“Shall we in equal strains return / Thy spleen, and answer scorn with scorn?”

The Journal of American Constitutional History just published (open access, and thus available to all) David Waldstreicher’s article “Racism, Black Voices, Emancipation, and Constitution-Making in Massachusetts, 1778.”

Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, just issued in paperback, and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification.

In that biography, Waldstreicher appended a number of poems published anonymously in the New England press that he “tentatively” attributes to Phillis Wheatley (or Phillis Peters, as she became after her marriage in late 1778).

One appeared in the 12 Feb 1778 Independent Chronicle in the midst of Massachusetts’s debate over ratifying a new constitution. This would be an unusual work for Wheatley, in both subject and form. She had never before exchanged literary insults in the weekly press, nor published in the satirical mode, and she rarely wrote in tetrameter. (One exception to the last pattern was “Ode to Neptune,” subject of my article for Commonplace.)

On the other hand, this poem was a direct response to one that attacked the idea of rights for black people in Massachusetts and used the name “Phillis” to refer to a politician’s black mistress. It shows poetic skill and some rhetorical resemblances to Wheatley’s published work, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the state having more reason to write it.

Waldstreicher’s paper goes into more detail than his book about the poem—its political context, its literary grounding, the verses it responded to, the reasons to link it to Wheatley. In doing so, it offers a snapshot of the state’s process of creating a constitution. That 1778 document proved to be a dead end, but this debate turned out to have a strong effect on the successful 1780 document.

Ironically, in the paper Waldstreicher stays just clear of stating that Wheatley wrote this poem, acknowledging other possibilities and calling it “Wheatleyan.” That may account for why the title of the paper doesn’t include Wheatley’s name, just “Black Voices.” 

In contrast, the book posits “If this poem is by Wheatley” and then proceeds to treat it as her work, indeed “a key work in her oeuvre.” That approach could have been demanded by how many other topics a biography has to cover, leaving less chance to pause and work through nuances. Or it could have been allowed by a different level of peer review pressure. Either way, it’s clear that Waldstreicher is convinced this poem is most likely Phillis Wheatley’s own commentary on the state of racial politics in Massachusetts in 1778.

And with the article freely available, everyone has a chance to study the poem, the verses it replied to, and the multi-layered analysis.

Fort Plain Museum’s 2024 Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 14–16 June

The Fort Plain Museum’s Revolutionary War Conference 250 in the Mohawk Valley will take place this year on 14–16 June in Johnstown, New York. Registration is open.

The scheduled speakers are:

• James Kirby Martin and guest host Mark Edward Lender having a fireside chat about the American Revolutionary War, its Sestercentennial, and their legacies as historians
• Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, “Alexander Hamilton’s War for American Economic Independence Through Two Documents” (supported by the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society)
• Gary Ecelbarger, “‘This Happy Opportunity’: George Washington and the Battle of Germantown”
• Shirley L. Green, “Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence”
• Mark Edward Lender, “‘Liberty or Death!’: Some Revolutionary Statistics and Existential Warfare”
• Shawn David McGhee, “No Longer Subjects of the British King: The Political Transformation of Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens, 1774-1776”
• James Kirby Martin, “The Marquis de Lafayette Visits the Mohawk Valley, Again and Again”
• Kristofer Ray, “The Cherokees, the Six Nations and Indian Diplomacy circa 1763-1776”
• Matthew E. Reardon, “The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, September 4-13, 1781”
• John L. Smith, “The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman ‘Not Apt to Be Intimidated’” (supported by the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation)
• Bruce M. Venter, “Albany and the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765”
• Glenn F. Williams, “No Other Motive Than the True Interest of This Country: Dunmore’s War 1774”
• Chris Leonard, Schenectady City Historian, “Storehouse Schenectady: Depot and Transportation Center for the Northern War”
• David Moyer, “Recent Archaeology Discoveries on the Site of Revolutionary War Fort Plain”

There will also be a bus tour of Revolutionary sites in the area with the theme of “1774: The Rising Tide.” In that year Schenectady saw a violent Liberty Pole riot while the British Indian agent Sir William Johnson passed away in July.

For more information, visit this page.

Upcoming Revolutionary Events in Newport

The Newport Historical Society is hosting a couple of Revolutionary history events in the next few days.

Wednesday, 6 March, 6:30 to 7:30 P.M.
“Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence”
Shirley L. Green

William and Benjamin Frank joined the integrated Second Rhode Island Regiment in the spring of 1777. That unit saw action along the Delaware River in the defense of Fort Mercer and the battle of Red Bank before falling back with the rest of the army to Valley Forge.

