Meeting Mary Vanderlight through Her Account Books

Hope (Power) Brown died in 1792 at the age of ninety. Her gravestone told visitors she was “The mother of Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses Brown.”

As Karen Wulf recently wrote at Commonplace, that left off Hope’s daughter, Mary (Brown) Vanderlight (1731–95).

“The Brown Brothers Had a Sister” shares what information survives about that member of the prominent Providence family:

She married David Vanderlight, a doctor and Dutch immigrant, in the early 1750s. Both her husband and their only child, a baby boy, died in February of 1755.

When she died in the spring of 1795, Mary Brown Vanderlight had been a widow for four decades, and lived on her own or with her mother. Like her mother, she remained a stalwart of the Baptist church that their forebears had helped found (though her brothers wandered to Quakerism and the Anglican church). Like her mother, she never remarried. Like her mother, she was the administrator of her husband’s estate, a complex job that came with significant legal and other practical responsibilities.

The main documentation for Vanderlight’s life is in account books—hers and other people’s. She started tracking her finances before her marriage, helped her husband manage his practice, and kept going as she had to support herself.

From the time David died, Mary continued the surviving account books. It looks like she also continued to serve patients at least by selling medicines but maybe also by practicing—or even teaching. As late as 1757 she was billing her neighbor Elisha Shearman for having trained his son in the “arts of apothicary.”

She also took up her husband’s role in the library [now the Providence Atheneum] and was listed as one of only two women among the nearly 150 “proprietors” who regularly paid to support—and use—it. . . .

She also kept investing. These investments included, according to a single notation in one of her brother’s accounts, helping to finance the infamous slaving voyage of the Sally.

Where did Mary Vanderlight learn to keep accounts? Wulf writes that she probably learned that skill from her mother, who for decades managed her own books and tracked who in the family owned what.

Jacob Bates Finds New Pastures in Newport

On 25 Oct 1773, two and half centuries ago, the Newport Mercury reported:

Last week Mr. Bates, the famous horseman, arrived in town, from Boston, and ’tis supposed he will perform this week.

Jacob Bates may have planted this item with printer Solomon Southwick, but it’s more tentative than his usual style.

When Bates arrived in New York and then Boston, he took out long advertisements proclaiming his skills, his triumphs in Europe, and exactly when locals would have the fortunate opportunity to see him perform.

But no such advertisements appeared in the Newport newspapers, not even little ones. Was he out of money? Or did he not need to advertise in Rhode Island because there was already plenty of interest in horsemanship—as reflected in this newspaper item?

Southern New England was known for producing horses. Since the late 1600s, Rhode Island’s governors usually listed horses first on their lists of the colony’s exports. The principal market was the sugar islands in the Caribbean, where the animals provided power for planting and refining as well as transportation.

In 1715 the governor of Barbados complained about how French and Dutch colonies had come to rival his island in producing sugar “owing to the great Supplies of Horses they receive from New England.” In 1729 a British merchant claimed that New England captains had told him they didn’t have to pay fees on French islands as long as they arrived with sixty horses. Two years later, British Caribbean planters asked Parliament to forbid the sale of horses outside the empire, but the mainland traders managed to head off that legislation.

Rhode Island was also a center of horse racing. The Rev. James MacSparran wrote in America Dissected (1753) that Rhode Island’s “fine horses…are exported to all parts of English America. They are remarkable for their fleetness and swift pacing, and I have seen some of them pace a mile in little more than two minutes, a good deal less than three.” Eventually these horses would be recognized as Narragansett pacers.

Thus, in moving his equestrian exhibitions from Boston to Newport, Jacob Bates was shifting to a smaller town but perhaps finding more appreciative audiences.

From the “Lower Counties” to an Independent State

Earlier in the week, I wrote about the fewer-than-thirteen colonies represented in Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 “JOIN, or DIE.” cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette.

The snake parts included Pennsylvania but not Delaware. From one perspective, Delaware was merely a part or adjunct of Pennsylvania. From another, it was a separate polity. The question wasn’t settled until 1776.

The area on the west side of what we call the Delaware River was the home of the Lenape, Nanticoke, and possibly Tuscarora people at the start of the seventeenth century. In 1631 the Dutch established a colony near the site of today’s Lewes, but that lasted about a year.

In 1638 Sweden tried imperial expansion and set up a colony at what’s now Wilmington. The Dutch returned in strength and took back the territory in 1655. Then the English seized Delaware from the Dutch in 1664.

That English expedition was acting on behalf of Prince James, Duke of York, later James II. Baron Baltimore, proprietor of Maryland, argued that the land should belong to his colony, but a duke had more clout than a baron. York turned his territory over to William Penn in 1682.

Penn was pleased that Philadelphia now enjoyed access to the sea along the Delaware River. He included his new “lower counties” in the Pennsylvania general assembly. But the old and new parts of the province didn’t work well together. In 1704 a separate Delaware assembly began meeting at New Castle.

In the top-down view of the Penn family and the imperial government in London, Pennsylvania and Delaware remained a single entity. They always had the same appointed governor. In 1765 the ministers in London named John Hughes as stamp master for all of Pennsylvania, including the ”lower counties.”

Franklin’s emblem showed a similar perspective. Though as a member of the Pennsylvania assembly he knew that the lower counties met separately, he didn’t think Delaware needed to be treated as a whole colony on its own. It was just an appendage to rapidly growing Pennsylvania, lacking western lands and a major port.

Other newspapers copied the Pennsylvania Gazette emblem, also leaving out Delaware. When Isaiah Thomas and Paul Revere adapted the original snake into a more dangerous kind for the Massachusetts Spy masthead, they added Georgia—but still filed Delaware under “P.”

What changed the way people looked at Delaware? I think the arrival of continent-wide Congresses was a big factor. (Ironically, the “JOIN, or DIE.” emblem was created to promote the first such gathering, the Albany Congress, which didn’t really work.)

Colony legislatures, not governors, sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and later gatherings. That meant Delaware acted separately from Pennsylvania. The two delegations had equal votes in the Congresses. American Whigs happily counted twelve colonies at the First Continental Congress, thirteen at the second.

By 1776, those politicians were proclaiming that power rose from the people—or at least that top slice of the people who elected representatives. From that bottom-up perspective, Delaware was already separate from Pennsylvania. During that year, the Delaware legislature’s declarations and resolutions formally established the state as independent not only from Britain but also from its northern neighbor.

Thompson on Hardesty, Mutiny on the Rising Sun

Last month the H-Early-America list shared Mark L. Thompson’s review of Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate by Jared Ross Hardesty.

