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“For your better information…”

May 3, 1775

General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America, and Governor of Massachusetts

Thomas_Gage_John_Singleton_Copley — General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America, and Governor of Massachusetts

“The intelligence you seem to have received, relative to the late excursion of a body of Troops into the Country, is altogether injurious, and contrary to the true state of facts,” wrote British General Thomas Gage to Jonathan Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut. He was answering a letter that Trumbull had sent to him a few days before, talking about the battles of Lexington and Concord, and asking about what the British troops had done — some people said that they had committed “outrages” that “would disgrace even barbarians” — and why Boston was now cut off from the outside world. Gage responded:

The Troops disclaim with indignation the barbarous outrages of which they are accused, so contrary to their known humanity….For your better information, I enclose you a narrative of that affair, taken from gentlemen of indisputable honour and veracity, who were eye-witnesses of all the transactions of that day. The leaders here have taken pains to prevent any account of this affair getting abroad but such as they have thought proper to publish themselves; and to that end the post has been stopped, the mails broke open, and letters taken out; and by these means the most injurious and inflammatory accounts have been spread throughout the Continent, which has served to deceive and inflame the minds of the people….

You ask, why is the Town of Boston now shut up? I can only refer you for an answer to those bodies of armed men who now surround the Town, and prevent all access to it.

I don’t know, off the top of my head, how true it was that, as Gage said, the rebel leaders were basically censoring mail in order to prevent people from hearing the other side of the story. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was truth in it, though; after all, they were now at war, and letters written by the enemy — including those who sided with the British — probably seemed like fair game.

Sources

“Governour Trumbull to General Gage. [Read before Congress, May 19, 1775.] Hartford, April 28, 1775.” American Archives, ed. Peter Force, Series 4, Volume 2, 433-4.

“General Gage to Governour Trumbull. [Read before Congress, May 19, 1775.] Boston, May 3, 1775.” American Archives, ed. Peter Force, Series 4, Volume 2, 482-3.

True Quacks

May 2, 1775

“True quacks”, “headless beings”, “tools to do [the King’s] dirty work” — all of these were terms that someone used to describe the high officials of the British government (and the same person said that it was “like man like master”, meaning that King George III was just as bad as they were):

When the Parliament met, I was in hopes the manly Address of the General Congress [that is, a petition from the Continental Congress] to the King, and that to the people of England, would have opened their eyes, and have led them to apply a remedy suitable to the disease; but instead of that, what have they done? Like true quacks, they deal in inflammatories, and attempt to heal by exasperating the evil they should cure…. Never, sure, were Ministers [that is, the top officials in the British government] more infatuated than those headless beings who manage the affairs of England…. Don Quixote like, they are obstinately bent on fighting wind-mills; and no wonder if they get broken heads in the encounter. Were they alone to smart, it were no great matter; but the mischief is, that I fear they will draw down irreparable evils upon both Englands. Lord North is only a tool to do the dirty work of his more dirty superiours; and the precious Parliament are, in their place, the tools to do his dirty work in return, for the pay he gives them.

Lord North, the British Prime Minister — “a tool to do the dirty work of his more dirty superiours”

Politics can be nasty, and I certainly won’t disagree that today’s American politics are very much so; but nastiness in politics didn’t start yesterday; it’s been around for ages, as shown by this letter.

The writer of this letter, who I think was probably either an Englishman or an American, was in Holland at the time, writing to the Reverend William Gordon of Roxbury, Massachusetts (who later wrote a history of the Revolutionary War).

Source

“Extract of a Letter from Holland, of May 2, 1775, to the Rev. Mr. William Gordon, of Roxbury.” American Archives, ed. Peter Force, Series 4, Volume 2, 462-3.

Planning to Invade Canada

Jonathan Brewer proposes a plan to attack Quebec.

May 1, 1775

You may not have heard that the Americans decided to invade and take over Quebec early in the Revolutionary War. The first part of the invasion was led by Benedict Arnold in September 1775. The journey itself was quite an achievement, but you can see that it didn’t work out, by the fact that Canada is not one of the United States.

