How the Massachusetts Press Responded to the 1783 Earthquake

Prompted by Karen Kleemann’s article quoted yesterday, I looked at how Massachusetts newspapers treated the 29 Nov 1783 earthquake and found some interesting details.

First, we’re used to a standard time extending across an entire time zone. But before railroads, every town had its own noon, and therefore its own perception of when something big happened.

The Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser in Springfield said this earthquake was felt “at 40 minutes past 10 o’clock.” The Boston Gazette reported it at “about six minutes before eleven o’clock.” And the Salem Gazette pegged it “at about 11 o’clock.” Of course, it took a few seconds for the shock to travel between those places. The big difference in those times came from how the Earth spins.

All those reports appeared in the first week of December. Starting on 8 December, Massachusetts newspapers began reporting on other places people detected the quake. Printers wondered if it wasn’t as small an event as it first seemed. On 12 December, the Salem Gazette said the shaking was definitely worse in Connecticut and New York.

By 18 December, the newspapers from Philadelphia had arrived, and Massachusetts printers could share details from nearer the epicenter in New Jersey. China and pewter thrown off shelves! People woken from sleep! Aftershocks later the same night!

Still, there were no deaths. Earlier in the year, American newspapers had reprinted news of many people dying from earthquakes in Italy, and similar reports from China.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy editorialized:

This year must make a conspicuous figure in the instructive records of Time: Great revolutions have occured in the natural and political world.

In Europe the convulsions of nature have destroyed a great part of Sicily, &c. with about one hundred thousand inhabitants. In America such events have taken place, as were before unknown to its civilized inhabitants.

What gratitude is due from us to heaven for its Benedictions—Independence, as a Nation, with the blessings of Peace; and that we have not in the first transports of our national existence met with those calamities that might in a moment have reduced our Continent to its original Chaos!

The Salem Gazette’s 12 December follow-up to its first report ran just above a local disaster with real damage: A fire in John Piemont’s barn in Ipswich had killed one cow and consumed all his hay for the winter.

Back in 1770, Piemont was a hair stylist at the center of Boston, and at the center of Boston events, as I discussed back here. He was able to bounce back from this fire, and in 1784 advertised that he once more offered a stable for horses.

(The broadside shown above dates from almost thirty years after this quake.)

“A small shock of an Earthquake” in 1783

Last fall the Heidelberg Center for American Studies shared Katrin Kleemann’s remarks about an earthquake that rattled a lot of the northern U.S. of A. in late 1783.

Kleemann wrote:

Many of the diaries I studied in the American archives mentioned this earthquake—in Philadelphia, New Haven, Boston, and Worcester. Most of these entries are really brief, usually only consisting of a few words, such as the line “Between 10 & 11 [pm] a small shock of an Earthquake” from Cotton Tufts’ diary on 29 November 1783. He lived in Weymouth, Massachusetts. The fact that diarists from several different states reported on the earthquake, means the earthquake must have been felt over a large area and must in fact have been quite strong, but not strong enough to cause widespread destruction.

Several contemporary newspapers also featured reports about this earthquake, such as this one above in the Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser, published in Philadelphia, from 2 December 1783:

“On Saturday night last, about a quarter after ten o’clock, a smart shock of an earthquake was felt in and about this city; and about one o’clock on Sunday morning another, less violent, was felt by many people in the city and suburbs. Most of the houses were very sensibly shaken so that in many the china and pewter, &c. were thrown off the shelves, and several persons were waked [sic] from their sleep. We hope that the country has sustained no damage by this convulsion of nature, which brings fresh to our memory the late calamities of Italy, &c, &c.”

Indeed, the earthquake(s) seemed to have awoken many people along the East Coast…

Kleemann’s primary focus is on climate events. I’ve noted her interesting essays in past postings. Last year she published A Mist Connection: An Environmental History of the Laki Eruption of 1783 and Its Legacy.

TOMORROW: The local angle.

“They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday”

Anna Riggs (1741–1781) was the daughter of a London Customs official, granddaughter of a wealthy Irish Privy Councilor.