Here’s a taste:

…Hardesty draws on this Dutch and Atlantic research but offers something new: a microhistorical account of a single smuggling venture and the wide cast of characters who were involved in and touched by it. If most contraband trade was a prosaic affair that attracted little notice, this ill-starred voyage from Barbados to Suriname in 1743 proved in several respects to be quite the opposite, as it led to murder trials, official investigations, gory printed accounts, and transcontinental legal wrangling.

Working from the long paper trail that followed in the Rising Sun’s bloody wake, Hardesty and a team of researchers in New England and the Netherlands (in particular, Ramona Negrón, a doctoral candidate in history at Leiden University) have been able to trace out the story in many directions through extensive archival research. The result is a detailed account that weaves together multiple historical threads into a well-constructed narrative.

Although the book calls itself a tragedy, it borrows its form (and appearance) from true crime with a splash of gothic horror. The dust jacket is printed in muddy black and brown tones with blood-red accents (while the cloth cover beneath is bright red with golden print along the spine). True to form, the introduction begins with an apparently placid but foreboding scene—the Rising Sun’s boatswain steering the ship on a calm June night—but by the third page the captain, supercargo, and clerk have been stabbed about twenty times, chopped with an axe, sliced with a cutlass, and, in the case of the captain, thrown overboard, “scream[ing] as he plunged into the dark abyss”. . . .

The epilogue, meanwhile, offers a fascinating account of the origins of the book, which began as an earnest effort to learn more about the namesake of “Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop,” a tourist attraction and heritage site associated with the Old North Church along the Freedom Trail in Boston. In a strange turn of events, the research for the book (sponsored in part by the candy company Mars Wrigley Confectionary) actually led to the shutting down of the chocolate shop. . . . Today the eighteenth-century Clough House that once marketed historic chocolate is home to a colonial-style print shop and an artisanal gift store. Captain Jackson’s lurid past has been well scrubbed away.

I think that last sentence could easily be read as suggesting Old North “scrubbed away…Jackson’s lurid past.” The bloody story of this voyage was scrubbed away centuries ago; Boston historians didn’t know about it.

Hardesty and his team, with the support of Old North, have brought that “lurid past” back into the light. To be sure, knowing more about Edward Jackson means his name is no longer attached to a church shop selling candy to tourists and school groups, but that seems like a Good Thing.

Thompson’s full review can be downloaded here.

Botto Sculteus Aeneae’s American War

At the Age of Revolutions site, Tessa de Boer shared a new source on the latter years of the American War for Independence through the eyes of a youth.

In August 1781, Botto Sculteus Aeneae was “a twelve-year-old boy from Amsterdam, feverishly excited about his fanciful midshipman job.”

He was serving on a ship called the South Carolina, ferrying military supplies from the Dutch island of Texel to Charleston in the young United States of America.

On 25 Nov 1783, Botto was back in Amsterdam. He described his previous two and a half years to a notary. The intervening experiences included:

• shying away from the Charleston port on learning that it had been recaptured by the British. 
• sailing the Caribbean on the South Carolina, taking prizes.
• helping the Spanish military seize the Bahamas in May 1782. 
• reaching Philadelphia, where the ship had to be restaffed with “mostly inexperienced youth desiring adventure, and Germans recruited out of British prisoner camps.” 
• quickly being captured by three British warships. 
• being sent as a prisoner onto the infamous Jersey prison ship in New York harbor. 

Of course, the existence of the manuscript shows that Botto Sculteus Aeneae survived the Jersey and the war, making it back to his home town. However, the same document suggests he was preparing a lawsuit of some sort, possibly seeking compensation for his service better than the Continental bond and grants of land in North America that American authorities had offered.

That purpose also makes Botto’s deposition somewhat frustrating. He didn’t tell his story to inform his family what he went through, to entertain readers, or to create meaning for himself. He was simply getting his experiences and basic suffering down on paper for the record. The account doesn’t have a lot of daily detail or emotion beyond frustration and suffering. 

Still, it’s a side of the war we rarely see from an even more unusual witness and participant. De Boer’s translation of the text appears under the notes for her essay about it.

A Dutch-English Graphic Novel about Slavery

I’ve written before about John Gabriel Stedman (1744–1797), a mercenary of British and Dutch parentage who volunteered to be an officer in the campaign to fight Maroons who had escaped from slavery in Surinam.

In 1796 Stedman published a memoir about that experience, which the publisher augmented with horrific illustrations by William Blake and other artists.

Stedman’s diary shows him to have been fairly active in exploiting enslaved people, especially on the sexual side, but also caustic about the institution. He carefully edited the memoir to be more acceptable on both counts to the British reading public at the time. Nonetheless, it became an important document for British abolitionists.

Among the people Stedman encountered as an officer was a recently kidnapped African boy named Quaco, loaned to him as a personal servant. The Dutch author Ineke Mok reconstructed that boy’s life for a graphic novel titled Quaco: My Life in Slavery.

Eric Heuvel drew the art for this comic using the “clear line” style that American readers probably know best from Hergé’s Tintin adventures. But here the adolescent crossing the globe after being enslaved. It feels incongruous to me at first, but Heuvel has reached a young international audience by exploring World War II in similar style.

Quaco: My Life in Slavery was published in Dutch in 2016. Recently the University of Sheffield’s School of Languages and Cultures made a collective student project out of translating the book and its teaching materials into English.

This article from Sheffield offers some sneak peeks of the project, and the book is offered for sale through this website. 

What Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Book Had to Say

Among the digitized items in the Harvard Libraries’ Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom collection that I mentioned yesterday is A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as related by himself.

Published in Bath, England, in 1770, this was the first autobiography of a black former slave published in English, and one of the first handful of English books of any kind by a black author.

Interestingly, Gronniosaw was literate only in Dutch, having learned to read while enslaved in New York early in the century. His story was taken down by “a young lady of the town of Leominster.”

Gronniosaw dedicated his memoir to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the same evangelical noblewoman who financed the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s first book of poems. Gronniosaw also composed a letter to the countess thanking her for financial support a couple of years later—the only other known sample of his words.

Harvard’s copy of this book is labeled the second edition, but it doesn’t state where and when it was printed. (Sen. Charles Sumner, champion of abolition and civil rights, bequeathed this copy to the university.) The first American edition was published in Newport by Solomon Southwick in 1774. The Harvard library also owns a copy of a Welsh translation published in 1779, and there were several more editions in the decades that followed, showing the book’s popularity.

One notable aspect of Gronniosaw’s story is his description of how he first understood reading when he saw a white sea captain doing it—he thought that the book was talking to that man but wouldn’t talk to him as well. Henry Louis Gates traced this “Talking Book” trope through several more slave narratives in his study The Signifying Monkey. (Gates also included Gronniosaw’s text in Pioneers of the Black Atlantic, summarizing his earlier analysis in the introduction.)