This map was made by a British officer in the 1760s. It shows the wilderness areas he traveled through to get from Quebec to Maine. The first American invasion of Quebec followed a similar route, in the opposite direction.

I’ve read a lot about Arnold’s trek along the rivers and through the woods of Maine and Quebec, but I didn’t realize until today that somebody else was itching to start such an expedition before the war was even two weeks old. Jonathan Brewer, Esquire, of Waltham, Massachusetts, submitted a petition to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, stating:

That your Petitioner having a desire of contributing all in his power for this Country’s good, begs leave to propose to this honourable House to march with a body of five hundred Volunteers to Quebeck, by way of the Rivers Kennebeck and Chadier, as he humbly begs leave to apprehend that such a diversion of the Provincial Troops into that part of Canada, would be the means of drawing the Governour of Canada with his Troops, into that quarter, and which would effectually secure the Northern and Western Frontiers from any inroads of the Regular or Canadian Troops. This he humbly conceives he could execute with all the facility imaginable. He therefore begs that this honourable Assembly would take this his proposal into consideration, and to act thereon as in their wisdom shall seem meet.

The plan he proposed was pretty much the same one that Benedict Arnold followed several months later. When he said he could “execute” his plan “with all the facility imaginable”, what he meant was that he could carry it out quickly.

I’m sure there was plenty of talk about invading Canada during the early months of the war, but I didn’t know it was formally proposed as early as May 1, 1775, which is when this petition was evidently submitted.

Sources

American Archives, Series 4, Volume 2, 462.

A Map of the Sources of the Chaudière, Penobscot, and Kennebec Rivers, by John Montresor, ca. 1761. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3730.ar083800

Burials and Baptisms

Any idea how many people died in your town in the last week? Or last year? Or how many people were baptized into a church?

Nowadays, I’m not sure where to find that information, though I’m sure it’s somewhere. In the 1770’s, however, you might be able to find it simply by opening your newspaper. The Boston Gazette on January 4, 1773, included information like this:

Burials in the Town of BOSTON, since our last [that is, since the last edition of the newspaper],

Eight Whites. One Black

Baptiz’d in the several Churches, Ten.

It went on to list burials and baptisms for each month in 1772, the totals for 1771, and then the “Bills of Mortality” — that is, how many people died — for the years 1701-1772. Smallpox and measles were listed next to some of the years; I assume this means that there were epidemics of those diseases in those years.

Here are some of the statistics listed in the Boston Gazette.

It’s worth noting that the numbers of deaths were listed separately for blacks and whites. Most black people in America at that time were slaves, and most white people looked down on them. But I’m not sure why there weren’t separate numbers for baptisms. Did the churches not allow blacks to be baptized? I don’t think so, because I know that there were black church members in at least some places in New England at that time. Maybe they weren’t listed separately on the baptismal records, because the government didn’t use those records. I’m not sure, but it’s a reminder of the racial distinctions that existed at that time.

Source

The Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, 4 January 1773, page 3.

Michael Finnigan

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I keep starting over. I’ve even deleted all my posts and started from scratch — more than once. I’ve changed my approach (more than once) and taken long hiatuses (I suppose the correct plural is actually “hiati”, but nobody would know what I was talking about if I said it, and “hiatuses” is more of a mouthful and therefore more fun to say* — and I’m not really sure about “hiati”, anyway). I’ve learned a lot about the Revolutionary War since I first started blogging several years ago, but I certainly haven’t blogged consistently.

So, here we are, seven years after I published my first blog post, and it’s that time of year again: a day-by-day history of the Revolutionary War (which is what I set out to create in the first place) has to start out with the battles of Lexington and Concord, which took place on April 19, 1775. Most everybody has heard something about those, even if they don’t remember it; if nothing else, most people seem to remember something about Paul Revere, who made his famous ride the night before. I won’t promise to post something every day, as I tried to do at first, but you’ll probably be hearing from me more often than you have been. I hope you enjoy it.

“There was an old man named Michael Finnigan…” That’s not a quote from the 1770s, but if you know the rest of the song, you can guess why I mentioned it.

*Or, as Mark Twain put it in A Horse’s Tale, “size is the main thing about a word, and that one’s up to standard.”