Riggs’s mother was, according to the novelist Frances Burney, “a most prodigious fat old lady,…very merry and facetious.” Horace Walpole said she was “an old rough humorist who passed for a wit.”

In 1765 Riggs married John Miller (c. 1744–1798), from a genteel but poor Irish family. He served as a junior officer in a light-horse regiment during the last three years of the Seven Years’ War and then tried studying the law.

Miller was “full of good-natured officiousness,” Walpole said, but that didn’t promise financial success. Fortunately, Anna inherited a fortune from her grandfather.

The Riggs-Millers (John took on Anna’s surname in honor of her money) bought an estate in the village of Batheaston, near Bath. They spent a lot of the Riggs family money fixing up the manor and laying out ornamental gardens.

By 1770 this lifestyle had become too expensive or, in Walpole’s words, “the whole caravan were forced to go abroad”—the Riggs-Millers, their infant girl, and Anna’s mother, plus select servants. The family spent a couple of years in France and Italy, expanding with the birth of a boy in Paris. Anna Riggs-Miller bought an antique vase dug up “by a labouring man in 1769 at Frescati, near the spot where is supposed to have stood the Tusculanum of Cicero.”

The couple came back to Batheaston full of continental sophistication. Well, a version of it, per Walpole:

Alas! Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle [Madeleine de] Scuderi, and as sophisticated as Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vesey. The Captain’s fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over with virtù…

Anna published her Letters from Italy in three volumes in 1776.

By 1775 the Riggs-Millers were hosting literary salons at Batheaston. The main ritual of these gatherings was a poetry contest staged around that antique vase. Once again, here’s Walpole, from a 15 Jan 1775 letter in which he also remarked on news from Massachusetts about something “called minute-men”:

They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend for the prizes. A Roman vase, dressed with pink ribbons and myrtles, receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival; six judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest compositions, which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel to Mrs. Calliope Miller, kiss her fair hand, and are crowned by it with myrtle, with—I don't know what.

You may think this is fiction or exaggeration. Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published. Yes, on my faith, there are bouts-rimés on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them, by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others, very pretty, by Lord Palmerston; some by Lord Carmarthen; many by Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre; and immortality promised to her without end or measure.

In short since folly, which never ripens to madness but in this hot climate, ran distracted, there never was anything so entertaining or so dull—for you cannot read so long as I have been telling.

Between 1775 and 1781 the Riggs-Millers published four volumes of Poetical Amusements at a Villa Near Bath, along with the smaller collections On Novelty and Hobby Horses, giving the proceeds to charity. The frontispiece of the first volume showed the “Roman vase,” above.

Literary reviewers and poets who weren’t invited to the salons tended to disdain the whole enterprise. Nonetheless, notable writers like William Mason and David Garrick contributed work. The poet Anna Seward credited that biweekly salon for discovering her. In 1778 John Riggs-Miller was made a baronet (on the Irish establishment).

In October 1778, as I described back here, the celebrated historian Catharine Macaulay left Bath after sharing the Rev. Thomas Wilson’s house for years. The next month, in the town of Leicester, she married William Graham, a doctor less than half her age. By the end of the year, the posh people of Bath were gossiping about the newlyweds. And in that same period Sir John and Lady Miller hosted one of their regular salons.

TOMORROW: “Winter’s Amusement.”

Explaining the Summer of 1783

I looked up the Massachusetts newspaper coverage of Europe’s unusual atmosphere in 1783, quoted yesterday, after reading Katrin Kleemann’s online article from a few years back, “Speculating About the Weather: The Unusual Dry Fog of 1783.”

Kleemann wrote:

…in the summer of 1783, Europeans had more than enough reasons to be concerned with the weather. A peculiar dry fog with an odd sulfuric smell cloaked Europe and remained for months, with neither wind nor rain managing to disperse it. The fog was not the only oddity these individuals were facing that summer: The sun had a blood red color when it set and rose; an unusual number of thunderstorms seemed to pass through; meteors were visible over western Europe, earthquakes occurred in Italy, and a new island emerged from the sea off the coast of Iceland. Speculation was rife as to the cause of all this.