Gronniosaw depicted himself as a prince in his birthplace, Bornu, at least by his maternal ancestry. He also said he was a dissenting monotheist among pagans. Gates therefore connects Gronniosaw’s description of himself to the idea of the Noble Savage, already established in British literature.

After being captured and sold into slavery in his teens, Gronniosaw recounted, he was shipped to Barbados, then New York, where he converted to Christianity and learned to read. Freed by his clerical master’s will, he signed onto a privateer and later into the 28th Regiment of Foot, but his goal was to reach England.

Once there, Gronniosaw struggled as a poor laborer. He married a widowed weaver, and they moved from one city to another during the 1760s and early 1770s, raising their children. In Kinderminster, Gronniosaw connected with a Dissenting minister who knew the Countess of Huntingdon, and that led to his life story being published.

Unlike other African-born memoirists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gronniosaw did not condemn slavery. He did condemn racism, but seemed to feel that he deserved equal treatment in Britain because he was a Christian, not because he was a person. 

For many decades Gronniosaw’s book was the only evidence of his life. Then scholars discovered a death notice in the Chester Chronicle dated 2 Oct 1775 and a line in the burial register for that city’s church of St. Oswald. The newspaper repeated the book’s information about Gronniosaw, including both his Christian and original African names, and both sources said he had died at the age of seventy.

Tilly Merrick, at Home and Abroad

Yesterday’s posting introduced Tilly Merrick (1755-1836), who grew up in Concord before the Revolutionary War and died in that town decades later, telling stories about the Revolution.

In between those periods, however, Merrick had a farflung business career.

When the war began, Merrick was home, working as a schoolteacher, drilling with the militia, and earning his master’s degree from Harvard.

His widowed mother Mary’s second husband, Duncan Ingraham, was considered a Tory, but he grudgingly cooperated with the rebel government after the war began.

Merrick went to work for a mercantile firm whose partners included his stepbrother Duncan Ingraham, Jr. (1752-1802). That meant traveling to Europe. The first sign of this appears to be an entry in Benjamin Franklin’s diary for 17 Feb 1779: “Gave a Pass to Mr Tilly Merrick, going to Nantes.”

He next pops up in the diary of John Adams for 21 May, during a long voyage home to Boston after his first, truncated diplomatic mission: “Mr. Ingraham and Mr. Merrick dined with me, in the Cabbin.”

In his later years, Merrick left his Concord neighbors with the impression that he was actually part of Adams’s staff: “During the Revolutionary War, Mr Merrick was connected with the embassy of John Adams to France and Holland, as an attaché, and was secretary while abroad…,” wrote a town chronicler.

In fact, that one dinner was the only time Adams mentioned him. As the author of Merrick’s entry in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates wrote in a footnote: “It is troubling that his name does not appear in the published correspondence of any of the era’s principal diplomats.”

On 18 Jan 1781 Adams was in Amsterdam on his longer and more successful mission. He wrote to the Massachusetts Board of War:

There are three Gentlemen, in the Mercantile Way, Mr. [Charles] Sigourney, Mr. Ingraham and Mr. [Henry] Bromfield, who are now in this City, and propose to reside here and establish a mercantile House. These Gentlemen are very well known in the Massachusetts, and therefore it is unnecessary for me to Say any Thing concerning their Characters.

These partners helped Adams find quarters, shipped supplies to his wife, and showed up often on social occasions in his diary.

In May 1781 Tilly Merrick arrived in Amsterdam as well to continue working for his stepbrother. He wrote back to a friend, Nathan Bond:

It was your opinion & that of many others in Boston, that it was impracticable for any stranger to do business here, & that it was confined to those who were brought up & fix’d in the business of the Country, & that an effort of settling here would be fruitless on act. of the Combination of the Merchants. . . . I would say that a person who can do business any where & understand the principles of Trade, can do business here. . . . The difficulties, common to a stranger in a place, have been combatted, & are removed.

From that period on, Merrick’s work is well documented in his own papers, now at the Concord library. Richard Lowitt studied them for an Atlantic Studies article titled “Tilly Merrick, Merchant in a Turbulent Atlantic World.”

Soon Merrick was trading on his own account, investing in any number of goods: cloth, Bibles, beaver hats, pen knives, tableware, hinges… Bond wrote back: “You will please in Future to examine more perfectly the goods you put up. I think that every Invoice as yet has had its errors.”

Throughout 1782 Merrick followed the peace negotiations between Britain, France, and the U.S. of A. closely, looking for business advantages. When the war finally did come to a close, he sailed for America—but not for Boston. Instead, Merrick decided to set himself up at some port in the south in partnership with another American named Isaac Course and use the commercial contacts he’d built up.

By summer 1783 Merrick was in Charleston, South Carolina (map shown above). Massachusetts governor John Hancock sent a certificate of his good standing. Soon the partnership was trading with Bond in Boston; Ingraham in Amsterdam and then Hudson, New York; Sigourney in Hartford, Connecticut; Bromfield in Bordeaux; his brother Augustus in North Carolina; and so on. In 1787 Mary Ingraham wrote from Concord, “Dear Child, I think you have for Got you have a Mother.”

Over the next decade Merrick did business in lots of goods, including enslaved Africans. He was successful enough to buy his own slave-labor plantation outside of Charleston. In lean times, however, he considered moving to another port, and even tried out Philadelphia in 1792. Since Pennsylvania had laws limiting slavery, that would have meant quite a change.

Back in Charlestown by 1795, Merrick co-signed $40,000 worth of notes for another merchant. That man went bankrupt in 1797, and Merrick had to liquidate his property. Around the same time, his younger brother John died, leaving him land in Concord. After nearly twenty years away, Tilly Merrick chose to return to his home town.

In midlife, Merrick shifted to a different lifestyle. No longer interested in global trade, he opened a country store and then paid little attention to profiting. Having been a bachelor into his forties, he married his cousin Sarah Minot on Christmas Day in 1798 and started a family. He became active in local civic organizations and represented Concord in the Massachusetts General Court four times between 1809 and 1816, siding with the Federalists.

And, of course, Tilly Merrick told stories about the first day of the Revolutionary War.

“I found moreover a liveliness in my whole frame”

Sometime between 1764 and 1767 Benjamin Franklin met a Dutch physician named Dr. Jan Ingenhousz (1730–1799). They were part of the same scientific circle in London.

In 1768 Sir John Pringle, head of the Royal Society, sent Ingenhousz to Vienna to inoculate the imperial family against smallpox. That worked so well that Ingenhousz became physician to Emperor Joseph II and his mother, Queen Maria Theresa of Austria.

Later, when Franklin was representing the U.S. of A. in Paris, he used his correspondence with Ingenhousz to promote the cause of America in Vienna.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ingenhousz continued his scientific and medical investigations in Vienna. On 15 Aug 1783 he wrote to Franklin, recalling the American’s report about accidentally electrocuting himself instead of a turkey, quoted back here, and building on it.