After the Battle of Monmouth, the Frank brothers were transferred into the new and segregated First Rhode Island Regiment, composed of Black and Native American soldiers, including enslaved men promised freedom in exchange for service. This “Black Regiment” fought in the Battle of Rhode Island in August 1778. Later the brothers’ paths diverged, and they ended up settling in different countries.

Green based her book Revolutionary Blacks on her family’s oral history, archival research, interviews, and DNA evidence. Her talk is presented by the Battle of Rhode Island Association and the Newport Historical Society. Admission is $20, $15 for society members and people serving in the military. Register through this page.

Saturday, 9 March, 11:00 A.M. to 12:15 P.M.
“Newport’s British Occupation” walking tour
Brandon Aglio

In 1777, seven thousand British and Hessian soldiers invaded Newport, starting a military occupation that lasted for nearly three years. An expert tour guide dressed in an authentic 18th-century British military uniform leads this exploration of the sites and the stories from this trying time.

This event costs $15 for adults, $10 for members of the society and U.S. military, $5 for children ages 5–12. Register through this page.

“The Art of Horsemanship in all its different branches”

As I wrote yesterday, by 1781 a man named Jacob Bates was living north of Philadelphia and breeding horses.

Was this the same Jacob Bates who had visited Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Newport in 1772 and 1773, exhibiting feats of horsemanship for paying audiences?

Starting in mid-1785, a man named Pool advertised similar equestrian exhibitions in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. I’m looking into Pool, and what I’ve found so far is surprising enough that I have to pause to catch my breath. I hope to tell you soon.

What’s important to this story is that in August 1785 Pool came to Philadelphia and erected “a MENAGE, as a very considerable expence.” It stood “near the Centre-House,” a prominent tavern. Back in 1772, folks could buy tickets for Bates’s shows at the same Centre-House.

Bates had used the same term for where he showed his horses, spelling it “Manage.” Strictly speaking, it meant a riding school rather than a theater, but of course he wanted to elevate his craft.

Pool moved on from Philadelphia. It looks like he was in New York at the end of September 1785, and in 1786 in Boston and New York again.

On 28 Apr 1787, a year and a half after Pool’s departure from Philadelphia, Jacob Bates announced that he was starting a riding school:

The MENAGE
At the Center-House will be Opened on the 7th day of May, by the subscriber, for the instruction of Ladies and Gentlemen in that manly, useful and healthy exercise, the Art of Horsemanship in all its different branches: as he had the honour of instructing several Gentlemen 6 years ago, and likewise last summer, he hopes the pupils that may in future come under his care, will not find the least reason to complain, either of his abilities or attention.

The days of exercise will be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for the Gentlemen; and in order that business may not be interrupted, nor Gentlemen incommoded with the heat of the day, he proposes to begin each morning at 4 o’clock and close at 8 o’clock.

JACOB BATES.

N.B. Ladies will be attended to on the other three days.

I don’t think there’s any way to know if Pool’s “MENAGE” had stayed up until Bates started to use it, or if Bates had to rebuild from scratch. But the fact that the two men referred to the same spot is probably why some authors say Bates took over or even rented Pool’s establishment.

Back in 1772, Jacob Bates didn’t sell horseback riding lessons, however much he hinted that his equestrian displays were instructive. But perhaps he was getting too old for those tricks, and genteel riding lessons looked like an easier way to make money.

It looks like the riding school didn’t last more than a season, however, and Bates went back to his property in the Northern Liberties.

In September 1788 Bates advertised the auction of the Richard Hopkins estate in the Independent Gazetteer. However, on 26 Nov 1789 the sheriff advertised the same estate for sale, apparently having seized it under a prior writ.

Nonetheless, Bates was still out at Point-no-Point in July 1792 when he offered an “Eight Dollars Reward” for the finding “a Negro boy named RICHMOND, about eighteen years of age.” Bates stated: “he may pretend to know something of breaking, riding, and taking care of horses as he has seen something of it.” Presumably young Richmond’s experience working with horses for Bates was precisely why Bates wanted him back.

Finally, on 18 Mar 1793 Johoshaphat Polk and Philip Redman advertised the settlement of “the Estate of Jacob Bates, late of Point-no-Point, deceased.” If this Pennsylvanian was indeed the man who had toured colonial ports showing of his riding skills in 1772–73, he had returned to the continent and died as an American.

Celebrations of Phillis Wheatley’s Boston Pub Date

At the end of November 1773, the ship Dartmouth was moored in Boston’s inner harbor, watched by a militia-style patrol of volunteers to ensure the tea it carried was not unloaded and taxed.

The Rotch family’s vessel, under the command of James Hall, brought other cargo as well. Among those items were copies of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Wheatley had recently become legally free, and she was counting on sales of those books for her income.

Fortunately, by 1 December the local Whigs made clear that everything could be unloaded from the Dartmouth except the East India Company tea, so the books came ashore.