Hekla, an Icelandic volcano, known in Europe since medieval times as the gate to hell, was thought to be a potential culprit. When referring to historical maps of Iceland, Hekla is usually pictured as erupting. Famously, Benjamin Franklin suggested that Hekla or Nyey, the newly emerging island, might have caused the dry fog. However, what is often forgotten in this context is that in the same paragraph, Franklin suggested “great burning balls” (meteors) might alternatively have caused it.

At the time a very fashionable explanation was electricity: Lightning was believed to fertilize the soil when it hit the ground. The numerous thunderstorms of the summer quickened the spread of the lightning rod, which had not yet had its breakthrough. The lightning rod was believed to withdraw the beneficial electricity from the atmosphere, which—so the theory went—caused the dry fog, as sulfuric odor had previously been consumed by the “electrical fire.”

There was yet another story making its rounds in the newspapers in July 1783: Not just one but two volcanic eruptions were described within the German territories. The Cottaberg near Dresden as well as the Gleichberg mountains near Hildburghausen were said to have roared to life and to be spitting fire. Both mountains are actually of volcanic origin—however, their last eruptions occurred 25 and 15 million years ago, respectively. The reports were retracted a few weeks later.

The most popular theory of the time suggested that earthquakes in Italy and this dry fog were directly related: people believed the earthquakes had opened a crack in the Earth, which released sulfuric odor from the Earth’s interior into the air. The concept of a subterraneous revolution plausibly explained the sulfuric smell, the fog, the earthquakes, and the newly emerging island.

As Kleemann related, the answer to the atmospheric mystery did lie in Iceland, but it took a long time to come out. Eleven years after that odd summer, an Icelandic scientist named Sveinn Pálsson (1762-1840, shown above) described the volcanic fissure now called Laki. That system had erupted from June 1783 to February 1784, emitting huge amounts of basalt lava and poisonous clouds. The effects in continental Europe were nothing compared to what happened locally, as more than half of Iceland’s livestock died, followed by most of the crops, followed within a few years by about a quarter of the humans from famine.

Despite all those effects, Pálsson’s report wasn’t published by the Danish Society of Natural History but simply filed away. A century later, the eruption of Krakatoa confirmed that massive volcanic activity could affect the atmosphere all over the planet. People rediscovered what Pálsson had written. His manuscript was finally published in full in 1945, explaining the odd summer of 1783.

(Kleeman’s article appeared on the website of N.I.C.H.E., which is both the Network In Canadian History & Environment and the Nouvelle Initiative Canadienne en Histoire de l’Environnement. Coming up with a name to justify a good acronym is tough enough, but doing so in two languages at once is a real feat.)

How Franklin Rebranded His Musical Invention

Rob Scallon’s long and lively video about his visit to musician Dennis James prompted me to look up more information about the glass instrument they played.

The first evidence of this new invention appeared in the Bristol Journal newspaper on 12 Jan 1762, as reprinted elsewhere:

The celebrated glassy-chord, invented by Mr. [Benjamin] Franklin of Philadelphia: who has greatly improved the musical glasses, and formed them into a compleat instrument to accompany the voice; capable of a thorough bass, and never out of tune.

Miss Davies from London, was to perform in the month of January, several favourite airs, English, Scotch and Italian, on the Glassychord (being the only one of the Kind that has yet been produced) accompanied occasionally with the voice and the German Flute.

The performer was Marianne Davies (1744–1816?). Her parents were musicians, and she had been on the stage since the age of seven, singing and playing the harpsichord and flute. In July 1762, Davies and her father entertained an audience that included envoys from the Cherokee nation.

Around the same time, on 13 July 1762, Franklin wrote a long letter to Father Giambatista Beccaria, a professor of physics in Turin, introducing his invention. But he didn’t use the term “glassy-chord”:

Perhaps, however, it may be agreeable to you, as you live in a musical country, to have an account of the new instrument lately added here to the great number that charming science was before possessed of: As it is an instrument that seems peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft and plaintive kind, I will endeavour to give you such a description of it, and of the manner of constructing it, that you, or any one of your friends may be enabled to imitate it, if you incline so to do, without being at the expence and trouble of the many experiments I have made in endeavouring to bring it to its present perfection. . . .

