founders didn’t think those were enough.

[Image above courtesy of Northampton, New Hampshire.]

A Chance to Be on TV (kind of)

C-SPAN is recording William M. Fowler’s talk about his new book, An American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783, at the Social Law Library tonight. The event runs from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., and organizers ask people to arrive promptly so as not to disrupt the recording. But hey, if you want to be a blurry shoulder crossing in front of a camera halfway through the event, here’s your chance.

Bill Fowler is also host of this New England Quarterly podcast from last summer discussing Richard Brown’s article “‘Tried, Convicted, and Condemned, in Almost Every Bar-room and Barber’s Shop’: Anti-Irish Prejudice in the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1806.”

Prof. Brown is a very interesting historian of early America who organized one of the first history conferences I attended. This paper grew from the same research that led to The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, written with Prof. Irene Quenzler Brown, and he’s doing other research on the criminal justice system. Even on a topic that obviously means a lot to him, Dick Brown is somewhat dry as a speaker, thoughtful rather than effusive, so to liven up this recording there’s also…

Michael Dukakis!

The former governor, now a professor of government at Northeastern, comes into the conversation because he issued a proclamation acknowledging the injustices of the Daley and Halligan trial, modeled on a similar proclamation about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Tell me he doesn’t sound loose, casual, and still very smart about government.

An interesting aspect of the discussion, not fully explored, is that Brown concluded that anti-Irish sentiment was not a factor in Daley and Halligan’s conviction, though their defense counsel raised that issue. The prosecuting attorney, James Sullivan, was only one generation removed from Ireland himself, and Massachusetts would elect him governor the next two years. Other Irishmen were acquitted in similar trials at the same time. On the other hand, the rules of the court in 1806 were not what any of us would consider fair today.

The Final Blow to the Liberty Bell

All in all I’m inclined to believe E. J. Rauch’s 1911 recollection of helping to crack the Liberty Bell in 1835. The story he told the New York Times didn’t present him as more than one of a crowd, and it didn’t come with any tidy moral.

However, that wasn’t the occasion when the bell cracked; it was one of a series of occasions. Rauch recalled seeing a crack twelve to fifteen inches long. The current gap is over two feet long, and a hairline crack extends another few inches from its top.

The last time the city ordered the bell to be rung was eleven years after the date Rauch remembered it cracking. On 26 Feb 1846, USHistory.org states, the Philadelphia Public Ledger reported:

The old Independence Bell rang its last clear note on Monday last in honor of the birthday of Washington and now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and dumb. It had been cracked before but was set in order for that day by having the edges of the fracture filed so as not to vibrate against each other. . . . It gave out clear notes and loud, and appeared to be in excellent condition until noon, when it received a sort of compound fracture in a zig-zag direction through one of its sides which put it completely out of tune and left it a mere wreck of what it was.

By that year, according to what he told the Times, Rauch had enlisted in the army, so he may well have been far out of hearing range. Thus, he went through life thinking he’d helped break the bell.

“We found that there was a big crack”

Yesterday I started to quote a letter from E. J. Rauch published in the New York Times on 16 July 1911 about the crack in the Liberty Bell.

On George Washington’s birthday in 1835, when he was nine years old, little Emmanuel Joseph was returning from an errand for his mother when the custodian of the old Pennsylvania State House, a man named Downing, beckoned to him.

“Come here!” he called to me and several boys whom he spied in the square. After he had corralled six or eight of us—I don’t remember exactly how many—he told us that he wanted us to ring the Liberty Bell in honor of Washington’s Birthday. The idea pleased us very much—we boys were not in the habit of ringing the old bell—and we agreed to do it.

Then Downing climbed into the steeple of the State House and tied a rope to the clapper of the bell. Coming down again, he put the end of this rope into our hands and instructed us to pull with all our might, which we did.

We were working away, and the bell had struck, so far as I can recall, about ten or a dozen times, when we noticed a change in the tone. We kept on ringing, though, but, after a while, the steeplekeeper noticed the difference, too. Surmising that something might be wrong, he told us to stop pulling the rope. Then he climbed back into the steeple, we boys following behind.