John Adams on Self-Delusion

If you’ve heard of John Adams, you may know of him as a member of the Continental Congress, an ambassador to France during the Revolutionary War, and the first Vice President and second President of the United States. A few years before the war started, however, in addition to being a lawyer, he wrote newspaper articles about agriculture. But as politics got more turbulent in Massachusetts, he became more involved, and he couldn’t help putting some of his political opinions in his letters to the editor.

Knowing what we know about John Adams — that he became a famous statesman and one of the founders of the United States, and that he wrote and published a lot of things about politics and government — it’s a bit funny to read, in a political article he wrote in August 1768, that it was “the last” time he would write about politics instead of his “principal and favorite views of writing on husbandry and mechanic arts.”

He was an independent sort of person. Not only did he later devote his life to American independence, but he didn’t like being tied to a political party; he liked to do things the way he thought they ought to be done, rather than following the crowd — even if it made him unpopular. In this particular article, he wrote, “I would quarrel with both parties and with every individual of each, before I would subjugate my understanding, or prostitute my tongue or pen to either.” (Note that he wasn’t talking about the Republican and Democratic parties, which didn’t exist at the time; he was just talking about the opposing groups in Massachusetts at that time.) He went to say that

…more pains have been employed in charging desire of popularity, restless turbulence of spirit, ambitious views, envy, revenge, malice, and jealousy on one side; and servility, adulation, tyranny, principles of arbitrary power, lust of dominion, avarice, desires of civil or military commissions on the other; or in fewer words, in attempts to blacken and discredit the motives of the disputants on both sides, than in rational inquiries into the merits of the cause, the truth, and rectitude of the measures contested.

That description, sadly, fits things that happen all the time; people spend more time and energy talking about how bad the other political party is and trying to dig up and throw mud at each other than they spend trying to figure out what is true and what can be done. (If you don’t believe it, maybe you haven’t watched the news lately.) Adams was watching the same thing happen around him, involving some people he knew and even respected, and he wanted less yelling (so to speak) and more honest, rational thinking (the title of his article was “On Self-Delusion”).

Adams wasn’t done writing about politics; his next article, published a week later, began with the words, “It seems to be necessary for me, (notwithstanding the declaration in my last) once more to digress from the road of agriculture and mechanic arts…”

Source

John Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, Selected and with a Foreword by C. Bradley Thompson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000). 4/6/2019. <https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/592> Pages 7-12.

Thick Skull

For some reason, somebody writing in a Massachusetts newspaper in late 1772 chose the pen name “Thick Skull.” It was common at that time for people to use pen names when writing something for a newspaper or pamphlet, and the pen names usually had some special meaning, but why this person chose to call himself “Thick Skull” is beyond me.

I haven’t found the article he presumably wrote under this pseudonym; I only came across a little paragraph in The Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal of January 4, 1773, where he made a comment about himself. Apparently somebody made fun of his choice of name (which is certainly understandable), and he responded:

THICK SKULL, would acquaint the anonymous writer in Draper’s last paper, that he does not think himself in the least “unlucky in the choice of his signature”, as his choice was deliberate; rather thinks himself happy that this writer should think that “the signature fits him”, and that for once at least he is like to have “great proof” in his favour.

Maybe if I find the original article or pamphlet, I can figure out why he called himself that — or if the only reason was that he actually had a thick skull or a large head or something. (I assume that he wasn’t trying to say that he was stupid.) If I find out, I’ll let you know. In the meanwhile, I’ve started thinking: If I were to use a pen name, what would I pick?

Some pen names used during the Revolutionary period were:

Americanus (“an American”)
Novanglus (“a New Englander”) and Massachusettensis (“a Massachusettsian”); these were used by John Adams and Daniel Leonard in a newspaper debate
Common Sense (this was not only the title of Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet, but also the pen name he used for this and a number of other pamphlets)
Cato (the name of an ancient Roman politician; this was probably used a number of times by a number of people, but one of the people who used it was someone who disagreed with “Common Sense”)
The Forester (which Thomas Paine used to respond to “Cato”; I’m not sure why he chose that one)
Age & Experience
J. (used by Jonathan Sewall)
U. (used by John Adams)

Source

The Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, 4 January 1773, p. 2.