The advantages of this instrument are, that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being once well tuned, never again wants tuning.

In honour of your musical language, I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it the Armonica.

We thus call Franklin’s instrument an armonica rather than a “glassy-chord.” (But from now on I’m always going to think of the original name.)

TOMORROW: A missing source?

How to Become the Member from Thirsk

Under the subject of “Eighteenth-century British aristocrats are not like us,” I’ve been looking into the life of Thomas Gascoigne (1745-1810).

Gascoigne was born not in Britain but in a convent at Cambrai in northern France. He was the third son of Sir Edward Gascoigne, baronet, and his wife. The Gascoignes were Catholic and had long ties to that convent, which was part of the English Benedictine Congregation.

Thomas grew up in France, educated by monks at Douai. In 1762, when he was sixteen years old, his older brother died, and he succeeded to the baronetcy. From then on he was Sir Thomas Gascoigne, baronet.

To prepare for his responsibilities as an estate owner, the teenager was sent to Paris for more schooling, visited Britain for the first time, and in 1764 embarked on a Grand Tour of southern Europe.

That travel ended abruptly in March 1765 when, it appears, a traveling companion killed a coachman in Rome and young Sir Thomas was peripherally involved. He had to hurry back to England, though his connections secured a papal pardon later in the year.

For the next decade Sir Thomas Gascoigne settled into life as a British gentleman. He developed his estates, including the usual improvements: scientific gardening, breeding race horses, funding coal mines, founding a spa. He had a romance with Barbara Montgomery (1757-1788), one of the three sisters Joshua Reynolds painted as “Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen” in 1773.

By 1774 it was safe to visit Europe again, and Sir Thomas spent the rest of the decade outside Britain. He traveled with the author Henry Swinburne, paying most of the bills. During those years Britain declared war on France and Spain, but that doesn’t appear to have greatly affected Sir Thomas’s movements because he was traveling in Catholic circles. His faith kept him out of the British government, after all.

That all changed soon after Sir Thomas Gascoigne returned to his seat in the middle of 1779. He decided to get involved in politics. As a baronet, he had inherited a title but not a peerage, so he wasn’t in the House of Lords and could run for the House of Commons. However, the law barred him from Parliament as a Catholic.

On the king’s birthday in June 1780, therefore, Sir Thomas Gascoigne renounced his Catholicism before the Archbishop of Canterbury. (He never stopped supporting Catholic missions.) Three months later, he entered Parliament as the member from Thirsk, a seat recently purchased by the Marquess of Rockingham for his faction of Whigs. Later he represented Malton and Arundel.

As a Rockinghamite, Sir Thomas opposed continuing the war in America and supported some electoral reforms. Within the larger Whig faction he favored Charles James Fox over the younger William Pitt, which left him once again excluded from power after 1784.

TOMORROW: Sir Thomas Gascoigne’s mark on history.

Studying America’s Earliest Jewish Communities

The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at the New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering an online course on “Freedoms and Challenges: America’s Earliest Jewish Communities, 1650–1840” starting on 2 March.

The course description says:

American Jewish history begins over 100 years before the United States was founded, and the experiences of the earliest Jews lay out the foundational themes of America itself. In this four-part course we will explore the writings, architecture, ideas, and daily lives of American’s earliest Jewish individuals and communities—lives that were vigorous, variegated, and experimental.

Issues they faced still concern us today: desires of individuals vs. communities; the relationships of different communities to one another; how experiences differ by generation, geography, and gender; and the overall strategies, choices, and responses we make in creating and securing our identities in a nation that does not fully define them for us.

