The Eleventh America’s History Conference on the Revolution, 15–17 Mar.

America’s History, L.L.C., is hosting its eleventh annual conference on the American Revolution on 15–17 March.

In past years this gathering has brought history buffs to Williamsburg, Virginia, but the 2024 conference will be at the Virginia Crossings Hotel in Glen Allen, close to Richmond.

The speaker lineup, recruited by head of faculty Edward G. Lengel, includes:

• Mark R. Anderson, “Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians’ First Battles in the Revolution”
• Friederike Baer, “Incomprehensible Friends and Rebellious Enemies: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War”
• Brooke Barbier, “King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father”
• Stephen Brumwell, “Turncoat: A Fresh Interpretation of Benedict Arnold and the Crisis of American Liberty”
• Iris De Rode, “A New Perspective on the Yorktown Campaign: Revelations of the Unpublished Private Papers of François-Jean de Chastellux”
• William Anthony Hay, “‘We Live on Victory’: British Military Strategy and Decision-Making in the American Revolution, 1774-1781”
• Ricardo “Rick” Herrera, “Projecting Power Continental Army Style: George Washington and the Armed Camp at Valley Forge”
• Paul Lockhart, “Drillmaster of the Revolution: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army”
• Daniel Murphy, “The Revolutionary War’s Other Cavalryman: William Washington, America’s Light Dragoon and the Myths of Hobkirk’s Hill”
• Kevin J. Weddle, “America’s Turning Point: Leadership in the Saratoga Campaign of 1777”

That’s a range of authors with some excellent books, new and old. There will also be a tour of Revolutionary sites in Goochland County led by Dr. John Maass, historian at the new National Museum of the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir.

For more information and to register, go to this site.

Unabashed Gossip from William North

On 9 Mar 1784, the former Continental Army officer William North (1755–1836, shown here) wrote a catty letter to his close friend Benjamin Walker, part of which is now held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

North was visiting their old commander-in-chief, George Washington, at Mount Vernon.

Only one sheet of what was at least a two-sheet document survives, so the text picks up in the middle. Based on the low-resolution scan on the society’s website, I think it reads:

She drank your health—but she has no breasts Ben! & then you know George Washington is to have her.

Here we are, three meals a day & quadrilles at night—The Great Man retires to his Study after breakfast, & us to our rooms. Could you believe it I have not hump’d a single Mollato since I am here, O tempora O Moses!

It now rains hard, & I pray God it may rain harder, the sooner the ice breaks, the sooner we set out. Miss Bassett & Madam Mew at each other like two cats, such a damned tune [?] I never heard. The Great man won’t stay long at home, he can’t bear this Solitude, this want of parade & flattery.

Poor Walker said Madam, he would only Stay 2 or three days with us & I declare I was sorry to part with him. The Women has a certain [?] goodness of heart, but then she is such a figure & squeaks so damnedly that there is no bearing her.

George Carter the son is married to Miss Skipwith, for to have fortune &c.

Lucy Randolph is at [???] I wish I was there too instead of here. The Byers [?] in [???].

The Baron makes a dive [?] at Congress on our return to annapolis, asks for nothing but his due, with months [?] of no plan or pension, retires to his farm & lives [blank] as usual.

With the favoring [?] of God I shall be with You soon.

Adieu May the Good Spirit comfort you
[Signature]
Mount Vernon
March 9th 1784

North apparently referred to his host as “the Great Man” and to Martha Washington as “Madam.” In the first line above “George Washington” meant the general’s nephew George Augustine Washington, who married Martha’s niece Fanny Bassett the following year.

“George Carter” is often referred to as George Hill Carter of Corotoman (1761–1788) to distinguish him from relatives. He married Oratrix Lelia Skipwith (1767–1837), daughter of a baronet. Her next husband was St. George Tucker.

Lucy Randolph might be the daughter of Peyton Randolph who married French consul Joseph Latil in 1787 before dying three years later. No idea about the rest of that paragraph above.

“The Baron” meant Gen. Frederick William de Steuben, who was both North and Walker’s mentor and their charge. Always in debt, Steuben was lobbying the Congress for a bigger land grant and/or pension. North and Walker no doubt expected to clean up his financial affairs.

When North wrote this letter to Walker, they were both bachelors, possibly still living with the baron in New York. North’s remarks about Fanny Bassett’s breasts, the women enslaved at Mount Vernon, and who was marrying whom reflected their social position as both young army buddies and eligible gentlemen. Walker married in August 1784, North three years later.

This letter offers an unusual perspective on the Washingtons, to be sure. I suspect the master of Mount Vernon would have been absolutely furious to know about it. I’ve seen a couple of lines quoted, but I don’t think it’s ever been published in full, and I don’t claim all my transcription is accurate.

“Never acquaint any person with that place where I shall be buried”

In his last last will and testament, Gen. Frederick William de Steuben wrote:

I do hereby declare that those legacies to my servants are on the following conditions, that on my Decease they do not permit any person to touche my Body, not even to change the Shirt in which I shall die but that they wrap me up in my old Military Cloak and in twenty four hours after my Decease bury me in such spot as I have before my Decease point out to them and that they never acquaint any person with that place where I shall be buried.

It didn’t work out like that.

When the baron died in 1794, his heirs and executors followed his instructions as best they could. (It’s not clear whether he actually did point out a spot or they chose one they thought he’d like.)

But ten years later the growing population of central New York meant that a road was going past or over his grave. Benjamin Walker arranged for his former commander’s remains to be moved to a more secluded spot and donated nearby land to a Baptist church on the condition that its congregation care for that new grave.

Twenty years after that, as the fiftieth anniversary of independence approached, a small monument was erected. In 1871 a much larger pile of stone went up, festooned with half-buried iron cannon and cannon balls.

The gravesite got the high-falutin’ name of the “Sacred Grove”; was named a memorial state park in 1931; has been augmented with a replica of the baron’s cabin, interpretive signage, and public restrooms; and is now managed by the state government in partnership with the National Park Service.

This is, of course, a far cry from Baron de Steuben’s original wish that his executors “never acquaint any person with that place where I shall be buried.”

Yet somehow I think Steuben would be more upset at hearing the cyclist who came through while I was taking photos: “I’ve lived here thirty years, and never knew this was back here.”