Historians only recently recognized the connection between Wheatley’s book and the Boston Tea Party because no one mentioned it at the time. Wheatley may have been worried 250 years ago today, but by the time she was writing the letters that survive she had her books on dry land and was busy promoting orders.

Wheatley wrote that her books would arrive “in Capt. Hall,” using the common way of referring to a ship by its master rather than its name. About ten years ago Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, researcher Richard Kigel, and others realized that the captain of that name arriving in Boston around that time had to be James Hall on the Dartmouth.

The sestercentennial of the Tea Party thus coincides with the sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s book in America, and both events are being commemorated this season.

Ada Solanke’s play Phillis in Boston will have its last performances for the year in Old South Meeting House, the poet’s own church, on Sunday, 3 December. That site-specific drama depicts the poet, her friend Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, her recent owner Susannah Wheatley, and abolitionist Prince Hall. Order tickets here.

The next evening, 4 December, the Boston Public Library will host “Faces of Phillis,” a free program discussing the poet from various perspectives. It will start with a staged reading of parts of Solanke’s plays about Wheatley. Then there will be a panel featuring Solanke, sculptor Meredith Bergmann, and Kyera Singleton of the Royall House & Slave Quarters museum. The evening will conclude with Boston’s Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola, performing a dramatic reading of her own work and one of Wheatley’s poems.

“Faces of Phillis” is scheduled to last from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. Register for that event here.

Peering into a Prison in 1799

Richard Brunton (1749–1832) came to America to fight for his king as a grenadier in the 38th Regiment. That lasted until 1779, when he deserted.

As Deborah M. Child relates in her biography, Soldier, Engraver, Forger, Brunton struggled to make an honest living in New England with his talent and training as an engraver.

One product he kept coming back to was family registers and other genealogical forms. Another was counterfeit currency.

In 1799 the state of Connecticut sent Brunton to the Old New-Gate Prison in East Granby for forging coins. To pay his accompanying fine, he made art, including a portrait of Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, a seal of the state arms, and a picture of Old New-Gate itself.

That prison, also known as the Simsbury Mines, was notorious as a place where the state held Loyalists underground during the Revolutionary War. However, in 1790 the state took over the property and rebuilt it according to a modern philosophy of criminal punishment, based on locking people up for years doing labor instead of physically punishing or hanging them. Brunton depicted the place he came to know during his two-year sentence. 

The Boston Rare Maps page for this print says:

The view suggests that coopering (barrel making) was a major activity for prisoners, as two figures can be seen at upper right engaged in the task, while another at the bottom seems to be bringing a completed barrel to a shed.

Also visible are what appear to be two African-American figures carrying buckets can be seen in the view; these figures, which are completely blackened, stand out conspicuously from the others in the view. It is documented that enslaved African-Americans worked in the copper mine that had earlier operated in the location of the prison. Whether African-American were also engaged at the prison as well is a question for further research raised by this work.

Although the engraving contains an image of a prisoner receiving the lash, as a state prison Newgate followed a relatively humane approach for the period; a prisoner could be given no more than 10 lashes, and there was a limit on time served there. Participation in labor was required of all prisoners, and in addition to coopering they also engaged in nail making, blacksmithing, wagon and plow manufacture, shoe making, basket weaving and machining.

After being released, Brunton went back to Boston, where he was arrested for counterfeiting again in 1807. He served more years in a Massachusetts state prison and finally lived out his life in Groton.

The copperplate for Brunton’s Old New-Gate image survived until about 1870, when a few more prints were made. Only a handful of copies survive, and it’s impossible to tell whether they came from the initial run or the reprint decades after the artist died.

The example shown above was recently acquired by the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island. Other prints are at the Connecticut Historical Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Learning about Phillis Wheatley in London and Boston

Ade Solanke is a British playwright of Nigerian descent. She earned an M.F.A. in screenwriting at U.S.C. on top of British degrees, and she’s now a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.

Solanke specializes in stories about the African diaspora. In 2018 her play Phillis in London debuted at the Greenwich Book Festival. It dramatized the experiences of Phillis Wheatley in the summer of 1773, visiting the imperial capital to promote the publication of her book of poetry.

On Monday, 30 October, Solanke will be at the Massachusetts Historical Society for a reading from that play and a panel discussion about researching it, titled “Bringing Phillis to Life.” The other panelists will be:

• Tara Bynum, author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America.
• David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley.

That event starts at 5:30 with a reception, and the program will begin at 6:00. Admission is $10, free to members. People can also watch online for free. Register to attend one way or the other through this page.

On Friday, 3 November, Solanke’s new play Phillis in Boston will premiere at the Old South Meeting-House—no doubt the event that’s bringing the playwright to Boston. (There will be preview performances the previous two nights.)