Ingenhousz said:

As the effect of a Similar stroke by which I was struk, was followed by some remarcabel particularities I should like to compare them which those you have experienced.

The jarr, by which I was Struck, contained about 32 pints, it was nearly fully charged when I recived the explosion from the Conductor supported by that jarr. The flash enter’d the corner of my hat. Then, it entred my fore head and passed thro the left hand, in which I held the chaine communicating with the outward Coating of the jarr.

I neither saw, heared, nor feld the explosion, by which I was Struck down. I lost all my senses, memory, understanding and even sound judgment. My first Sensation was a peine on the forehead. The first object I saw Was the post of a door. I combined the two ideas togeather and thaught I had hurt my head against the horizontal piece of timber supported by the postes, which was impossible, as the door was wide and high.

After having answered unadequately to some questions, which were asked me by the people in the room, I determin’d to go home. But I was some what surprised, that, though the accident happened in a hous in the same street where I lodged, yet I was more than two minutes considering whether, to go home, I must go to the right or to the left hand.

Having found my lodgings, and considering that my memory was become very weak, I thaught it prudent to put down in writing the history of the case: I placed the paper before me, dipt the pen in the ink, but when I applyed it to the paper, I found I had entirely forgotten the art of writing and reading and did not know more what to doe with the pen, than a savage, who never knew there was such an art found out. This Struck me with terror, as I feared I should remain for ever an idiot. I thaught it prudent to go to bed.

I slept tolerably well and when I awaked next morning I felt still the peine on the forehead and found a red spot on the place: but my mental faculties were at that time not only returned, but I feld the most lively joye in finding, as I thaught at the time, my judgmement infinitely more acute. It did seem to me I saw much clearer the difficulties of every thing, and what did formerly seem to me difficult to comprehend, was now become of an easy solution. I found moreover a liveliness in my whole frame, which I never had observed before.

This experiment, made by accident, on my self, and of which I gave you at the time an account, has induced me to advise some of the London mad-Doctors, as Dr. [Thomas] Brook, to try a similar experiment on mad men, thinking that, as I found in my self my mental faculties improoved and as the world well knows, that your mental faculties, if not improoved by the two strooks you recieved, were certainly not hurt by them, it might perhaps become a remedie to restore the mental faculties when lost: but I could never persuade any one to try it.

Some medical authors suggest that Ingenhousz has stumbled into electroconvulsive therapy. The confusion and memory loss followed by more “liveliness” correspond to what some people suffering from deep depressions report from the modern treatment.

Back in the late 1700s, scientists like Franklin, Ingenhousz, and Pringle were reporting on electricity and its spooky powers. Such doctors as James Graham and Franz Mesmer claimed, too eagerly, to be using those powers to heal and strengthen the body. Those reports and claims fed into the delusions of Lt. Neil Wanchope and James Tilly Matthews, as quoted yesterday. But ironically, there really were mind-altering properties of electricity to discover.

“There to pursue their Studies of Latin and Greek”

John Adams wasted no time in reacting to Benjamin Waterhouse’s 13 Dec 1780 letter about educational opportunities in Leyden, quoted yesterday.

Five days later, the American diplomat packed his eldest sons, John Quincy and Charles, off to that Dutch university town with their occasional tutor, John Thaxter.

Even before knowing that they had settled in, Adams wrote home to his wife Abigail in Braintree:

My dearest Portia

I have this morning sent Mr. Thaxter, with my two Sons to Leyden, there to take up their Residence for some time, and there to pursue their Studies of Latin and Greek under the excellent Masters, and there to attend Lectures of the celebrated Professors in that University. It is much cheaper there than here: the Air is infinitely purer; and the Company and Conversation is better.

It is perhaps as learned an University as any in Europe.

I should not wish to have Children, educated in the common Schools in this Country, where a littleness of Soul is notorious. The Masters are mean Spirited Writches, pinching, kicking, and boxing the Children, upon every Turn.

The last paragraph looks like a comment on the Latin School on the Singel, where John Quincy had had such a poor experience in September and October.

This letter is our first sign that part of the pedagogy, and part of the problem, at that school was corporal punishment. Or, probably more accurately, even more corporal punishment than a New England family like the Adamses thought was just.

As Adams wrote, he and his wife were staying on friendly terms with James Lovell, a former usher at Boston’s South Latin School whose method of beating boys on the hand with his ruler was legendary. But whatever happened in Amsterdam was supposedly worse.

Another implication of this letter is that John Adams had not told Abigail anything about John Quincy’s problems at the Latin School. She may never have learned about those difficult fifty days and how her eldest son reportedly misbehaved to force his removal.

Fortunately, John Quincy liked the new arrangements in Leyden. The day after the party arrived, he told his father, “we went to hear a Medicinal lecture by Professor Horn, we saw several experiments there. In the afternoon we went to Hear a Law lecture by Professor Pessel.” The next day he reported: 

I have this day seen the master who is to teach us greek and Latin. He is to come to us twice a day; from twelve to one oclock and from five to six in the afternoon, so that I shall be two hours occupied with our master an hour at each lecture is two more and the rest of my time I shall be writing from Homer, the Greek testament, of Grammar, and learning lessons for our Master.

Thaxter engaged this man, an usher at the town’s high school, for thirty Guilders per month. The lessons were in French, as the boys had prepared for.

In addition, in January 1781 the university registered Thaxter, John Quincy, and Charles as students, the first two to study law and the youngest to study letters. Thaxter reported: “Ils travaillent avec beaucoup d’ardeur, et ils avancent très bien.” They work with lots of ardor and they progress very well.

Thus ended the only significant blot on John Quincy Adams’s scholastic career.

“Send my Children to me this Evening”

As I quoted yesterday, on 10 Nov 1780 Latin School rector Heinrich Verheyk sent American diplomat John Adams a letter stating that his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was misbehaving in an attempt to get expelled.

John Adams responded immediately:

Sir

I have this moment received, with Surprise and Grief, your Billet.

I pray you Sir, to send my Children to me this Evening and your Account, together with their Chests and Effects tomorrow. I have the Honour to be, with great Respect, Sir, your humble servant,

He whisked both John Quincy and younger son Charles out of the Latin School at the Singel.

We don’t know what conversations took place in the Adams house that night. We do know that Adams already disagreed with how the school was placing John Quincy in a class with younger boys instead of letting him study Greek. So, while he may have been mortified at his son’s reported misbehavior, he sympathized with the motive behind it.

Adams cast about for a way for his boys to continue their education. John Quincy was thirteen, a year away from the age when many elite Massachusetts boys went to Harvard, and Charles was ten. They needed Latin and Greek for college. Adams was too busy trying to convince the Dutch republic to recognize the U.S. of A. to teach them himself. John Thaxter, who had tutored the boys in Braintree and aboard the ship to Europe, was still in Paris helping the American diplomats there.