The Myth of Frederick II’s Fan Letter to George Washington

On 20 May 1780, the Providence Gazette ran a paragraph headed “Extract of a Letter from an Officer in the American Army, dated May 4, 1780.”

The article read:

On Thursday we were mustered and inspected by the Baron Stuben. We had likewise the Honor of his Excellency’s Presence. The Appearance of the Troops, their Arms, Accoutrements, &c. drew the Applause of that great Man, who does Honor to the Name of Soldier. The Dignity of his Manners, the Elevation of his Sentiments, and the Nobility of his Soul, speak him the first of Characters.

Did I ever mention to you an Anecdote which respects him? For Fear I never did, I’ll relate it:—His Majesty of Prussia wishing to bestow some Mark of his Esteem on so exalted a Character, sent him his Picture; underneath were these Words: “FROM THE OLDEST GENERAL IN EUROPE, TO THE GREATEST GENERAL IN THE WORLD.”

“His Excellency” who was, of course, Gen. George Washington. This laudatory item was reprinted in several other American newspapers that year. Whether or not the letter was genuine, it could be useful propaganda.

While relating the story of King Frederick II sending Gen. Washington a picture, this anonymous officer didn’t claim to have seen the picture itself. He was just retelling “an Anecdote” that was going around.

As I discussed yesterday, scholars studying the papers of Frederick the Great haven’t found any letter mentioning Washington by name, much less sending him a picture and fan letter. No such image or correspondence survives in Washington’s papers, and he was careful about saving such documents. So, of course, was the Prussian court.

In sum, this is just as much of a myth as Frederick the Great’s praise for Washington’s maneuvers around Princeton, yesterday’s example. This story arose during the war, rather than decades later, which makes it seem more reliable, but it lacks the confirmation we should expect.

The officer’s anecdote resurfaced decades later in the Eastern Argus of Portland, Maine, on 20 June 1825, in a review of a French pamphlet about Lafayette (shown above). That item stated that when Lafayette met Frederick II at “Pottsdam” in “the Autumn of 1782,” the Prussian monarch invited the French marquis to his palace and listened to his stories about Washington. In admiration, the king sent Washington an unidentified “token of remembrance” with the “greatest General” inscription. (This item in the Eastern Argus was said to be a letter to the editor of the Albany Argus, but I couldn’t find an issue of the New York newspaper carrying it.)

Lafayette did indeed visit Potsdam, but in 1785, as he reported to Washington in a letter dated 6 Feb 1786. The marquis stated:

I went to Make my Bow to the King, and notwisdanding what I Had Heard of Him, could not Help Being struck By that dress and Appearance of an old, Broken, dirty Corporal, coverd all over with Spanish snuff, with His Head almost leaning on one shoulder, and fingers quite distorted By the Gout. But what surprised me much more is the fire and some times the softeness of the most Beautifull Eyes I ever saw, which give as charming an expression to His phisiognomy as He Can take a Rough and threatening one at the Head of His troops

Obviously, Lafayette hadn’t met Frederick II before this moment. The two men had no long conversation about Washington. And Frederick definitely didn’t send a token to Washington to arrive by May 1780, as the Providence Gazette letter had claimed.

The story bobbed up again in 1839 when newspapers published an article called “The Character of Washington,” the recreation of a speech delivered at a Daniel Webster dinner party in early 1838 by Sen. Asher Robbins (1761-1845) of Rhode Island. Robbins included the anecdote about Frederick II sending a picture “from the oldest General in Europe, to the greatest General in the world.” He might have read that story as a Yale student in 1780 or later. From the newspapers, the speech and thus the story were published the next year in the Rev. Charles W. Upham’s Life of Washington and Ebenezer Smith Thomas’s Reminiscences. Again, there was still no such picture.

TOMORROW: Frederick the Great’s supposed encomium in a new form.

The Last Years of Baron de Steuben

When we left the retired general Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, usually then known as Baron de Steuben, his first postwar housemates had left him as well.

Those were three of his former military aides: Benjamin Walker, James Fairlie, and William North. In the mid-1780s they all got married and set up their own households. That left the baron at loose ends in New York, living beyond his means.

Steuben enjoyed the company of young men—but not all young men. Sometime during the 1780s two nephews visited Steuben from Prussia. The baron quickly came to dislike them, especially because they expected him to provide their fare and living expenses (after all, he had written letters boasting of his success in America). They went home.

In the late 1780s the baron showered gifts on his butler, who North thought was a “worthless rascal” being dressed up as a “beau.” For a while in 1791 Steuben lived at Walker’s house.

In the spring of 1792, however, the baron set up a household at 32 Broadway and collected a new pair of companions. The first was John W. Mulligan (1774-1862), son of New York tailor and wartime spy Hercules Mulligan. A recent Columbia graduate, Mulligan started to study the law in the office of Alexander Hamilton but then took the job of Baron de Steuben’s secretary.

The next arrival was Charles Adams (1770-1800), son of John and Abigail Adams, another aspiring attorney. In April 1792, Adams told his mother about Steuben: “He is the best man in the world I sincerely beleive.” In a letter dated 8 Oct 1792, Charles Adams described how the baron had invited him to move in:

The Baron returned from Steuben [his town in upstate New York] last week and I had intended to procure lodgings at some private boarding house, but when I mentioned to him my intention, he took me kindly by the hand “My dear Adams said he When your sister went from New York I invited you to come to my house, at least till you could find more convenient and pleasant Lodgings; I then had not the pleasure of a long acquaintance with you, but I was pleased that in our little society we could be of mutual advantage to each other, and that our improvements in the French language and in other branches of literature would render my table the seat of improvement and pleasure.

[“]I have since you have been here formed a very great and sincere friendship for you. You must now allow me the right of friendship; Indeed you must not leave me. What is it? Is there any thing you do not like? Is any thing inconvenient? I wish I could give you a better apartment, but the house will not aford it.[”]

I told him there was not a desire I could form but what was accomplished in his house; but that I did not think it proper that I should any longer take advantage of a kindness I had not a right to expect.

[“]And will you not then allow me to be any longer your friend and patron? You must not make such objections. It is not from any favor I can ever expect from your father. I am not rich, nor am I poor: and thank God I have enough to live well and comfortably upon; your being here does not make any difference in my expences. I love you, and will never consent that our little society should be broken, untill you give me more sufficient reasons for it.[”]

To this affectionate and fatherly address, I could only reply that I would do any thing he wished and would not leave him if he was opposed to my doing so. My dear Mamma there is something in this man that is more than mortal.