On the side of the bell that hung toward Walnut Street we found that there was a big crack, a foot or fifteen inches long. Downing then told us to run along home. We obeyed.

What happened after that I forget—boy-like I didn’t do any worrying, and heard no more about the cracking of the bell until some years later. Then, however, and many times since, I have read of how the bell came to be cracked, but never have I seen the version which I have just given. I honestly believe it is the correct one.

A nineteenth-century tradition held that the bell cracked while being tolled on 8 July 1835 for Chief Justice John Marshall’s death. But perhaps that was the day when the public learned about the crack that had appeared a few months before. Perhaps Rauch misremembered the occasion when he had helped pull the rope. Or perhaps his story has no foundation in fact; normally people wouldn’t want credit for damaging a national icon, but the crack in the Liberty Bell is part of what makes it iconic.

The historical record shows, however, that Philadelphia continued to order the Liberty Bell to be rung after 1835.

TOMORROW: The final blow.

(The picture above illustrates a legend about the signing of the Declaration of Independence that Philadelphia author George Lippard came up with in 1847. It’s got nothing to do with Thomas Downing, E. J. Rauch, and the other boys. But I couldn’t resist using it.)

“How I Broke the Liberty Bell”

A century ago, the 16 July 1911 New York Times ran a story headlined “‘How I Broke the Liberty Bell’—By the Boy Who Broke It.” I read about this confession in Gary B. Nash’s book on the bell and went in search of the full article. Old enough to be in the public domain, the story is available in the newspaper’s public archive and more easily at Sunday Magazine.

Emmanuel Joseph Rauch contacted the Times to state that he had helped to put the famous crack in the famous bell. He told the paper that he had been born in Pennsylvania on 6 Nov 1825 and had reached the age of eighty-six. Actually, that meant he he was in eighty-sixth year, but he tended to give himself an extra.

Rauch had worked for both the army (a lieutenant in the Civil War) and the railroads, among other enterprises. In 1886 he moved to New York, joined the Manhattan Elevated Railway company, and became “road foreman of engines.” I find his name on a letter to the Locomotive Engineers’ Monthly Journal in 1892. Age and the arrival of electric engines spurred Rauch’s retirement. His granddaughter Julia Rhoads left a biographical article about him among a few other papers at Penn State.

E. J. Rauch’s letter as the Times began this way:

The Liberty Bell was cracked, as I remember, on Washington’s Birthday, 1835, and this is the way it was done:

I was then 10 [sic] years old. On that day I had been sent by my mother on an errand to a shop not far from our home. On my return from it, I was walking through State House Square when I noticed that the janitor or steeplekeeper of the old State House building was beckoning to me. His name was Downing—“Major Jack” we used to call him—and he was a well-known character in Philadelphia at that time.

Hold on! The name “Major Jack Downing” was a character that Seba Smith of Maine had created as a voice for humorous essays starting in 1830. Three years later a New York writer, Charles Augustus Davis, started using the same pseudonym. So was Rauch remembering a fictional character?

In fact, the 1829 Register of Pennsylvania records “Thomas Downing, watchman at the State House, praying for an advance in his salary.” He did so again in 1835. In 1839 Thomas Downing testified before the legislature about a political fight the previous autumn; he stated, “I live in the Terret of the State House.”

An 1884 history of Philadelphia identifies the old State House janitor as “Tommy Downing,” well known to the city’s firefighting societies because he rang the old State House’s alarm bell. Charles Franklin Warwick’s Keystone Commonwealth, published in 1912, states:

The last ringer of the [Liberty] bell was Thomas Downing. His term of office extended from 1827-35. He lived in the steeple and the pipe from his stove protruded through one of the openings. It was while he was the ringer that the Bell cracked in 1835.

Even though Downing had to stop ringing the old bell that year, his later legislative testimony shows he continued to live in the tower.

So a Mr. Downing was indeed “janitor or steeplekeeper of the old State House building” when Rauch was a boy. Folks probably took to calling him “Major Jack” after the fictional character.