Directed by Regge Life, Phillis in Boston explores the life of the poet soon after she returned from London. Revolutionary Spaces says:

The play celebrates friendship, love, community, and joy by centering Wheatley’s relationships with her friend and confidant Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, and the dynamic abolitionist Prince Hall. Phillis in Boston examines slavery in New England through the lens of Wheatley’s complex relationship with her enslaver Susanna Wheatley, who supported Wheatley’s literary ambitions even as she kept her in bondage.

Phillis in Boston is designed to be performed in the meetinghouse where Wheatley and other revolutionaries were congregants.

Solanke’s play will run in that space through Sunday, 3 December, on evenings from Wednesday through Sunday. Tickets cost $15–35. For more information and to reserve seats, visit this page.

(The striking image above comes from the webpage of an event at the British Library earlier this month, all inspired by the sestercentennial of Wheatley’s book.)

Local Archeology for Local Historians in Charlestown and Medford

On Thursday, October 26, folks have a choice between two events on local archeology north of the Charles.

At 6:00 P.M., the City of Boston Archaeology Program, Boston’s Commemoration Commission, and the National Park Service will hold a “public listening event” at the Bunker Hill Museum, asking what people want to know about that battlefield and the destruction of Charlestown.

Co-sponsored by the Charlestown Historical Society and Charlestown Preservation Society, this session will feature Joe Bagley and the City Archaeology Program team, Genesis Pimentel of the Commemoration Commission, and Meg Watters Wilkes of the National Park Service. They will discuss previous archeological work around the battle and how new technology and methods might reveal more.

Folks can help the presenters prepare, or participate in the ongoing discussion, by filling out this form asking about interests in the battle.

At 7:00 P.M. the Medford Historical Commission will host “History Beneath Our Feet: The Archaeology of Thomas Brooks Park” at the Medford Public Library.

This event description says:

Located in West Medford, the wooded and grassy parcel is an important reminder of Native Americans, northern slavery and the Brooks family. The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. and the Commission will share artifacts which were excavated by volunteers from the recent archaeological dig and talk about how these tiny fragments provide greater insight into the people who inhabited the landscape.

Thomas Brooks owned that land in the mid-1700s, and he also owned a man named Pomp, who around 1765 built a decorative brick wall that’s preserved in the park. The area was recently restored, as described on the historical commission’s website, and part of that work was the new study.

(The photo above, courtesy of the Medford Historical Commission, shows one of the bricks from Pomp’s wall, preserving the impressions of the fingers of the person who made it.)

Exploring the Boston Slavery Database

Speaking of the city of Boston’s Archaeology Program, its staff took the lead in developing the “Slavery in Boston” exhibit in Faneuil Hall that I discussed back in June.

Its webpages host the online complement of that exhibit.

Those webpages include the Boston Slavery Database, a spreadsheet listing (as of 12 October) “2,357 Black and Indigenous people enslaved in Boston between 1641 and 1783.”

It looks like that listing was compiled mainly by compiling the enslaved people named in “the probate records for Boston proper and Dorchester,” along with research by historians Aabid Allibhai, Jared Ross Hardesty, and Wayne Tucker. The agency acknowledges that it’s incomplete.

Indeed, I ran some test searches for people like Onesimus Mather, Caesar Marion, Surry (Adams), Nero Faneuil, and Sharp Gardner, and didn’t find them.

Printers Pompey and Caesar Fleet appear, but not their father, Peter Fleet. Oliver Wendell appears twice as a slaveholder, but his servant Andrew, documented as testifying about the Boston Massacre, doesn’t show up.

The Boston Globe said one goal of this effort was to inform the public about colonial Bostonians in bondage “beyond the better known names of Phillis Wheatley and Prince Hall.” Ironically, neither of those names appears in the database.

All those missing names show how much larger the institution of slavery was over its fourteen decades in Boston. They also show the limits of one type of historic record. Enslaved people don’t appear in probate records if they died or were freed before their owner died, or if the vagaries of an owner’s estate mean that they weren’t specifically bequeathed or valued. Or if those documents simply disappeared.

The website says: “If you have done research and found evidence of an enslaved Bostonian who is not yet on this list, please email us with your data so that we can add them, with credit.” So this database is like Wikipedia, in that spotting an error or omission also confers some opportunity and responsibility to do something about it. Unfortunately, it’s easier to poke holes than to fix them. But I’ll add figuring out this database to my list of tasks.

Smithsonian’s Phillis Wheatley Peters Collection Now Online

Last month the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., announced the acquisition of the Phillis Wheatley Peters Collection of materials related to the Revolutionary-era poet.