Somehow Adams learned about another possible source of information: a young man from Newport, Rhode Island, named Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846, shown above as painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1775). He had started studying medicine as an apprentice at age sixteen and then sailed to Britain for more advanced training in March 1775, just before the Boston Port Bill took effect. Though Waterhouse spent the next three years in wartime Britain, he supported the independent U.S. of A.

In 1778 Waterhouse went to study at the University of Leyden, reportedly disconcerting the authorities by declaring himself a citizen of the free American states, which Holland had yet to recognize. After finishing a medical degree in 1780, he went back to Britain to visit his mentor there, then returned to Leyden to attend lectures on law and history. Perhaps on that trip he passed through Amsterdam, a little over twenty miles north of Leyden, and met the American minister.

Sometime in November or early December Adams asked Waterhouse if there were educational opportunities for his sons in Leyden. On 13 December the young doctor wrote back:

It so happened that I could not see the persons of whom I wished to enquire concerning the Schools, mode of education &c. untill yesterday, otherwise I should have written before.—

The Gentlemen from whom I have my information have each of them a young person under their care about the age of your eldest, and are well acquainted with every thing appertaining to education in this City, from conversing with them I am able to inform you that besides the publick-school which is a good one, there are private masters in the latin and greek, who at the same time they teach these languages, teach the greek and roman History. With boys who are far advanced in greek they read and explain Euripides, Sophocles and others.

The same person will if required repeat any of the Law-lectures to the pupil, and that indeed is what they are principally employed for, by those whose wives are to be Mevrouws [i.e., ladies].— There is a teacher of this kind in Leyden who is both an elegant schollar and a gentleman, such a one asks 20 ducats a year. . . .

In regard to living I am persuaded they can live here for much less than at Amsterdam. Three furnished rooms would probably cost 20 guilders a month. We find our own tea, sugar, wine, light and fire, and give one ducat a week for dinner, it is always the same price whether we go to the public-house, or have it brought from thence to our own rooms . . .

In respect to their being Americans or Sons of Mr. Adams they will never meet with any thing disagreeable on that head, where any profit is like to accrue little do the Dutchmen care for their political, or even religious principles—Turk, Jew, or Christian make no difference with them. I beleive we may say of them as they said of themselves at Japan when the Japonese enquired if they were christians—they answered, they were Dutchmen.

If the Gentlemen should come, I can insure them an agreeable Society and a genteel circle of acquaintance. If they should not, I hope at least they will come and pay us a visit, and I think I need not add how ready I should be to render them any service in my power.

Meanwhile, Adams had summoned Thaxter from Paris.

TOMORROW: A new arrangement.

“The disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son”

John Quincy Adams signed off his 30 Sept 1780 diary entry with: “End of My Journal.”

It’s not clear whether he meant the end of that month, the end of one little volume, or the end of his resolve to write daily entries about his life. But no journals from John Quincy survive until June 1781, when his life was quite different.

Back on 6 September John Quincy recorded that at the Latin School on the Singel: “Brother Charles and Myself Study in a little chamber apart because we dont understand the Dutch.” And on 9 September he wrote:

At about twelve o clock [family servant Joseph] Stevens came here for us, as we were going we met our Dutch Master who was coming to give us a Lesson.

The Adams brothers didn’t stay for that lesson; they were at their father’s home well before one o’clock. It’s also notable that John Quincy didn’t put the name of his Dutch teacher or any other teacher at the Latin School into his journal. He wasn’t connecting with them.

After September, our evidence about John Quincy’s life at the Latin School come from his father John Adams’s correspondence. First, on 18 October he wrote out a letter to the heads of the school:

Mr. Adams presents his Compliments to the Rector and the Preceptor, and acquaints them that his eldest Son is thirteen Years of Age: that he has made considerable progress already in Greek and Latin: that he has been long in Virgil and Cicero, and that he has read a great deal for his Age, both in French and English; and therefore Mr. Adams thinks it would discourage him to be placed and kept in the lower Forms or Classes of the School; and that it would be a damage to interrupt him in Greek, which he might go on to learn without understanding Dutch. Mr. Adams therefore requests that he may be put into the higher Forms, and put upon the Study of Greek.

In the end, however, Adams didn’t send that letter. He continued to defer to the teachers’ judgments about his eldest son.

That presumably left John Quincy stuck as a teenager in a class with little boys just starting their Latin, still struggling with rudimentary Dutch even though he could speak French.

It appears that John Quincy then took action on his own to resolve his situation. On 10 November the school’s rector, Heinrich Verheyk, wrote to John Adams (as translated from the French by Google and me):

The disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son, who does his best to corrupt his amiable Brother, is no longer to be suffered, since he himself seeks by his insolence to attract the punishment he Merits, in hopes of leaving the school under this pretext.

I beg you, therefore, to have the goodness to withdraw him from here, rather than to see public discipline rendered laughable, since at the end I shall be obliged to treat him according to the laws of our school.

I have the honor to be Monsieur Your Most Humble Servant,

As I wrote before, John Quincy rarely broke rules. He liked doing well in school, and he craved his parents’ approval. He tried to fit in at the Latin School when he arrived. But he apparently didn’t make friends among the Dutch boys, and the teachers held him back. So, at least according to the rector, he changed his usual behavior and set out to get himself expelled.

TOMORROW: What did Pappa and Momma say?

[The picture above is the title page of an edition of Antoninus Liberalis’s Metamorphoses, edited and published in 1774 by rector Heinrich Verheyk. A handsomely bound edition of this book was one of the prizes given to top boys at the Latin School.]

“I shall have but very few things to put down”

On 1 Sept 1780, his second full day at his new school in Amsterdam, John Quincy Adams warned readers of his diary that he would soon be too busy to write much in it:

As I shall have but very few things to put down I shall keep a Journal only the days when there will be something Extraodinary.

We don’t have John Quincy’s diary from that spring when he attended a school in Passy, France, alongside other American boys like Silas Deane’s son Jesse (shown here at age two) and Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. Maybe that journal didn’t survive, but his comment in September suggests he hadn’t seen a reason to keep a diary when he was busy studying and playing day after day.

As it turned out, John Quincy wrote in his diary every day in September 1780. Even when he reported, “Nothing very remarkable to day,” he took the time to write that. On several evenings he copied poetry from The Spectator, The Tatler, The Guardian, and other old volumes into his notebook, making it a commonplace book.

John Quincy’s longer entries reported his and his younger brother Charles’s moves between the school and the house where their father was staying. Classes ended at midday on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the brothers always went home as soon as they could, returning on Wednesday evening or Monday morning. 