TOMORROW: Back to Rauch’s story.

Faneuil Hall Renovated

This week Charles Bahne alerted me that the Boston Globe website offers an article and slide show about the ongoing renovation of Faneuil Hall.

In a few months, the landmark will reopen with “new interpretive exhibits, educational space, and up-to-date technology” in the new Boston National Historic Park visitors’ center on the ground floor.

The upper floors will continue to house the auditorium built for public meetings and the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company’s museum. The building’s current configuration dates from 1806, when Charles Bulfinch oversaw its most extensive renovation.

The Faneuil Hall that housed the town meetings of the 1760s and 1770s was significantly smaller, as in this image (courtesy of Boston College).

Liberty Bell Curiosities

Gary B. Nash’s The Liberty Bell, published by Yale University Press last year as part of a series on American icons, offers these intriguing facts:

• In 1828 the city of Philadelphia commissioned William Meredith to make a new bell for the old Pennsylvania State House. That building’s damaged pre-Revolutionary bell was stuck on the fourth floor of a tower, and the city told the bell-maker that for $400 he could have it for scrap. After looking at the situation, Meredith decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of hoisting the bell down and hauling it away. And that’s why we still have the bell that, seven years later, abolitionists in New York dubbed the Liberty Bell.
• In 1893, the Daughters of the American Revolution collected copper coins from the Roman Empire, the heads of pikes used by John Brown’s raiders, a silver spoon from John C. Calhoun, hinges from Abraham Lincoln’s house, links of George Washington’s surveying chain, a copper kettle from Thomas Jefferson, and Lucretia Mott’s silver fruit knife, and had them all melted down to make the Columbian Liberty Bell, a 13,000-pound tribute to the Liberty Bell at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Hey, cheer up! Most of those artifacts probably had horrible provenances.)
• The Liberty Bell has been on display in Boston only once, for two days in 1903 around the 128th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. (Boston had asked for the bell three years earlier, but Philadelphia decided to keep it—perhaps to be present at the 125th anniversaries of the creation of the Continental Army and the naming of Washington as commander-in-chief.) After the bell arrived in Boston by train, it was carried on “a float drawn by thirteen bay horses and escorted by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company” to the Bunker Hill monument for its brief display.
• The bell rang to summon “eight thousand Philadelphians to the State House to hear the portentous news in April 1775—brought by Paul Revere after a five-day dash on his magnificent mare, Brown Betty, from Boston to the Quaker City—about the firefights at Lexington and Concord.”

Ooh! Ouch! Reading that last sentence is like watching a pig fall down a flight of stairs—getting both more awful and more risible with each bump. It mixes up Revere’s ride to Philadelphia with the Suffolk Resolves in the fall of 1774 with the series of express riders who carried news of shots at Lexington (but not yet Concord) in April 1775. The name of Revere’s horse was Brown Beauty, at least according to a 1930 genealogy. I don’t know about the eight thousand people, but Nash is an expert on the social history of Philadelphia, so on that detail I trust him.

Schecter on Washington’s Maps at Boston Public Library, 6 Dec.

On Tuesday, 6 December, the Boston Public Library will host a talk by Barnet Schecter about his book George Washington’s America: A Biography Through His Maps.

This book is based on a collection of maps that Washington owned which were eventually bound in a single volume, now at Yale University. It traces the first President’s life through those maps, some of which he drew as a surveyor and landowner, most of which he collected as a land speculator, military leader, and political official.

The book is oversized and heavily illustrated, letting readers see the maps as Washington did. They show the territories he worried about taking or protecting, and the early growth of the U.S. of A.

Schechter is also author of The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution.

The library is presenting this talk in partnership with the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center and the Boston Map Society. It will begin at 6:00 P.M. in the Abbey Room, in the older part of the main library.

Upcoming Events at the Massachusetts Historical Society

The Massachusetts Historical Society is hosting three events on the history of eighteenth-century America in one busy week.