The unique jewel in this collection is the poem “Ocean” in the poet’s own handwriting. This was one of the poems listed for Phillis Peters’s second collection in 1781, but during the war that announcement didn’t attract enough subscriptions for the book to be printed.

The manuscript of that collection is lost, but some individual poems survive. “Ocean” was first published in 1998. Scholars speculate that Phillis Wheatley wrote it during her third transatlantic crossing 250 years ago as she came back from London.

The collection of thirty objects includes six published in Wheatley’s lifetime, including:

• her collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
• short items that her publisher placed in the May 1773 Gentleman’s Magazine ahead of publication.
• the December 1774 issue of the Royal American Magazine, published in Boston by Joseph Greenleaf, printing “To a Gentleman of the Navy.”
• A shortened version of “On the Death of a Child” printed in the Rev. John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine in 1781.

Other items show Wheatley’s legacy as an author and a symbol of African-American achievement:

• Isaiah Thomas’s 1791 proposal to reprint Wheatley’s first collection with additional material, also unsuccessful.
• reprints of individual poems in the early 1800s. 
• scholarly studies.
• a booklet issued by the Phillis Wheatley Club of Waycross, Georgia, a women’s club, in 1930, shown above.

All of that material is already digitized and available for viewing on the Smithsonian’s website and through the Digital Public Library of America.

Behind Watson and the Shark

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Essays on “Wheatley in London”

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

The call says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Samuel Swift Sought Scipio

While researching the Boston lawyer Samuel Swift last month, I came across a series of advertisements he placed in Boston newspapers in 1770.

The Boston Evening-Post, 28 May:

SCIPIO, a smooth fac’d Negro Fellow, pretty black, 22 Years old, on the 23d Inst. [i.e., of this month] ran away from his Master; he has since chang’d his Cloaths: His Hair or Wool grows something onward upon his Cheeks, is good natured and artful, inclines to a Seafaring Life; bent his Course towards Providence or Rhode-Island. Whoever will convey him to his said Master in Boston, shall be handsomly rewarded by
SAMUEL SWIFT.

P.S. It may be needless for any Captain of a Ship or other Vessel to harbour him, as it may not eventually be either for their Profit or Honor, he is such an Urchin.

Boston, May 26, 1770.

Usually people seeking other people they claimed as property put the same ad in as many newspapers as they could afford, and then kept those ads running week after week until the runaway was found or they gave up. But Swift wrote multiple versions of his notice.

The Boston Gazette, 4 June:

Run-away from his Master the 23d Instant, a Negro Fellow about 22 Years old, has since chang’d his Cloaths. His Hair or Wool grows pretty much on his Cheeks, smooth-fac’d, his Fore-teeth jet out a little, is artful and good natured, went towards Providence. Whoever conveys him to his Master, shall be well rewarded, by
SAMUEL SWIFT.

N.B. It is taken for granted all Captains of Vessels will discountenance him.

Boston, May 26, 1770.

Those ads didn’t have any effect, so on 28 June the Boston News-Letter published this:

TO all worthy Brothers and other Generous Commanders of Ships or other Vessels sailing between the Poles,—as also to all the valourous Sons of Zebulon and others, however dispers’d upon the wide surface of old-Ocean, or upon any Island or Main-laid upon this habitable Globe, into whose Hands these may chance to fall:—

Note well,—THAT on the 23d of May 1770, SCIPIO, a Negro Man near 23 Years old, Ran from the Subscriber,——He is five Feet and 3 or 4 Inches high, little more or less, and well set, his Hair or Wool (unless shav’d) comes low upon his Cheeks, his Fore-teeth rather splaying, has an Incision mark on one of his Arms where he was Inoculated, and 2 or 3 Scars in his Legs where he was lanc’d, is pretty black, with a flattish-Nose, tho’ not that flat so peculiar to Negroes, is very Artful—Speaks plain but something inward and hollow, inclines much to the Sea, will make an able Seaman, and is a Cooper,—

If he returns voluntarily he shall not be whipt as he deserves, but I will either sell him to a Good Ship-Master, or lett him as he shall chuse, till he has Earnt his prime Cost, &c, when I will give him his Freedom,—but if any shall bring or convey him to his Master, shall be paid EIGHT DOLLARS, by
SAMUEL SWIFT.

P. S. I at present forbear mentioning the Ship I am satisfy’d he went off in.

The word “Brothers” in the top line might have been an address to Swift’s fellow Freemasons. “Sons of Zebulon” referred to mariners, but rarely enough that it’s an example of Swift’s uncommon phrasing.

The term “prime cost” usually appears in Boston newspapers of this time to mean a good price for the consumer, so Swift appears to have been promising Scipio he wouldn’t have to pay the maximum amount for his freedom. But he’d still have to pay.