Three weeks of school vacation began on 22 September. John Quincy and Charles slept at the school, but they still spent every day with their father and his colleagues, often seeing local sites before getting walked back in the evenings.

The highlight of the month came just before that vacation:

To day I went with all the scholars to see the promotion and the proemiums given. It was in the old Church. There were present two burgermasters the inspector of the school the rector the Conrector, the Praeceptors and the professors, and all the scholars.

In the first place three scholars spoke Orations one after the other and then the rector named those who were to receive the praemiums and they Went and received them from the Hand of one of the Burger master’s. The praemiums of the first and Second Classes were folio Volumes magnificently bound, those of the 3d and 4th’s Quarto Volumes and the fifth and sixth Octavo Volumes.

John Adams wrote about his eldest son’s response to that prize ceremony in a letter to Abigail on 25 September:

My two Boys are at an excellent Latin School, or in the Language of this Country, Den de Latÿnche School op de Cingel by de Munt. The Scholars here all speak French.

John has seen one of the Commencements when the young Gentlemen delivered their Orations and received their Premiums, and Promotions which set his Ambition all afire.

Charles is the same amiable insinuating Creature. Wherever he goes he gets the Hearts of every Body especially the Ladies.

One of these Boys is the Sublime and the other the Beautifull.

John Quincy may not have been as naturally amiable as Charles, but he had made friends his own age on the ship to Europe and in Passy. He exchanged letters with those schoolmates after he had to leave.

On his first day at the Latin School on the Singel, John Quincy wrote down the names of the other boarders. One of those boys, “young Mr. Brants,” visited the Adamses the next weekend. But Brants never appeared in the diary again, and John Quincy never mentioned any other schoolmate by name. After that 22 September ceremony he described “three scholars” orating and others receiving prizes, but he didn’t note who those scholars were.

All the boarders had their own bed chambers, so John Quincy wasn’t thrown in with a roommate to get to know. Furthermore, despite expecting everyone to speak French, the Adams boys were taught separately: “Brother Charles and Myself Study in a little chamber apart because we dont understand the Dutch.” As a result, John Quincy wasn’t making friends.

John Quincy’s September 1780 diary suggests that he spent his free time alone in his room, copying stuff from magazines and waiting for his next opportunity to go home.

TOMORROW: The language barrier.

“I will also take down some of the rules of the school”

On 31 Aug 1780, John Quincy Adams woke up in an unfamiliar bed.

As I recounted yesterday, the thirteen-year-old had been left at the Latin School on the Singel in Amsterdam, along with his ten-year-old brother, Charles.

Their father, John Adams, was in Holland as the Continental Congress’s representative to the Dutch government. He didn’t want his boys to fall behind on their schooling.

Earlier in the year, when the Adamses were in Paris, John had sent his two boys to a small academy. There’s no discussion in the family papers of how he made a similar decision in Amsterdam, but presumably it wasn’t a surprise.

In characteristic mode, John Quincy immediately set about to studying his new school and home. His diary for 31 August begins:

This morning we got up and I asked the names of all the scholars who board here. They are as follows.

Roghe, Toelaer, Vander Burgs, Hulft, Slingelandt, Brants, Van Lennep, Koene, de Graft, Genets, Petri, Van der Paul, Clifford.

He added marks to help him pronounce those unfamiliar names.

Then John Quincy wrote, “I will also take down some of the rules of the school.” At least in this recording, that really meant the meal schedule, but it ran to more than 200 words.

At the end John Quincy wrote about his fellow students:

Every one of the young Gentlemen Speak french and it is a general Custom for the Gentlemen to have their sons speak french. Their comes here every day an hundred boys to learn latin.

That was helpful because he couldn’t speak Dutch, but he could read and speak French pretty well.

Indeed, John Quincy then began to write out a history of the school from a 1772 French guidebook that his father had lent him, translating the prose as he went:

This place was formerly a charity house of a Convent of Religious women. I have a book call’d le Guide D’Amsterdam in which this School is spoke of. It is in french but I will translate it as well as I can into English.

That passage came to another 600 words, starting with a count’s permission for the city to found schools in 1342 and ending with new library acquisitions.

The new schoolboy concluded his morning diary entry by writing: “At about 10 o clock our things were brought here by [family servant Joseph] Stevens. Pappa and Mr. [Herman] Le Roi came to see us.”

John Quincy didn’t record any reluctance about staying at this school. He seems to have been really eager to fit in.

TOMORROW: The school day.

Off to a New School in 1780

Here’s a story I’ve had in mind for a while, waiting for back-to-school season. It’s about the time young John Quincy Adams behaved so badly he had to be pulled out of school.

“What?” you exclaim. “John Quincy Adams? The prematurely mature fellow who went to St. Petersburg on a diplomatic mission at the age of fourteen and learned to speak eight foreign languages?

“The disciplined guy who kept a diary for sixty-eight years and served in the House of Representatives for eighteen years until he had a fatal stroke at his desk and was even, to be honest, a bit of a prig? Not our Johnny Quincy! No, no, you must mean Charles.”

Indeed, Charles Adams did rack up a lot of infractions at Harvard College, far more than his older and younger brothers. (See the Boston 1775 investigation starting here.) But in the episode I’m now writing about, reports said Charles was pulled into misbehavior by John Quincy. This story unveils a side of the oldest Adams boy we hardly ever see.

In August 1780, John Adams was the Continental Congress’s envoy to Holland, based in Amsterdam. He had brought his two oldest sons to Europe with him. John Quincy had just turned thirteen, and Charles was ten. John Thaxter had come along as a secretary for the minister and an occasional tutor for the boys, but he was back in Paris, and their father wanted them to have formal schooling.

On 30 August, John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: ”After supper Mr. Le Roi went with us to a School and left us here. How long we shall stay here I can not tell.”

“Mr. Le Roi” was Herman Le Roy, New York–born son of the Rotterdam merchant Jacob Le Roy. He hosted the Adamses in Amsterdam, particularly the boys, and helped John Adams translate documents. A couple of years later as the war simmered down, Herman Le Roy sailed back to America. He formed a mercantile firm with his in-law William Bayard and made a lot of money from trade and developing land in western New York. Le Roy was also Holland’s consul to the U.S. of A.

As for the school where Le Roy left the two boys, the editors of the Adams Papers explain:

The school was the celebrated Latin School on the Singel (innermost of Amsterdam’s concentric canals), close to what is today one of the busiest sections of the city, marked by the ornate and highly conspicuous Mint Tower in the Muntplein (Mint Square) and across from the Bloemenmarkt (Flower Market). The building then used by the school is now, much altered, occupied by the city police.

The picture above shows that school building painted by Jacob Smies around 1802. Explore that painting more, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum and Google Arts and Culture, here.