On 31 Jan 1793 Adams wrote to his father:

The Baron returned [from Philadelphia] on teusday his visit has been of service to him He said to me upon sitting down to supper that evening “I thank God my dear Charles that I am not a Great man and that I am once more permitted to set down at my little round table with Mulligan and yourself enjoy more real satisfaction than the pomp of this world can afford.” 

However, that situation was financially unsustainable. Steuben decided to move to his country estate, where life was cheaper. He headed out there in May 1793 and again in the spring of 1794. Vice President Adams understood the baron intended “there to reside for the Remainder of his Days.” Mulligan moved with him, still in the role of secretary.

On 12 Feb 1794, before leaving the city, Baron de Steuben made his third and final will (P.D.F. download). He had decided to “exclude my relations in Europe”—those nephews. Instead, he would “adopt my Friends and former Aid Des Camps Benjamin Walker and William North as my Children and make them sole devisees of all my Estates therein.” So they shared a financial inheritance which they probably would have had to sort out anyway.

Steuben left swords and other specific bequests to North and Walker. He left Mulligan “the whole of my library Maps and Charts and the sum of Two Thousand five hundred Dollars to complete it.” He assigned a year’s wages and clothes to his servants. Charles Adams, who was staying in the city to study for the bar, was a witness to the will. Another was Charles Williamson (1758-1808), a former British army officer who emigrated to America to promote land investments and the interests of the British Empire.

On 22 September, Charles Adams wrote to his mother:

On the fourteenth of October I shall set out for Albany The earnest solicitations of the Baron have drawn a promise from me to spend a few days with him at his solitude after I have passed my Counsellors examination. I have always lamented that you have so little acquaintance with this excellent man I never have know a more noble character and his affection for me calls forth every sentiment of gratitude which can exist in my breast.

In November Adams’s father happily reported that Charles was “at Steuben after an Examination at Albany and an honourable Admission to the Rank of Counciller at Law.” But out on the baron’s estate, things were going poorly.

Early in the morning of 26 November, the general suffered a stroke. A biographer who relied on Mulligan’s memories wrote that a servant came to fetch him from another building:

Mulligan at once ran through the snow to his room, and found him in agony. Steuben appeared to have suffered much, and could only articulate a few words, “Do n’t be alarmed, my son,” which were his last.

This account didn’t mention Charles Adams, but he must have been in the area because he wrote to his father (in a letter that no longer exists) that Steuben had suffered a “Palsy.” William North hurried over from his home in Duanesburg, and a doctor arrived.

But Steuben never regained consciousness. He died on 28 Nov 1794. Mulligan and North picked out his burial place “an eighth of a mile north of the house, on a hill in the midst of a wood.” Ten years later the baron’s remains were moved to the present gravesite.

Charles Adams married in 1795 but died only five years later, having drunk himself to death. John W. Mulligan around the same time wed a woman from Kentucky; they had nine children. He lived until 1862, thus witnessing the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Civil War.

[The statuary shown above, labeled “Military Instruction,” consists of an ancient warrior displaying a sword perilously close to a nearly naked young man. It’s part of the monument to Steuben in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. The baron would have loved it.]

Steuben, Walker, and North (and Fairlie)

For the last few days I’ve been discussing statements about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality made in this comic published by The Nib. I think there’s good evidence for Steuben being gay, but there are also a lot of errors floating around. To whit:

“President George Washington rewarded his prize general with an estate in Valley Forge, the site of perhaps his greatest military victory.”

The source for that misstatement is probably this article by Mark Segal, or one of many like it making a similar error. That article shares a timeline of the baron’s war activity and then says, “Washington rewarded von Steuben with a house at Valley Forge…” That can easily be interpreted as a grant after the war by the first President. But there was no such gift.

Gen. Washington assigned the baron a house within the Valley Forge encampment in 1777-78. That wasn’t a lifelong grant of real estate. It wasn’t a reward for service since, after all, Steuben had just arrived. That house was just where the new general and his staff could live so snow wouldn’t fall on their heads.

Baron de Steuben did receive some grants of real estate after the war in recognition of his service to the new republic. The Continental Congress offered western lands to any officer meeting certain terms, but the baron also got special gifts. His holdings are a bit hard to suss out, not least because he overstated them in his wills. But it looks like his major properties were:

• rented houses in New York City where he lived in the 1780s.
• an estate that New Jersey confiscated from a Loyalist family and granted the baron in 1783 on the condition that he live there, not rent it out. He spent considerable time and money fixing it up, receiving full title in 1788—and a month later he sold it to pay off debts.
• a large amount of land granted by New York in Oneida County. In 1792 that area was even named the town of Steuben.

None of the general’s real estate was in Valley Forge.

Lastly, Valley Forge was the site of an army camp, not a battle and thus not a “military victory.”

“Steuben spent his finals [sic] years with two younger men he had served with in the war: Captain Benjamin Walker and Brigadier General William North. Who later became a US Senator.

“He adopted both as his ‘sons’, but speculation about their relationship remains.”

While this statement acknowledges ambiguity in the historical evidence, it simplifies and skews the facts of Baron de Steuben’s life and of the lives of Walker and North. Steuben did live with those men for a while after the war. He did write in his final will that he wished to “adopt [them] as my Children.” However, those two former aides left the baron’s household to get married in the 1780s, so he didn’t spend his “final years” with them. Here’s the more complex story.

At Valley Forge, Steuben picked up three aides de camp: Benjamin Walker (1753-1818), William North (1755-1836), and James Fairlie (c. 1757-1830). He became very close to them all. In the first will the baron wrote after coming to America, dated 28 May 1781 (P.D.F. download), he bequeathed £1,050 to each of those three men. (He also left half that sum to two Frenchmen who had accompanied him to America, Peter Stephen Duponceau and Capt. Louis de Pontière, and to Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the diplomatic fixer and playwright who helped him connect with American envoys in Paris.) But Steuben’s main heir was a nephew back in Germany, whom he wanted to renounce his baronial title, emigrate to America, and become a republican.

In Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships, William E. Benemann describes a web of shifting relationships among Gen. de Steuben and his military aides: North and Fairlie as a couple before North realizes he likes Walker more and they become intimate, and then Steuben becomes infatuated with both North and Walker, but Walker strings the general along for favors while North is truly affectionate, though more like a son to a father… All this in only two years of those men being in the same military family. And with, frankly, very little textual support for such a level of detail.