The teacher is Ellen Smith, Professor Emerita at Brandeis University. In September 2020 she retired as Director of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program, having taught in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Heller School for Social Management. Trained as a professional historian and a museum curator, Smith has produced over three dozen books, articles, and exhibitions on American Jewish history. She is the co-author and editor, with Jonathan D. Sarna, of The Jews of Boston and was the chief consultant to the Emmy award-winning WGBH television show of the same name. Prof. Smith is a past Curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, and was the Chief Curator in the planning stage of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

There are four classes scheduled, all at 4:00 to 5:30 P.M. on Tuesdays:

• 2 March: Accidents and Opportunities
• 9 March: Promise or Peril?
• 16 March: American and Jewish Revolutions
• 23 March: Beyond the Northeast

Participants will continue to have access to course materials until 30 June. The cost for this class is $85. People can register here.

The photo above shows the gravestone of Judah Monis. Its first part reads:

Here lies buried the remains of RABBI
JUDAH MONIS, MA, late HEBREW
instructer at HARVARD College in
Cambridge in which office he continued 40
years. He was by Birth and Religion a Jew but
embrac’d the Christian faith & was publickly
baptiz’d at Cambridge, AD 1722 and
departed this life April 25, 1764 Aged
81 years 2 months and 21 days.

After that are quotations from five Bible verses, three from the Hebrew Bible and two from the New Testament.

Monis was the most prominent man of Jewish ancestry in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, especially since there was practically no competition. Unlike Newport, Rhode Island, colonial Boston didn’t have enough Jewish people to form a community.

Monis was born in Italy in a family that had converted to Christianity under pressure, but he studied at Jewish academies there and in the Netherlands. He arrived in New York in 1715. Five years later, Monis came to Harvard College, earning an M.A. degree by writing a Hebrew grammar. The college asked him to teach Hebrew but required that he adopt Congregationalism. Monis’s conversion was controversial for both Jews and Christians in America, and he never became a professor, only an instructor connected to the college. Nonetheless, he was respected as the expert on his topic for decades. In his final years Monis lived with relatives in Northboro, where he was buried.

The Influenza Epidemic of 1760

Yesterday I quoted Dr. Ernest Caulfield on the dysentery epidemic of late 1775.

Caulfield wrote a few years later on influenza epidemics in colonial New England. Not only did the British subjects of that time not understand the disease, they didn’t even have a name for it:

That name, influenza, coined by the Italians to signify the influence of celestial bodies on man’s affairs, was first used in England during the epidemic of 1743, but was not used in this country, so far as I could determine, until after the Revolution. The colonial epidemics when given definite names at all were usually called “uncommon colds,” “very deep colds,” “pleuritic fever,” or “malignant pleurisy.” . . .

Although influenza attacked all age groups children withstood it much better than adults, for statistics when available usually show that adults comprise about two-thirds of the total deaths. During many colonial epidemics the fact was stressed that this disease was unusually fatal to those in the prime of life, the group that was expected to withstand epidemic diseases best of all. . . .

It is generally accepted among medical historians that severe influenza spread throughout most of the country during the winter and spring of 1760-1761. Early in September, 1760, rumors had reached the country towns that as many as twenty persons were dying in Boston daily, but the News-Letter of September 11, in denying such stories, said that there were not twenty deaths a week, yet acknowledged the prevalence of two diseases, the bloody flux and colds.

Various sources indicate that by late September “Great Colds” were prevalent throughout Massachusetts, and October was “a tedious Time for Colds and Caughs” among the Massachusetts men in the camps around Ticonderoga.

British forces had just taken that fort from the French the previous year.

The New London Summary (February 20, 1761) said that “Great Colds” had prevailed in Connecticut throughout the autumn. The first indication of severe influenza was the outbreak which began in Bethlehem, Connecticut, that November and caused 34 deaths, five of them in the home of Dr. Zephaniah Hull.

“During this epidemic, a flock of quails flew over the chimney of a house, in which were several diseased persons, and five of them [meaning quails, I presume] fell dead on the spot.” [Noah] Webster thought that this was natural in view of the concentration of infected air.

People still had a lot to learn about disease.

Dr. Caulfield published this study in the April 1950 issue of the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings (P.D.F. download).

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.