Tonight William M. Fowler, Jr., will speak at 6:00 P.M. on his new book, American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783. Bill is a professor at Northeastern and a former director of the M.H.S. Reading his short biography of Samuel Adams was one of the steps that ultimately led me to Boston 1775 (so he has a lot to answer for). The reception before Bill’s talk will start at 5:30. Register for the event here.

On Tuesday, 6 December, at 5:15 P.M. the Boston-Area Early American History Seminar will feature a panel discussion on colonial family law. One presentation will look at “Boston Almshouse children and…their patterns of binding out through four multi-child narratives.” Another will explore “the little-known role played by midwives in the colonial courtroom.” Panelists are Abby Chandler of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Ruth Wallis Herndon of Bowling Green; and moderator Cornelia Hughes Dayton of the University of Connecticut.

Two days later at 5:30 P.M., in the Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender, Jennifer Morgan of New York University will present a paper called “Quotidian Erasures: Gender and the Logic of the Early Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” The slave trade across the Atlantic coincided with the Enlightenment’s new scientific study of people. The result is more data for historians, but also more questions about how and why that data was collected and its meaning then and now. At least that’s how I interpret the seminar description. Prof. Linda Heywood of Boston University will comment.

Finally, folks interested in the seventeenth century might want to peek in on the seminar on Wednesday, 14 December, in which Jonathan Beecher Field of Clemson will lay out his research on how John Winthrop understood and presented the stories of “monstrous births” involving—surprise!—his religious and political enemies. With that appetizing subject, this is naturally a brown-bag seminar, starting at noon.

“Meat became available to the masses”

The 21 Nov 2001 issue of the New Yorker, with the theme of food, includes an article (not freely available online) about historians at Hampton Court Palace in London recreating a dinner served to George III and his family on 6 Feb 1789. The king was just recovering from his earliest bout of madness, and that day was the first time that his attendants let him resume using a knife and fork.

Along the way reporter Lauren Collins says:

During the Georgian era [in England], meat became available to the masses. Farmers learned to produce fodder (turnips, swedes, and clover) that could sustain their cattle through the winter. The average ox sold at Smithfield Market in 1710 weighed three hundred and seventy pounds; by 1795, it had reached eight hundred. . . .

Seafood was plentiful, too: an account book shows that thirteen varieties, from salmon to smelts, were requisitioned in a month at [the royal palace at] Kew. A barrel of oysters cost five shillings. Cod was ordered “crimped”—the fishmonger would score it to the bone, while it was still alive, to give it a firmer flesh.

For reasons of hygiene as well as of fashion, the Georgians mistrusted raw fruits and vegetables. Cucumbers, lettuce, and celery were served stewed. Tomatoes—known as “apples of love”—had been in England since the sixteenth century, but people didn't start eating them until around 1800.

Still, the Georgian palate was sophisticated, especially in its marriage of sweet and savory flavors, evident in such delicacies as pistachio ice cream. The grocery list for Kew in February, 1789, includes hams (379 1/4 pounds), anchovies, “vermicelly,” “Paramazan cheese,” isinglass (gelatinized dried fish bladder, for clarifying beer), and sago (the pith of palm stems, for milk puddings). Many Georgian dishes would strike contemporary taste buds as almost Christmassy.

The American diet was probably plainer, but ample. Observers agreed that the common American was in better health than the equivalent European. The lower population density meant less disease, and the more equal distribution of wealth and greater demand for labor meant more people could enjoy adequate daily nutrition.

For studies of what early New Englanders ate, I recommend the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife volume Foodways in the Northeast.

Tea Party Time Coming Closer

Tickets for the annual reenactment of the meeting at Old South Meeting House that led up to the Boston Tea Party are on sale now. The sales site says:

By December 16, 1773, all the fuss about tea in Boston had come to a boil. Three ships loaded with tea sat anchored in Boston harbor. The Patriots were determined to prevent the tea on these ships from being landed on American soil, because if it were, a tax would be due upon it.

This is where you join the party! Come take on the role of Patriot or Loyalist in this spirited reenactment of the Boston Tea Party. Hear from the likes of John Hancock, the richest man in Boston; Francis Rotch, owner of the ship Dartmouth; famed orator and doctor Joseph Warren; and notorious rabble rouser Samuel Adams.