But the evidence is clear that Steuben, North, Walker, and Fairlie became very close. Though assignments took them in different directions in the last years of the war, afterward they reunited and lived in the baron’s house on the outskirts of New York City.

That last decade of Steuben’s life is particularly significant to the question of his sexuality because it’s the only period when he wasn’t serving in an army or in a court and thus could live as he chose—or as close to that as circumstances allowed. And what Gen. Steuben wanted to do was spend his time in the company of young men. He used his martial celebrity to sponsor militia units and military academies. For money, he borrowed a lot and sought rewards for his wartime service.

Steuben, then in his fifties, was happy in his bachelor lifestyle. His young friends, however, took more traditional paths in their society. First Walker married a Quaker girl named Molly and set up his own household. Around 1786 Steuben, North, and Fairlie all had their portraits painted by Ralph Earl while he was locked up in debtors’ prison, but later that year Fairlie married and moved to Albany. The next year, with the baron’s help, North married Mary Duane, daughter of the city mayor; they eventually had six children.

Walker, North, and Fairlie all lived for many decades as prominent members of New York’s political class—not leading politicians but lawyers, civil servants, and occasional officeholders. North would be elected to the New York legislature and appointed for a few months to the U.S. Senate. In the early 1800s Walker would serve one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Walker and North remained close to Baron de Steuben once they married, but more like grown sons looking after a failing father—failing in the financial sense. They tried to cajole the baron into not spending so much and to cajole Congress or state governments into granting him more support. The letters that have been preserved don’t say much about physical intimacy, but there’s clearly fondness on all sides.

Meanwhile, Baron de Steuben found some new young friends.

TOMORROW: The baron’s last years.

[The photo above shows relief portraits of Walker and North on the monument to Steuben in Washington, D.C.]

“The abominable rumor which accused Steuben”

Here’s the continuing discussion about what we know and don’t know about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality, keyed to statements in a recent comic at The Nib.

“Rumors about Steuben’s ‘tastes’ were common knowledge, and reported in the American press.”

It would be good to see examples of such American newspaper reports. To my knowledge no one has found any. And that’s significant to how “openly” Baron de Steuben lived as a gay man and how much his American neighbors accepted him.

Now it’s conceivable that such articles are lurking in the big newspaper databases with asterisks and allusions making them hard to spot. But no one researching Steuben has cited such a report, and I’ve kept my eyes open for such a finding.

The most open discussion of Steuben’s sexuality in print in the eighteenth century was an article published in Germany in 1796, two years after the baron’s death. Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817) was a professor in Hamburg and a fan of the American republic. In his Amerikanisches Magazin he wrote an article (“Nachrichten von den Lebensumständen des Baron von Steuben”) which John Macauley Palmer translated as saying:

Just who it was who spread abroad the abominable rumor which accused Steuben of a crime the suspicion of which, at another more exalted court [i.e., Frederick the Great’s] at that time (as formerly among the Greeks), would hardly have aroused such attention, has not become publicly known.

I couldn’t find any American newspaper or magazine mentioning Ebeling’s article in the decades after it was published.

And of course Ebeling did his best to imply the “abominable rumor” was untrue, spread by Steuben’s clerical enemies and eventually rejected by right-thinking people. Which is not exactly the same thing as stating flatly that it was untrue.

“One story claimed that Von Steuben loved to host cocktail nights for his favorite cadets. No clothing allowed.”

The ultimate source for this statement is the memoir of Peter Stephen Duponceau, a young Frenchman who accompanied Baron de Steuben to America in 1777 (and actually paid for their passage). Duponceau served unsuccessfully as a staff officer during the war and more happily as a linguist in Pennsylvania after it. Late in life he wrote about Valley Forge:

Once, with the Baron’s permission, his aids invited a number of young officers to dine at our quarters, on condition that none should be admitted that had on a whole pair of breeches. This was of course understood as pars pro toto [the part for the whole]; but torn clothes were an indispensable requisite for admission, and in this the guests were very rare not to fail. The dinner took place; the guests clubbed their rations; and we feasted sumptuously on tough beef steaks and potatoes, with hickory nuts for our dessert. In lieu of wine, we had some kind of spirits, with which we made salamanders; that is to say, after filling our glasses,, we set the liquor on fire, and drank it up, flame and all. Such a set of ragged, and, at the same time, merry fellows, were never before brought together. The Baron loved to speak of that dinner, and of his sans-culottes, as he called us.

The point of this gathering was that those young Continental Army officers were wearing torn uniforms and eating “tough beef steaks” because their pay and supplies were so meager. It was a bonding experience. Notably, Duponceau recalled the idea coming from Steuben’s aides, not the general himself.

Now that gathering might have been titillating for some; certainly we’d interpret an anecdote about young women having to wear torn clothing to a party through the lens of sexuality. But as to the accuracy of the statement from the comic above, if people have to wear torn clothing to a party, then that party is not “No clothing allowed.” And since this happened “once,” it’s not evidence Steuben made a habit of hosting such events—however fondly he remembered that one occasion.

Also, an eighteenth-century midday dinner does not constitute “cocktail nights.”

TOMORROW: The baron in retirement.

A Letter of Recommendation for the Baron de Steuben

Yesterday I started to analyze evidence about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s sexuality. In sum, I think that evidence strongly suggests he was gay, but it’s not nearly as definite as popular articles have recently claimed.

I’m drawing from the draft of an essay I started years ago, somewhat abashed that I’m pulling it off my hard drive in response to a cartoon. Nevertheless, here’s the second installment of replies to claims in that cartoon.

“Franklin knew about Von Steuben’s past, but still decided to write a letter of recommendation to George Washington.”

There’s no evidence Benjamin Franklin knew about the allegations of child-molesting or homosexuality against Steuben in the principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. That statement rests on the assumptions that (a) that gossip reached Paris by September 1777, and (b) Franklin heard it. But actual evidence would be some document showing that Franklin knew more facts than he let on.

In fact, the evidence we have suggests Franklin knew less. Here’s the letter that he and his fellow envoy  Silas Deane sent to Gen. George Washington on 4 Sept 1777, recommending Steuben for a role in the Continental Army. The diplomats wrote:

The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben, lately a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s Service, whom he attended in all his Campaigns, being his Aide Camp, Quartermaster General, &c. He goes to America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power.