Swift’s last ad continued to run through late July. I see no evidence Scipio ever came back to the attorney, voluntarily or not.

When Phillis Met Benjamin

On 7 July 1773, nearly two hundred fifty years ago, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his relative Jonathan Williams, Sr., in Boston:

Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and offer’d her any Services I could do her. Before I left the House, I understood her Master was there and had sent her to me but did not come into the Room himself, and I thought was not pleased with the Visit. I should perhaps have enquired first for him; but I had heard nothing of him. And I have heard nothing since of her.

The “black Poetess” was, of course, Phillis Wheatley, in London to finalize arrangements for the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Franklin Papers editors suggest that Nathaniel Wheatley kept away from the discussion because of the previous year’s Somerset v. Stewart case. Williams later apologized for having set up the meeting if the young man was going to behave that way. I think there could be any number of other reasons for his absence; we don’t have the Wheatleys’ side of this encounter.

Regardless of any awkwardness surrounding that event, Franklin’s letter shows that he and Wheatley did meet face to face. He came away with no reason to doubt what Bostonians reported about her intelligence and poetic skill.

Debbie Weiss wrote a play inspired by that event, “A Revolutionary Encounter in London.” It was an online presentation through the Massachusetts Historical Society a couple of years ago during the plague, and there are other videos online as well.

On Saturday, 1 July, the Lexington Historical Society will host a staged reading of “A Revolutionary Encounter in London,” directed by Weiss with Cathryn Phillipe portraying Phillis Wheatley and Josiah George as Benjamin Franklin. That presentation will start at 6:30 P.M. in the Lexington Depot. Tickets are $25, available here. Society members get a discount on tickets and can stay to talk with the actors and playwright-director over tea and desserts.

Weiss, Philippe, and George will next bring the show to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum on Thursday, 6 July, at 7:00 P.M. I think seats are included in the museum admission for that day.

Wheatley stayed in London for only about six weeks. Learning that Nathaniel’s mother Susannah Wheatley was ill, she left before her book was printed. The publisher shipped copies to Boston later in the year for her to sell.

Unfortunately, those books traveled on the Dartmouth, which also carried the first consignment of East India Company tea to reach Boston. Hence the Tea Party connection.

“Revolution’s Edge” Premieres at Old North, 15 June

Old North Illuminated has commissioned a new play depicting the tensions within its Anglican congregation on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

The playwright and producer is Patrick Gabridge. Through Plays in Place, he has previously written site-specific dramas about the Boston Massacre and the John Hancock household for Revolutionary Spaces.

“Revolution’s Edge” portrays three men connected with Christ Church, Boston, in early 1775:

• the Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Jr., the minister and a firm Loyalist, though descended from the Puritan Mathers. 
• John Pulling, a vestryman on the committee who hired Byles, a merchant captain, and an active Whig (member of the North End Caucus, for example). 
• Cato, a domestic servant enslaved to Byles, married to a woman enslaved to Byles’s in-laws out in Roxbury. 

All three men have young children. All three face the prospects of separating from their families or communities. Byles has just resigned to take a pulpit in New Hampshire while Pulling is wondering if it’s safe for him to remain in army-occupied Boston.

And it’s also the morning of 18 April.

To hear more about this production and the historical facts behind it, listen to Gabridge and Nikki Stewart, execuctive director of Old North Illuminated, chatting with Jacob Sconyers for the HUB History podcast. (Disclosure: Stewart and Sconyers are married. Double disclosure: I’m referenced in this discussion.)

“Revolution’s Edge” will premiere on Thursday, 15 June. After that, there will be performances every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening until 19 September. Seating starts at 5:00 P.M., with the performance running from about 5:20 to a little after 6:00. Tickets are $20 for adults, $10 for people under age eighteen, though the show isn’t really recommended for kids under twelve.

Larson on American Inheritance in Boston, 31 May

On Wednesday, 31 May, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a talk by Edward J. Larson on his new book, American Inheritance: Liberty & Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795.

The publisher’s description of the book says:

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? . . .

With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades.

Larson’s narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, throughout Larson’s history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

Larson is University Professor of History and Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. His books include The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789; A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign; and Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, which received a Pulitzer Prize.

This talk will be a hybrid event. The Zoom feed will start at 6:00 P.M. while in-person attendees can enjoy a reception in the preceding half-hour. Register for either form of access here.

“Finding Mrs. Phillis” in Cambridge, 20 May

On Saturday, 20 May, the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge will host an event called “Finding Mrs. Phillis” with Toni Bee and Nicole Aljoe.

Bee is a poet, teacher, and Poetry Ambassador for Cambridge. Aljoe is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. They’re two of the three coauthors of “Reading and Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters in Boston,” published in a recent issue in Early American Literature.