Note the stereotypical treatment of Samuel Adams as a troublemaker, despite the fact that we’re supposed to admire what he notoriously roused the rabble to do. Longtime Boston 1775 readers know that I occasionally grouse about misrepresentations of Samuel Adams as an unreasonable troublemaker. But only occasionally.

This year the event is co-sponsored by the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum; that nascent institution’s website says it’s a bit over 200 days from opening. That gives its staff plenty of time to improve its presentation about David Kinnison.

Dig at the Durant-Kendrick Homestead

Yesterday’s Boston Globe included a regional story on an archeological dig in Newton, at the Durant-Kendrick Homestead.

I’d never heard of this site. Growing up in Newton, as my friend Jack Riccardi has said, means you learn on school field trips that the Jackson Homestead is the center of U.S. history, perhaps followed by Independence Hall and the White House. But Historic Newton, guardian of the Jackson Homestead, also spearheaded the study of the Durant-Kendrick site.

Of the main house there, the Globe states:

The circa-1730s structure is endowed with centuries of history.

For starters, Edward Durant III - whose father built the house, which originally sat on 97 acres along with several outbuildings and barns - was involved in numerous town committees that responded to national issues when the Colonies were on the verge of the Revolutionary War, according to the research of independent scholar Mary Fuhrer.

The Kenrick family, who took over ownership in 1790, operated the largest plant nursery in New England from the site, according to [Historic Newton director Cynthia S.] Stone. They had around 200 species of pear trees, and varieties of apples, flowers, berries, and ornamental trees. They sold plants to people throughout the country, changing the landscape of the United States, Stone said. . . .

Throughout this process, their biggest discovery was the sunken dairy, with its brick floors and walls. It was likely used in the late 18th or early 19th century for processing milk into butter or cheese, Beranek said, then was filled in during the 1850s with construction rubble and trash.

The project is headed by Christa M. Beranek of the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The artifacts are now being analyzed, and there are plans for a report and an exhibit at Historic Newton.

I find that Edward Durant’s floor stencils from around 1780 have inspired some modern decorating products.

“All this commotion about the Bell”

In his short book The Liberty Bell, Gary B. Nash quotes from a reminiscence by William Linn which he could credit only to “Unidentified source from Independence National Historical Park files.”

Google Books let me find Linn’s statement at greater length in The Liberty Bell: Its History, Associations and Home, a booklet compiled by E. R. Gudehus and published by the city of Philadelphia in 1915.

The full recollection was:

All this commotion about the Bell makes me think of my boyhood days, when we would go down to the old Bell and, with paving stones, try to knock off a piece of it.

If the Bell would break at all, it would have broken then, when these boys hammered it with pieces of iron and stones trying to get a piece off.

For nearly a hundred years no one had paid any particular attention to the Bell. Then came the Centennial, when the worship began, although it had hung in the Hall for years. That was done, no doubt, to save it, or the boys would have broken it all up.

There was an attorney named William Linn in Philadelphia active in Republican politics in the late 1800s. He died on 22 Nov 1922, according to the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. The 24 November Reading Eagle stated that he had been a Civil War officer and “more than 70 years of age.” In the following year, Linn’s widow sent the Public Ledger a manuscript of his reminiscences of old Philadelphia. So I’m thinking that man’s probably the source of this anecdote, and it refers to the period around 1850.

As Nash shows, the bell was just becoming famous then because Abolitionists adopted it as a symbol of freedom and author George Lippard had linked it fictionally to the Declaration of Independence. But people hadn’t yet accepted the value of preserving something old for everyone, as opposed to trying to take a souvenir of it for oneself. In 1852 the city moved the bell from a little-visited upper floor of Independence Hall to the ground floor—though I can’t tell whether that meant boys had less of a chance to pound on it, or more.