Steuben had never been “a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s Service” or a “Quartermaster General.” He had indeed been an aide de camp to Frederick the Great for a while, but his highest Prussian army rank was captain. He’d been working in the civil government of a small German state since 1764.

I have to add that there’s nothing in Steuben’s European career to suggest he had “a true Zeal” for America or republican government, unlike some other Old World officers offering their services. He had personal reasons, both legal and financial, for sailing thousands of miles from home.

Where did Franklin and Deane get their information about Steuben? They dropped the names of two French high officials: “Mr Le Comte de Vergennes,” the foreign minister and spymaster, and “Mr Le Comte de St Germain,” the minister of war. St. Germain especially admired the Prussian military, and his attempts to reform the French army along those lines ran into such opposition that he resigned later that September.

But most of the American diplomats’ information probably came from Steuben himself. And he was a habitual liar. In John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography there’s an index entry for “Steuben…, his fictitous autobiography, 2-5, 53, 85-6, 103-108, 305, 407.” And those pages don’t even include all of his false claims to have become become a lieutenant general in Europe (e.g., 97, 138).

Palmer viewed Steuben as indispensable to American independence, and he didn’t want to believe that his hero lied as he offered his services to the young nation. In fact, when Palmer considered that possibility early in his research, he was ready to set aside the project. He wrote:

My first reaction upon discovering that my hero was a systematic, circumstantial and deliberate liar, was one both of disgust and disappointment. I was disposed to proceed no further with my book. Here was, indeed, a golden opportunity for a debunker or a muckraker, but that sensational role made no appeal to me. 

But eventually Palmer came up with a way to explain the discrepancy between the baron’s actual résumé and what Franklin and Deane wrote about him: Franklin came up with the lie. 

This approach depended on Franklin’s status in American culture and memory. We accept him as a trickster. From his teen-aged essays as “Silence Dogood” to his false supplement for a Boston newspaper printed at Passy and how we remember the oil in his cane, we enjoy stories of Franklin fooling people. We don’t tell such stories about Washington, Adams, or Hamilton, and Jefferson’s duplicity still gets people angry.

In the case of Steuben, Palmer decided that the baron didn’t make any false claims about his career to Franklin (who was supposedly too smart to fall for such lies, anyhow). Instead, Franklin was so smart that he made up those falsehoods himself. He recognized how useful Baron de Steuben would be near the top of the Continental Army. Therefore, he ensured that Gen. Washington and the Continental Congress would treat this newcomer as a man of invaluable experience who deserved top rank by harmlessly—even helpfully—inflating his Prussian credentials.

As for the hapless Silas Deane, Palmer blamed him for falsely claiming to have seen documents to confirm the baron’s credentials—a deception that, unlike Franklin’s, he couldn’t forgive. Palmer didn’t present the simpler possibility that Steuben had fooled Deane. The baron appears to have flashed papers and described their contents at his first meeting with the American envoys, but never handed them over; at the second meeting he said that, alas, he had left those documents behind.

Thus, Palmer rejected the evidence that Baron de Steuben was gay and argued that he was—if only at this crucial moment—honest about his past. Many later authors who accept that Steuben was gay have adopted Palmer’s conclusion that he was also honest. But if there’s one thing we can say for sure about the baron, it’s that he told a lot of lies about himself.

The simplest explanation for the glowing recommendation that Franklin and Deane sent to Gen. Washington is that they actually believed what Steuben had told them about his brilliant career. And the simplest explanation for why Franklin didn’t write anything about the baron being gay is not that he covered up that fact but that the baron didn’t tell him.

TOMORROW: Gen. Steuben in the Continental Army.

What Do We Know about Gen. de Steuben’s Sexuality?

Last month The Nib published Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings’s comic about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as a gay man.

I found it inaccurate at several spots. Yet the core message—that Steuben was both important to the Continental Army’s success and sexually attracted to other men—is almost certainly correct. It’s just that a lot of the details, especially those supporting that conclusion, are wildly exaggerated.

Most of the evidence about the Baron de Steuben’s sexuality appears in John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography, General von Steuben. Palmer admired Steuben greatly and disliked the idea of the baron being gay, so he tried hard to refute the evidence, leaving logical circles in the ground as he spun. But he did publish the relevant sources in English translation.

Many of the original European documents were probably destroyed in World War 2, along with others that might have been helpful. It’s therefore unlikely that we’ll find new evidence from Steuben’s lifetime. But we can do a better job than Palmer of interpreting those documents and spotting the most likely conclusions.

This comic instead overstates the evidence in various ways. It doesn’t cite sources but appears to have been based on articles written for American newspapers, magazines, and websites over the past twenty-five years since Randy Shilts’s Conduct Unbecoming focused attention on Steuben as a gay man.

I’ll go through the statements I think are exaggerated.

“Steuben lived openly as a homosexual before the term was even invented.”

It’s true that the word “homosexual” was coined in 1868. More important (as Trujillo and Hastings later acknowledge), people’s understanding of sexuality and expectations of how gay men behave were different in the Baron de Steuben’s lifetime and in our own. So what does it mean to say he “lived openly as a homosexual”?

Gen. de Steuben was a lifelong bachelor. He didn’t marry a woman while having affairs with men, as it was and is said of his monarch Frederick the Great of Prussia, Frederick’s brother Prince Henry, and Lord George Germain in Britain. The baron’s title was too new, his estate too small, to make a direct heir necessary. In that respect, Steuben was more like Horace Walpole or Charles Paxton.

But neither is there any evidence of Gen. de Steuben claiming a longtime partner or expressing sexual interest in males. When he set up a household with a young man late in life, he presented that man as his secretary.

Some of Gen. de Steuben’s letters express affection for other men more plainly than 20th-century male correspondents did, but there are similar letters between eighteenth-century men who had active heterosexual lives. Even in the baron’s circle, there’s a lot of joshing about young ladies, whether sincere or not.

So the comic’s statement that Steuben “lived openly as a homosexual” is highly questionable at best.

“Steuben was expelled from Germany on charges of sodomy.”

There was of course no political entity called “Germany” in Steuben’s lifetime. He was born in Prussia, but in the late 1760s and early 1770s he was a powerful government minister in the small principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. And then suddenly he wasn’t.