The event description says:

Through a historical eye and a creative mind, the Professor and the Poet will lecture on the correspondence between General George Washington and Poet Phillis Wheatley Peters. This event includes a lecture, house tour, and poetry workshop.

It is scheduled to start at 2:00 P.M. and end at 4:00. Register to attend here.

The phrase “Mrs. Phillis” comes from Gen. George Washington’s letter to Phillis Wheatley, sent from that Cambridge mansion during the siege of Boston on 28 Feb 1776.

As the owner of a slave-labor plantation, Washington was used to addressing and referring to enslaved people by their first names—even when he knew they had surnames—and with no honorifics like “Mr.” or “Mrs.” For example, as he freed his wartime bodyservant in his will, Washington referred to that man as “my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee).”

The commander-in-chief was completely unprepared to receive a letter and poem from a black woman, someone he knew had been enslaved until recently. She signed herself “Phillis Wheatley.” Had she been white, the general would certainly have started his reply to her with “Dear Miss Wheatley.”

Instead, Washington wrote, “Dear Mrs. Phillis,” casting the poet into an in-between space, neither fully respected nor completely disrespected.

Kongo, “Angolans,” and the Stono Region

Another mystery of the article about early American fossil discoveries that I quoted yesterday was why the author identified the enslaved people who recognized elephantine teeth as coming from the “Kingdom of Kongo.”

The main source on that historic episode, the naturalist Mark Catesby, didn’t mention where in Africa those workers had come from.

However, that discovery occurred in the Stono region of South Carolina around 1725. The same region was the site of a significant uprising by enslaved people in 1739.

As this P.B.S. description says, white slaveholders identified the initial leader of that rebellion a ”an Angolan named Jemmy.”

The History Bandits website states:

The leaders of the initial insurrection were reportedly “Angolans” and suspected to have connections with Spanish Florida. They spoke Portuguese, which many South Carolinians understood to be “a dialect of Spanish, such as Scots is to English” and demonstrated certain adherences to the Catholic faith. One South Carolina planter around this time complained that “many Thousands of the Negroes profess the Roman Catholic Religion,” having learned its tenants [tenets] in Africa before being brought to the New World.

The period term “Angolan” appears to have been a misnomer:

In the early eighteenth century, however, most actual Angolan slaves were shipped directly from the Portuguese colony across the southern Atlantic to Brazil. When South Carolinians employed the term “Angolan,” they were more likely referring to the coast of West Central Africa, which British ship captains called the “Angolan Coast.” The port of Kabinda, near the mouth of Zaire River, served as the main point of embarkation for the slave trade in the region . . .

the slaves themselves came from the vast African interior. Distinguishing actual identities and backgrounds of African slaves is often impossible. Given that the leaders of the Stono Rebellion spoke Portuguese and practiced Catholicism, it seems likely that they came from the Kingdom of Kongo, the only region of West Central Africa with a long history of exposure to both the Catholic Church and Portuguese traders.

Thus, while it appears to be an assumption that the people who identified the mammoth teeth were from Kongo, there’s solid historical reason for making that assumption. That would be consistent with a knowledge of elephants. In Fossil Legends of the First Americans, Adrienne Mayor noted that the Congo region was the home of “living Loxodonta elephant species.”

However, there were also elephants in the Senegambia region and other parts of western Africa, home to most people shipped to North America. The slaveholders of the Stono region appear to have seen the “Angolans” as a troublemaking fraction of the people they claimed, not typical. Thus, while the people who saw the resemblance between mammoth and elephant teeth could well have included captives from Kongo, I don’t think that was the only possibility.

“For the Information of the Friends of the unhappy Prisoners”

On 27 Nov 1777, the Independent Chronicle newspaper of Boston reported on a ship sailing under a flag of truce:

Last Sunday returned here a Flag from Halifax, with about 60 Prisoners, whose gastly Countenances and feeble Limbs present a striking View of the Cruelties which they have endured, and the horrid Situation of those who still remain there in Confinement.

The following is a List of the misfortunate Persons who belonged to the Hancock and Boston Frigates, and other Vessels, who were killed there by Starvation in the Months of July, August and September, viz.

Three lists of male names followed:

• 46 “Belonging to the Hancock,” virtually the same list transcribed here at the Continental Navy blog, with some differences in spelling.
• 6 “Belonging to the Boston.”
• 16 “Belonging to other Vessels.”

Massachusetts sent an offer to exchange prisoners for some of the surviving men, but those negotiations dragged into the new year. (Around this same time the Continental authorities were deciding not to let the “Convention Army” of prisoners from Saratoga go home to Europe after all.)