The United States Eagle as It First Appeared

This is Charles Thomson’s sketch of how he pictured the Great Seal of the United States in June 1782. The Continental Congress had asked him, as its longtime secretary, to offer some suggestions. Drawing on the discussions of previous committees, Thomson submitted this written proposal:

On a field Chevrons composed of seven pieces on one side & six on the other, joined together at the top in such wise that each of the six bears against or is supported by & supports two of the opposite side the pieces of the chevrons on each side alternate red & white. The shield born on the breast of an American Eagle on the wing & rising proper. In the dexter talon of the Eagle an Olive branch & in the sinister a bundle of Arrows. Over the head of the Eagle a Constellation of Stars surrounded with bright rays and at a little distance clouds.

The Congress’s seal committee made some changes to the eagle’s wings and the stripes on the shield, resulting in the following design. (Remember that it’s reversed when the seal is used to emboss a document.)

Kind of scrawny by modern standards, wasn’t it? More images and history at GreatSeal.com.

Franklin: “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen”

As long as I was writing about Benjamin Franklin and turkeys, I thought I’d look into the oft-repeated statement that he preferred the turkey to the bald eagle as a symbol of the new republic.

That came from a letter to his daughter, Sally Bache, written from France on 26 Jan 1784. Franklin had just received news of the Society of the Cincinnati, and he didn’t really care for it. Most of his letter was about “the absurdity of descending honors.” As for the Cincinnati “ribbands and medals,” Franklin called them “tolerably done,” but then went on to repeat other people’s criticisms.

One of those complaints concerned the eagle that formed the basis of the medal. (The example shown here belonged to Gen. Henry Knox.) Franklin reported, “Others object to the Bald Eagle as looking too much like a Dindon or Turkey.” Derived from “d’Inde” or “from the Indies,” “dindon” was the French word for “turkey.”

Thoughts of eagles and turkeys launched Franklin into a comparison of their symbolic qualities:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him. With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy.

Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country. . . .

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America. Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey was peculiar to ours. He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

Franklin’s understanding of bald eagle behavior left a lot to be desired, according to that bird’s fans. But he liked drawing political lessons from an animal’s supposed habits, as in this letter about rattlesnakes (probably).

While people often quote Franklin’s words in regard to the Great Seal of the United States, he wasn’t discussing that depiction of the eagle. He’d made other suggestions about a U.S. seal back when he was a member of the Continental Congress, but never wrote publicly about the design eventually adopted. This family letter wasn’t published until decades after his death.

I’m therefore inclined to think Franklin offered his turkey suggestion mostly as a joke, like his proposal of daylight saving time the same year.

Dr. Franklin’s Turkey Hotline

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin was deep in his investigation of electricity. He told a correspondent at the Royal Society in London that he planned to try killing a turkey with [what we’d now call] the static charge from two big glass jars.

On 25 December, Franklin wrote to his brother John in Boston describing the result of that experiment:

Two nights ago being about to kill a Turkey by the Shock from two large Glass Jarrs containing as much electrical fire as forty common Phials, I inadvertently took the whole thro’ my own Arms & Body, by receiving the fire from the united Top Wires with one hand, while the other held a Chain connected with the outsides of both Jars.

The Company present (whose talking to me, & to one another I suppose occasioned my Inattention to what I was about) Say that the flash was very great & the crack as loud as a Pistol; yet my Senses being instantly gone, I neither Saw the one nor felt heard the other; nor did I feel the Stroke on my hand, tho’ I afterwards found it raised a round swelling where the fire enter’d as big as half a Pistol Bullet by which you may judge of the Quickness of the Electrical Fire which by this Instance seems to be greater than that of Sound Light & animal Motion Sensation.