The baron met with American envoys Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin in Paris in the summer of 1777, but they couldn’t promise him a rank and good pay in the Continental Army. He instead sought a position in Baden. An official from that small country wrote to the prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen on 13 Aug 1777:

It has come to me from different sources that M. de Steuben is accused of having taken familiarities with young boys which the laws forbid and punish severely. I have even been informed that that is the reason why M. de Steuben was obliged to leave Hechingen and that the clergy of your country intend to prosecute him by law as soon as he may establish himself anywhere.

That’s the principal contemporaneous evidence for Gen. de Steuben’s homosexuality. We might even say the baron wasn’t accused of “sodomy” but of molesting children (in the original French, “d’avoir pris avec de jeunes garçons des familiaritiés, que les Loix defendent & punissent sévérément”). Again, the period’s understanding of sexual behavior is significant: the Prussian court appears to have revived the classical Greek admiration of adolescent boys as a noble way of expressing homosexual desire.

About five days after this letter was drafted, Steuben was back in Paris, over 300 miles away. Now he was quite interested in the Americans’ offer. By 4 September the baron had signed on to their cause, on 10 September he left Paris for Marseilles, and on 26 September he sailed for America, never to return.

All that said, no one has found evidence that Baron de Steuben faced formal “charges of sodomy” or that he was officially “expelled” from any country. Palmer even argued that the real problem in Hohenzollern-Hechingen was a budget crunch, and that the accusations of sexual misconduct were trumped up by Steuben’s court enemies—though he offered no evidence for such enmity. But the most likely explanation is that Baron de Steuben left his post and then Europe under a cloud because of those accusations of sexual misconduct, thus removing himself in a bid to keep the scandal as quiet as possible.

So again, The Nib’s comic takes the incomplete, somewhat murky evidence from Steuben’s lifetime and offers readers a definite statement reflecting modern expectations.

TOMORROW: What Franklin, Washington, and others knew.

More Special Events in February

Here are a couple more events this month that caught my eye.

On Sunday, 11 February, at 12:30 P.M. the Pickering House in Salem will host a presentation on “17th- & 18th-Century Food and Cookery” by Karen Scalia of Salem Food Tours.

What would the Pickerings and their contemporaries have been eating back then? How would it have been cooked? What about spices? Utensils? Where did they get their ingredients? How dangerous was standing over a fire? What about our friend, the Rumford Roaster?

(That would be the type of oven invented by Benjamin Thompson of Woburn, later Count Rumford, shown here.)

This lecture includes a “mini spice tasting.” The cost is $25, or $20 for Pickering House members. Advance registration required through [email protected].

Down in New Jersey, Somerset County’s Heritage Trail Association will offer its “Five Generals Tour” on Sunday, 18 February.

The popular bus tour…gives participants an opportunity to visit five of the existing houses where Generals George Washington, Henry Knox, Baron Von Steuben, Nathaniel Greene, and William Alexander were headquartered during the Middlebrook Cantonment of 1778-79. The historic homes include the Abraham Staats House in South Bound Brook, the Jacobus Vanderveer House in Bedminster, the Wallace House in Somerville, the Van Veghten House in Finderne, and the Van Horne House in Bridgewater.

At the Vanderveer House, Bob Heffner of the American Historical Theatre in Philadelphia will portray Gen. Knox (as shown at right). The artillery commander used that house as his headquarters in the winter of 1778-79. Knox also established America’s first military training school in nearby Pluckemin.

The tour begins at the Van Horne House, 941 East Main Street in Bridgewater. Docents will welcome visitors at each home. The bus will return to the Van Horne House between each visit for refreshments. The entire tour will take a little less than three hours, with departures on on the hour from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. Each tour is limited to twenty people. The cost is $25 for adults, $15 for students, free for children under age six. Register through the Heritage Trail Association.

A Child’s Memories of the Doctors’ Riot of 1788

A few days back I mentioned William Alexander Duer’s New-York as it Was, During the Latter Part of the Last Century, published in 1849.

Duer (shown here in a copy of a daguerreotype) was born in 1780, son of the British-born Patriot politician William Duer and grandson of the Continental general William Alexander, Lord Stirling.

Duer called the doctors’ riot of 1788 the “public occurrence that made the earliest, if not the deepest impression upon my memory.”

His retellings of events included details he couldn’t have been privy to at the time, and thus must have heard secondhand or taken from previous accounts. But he also described some dramatic moments that he or his family personally witnessed, recalled with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old.

For example, the clash of an upper-class militia company on horseback and the crowd:

Never shall I forget the charge I saw made upon a body of the rioters by [Capt. John] Stakes’s light-horse. From our residence opposite St. Paul’s, I first perceived the troop as it debouched from Fair, now Fulton-street, and attacked the masses collected at the entrance of the “fields,” whence they were soon scattered, some of them retreating into the church-yard,—driven sword in hand through the portico, by the troopers striking right and left with the backs of their sabres.

And the wounding and care of Gen. Steuben:

The Baron de Steuben was struck by a stone which knocked him down, inflicted a flesh wound upon his forehead, and wrought a sudden change in the compassionate feelings he had previously entertained towards the mob. At the moment of receiving it, he was earnestly remonstrating with the Governor against ordering the militia to fire on the people; but, as soon as he was struck, the Baron’s benevolence deserted him, and as he fell he lustily cried out, “fire! Governor, fire!”

[Footnote:] Upon the occasion mentioned in the text, he was brought bleeding into my father’s house, accompanied by most of the cortege which had assembled at the gaol, and there being no surgeon to be had, my mother [Catherine Duer] staunched his wound, of which the old soldier made very light, and bound up his head. After his departure, Governor [George] Clinton amused the company by relating the above anecdote.

Duer thus left us both a delicious story about Steuben and the provenance for it: from Gov. Clinton to his mother and thence to him.

Another eyewitness, not so young, was William Dunlap (1766-1839), whose history of New York was posthumously published in 1840. He wrote that during the doctors’ riot, “The house of Sir John Temple, the British consul, in Queen Street, was with difficulty saved. It was said ‘Sir John’ was misinterpreted ‘Surgeon.’”

Temple was James Bowdoin’s son-in-law, a friendly Customs official in Boston before the Revolution, and the most likely conduit for Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters to Benjamin Franklin. However, I can’t find any confirmation from Temple’s published papers for his house being mobbed in 1788.

TOMORROW: What about the medical student who started all the trouble?