TOMORROW: Settling in.

Yanks Abroad

I don’t want to leave the topic of early Americans in Paris on a down note, so I’ll share this link to Michael K. Beauchamp’s review of A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe by Jeanne E. Abrams.

Beauchamp writes:

The book begins with John Adams’s initial journey to Europe to serve as part of the US diplomatic mission to France, where he served alongside Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin. Adams arrived after the Treaty of Amity and Commerce had been signed and ended up doing much of the grunt work of keeping accounts and records while mediating between Franklin and Lee, who were often at odds. While Adams appreciated aspects of French art and culture, he found himself horrified by the decadence of the aristocracy, the futility of court ceremony, the superstitious Catholicism of the lower orders, and the Deism of so many members of the French elite.

Well, maybe John was more impressed on his second long-term posting, in Holland.

Though a Protestant country and one in which Adams secured diplomatic victories, here, too, Adams criticized elements of Dutch society such as the absence of hospitality, the lack of public spirit, and an obsession with accumulating wealth. He also wrote of a growing American oligarchy, which he linked to his opponents in Congress.

Perhaps when Abigail Adams joined her husband she saw more to like.

Abigail’s arrival in 1784 resulted in an analysis of France that mirrored her husband’s judgments. Abigail proved highly critical of Americans like Anne Bingham, whom she believed had become too enamored of French culture, though Abigail praised French women like Adrienne de Lafayette due to her husband’s service to the United States, her knowledge of English, and her elegant but simple dress.

And then the family moved to London.

As in France, the Adamses proved critical of British society, with Abigail particularly shocked by the degree of poverty: “She insisted that the English elite were occupied with the pursuit of enjoyment and pleasure and that they suffered from depraved manners. Moreover, she was grateful that American society did not exhibit the extreme social divides she witnessed in England” (p. 167).

Ironically, John Adams’s political opponents in America would later point to his years in Europe and say he’d become too enamored of Old World societies and too aristocratic in his thinking. However much Adams distrusted popular politics, he consistently criticized European countries for being too dominated by aristocracy and feared America would produce a new aristocracy of wealth.

“Abrams does an excellent job of interweaving the official diplomatic duties of Adams and the personal family dynamics at play,” Beauchamp writes in his review. “Just as importantly, Abrams writes well and the text has a strong narrative, which should allow it to reach a more popular audience than most university press monographs.”

The Later Career of Henry DeBerniere

On 18–19 Apr 1775, Ens. Henry DeBerniere was in the column of British troops that marched to Concord and back. Having visited the town looking for cannon the month before, he was probably one of the main guides for his regimental commander, Lt. Col. Francis Smith.

A couple of months later, he drew a map of the Battle of Bunker Hill that I discussed back here.

We have just a few glimpses of DeBerniere through the next few years as the 10th fought at Brooklyn, Germantown, Monmouth, and Rhode Island. He became a lieutenant during the war, a captain-lieutenant sometime in 1783. As of 1792 he was a captain, still with the 10th Regiment, stationed on Jamaica. Three years later, he was promoted to major.

Britain’s wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France opened up more opportunities for career officers. In November 1796, DeBerniere transferred to the 9th Regiment with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Three years later, the regiment fought in Holland, including the Battle of Bergen (shown above).

In 1798 DeBerniere married Elizabeth Longley (1770-1858), eighteen years old and born the year the lieutenant colonel entered the army. That difference in ages may be why later sources estimated he was born later than he was.

Meanwhile, in 1799 Henry’s older brother, retired army officer John Anthony DeBerniere (1744-1812), and his family moved from Ireland to South Carolina. Papers from that branch of the family are in the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society. His gravestone is in the cemetery of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Charleston.

On 10 Nov 1805 three British transport ships sailed from Cork, Ireland, to carry Lt. Col. DeBerniere and the 9th Regiment to a new assignment on the continent. A storm blew up, and one of those ships, the Ariadne, was wrecked off Calais. All the regiment’s staff officers and 262 soldiers became prisoners of war.

The Times of London reported that twenty women and twelve children were also captured. Those might have included Lt. Col. DeBerniere’s wife, their son John (b. 1801), and daughter Elisabeth (b. 1803). If not, Elizabeth DeBerniere later joined her husband in France.

The French government chose not to exchange the regimental commander for an officer held in Britain. DeBerniere remained a prisoner at Nancy, far from the coast in northeastern France, year after year as the wars swirled around him.

Eventually Napoleon had to retreat from Moscow, and the Sixth Coalition formed to pursue his army, defeating it at Liepzig in late 1813 and then entering France. In his Narrative of a Forced Journey Through Spain and France, as a Prisoner of War, in the Years 1810 to 1814, Baron Blayney wrote:

Shortly after the head quarters of the grand army were established at Metz, and the sick and wounded were removed from Mayence, &c. towards Verdun and the interior. For six weeks the roads were crowded with waggons, and all the public buildings at Verdun were converted into hospitals. At the same time an hospital fever prevailed at Mayence, and was conveyed to Metz and Nancy, in which latter place Colonel de Bernière of the 9th regiment fell a victim to it, universally regretted.

Henry DeBerniere thus died a captive in the land of his Huguenot ancestors on 6 December 1813.

Parliament approved a £150 annual pension for the widow Elizabeth DeBerniere and her three daughters. The DeBernieres’ only son had already died. Francoise Charlotte Josephine, born while the couple was in France, married the Rev. Newton Smart, and the family took the name of DeBerniere-Smart. Among their descendants is Louis de Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Looking at Submarines in the 1740s

This is a diagram of a submarine. It appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1747, illustrating an article titled “Description of a diving ship, built by order of his most serene highness Charles Landgrave of Hesse Cassel.”

The prince reportedly wanted a replica of “the famous diving ship, constructed by [Cornelis] Drebel” in 1620 and demonstrated in the Thames that decade—or at least a ship that did the same thing.

In the 1747 vessel, a man was supposed to fit into the horizontal cylinder marked E with more men in the larger cylinder working a pump. So this submarine was of considerable size. The article described its purpose as “to destroy the enemy’s ships” rather than, say, salvaging wrecks.

That magazine item concluded with this statement:

As to the difficulty of breathing in such a ship, Drebel mentions that he had provided a certain quintessence of air, one drop of which emitted would render the vitiated air again fit for respiration, but Dr [Denis] Papin imagines this is rather a thing to be wish’d than a reality.

Two years later the Gentleman’s Magazine published another picture of another submarine.

Although the accompanying article signed “T.M.” credited the picture and description to “M. Marriott,” it had actually been designed by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli in 1678. This cutaway view focused on the leather bellows that Borelli imagined being used to take in and expel water for ballast.

The second article prompted letters from Samuel Ley and John Lethbridge discussing submarines they had seen, read about, or developed themselves. There was some squabbling over credit.