What I can remember of the matter is, that I was about to try whether the Bottles or Jars were fully charged, by the Strength & Length of the stream issuing to my hand, as I comonly used to do, & which I might Safely enough have done if I had not held the chain in ye. other hand; I then felt what I know not how well to describe; a universal Blow thrôout my whole Body from head to foot which seem’d within as well as without; after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick Shaking of my body which gradually remitting, my sense as gradually return’d, & then I thôt the Bottles must be discharged but could not conceive how, till at last I Perceived the Chain in my hand, and Recollected what I had been About to do:

that part of my hand & fingers which held the Chain was left white as tho’ the Blood had been Driven Out, and Remained so 8 or 10 Minutes After, feeling like Dead flesh, and I had a Numbness in my Arms and the back of my Neck, which Continued till the Next Morning, but wore off. Nothing remains now of this shock but a Soreness in my breast Bone, which feels as if it had been Bruised. I did not fall but suppose I should have been knocked down, if I had received the Stroke in my head. The whole was over in less than a minute.

Franklin wanted his brother to warn young James Bowdoin, whom he had just sent a bunch of electrical writings, about this possible danger. The letter survives in the Bowdoin Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society; you can see it here.

Undaunted, Franklin returned to his experiments and sent a full report to the Royal Society, where it was lost but not before being summarized for its Philosophical Transactions:

He made first several experiments on fowls, and found, that 2 large thin glass jars gilt, holding each about 6 gallons, were sufficient, when fully charged, to kill common hens outright; but the turkeys, though thrown into violent convulsions, and then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an hour. However, having added three other such to the former two, though not fully charged, he killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight, and believes that they would have killed a much larger. He conceited, as himself says, that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.

Those experiments led Franklin becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756.

“Speechless in the face of its errors of fact”

In a discussion of sources and previous studies on page 297 of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, C. S. Manegold wrote:

By contrast, the almost bizarre piece, “An ‘Animadversion’ upon a ‘Complaint’ against ‘the Petition’ of Belinda, an African Slave,” by Vincent Carretta, published in Early American Literature in 1997, left me literally speechless in the face of its errors of fact (he posits that Isaac Royall was “an American invention” cooked up as a “slur against the avariciousness, Jewishness, and royalist sympathies of the ‘master’”). I can only say here, what was he thinking?

In fact, those phrases come from a previous paper by E. W. Pitcher that Carretta was quoting and refuting. Carretta’s two-page communication in the journal explained that Royall was a well-documented Medford slaveholder, and that Belinda’s original petition is preserved in the Massachusetts state archives. He stated, “The written account of Belinda’s petition [that the previous author doubted] is almost certainly fictionalized, but that does not render Belinda and her petition fictions.”

Criticizing someone for saying something he was actually quoting to debunk—that’s the sort of thing Mitt Romney does. Except I think Manegold made an honest mistake.

In fact, the previous paper was itself a response to an earlier paper by Joanne Braxton and Sharon M. Harris, so there were multiple levels to keep straight. For the record, this posting is my response to Manegold’s response to Carretta’s response to Pitcher’s response to Braxton and Harris.

More Pelham Miniatures—Or Are They?

Miniatures that Henry Pelham painted while he lived in America are very rare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of Stephen Hooper; correspondence between Pelham and Hooper confirms that the artist produced such a miniature.

During the war, Pelham left Massachusetts for Ireland. The National Gallery of Ireland has a miniature Pelham painted in 1779 of Lewis Farley Johnston, a little boy who grew up to be a judge.

I suspect that Pelham’s relationship to his celebrated half-brother John Singleton Copley has made people eager to attribute more miniatures to him. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston says this image of Peter Chardon, Jr. (1738-1766) was painted by Pelham in “about 1760”—but Henry was only eleven years old that year. (Perhaps he painted it from a 1760 Copley portrait after Chardon’s death.)

The M.F.A. also has a couple of miniatures attributed to Copley that show Henry Pelham as a grown man—or they show Copley’s brother-in-law Jonathan Clarke instead. Or maybe Pelham painted Clarke.

In 2007, Freeman’s sold the miniature of Jeremiah Kahler shown above as Pelham’s work. That auction house also said that Kahler was born in Hull and “lost at sea before 1830.” In fact, according to records of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, Kahler was born in Germany and “died at Boston, Feb. 2d, 1829, aged 86, extremely poor.” Period newspapers confirm both the date and the poverty.