Fight at the New York City Jail

When we left off William Heth’s account of the New York doctors’ riot of April 1788, the anti-dissection crowd had started to attack the city jail, where some anatomy teachers and students had taken refuge. Heth wrote:

The militia were ordered out, small parties were sent to disperse them [the rioters], but they instantly disarmed those attachments, broke their guns to peices, arid made them scamper to save their lives.

The evening advanced apace, and the affair became very serious. The Governor [George Clinton, shown here], after trudging about all day, first with the mob in the morning, endeavouring to pacify and accommodate, and in the afternoon to assemble a body respectable enough to preserve the goal [i.e., jail] and to restore peace and good order, advanced about dusk with a number of the Citizens, but without any kind of order or without any other than a few side arms and canes, while the Adjutant-Gen’l of the militia [Nicholas Fish], about 300 yards in his rear, led up in very good order about 150 men, tho’ not more than half with firearms, among whom were many gentlemen of the city and strangers, volunteers.

This body were not long before the goal before the bricks and stones from the mob provoked several to fire, and perhaps their might, on the whole, have been 60 guns discharged, but this is mere guess. This body made their way into the goal where a party remained all night, but a sally of 60 or 70 were defeated. Three of the mob were killed on the spot, and one has since died of his wounds, and several were wounded. One of them was bayonetted on attempting to force into a window of the prison which he saw filled with armed men, a proof of the astonishing lengths to which popular rage will sometimes carry men.

Numbers on the Governor’s side, besides himself, are severely bruised. Baron Steuben rec’d a wound just above the corner of his left eye and nose, from which he lost a great deal of blood. Mr. [John] Jay got his Scull almost cracked, and are both now laid up. Gen’l [John] Armstrong has got a bruised leg, but is able to go out.

Yesterday the militia turned out again, and made a respectable appearance, and paraded about exceedingly, both Horse and Foot, but it must be observed that the enemy were not be heard of.

In truth numbers who were in the mob on Monday evening turned out yesterday to support government.

It looks like “Gen’l Armstrong” was John Armstrong, Jr. (1758-1843), adjutant general of Pennsylvania and central figure in the so-called “Newburgh Conspiracy.” He was in New York as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and would soon settle in that state.

According to a letter from John Jay’s wife Sarah to her mother, it took a while for doctors “to decide whether his brain was injur’d or not.” While they debated, the doctors bled him, of course. Jay recovered.

TOMORROW: Treating the baron’s injury.

More Details from Capt. Samuel Leighton’s Papers

As I looked over the document dealer Seth Kaller’s offerings from the papers of Capt. Samuel Leighton of Kittery, Maine, a few things jumped out at me.

Records of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety say that a total of 91 guns were delivered to Col. James Scamman’s regiment on 30 June and 7 July 1775. The papers for sale include a receipt for four guns dated 4 July. The most expensive of those guns, worth a third of the total, is connected with Henry Foss, who was the Leighton company’s drummer.

Foss also had one of the best signatures in the company, as shown by this document. A few men signed with their marks only, including one, Stephen Nason, who is listed as a corporal. Normally I expect the non-commissioned officers to be able to write, but this man might have been exceptional.

At a council of war on 3 Aug 1775, Gen. George Washington learned that his army’s stock of gunpowder was considerably smaller than he’d understood. I suspect that led to Capt. Leighton’s inventory of “Aminitson” held by men on 12 August. It looks like most of the company had over twenty rounds.

At the end of the year, Col. Scamman didn’t receive a new Continental Army commission. Despite being acquitted in a court-martial, he apparently hadn’t escaped the cloud hanging over him since Bunker Hill. In fact, he continued to argue against those charges in the newspaper in 1776.

Capt. Leighton and many of his men chose not to reenlist. They accepted money in lieu of winter coats and collected their October pay on 29 December. Leighton turned in some ammunition and other supplies and got a receipt on 1 Jan 1776.

And then Capt. Leighton and many of his men went back home to Maine. Leighton was in Kittery on 8 March when he paid Sgt. Josiah Paul. Meanwhile, back in Massachusetts Gen. Washington was overseeing the endgame of the siege from Dorchester Heights.

A family genealogy includes his Samuel Leighton’s commission in the Massachusetts militia dated 16 May 1776. He led a company back to Boston later that year for guard duty and eventually was promoted to major in the state militia, but never again served in the Continental Army.

Among the other Leighton documents is what Seth Kaller calls a list of instructions for infantry formations. It’s actually the section headings of chapter five of Gen. Steuben’s drill manual, titled “Miscellaneous Evolutions.” That was published in 1779, so I assume Leighton or a relative copied it out later in the war, maybe for militia training.

Boston 1775 Visits the Ngram Viewer

Last month brought a new time sink from Google Books, the Ngram Viewer, which searches the entire database for requested phrases. As an example, LibraryThing’s Jeremy Dibbell mentioned how @cliotropic had asked to compare terms for trousers (including the modern “jeans” and “pants”). I pushed that backwards, asking for a comparison of “breeches” (“britches,” the phonic spelling, produced negligible results), “pantaloons”, “trowsers” (the old spelling), “trousers”, and “pants.” Here’s the result.

The words “breeches” and “pants” have additional, non-sartorial meanings, of course. Nonetheless, it’s clear how the first word/garment became much less popular between 1780 and 1980, and the second much more. “Trowsers” overtook “pantaloons” and “pants” in the 1810s, and bowed to “trousers” in the 1830s.

However, I also found some glitches in the Ngram Viewer database. Its results are only as good as the input data. Here’s a comparison of the phrases “Boston Tea Party” and “destruction of the tea.” That shows some examples of the former phrase from before 1820, but clicking into the data reveals that those are simply volumes with the wrong publication date applied. With numbers so small, a few errors can really shift the lines. Still, we can see how the “Boston Tea Party” label overtook the older “destruction of the tea” around 1890, and eclipsed it since.

Other quirks:

• The program doesn’t care for hyphens, periods, or other punctuation marks. Apostrophes have to be the straight up and down kind, as in this look at “Bunker Hill” replacing “Bunker’s Hill.”
• It’s case-specific, so “Sons of Liberty” is different from “sons of liberty”.
• For books published in the 1700s, try putting an “f” where the “long s” should be: “Bofton” shows up more than “Boston.” Some Google Books scans have been adjusted for that typographical shift, and others haven’t.