Historians of the submarine presume that David Bushnell studied these pictures in the Gentleman’s Magazine as he developed his idea for a submarine as a Yale College student in the early 1770s, though he never mentioned such influence.

The magazine articles show how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many European scientists were working on diving vessels, and people saw their military potential. At the same time, these diagrams show how inventive Bushnell was. His small Turtle didn’t look like either of these plans. It had some similarities to the one-person diving machine that Lethbridge described making, but even more significant differences. And Bushnell’s submarine actually worked.

Stedman in Suriname

At the online magazine OZY, Kristina Gaddy wrote about John Gabriel Stedman’s memoir of life in Suriname in the 1770s.

Stedman was born into a military family, his father a Scotsman who had joined the army of the Dutch Republic and his mother reportedly a Dutch noblewoman.

At twenty-seven years old, feeling the need for both money and adventure, Stedman volunteered to command a corps fighting “Maroons,” or people of African descent who had freed themselves from slavery and were challenging the white colonial society.

Stedman arrived in Suriname, a South American colony that really functioned as part of the West Indies, in February 1773. He stayed for four years, fighting Maroons and his boss with equal fervor.

Gaddy explained:

In his diary, Stedman described the Maroons, the armed tribes he was fighting, the lush landscape and the indigenous Arawaks who lived in the dense tropical jungle. He also wrote about his relationship with an enslaved woman named Joanna, the many sexual encounters he had and the lives of both masters and the enslaved. What he did, the music he heard, the unusual foods he ate and the indigenous plants he saw — everything was recorded in his journal. In addition, he collected “curiosities” — now part of the collection at the Museum Volkenkunde (the National Museum of Ethnology) in Leiden, the Netherlands — and painted vivid watercolors of scenes from Suriname.

When he returned to the Netherlands in 1777, Stedman set to crafting a story from his diary entries, eventually selling the rights to Joseph Johnson, a London publisher. Starting in 1790, Johnson devoted six years to transforming Stedman’s watercolors into engravings — he commissioned William Blake to produce several plates — that could be reproduced for the book.

That book — Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America — came out in 1796 and became an immediate popular success. While slavery existed in Europe, large plantations did not, and Stedman’s evocative, at times graphic account of both free and enslaved lives was richly illuminating to people across the Continent. “[Stedman’s book] was fundamental to people’s understanding of slavery” in the late 18th and early 19th century, says Karwan Fatah-Black, assistant professor of history at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Narrative was quickly translated into Dutch, Swedish, Italian, French and German, and became an international best-seller that would ultimately appear in 25 editions.

It was the kind of overnight success that would have thrilled most authors. But Stedman was enraged. It turned out that Joseph Johnson had secretly hired an editor to revise the original text and then published a version Stedman condemned as an outright distortion. “My book was printed full of lies and nonsense,” he wrote to his sister-in-law, and he claimed to have burned 2,000 copies.

In 1988 Richard and Sally Price finally created an edition that compared Stedman’s manuscript diary, which ended up at the University of Minnesota, against the published version. The original had a lot more sex, it seems.

Interestingly, the editing also made Stedman out to be more supportive of slavery than he really was. (It sounds like he was a bit cynical about everything.) Nonetheless, Stedman’s account of the slave society—perhaps because it wasn’t about a British colony—became one of the foundational texts of the British anti-slavery movement.

The Wikipedia article on Stedman is impressively detailed and worth reading alongside Gaddy’s.

The Hourglass Effect and Its Discontents

Last month the Panorama, the blog of the Journal of the American Republic, shared Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s essay “The Hourglass Effect in Teaching the American Revolution.”

Perl-Rosenthal, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote:

The hourglass problem arises from trying to synthesize old and new ways of seeing the American Revolution in a single course. You probably start your class with a wide-angle early modern frame: Big, oceanic topics like global empire, Atlantic slavery, and the consumer revolution are good for framing and explaining the coming imperial crisis.

But before long, the course’s terrain contracts as you turn to the traditional chronology of the Revolution. One feels the squeeze already with the Sugar, Stamp, and Townshend Acts. After early 1770, it gets hard to leave eastern North America. First one is in Boston for the Massacre, then explaining the local politics of the Coercive Acts, followed by Lexington and Concord, and the debate over independence. The same goes for the war years and the critical period. A reopening outward typically only gets underway in the 1790s. . . .

The geographic cinching-up of the 1760s and 1770s, by temporarily shutting out events anywhere but North America, paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very exceptionalist narrative of the Revolution that a wider lens is supposed to help us avoid. The wider world may play its part in the revolutionary era, this approach implies, but during the crucial period of the 1770s and 1780s there is a particular and special North American story that must be told.

Perl-Rosenthal then tries to sketch out (with sketches!) how a course might “tell the story of the revolutionary decades in parallel with simultaneous developments elsewhere in the continent and the world.”

What would a course on the American Revolution look like with this approach in mind? First, it would begin by sketching out the common traits of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world—not just in the British empire but across imperial boundaries. . . .

Second, you would want to use these shared traits to constantly relativize and contextualize the American experience. . . .

Third, those shared elements would provide a basis for incorporating contemporaneous revolutions into the course, starting in the 1780s. The idea would be to see these revolutions not as disparate phenomena in distant regions, but as branches off of the same trunk in constant interaction. . . .

I’ll conclude by going back to Lexington and Concord, a particularly tricky point in the course if one wants to avoid the hourglass effect. Where are the “Atlantic cultures” to be found in this story of British regulars marching into a provincial burgh? Not far off at all. Civic militia were an almost universal feature of the Euro-American world, who generally defended local interests—as the American militiamen did. The British regulars’ tactics had much in common with those of career soldiers elsewhere in the Atlantic, from Prussia to Cape Colony. And the confrontation between the two was hardly unusual. The Dutch patriot revolt, the early French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution—to name just a few—were also set off in part by similar clashes. 

John Fea, professor at Messiah College, responded briefly on his own blog:

As I read Perl-Rosenthal’s post I was struck by the presuppositions that guided the piece. It is assumed that any discussion of local narratives is bad or somehow contributing to American exceptionalism. He uses terms like “traditional chronology” as if that is a bad thing. Those who get too caught-up in this narrative “feel the squeeze.” And, of course, the word “exceptionalism” is a very loaded term with negative connotations in the academy. (In some ways, I would argue, the American Revolution was an exceptional event, even as it was shaped by global forces).

Perl-Rosenthal himself acknowledges the outsized influence of events in the thirteen colonies, but only parenthetically: “This emphatically does not mean denying the American Revolution’s transformative power in the region, nor its wider global significance.”

All of which suggests to me that some hourglass effect might be inevitable, especially if one is teaching American history at an American university to American students.