Earthquakes and a Volcano in 1783

Early this month the European Geosciences Union shared a blog essay by Katrin Kleemann on Europe’s frightening geological events of 1783:

Southern Italy and Sicily experience regular earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. However, the earthquakes of early 1783 did not follow the normal pattern of one strong quake and weaker fore- and/or aftershocks. Instead, there was a seismic sequence of five strong earthquakes. A seismic sequence is an unusual event, in which one earthquake increases the stress on other parts of the fault system, which triggers subsequent earthquakes. This process is called Coulomb stress transfer.

As a sign of how dire contemporary observers thought of these quakes, Kleemann quotes an account sent to the Royal Society by Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies:

The Earthquakes in Italy were, perhaps, the most terrible and destructive of any that have happened since the Creation of the World. Four hundred towns, and about four or five times as many villages, were destroyed in this dreadful calamity. The number of lives lost, are estimated at between forty and fifty thousand.

Hamilton had already published papers about Italy’s earthquakes and volcanos. In 1770 He had even won a medal from the Royal Society for one. But he’s better known in history for his second wife’s love affair with Lord Nelson, fictionalized by Susan Sontag in The Volcano Lover.

Kleemann continues:

At the time, it was believed that sulfuric fogs were a precursor to strong earthquakes, a dry fog was observed in the days before the 1755 Lisbon earthquake – most likely produced by an eruption of the Icelandic volcano Katla. A similar fog was also reported in Calabria on February 4, 1783.

We now know that the Icelandic Laki Fissure eruption, of 1783, released large amounts of gases and ash, which were carried towards continental Europe via the jet stream. However, news of this took almost three months to reach Europe, by which time the dry fog had vanished again, making it difficult to explain the phenomenon at the time.

The sheer number of unusual subsurface phenomena observed during this time seemed overwhelming. Many theories were developed to explain the “year of awe,” one suggested the Calabria earthquakes had created a crack in the Earth, which was releasing the sulfuric fog observed over Europe. . . .

In the late eighteenth century, it was believed that all volcanoes, most often coined “fire (spitting) mountains,” were connected via fire channels inside the Earth. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were believed to be caused by chemical reactions—between gas or metals and water for instance—in subterranean passages and caverns.

As discussed back here, in early 1784 Benjamin Franklin linked the Laki volcano to the dry fog and speculated that it affected the weather in Europe. (Of course, he also suggested the atmospheric haze might have been caused by meteors, so we mustn’t think Franklin got everything right.)

“A pretence for arming the Town”

We pick up the proceedings of Boston’s town meeting on 13 Sept 1768 after the voters present unanimously approved a call for a Convention of representatives from all of Massachusetts’s towns.

According to Gov. Francis Bernard’s report to the Earl of Hillsborough in London:

I should have mentioned before that in the middle of the Hall where they met, were deposited in chests, the Town Arms, amounting as it is said to about 400. These, as I have before informed your Lordship, about 4 or 5 months ago were taken out of the lumber rooms, where they had lain for some years past, to be cleaned; & have since been laid upon the floor of the Town hall to remind the people of the use of them. These Arms were often the subject of discourse & were of singular use to the Orators in the way of Action.

The resolution Boston’s Whig leaders next offered indeed related to such weapons as they proposed making sure the town’s militiamen were all armed:

Whereas, by an Act of Parliament of the First of King William and Queen Mary it is declared that the Subjects being Protestants, may have Arms for their Defence; It is the Opinion of this Town, that the said Declaration is founded in Nature Reason and sound Policy, and is well adapted for the necessary defence of the Community And for as much as by a good and wholesome Law of this Province, every listed Soldier, and other Householder (except [horse] Troopers who by Law are to be otherwise provided) shall be always provided with a well fixed Fire Lock Musket Accoutrement and Ammunition as in said Law particularly mentioned, to the satisfaction of the Commission Officers of the Company; and as there is at this Time a prevailing apprehension, in the Minds of many, of an approaching War with France: In order that the Inhabitants of this Town may be prepared in case of sudden danger; Voted, that those of the said Inhabitants who may at present be unprovided, be and hereby are requested duly to observe the said Law at this Time

“An approaching War with France”? Indeed, the 8 September Boston News-Letter had just carried a couple of alarming items from London:

By a Gentleman just arrived from Calais we are informed, that the common topick of conversation at that place, Dunkirk and other sea ports in France, is of an approaching war with England. . . .