All those grains of salt applied, Ngram Viewer is still a compulsive delight.

Who got the most press, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams? (Of course, there might be more than one John Adams.)

When did Americans start writing about “Sally Hemings”? (But note: That blip of early mentions is mostly misdated material. I can’t figure out a way to see examples of people writing about her without using her full name.)

Look how “von Steuben” overtook “de Steuben” (the general’s own usage) in the twentieth century.

How famous did Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, become in the early 1800s, relative to other scientists?

Are people learning how to spell the name of young Christopher Seider?

See how “lobster back” starts to appear in significant numbers after 1820, and “lobsterback” at the time of the Centennial.

Or headgear. “Mob cap” starts its rise in 1800, “tricorn hat” in 1880.

In the late 1900s the name of Crispus Attucks starts to appear far more often than the (more common) names of the other victims of the Boston Massacre.

The new term “vaccination” overtook “inoculation” twice, and “smallpox” replaced “small pox.”

Of the spellings “huzzah”, “hurray”, “huzzay”, “hooray”, “hoorah”, or “hurrah,” the last has dominated for a long time. Remove it to see how the Z spellings used to be more popular.

Where do we see the euphemisms “appeal to heaven” and “recourse to arms”?

The phrases “liberty tree”, “liberty pole”, and “liberty cap”? (Once again, the results for the early end of the timeline look suspect to me. I’ve learned to distrust those symmetric plateaus.)

How Henry W. Longfellow (after 1860) and Esther Forbes (after 1940) made Paul Revere a household name, with John Hancock and Henry Knox for comparison.

Charges "to a Dog" and "to Trouble"

Baron Frederick William Augustus von Steuben arrived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 1 Dec 1777 with his young French aides and a servant. In Europe the baron had been told that the American army wore scarlet, so he had secured uniforms in that color for himself and his companions. The locals immediately assumed they were British officers.

That confusion explained away, the Europeans headed south to Boston. Steuben's teen-aged translator, Peter Stephen Duponceau, later wrote to his granddaughter about their stay in that town:

We lodged as boarders at the house of a Mrs. Downe, the widow of a British officer, a respectable lady, with two beautiful and amiable daughters, the oldest Miss Betsy, about 19, and the youngest Miss Sally 16 years of age. There were no other boarders in the house but Baron Steuben and his family, and we were kindly and hospitably treated.

The bill at parting was very moderate, but there were two items in it which excited the anger of the good Baron, and made him ejaculate more than once, diable! diable! and Tertifle! The first of these charges was “to a dog,” which, in my opinion was a very just, and correct one. The Baron had brought with him his favourite dog Azor, a fine large Italian grey hound, who ate as much as any one of us. Why the charge was objected to, I cannot well conceive; it is probable that in Germany dogs go every where scot free.

The other charge was rather extraordinary, but under the circumstances a very just one. It was “to trouble.” I cannot recollect how much the charge amounted to, but it appeared to me very moderate. Only fancy to yourself an old German Baron, with a large brilliant star on his breast, a German servant attending him, and three French aid-de-camps, and a large spoiled Italian dog. None of all that company could speak a word of English except your grandfather, who was not a grave old man, as he is at present, but loved his share of fun when it went round.

We gave trouble enough to the good lady, and though I see in her charge much naiveté, I cannot perceive in it a symptom of avarice. As she had a little of what is, I do not know why, called Yankee cunning, she would have dropped these charges, and obtained her end by swelling a little, the more usual ones. . . .

In Mrs. Downe’s family to which came frequently female visitors,...I did not fail to take advantage of my fortunate situation, being the only person in our company who could speak the language of the country; I interpreted it as true as in duty bound, between the Baron and the old lady, and transmitted sometimes a few compliments from him to the young ones, but I left my brother beaux to shift for themselves. There they stood, or sat like Indians, and could talk only by signs. But the ladies had not studied Hieroglyphics, and I had the field all to myself. O! those were delightful times!

Italian greyhound portrait courtesy of Italian-Greyhound.net and Pet Action Shots.

Peter Duponceau Meets Samuel Adams

Peter Stephen Duponceau was born in France in 1760 as Pierre Etienne du Ponceau. His family, genteel but impoverished, pushed him into a church career because of his proficiency as a scholar, but in his mid-teens he ran away to Paris.

In 1777, du Ponceau met Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus von Steuben, a former officer of the Prussian army and out-of-work courtier. Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane were trying to recruit Steuben for the Continental Army, believing him to have been a general for Frederick the Great. Steuben initially turned them down because they didn’t offer enough money, but then a sex scandal gave him a strong reason to get out of Europe. Du Ponceau was expert in English, enamored of republicanism, and up for adventure, so the baron took him on as a translator and aide.

As it turned out, du Ponceau made a terrible military officer: utterly inexperienced, near-sighted, comically absent-minded, and sickly. He was, however, committed to the new U.S. of A. He settled in Philadelphia after the war, Americanized his name, and became a very good linguist and lawyer.

In 1836 Duponceau began to relate his Revolutionary experiences in letters to a colleague named Robert Walsh and then to his granddaughter. These letters have been reprinted in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Here is Duponceau’s recollection of his conversations with Samuel Adams in early 1778:

I shall never forget the compliment paid me by Samuel Adams on his discovering my Republican principles. “Where,” said he to me, “did you learn all that?”

“In France,” replied I.

“In France! that is impossible.” Then, recovering himself, he added, “Well, because a man was born in a stable, it is no reason why he should be a horse.” I thought to myself, that in matters of compliment they ordered these things better in France.

Adams, as a good traditional Yankee, viewed France as a big barrel of papist despotism.

Speaking of Samuel Adams I remember something of him that let me into the little jealousies that then existed between some of the great men of the day. I sat next to him at a dinner given by Govr. [John] Hancock to Baron Steuben, and happened, by mistake, to call him Mr. John Adams.

“Sir,” said he, looking sternly at me, “I would have you know that there is a very great difference between Mr. Samuel Adams (striking his breast and laying a strong emphasis on the word Samuel) and Mr. John Adams.”

I was afterwards on my guard addressing people by their Christian names.

John Adams also occasionally had to deal with people who thought he was Samuel. Although Duponceau recalled this mix-up as an example of “little jealousies,” the Adams cousins, who weren’t shy about expressing their resentments, almost always had good things to say about each other.