On 14 Feb 1778, John Carter of the Providence Gazette published similar information, this time prefaced:

Mr. CARTER,

For the Information of the Friends of the unhappy Prisoners, who fell a Sacrifice to British Cruelty in their Confinement at Halifax, I herewith send you a List of their Names, and request you would publish it in your next Gazette. As I was confined among them myself, and am lately arrived from Halifax, you may rely on the List being authentic.

Your’s, &c. A. B.

A List of Prisoners, taken in American Vessels, who died in Halifax Prison, between the 23d of November, 1776, and the 26th of December, 1777.

Then came a long list of names—“Total 192” said a note at the end. It included the men on the Independent Chronicle list and many more.

These names don’t appear alphabetically. Two men with only given names and the label “a Negro” appear at the bottom, but aside from that segregation there’s no indication of sorting by, for example, what ships they had served on or what prisons they died in. The men of the Hancock appear in about the same order as the chronological list linked above. In sum, this list appears to have been compiled mostly by date of death.

About four-fifths of the way through that long column appears the name “Dr. Samuel Prescott.” Thus, this Providence Gazette item is a long sought contemporaneous source confirming that the young doctor from Concord died in a Halifax prison. Since his name wasn’t on the earlier list of men who died “in the Months of July, August and September,” Dr. Prescott almost certainly died in the last months of 1777.

 

“Sons of Freedom join to sing…”

Yesterday I shared the first twenty-two verses of Lemuel Haynes’s poem ”The Battle of Lexington.”

First published in the William & Mary Quarterly in 1985, this poem has been partially reprinted in some textbooks. However, I’ve found the whole thing in only one anthology and no websites. So, in the interest of completeness, here are the remaining verses.

23
Altho our Numbers were but few
And they a Num’rous Throng
Yet we their Armies do pursue
And drive their Hosts along
24
One Son of Freedom could annoy
A Thousand Tyrant Fiends
And their despotick Tribe destroy
And chace them to their Dens
25
Thus did the Sons of Brittain’s King
Recieve a sore Disgrace
Whilst Sons of Freedom join to sing
The Vict’ry they Imbrace
26
Oh! Brittain how art thou become
Infamous in our Eye
Nearly allied to antient Rome
That Seat of Popery
27
Our Fathers, tho a feeble Band
Did leave their native Place
Exiled to a desert Land
This howling Wilderness
28
A Num’rous Train of savage Brood
Did then attack them round
But still they trusted in their God
Who did their Foes confound
29
Our Fathers Blood did freely flow
To buy our Freedom here
Nor will we let our freedom go
The Price was much too dear
30
Freedom & Life, O precious Sounds
yet Freedome does excell
and we will bleed upon the ground
or keep our Freedom still
31
But oh! how can we draw the Sword
Against our native kin
Nature recoils at such a Word
And fain wd. quit the Scene
32
We feel compassion in our Hearts
That captivating Thing
Nor shall Compassion once depart
While Life retains her String
33
Oh England let thy Fury cease
At this convulsive Hour
Consult those Things that make for Peace
Nor foster haughty Power
34
Let Brittain’s king call home his Band
of Soldiers arm’d to fight
To see a Tyrant in our Land
Is not a pleasing Sight
35
Allegiance to our King we own
And will due Homage pay
As does become his royal Throne
Yet in a legal Way
36
Oh Earth prepare for solemn Things
Behold an angry God
Beware to meet the King of Kings
Arm’d with an awefull Rod
37
Sin is the Cause of all our Woe
That sweet deluding ill
And till we let this darling go
There's greater Trouble still

This poem survived as a manuscript in Haynes’s handwriting. A lot of words are crossed out. One whole verse was composed, shifted, and finally rewritten for another place in the poem. (Except for the introductory line yesterday, I didn’t indicate the earlier language, but it all appears in the William & Mary Quarterly.) Thus, this was almost certainly Haynes’s working manuscript.

In her article on the first publication, Ruth Bogin deduced that Haynes wrote the poem in the spring of 1775 because he complained about the regulars’ actions in the Battle of Lexington and Concord but didn’t mention the greater destruction of Bunker Hill.

The poem also matches the political situtation early in the war, when American colonists still proclaimed their loyalty to King George III and appealed to him to reverse his ministers’ policies.

As we should expect from a future minister raised in a rural New England deacon’s household, these lines reflect a Congregationalist outlook on the conflict, fusing the current political crisis with the Last Judgment. In metre and length, the poem echoes common hymns.

That outlook is why Haynes described the royal government as “Nearly allied to…That Seat of Popery,” as if all oppression stemmed from Rome. Three years later, the U.S. of A. would sign a treaty with Catholic France, making that sentiment less tenable.

(The photo above shows the Rev. Lemuel Haynes’s grave in Granville, New York, courtesy of Find a Grave.)