One day last week, at a certain Coffee-House not 100 miles from St. James’s, a wager of 1000 guineas to 20, was laid that war would be declared between Great Britain on the one part, and France and Genoa on the other, before the 3d day of August next.

But if the Whigs were really worried about another French war, why were they objecting to the arrival of British regiments? Surely the people of Massachusetts would welcome their own nation’s professional military protection.

Gov. Bernard saw through the ruse:

As the Subject of their debates turned upon arming the Town & Country against their Enemies, The probability of a French War was mentioned as a pretence for arming the Town & a Cover for the frequent use of the Word Enemy.

It was said that the Enemy would probably be here before the Convention met, that is within 10 days; It was moved that the Arms should be now delivered out to oppose the Enemy; this was objected to for that they might fall into hands who would not use them.

But this flimsy Veil was not allways kept on: it was often said that they had a right to oppose with arms a military force which was sent to oblige them to submit to unconstitutional Laws; and when it was required to be more explicit, the Chairman [James Otis, Jr.] said that they understood one another Very well, & pointing with his hand added “there are the Arms; when an attempt is made agst. your liberties they will be delivered; our Declaration wants no explication:” and indeed it does not.

After this discussion, the resolution about military preparation passed “by a very great Majority.” The earlier votes were unanimous, which meant there were some brave dissenters in the meeting.

The meeting wrapped up with three votes:

• Thomas Cushing shared a letter from New York merchants supporting non-importation, and the gathering voiced its approval.
• The town asked local ministers to set aside the next Tuesday “as a Day of Fasting and Prayer.”
• The town decided for the proceedings of this meeting to be “published in the several News Papers; and also that a Number of Copys be struck off & sent to the several Towns in this Province.”

On Thursday the Boston News-Letter and Boston Chronicle, which both leaned a bit toward the royal government and may have been partly laid out already, ran those proceedings on inside pages, where local news usually appeared. But come Monday, the Boston Gazette, Boston Post-Boy, and Boston Evening-Post all put the town’s business on the front page.

On 14 September—250 years ago today—Boston’s selectmen sent the broadside shown above to the other towns in Massachusetts, inviting them to a Convention in Faneuil Hall eight days later.

TOMORROW: Back to Beacon Hill.

In Captivity with Gen. Charles Lee

Gen. Charles Lee was captured in New Jersey on 13 Dec 1776.

On 28 Jan 1777 he wrote from British-occupied New York to Robert Morris in Philadelphia:

I am extremely obliged to you for your kindness and attention—the money for the bill I am told I shall get to-day—I have nothing to request at present but that you will write to Mr. Nourse to take care of what belongs to me—and if that my servant Guiseppe is well enough you will send him and desire him to bring the Dogs with him as I am much in want of their Company—God bless you My respects to Mrs. Morris

“Guiseppe” was Giuseppe Minghini, an Italian whom Lee had hired as a personal servant while he was traveling in Europe. The general was asking Minghini to join him in captivity—and to bring the dogs as well.

It might not be surprising that Minghini didn’t immediately set out. Lee was still in New York on 4 April, and he renewed his instructions directly to the Italian:

If your health permits I desire you will without a moments delay set out for this place—your establishment & fortune depend on your compliance—bring with you as many summer cloaths as you can silk stockings, linnen wastecoats and breeches tights, boots and a new hat—some books likewise particularly Ainsworth’s [Latin] Dictionary & the six french books, l’histoire politique—if any of the Dogs are with you bring them. Mr. Rob Morris will furnish you with the necessary money. Addio—come immediately

Minghini brought one dog to keep Lee company until the trio was finally released on 21 Apr 1778. By then the general had also picked up a mistress whom Elias Boudinot called “a miserable dirty hussy…(a British Sergeants Wife).”

One might think that Minghini brought the general’s his favorite pet, Mr. Spado, but that dog wasn’t available.

TOMORROW: What happened to Spado?