I went looking for information on when Kahler arrived in New England. The earliest record I found of him dates from 1784, when he subscribed along with over two hundred other businessmen to improve Boston Common. The Massachusetts General Court naturalized him in November 1788 under the name Jeremiah Joachim/Joakim Khaler, which implies, but doesn’t prove, that Kahler had not been established in Massachusetts before independence. That act identified the merchant as “late a subject of the King of Denmark”; perhaps Kahler had come to Boston from the Danish West Indies.

The first newspaper advertisement I found from Kahler appeared in the Columbian Centinel in 1793. The next year he married Hannah Spear (1765-1845), and he was active in many business and charitable societies around the turn of the century. Kahler’s translations from German newspapers for the Boston press were reprinted all along the Atlantic seaboard, and he was the connection between Bostonians and Prof. Christoph Daniel Ebeling of Hamburg.

For Pelham to have painted this miniature, Kahler would have had to arrive in America before March 1776, when the artist left with the British military. It’s conceivable that the two men crossed paths somewhere else. But it seems most likely that this miniature was created by another, less interesting artist.

Little Portrait from a Little Brother

After John Singleton Copley’s portrait-painting career took off in the early 1770s, he stopped painting so many miniatures. His younger half-brother Henry Pelham took on that task.

Skinner Auctioneers just sold one of the miniatures that Pelham made from his older brother’s full-sized work, showing merchant Adam Babcock (1740-1817, at left). Babcock was the son of Joshua Babcock, a Rhode Island physician, Chief Judge, and Assembly Speaker [hey, the place was even smaller then]. The elder Babcock went on to sign the state’s declaration of independence from Britain, issued two months before the Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence.

The auction house says Adam Babcock was from Boston, and indeed he died there, but at the time of those portraits he was based in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the plaintiff in a long lawsuit over a 13s. pair of leather breeches, described starting here.

The auctioneer notes that the gold case of this miniature looks just like one from Paul Revere’s workshop, which is interesting given the big argument Pelham and Revere had in early 1770.

TOMORROW: Sniffing out more Pelham miniatures.

Drummers Beating

In the eighteenth-century British army, drummers had the duty of whipping men convicted in courts-martial. This became a political issue when troops was stationed in Boston in 1768-1770.

From 1759 to 1843, His Majesty’s 29th Regiment had black drummers. Adm. Edward Boscawen bought the first batch of those musicians at Guadaloupe and gave them to his brother, the regiment’s colonel. At least three of those original men were still with the regiment in 1775.

When the 29th was sent to Boston in 1768, locals were surprised to see black soldiers whipping white ones. Within a week of the troops’ arrival, the 6 October Boston Evening-Post reported:

In the Morning nine or ten Soldiers of Colonel [Maurice] Carr’s Regiment for sundry Misdemeanors, were severely whipt on the Common. To behold Britons scourged by Negro Drummers, was a new and very disagreeable Spectacle!

Whigs played up this inversion in one of their one-sided dispatches to newspapers in colonies to the south about life in occupied Boston. In February 1769, however, they also reported that a black drummer was himself whipped because he “had adventur’d to beat time at a concert of music.”

The Continental Army was mostly modeled after the British army, and the drummers’ punitive responsibilities was one of the customs carried over. However, Americans drummers were more likely to be teenagers than those in the royal ranks.

That also caused a stir, as recalled by Israel Trask, an eleven-year-old boy who had accompanied his father to the siege of Boston. Recalling the spring of 1775, he said:

It was here I witnessed for the first time public punishment inflicted in the regiment. Five or six soldiers were condemned to be flogged for the crime, I believe, of being concerned in the mutiny at Boston. This incident was impressed on my memory with increased force from the interest made to exonerate Major [Ezra] Putnam’s son from his share of the duty of applying the cat to the naked backs of the criminals that fell to him as a drummer in the regiment. A year or two older than myself, he was, however, obliged to submit and take his share of the unpleasant duty with his colleagues.

Drummer Ezra Putnam, Jr., was actually sixteen years old. After the war he and his family moved out to the Ohio Territory, and in January 1791 he died in what became known as “the Big Bottom Massacre.”