Rome and the Bible

One thing that people of the 1700s often used when arguing about politics was ancient Roman history. Another one was the Bible. People on all sides of the debate about America used them to support their arguments. Of course, some people didn’t know Roman history well, although well-educated people generally did; and not everybody knew the Bible. But generally speaking, I think that the people in England and America at that time knew more about both than the average person does today. Some speeches, newspaper articles and pamphlets were full of quotes from the Bible, or references to Roman history. For example, a New Yorker wrote in 1774:

Let us, with the brave Romans, consider our ancestors and our offspring. Let us follow the example of the former, and set an example to the latter. … Had I a voice which could be heard from Canada to Florida, I would address the Americans in the language of the Roman patriot: “If you have a mind to keep those things, be they what they will, you are so fond of,” (whether your money, your freedom, civil and religious, or whether your very superfluities,) “rouse at length, and stand up for the liberties of your country.”

I hope that you don’t think (because you may not know Roman history very well) that all of the ancient Romans were noble, brave, and free; but Rome was a republic at times and was often held up as a model of good government.

The same writer also quoted or referred to the Bible several times, and encouraged clergymen to support the cause of liberty:

And let not the Ministers of the Gospel neglect their duty; let them remember the example of the Apostles, who embraced every opportunity of testifying their zeal for the civil and religious liberties of mankind; and while they teach men to consider their oppressors as “the rod of God’s anger, and the staff of his indignation,” let them not fail to excite and encourage them to a hope of his interposition in their behalf, while they humble themselves by fasting and prayer, and are in use of all proper means for deliverance.

If an article like this showed up in a newspaper today, I don’t think it would be very well received; most people probably wouldn’t understand the things it said about Rome and the Bible, and some would say that it’s inappropriate to base political arguments on the Bible at all.

If you want to test your Biblical knowledge, read the whole article and see how many Biblical references you can find.

Source:

American Archives, Series 4, volume 1, pp. 294-5.

A Race of Convicts

I mentioned in my previous post that Dr. Samuel Johnson hated Americans in general. Here are some examples of the things he said about them:

He once wrote in a letter that “the planters [that is, plantation owners] of America” were “a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.”

Another time, while talking with someone about the Americans, he said, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”

And while dining with some friends and acquaintances one evening about three years after the Revolutionary War started, he somehow got onto the subject of America and said:

“I am willing to love all mankind except an American:” and his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he “breathed out threatenings and slaughter;” calling them, “rascals — robbers — pirates;” and exclaiming, he’d “burn and destroy them.”

One of the other dinner guests criticized him a little bit for this outburst, which irritated him, and he “roared out another tremendous volley, which one might fancy could be heard across the Atlantic.” He was a big man, and I imagine that he could roar pretty loud.

He was an interesting man, and I find it very interesting that America seemed to be the only subject that always made him angry. Maybe sometime I’ll go into one of the pamphlets that we wrote in response to the Americans’ complaints about taxes; it was titled “Taxation No Tyranny”.

Source

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, Esq.; vol. 1, pp. 304, 484; vol. 2, p. 194.

Slavery and Liberty

James Boswell, a Scottish gentleman who spent much of his life in London, which he called a “heaven on earth,” was a good friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a very intelligent, well-educated, and famous Englishman. Among other things, Dr. Johnson had written a dictionary. Boswell looked up to Johnson a lot, though he didn’t always agree with him.

Johnson hated the Americans — and I mean he really hated them. When I read his biography (written by Boswell himself, with lots of notes of conversations they had and time they spent together), it seems like the Americans, and especially the rebellious ones, were the only subject that always made him angry, whenever it came up. Other things he might get upset about, but when he talked about the Americans, or when somebody else spoke in their favor, he got more than a little upset.

Boswell, on the other hand, thought that England was too harsh on the American colonies, and that they were even being unjust. This caused some friction between them at times, and Boswell generally tried to avoid the subject.

But on another subject that had to do with freedom, their opinions were reversed, in my view: Johnson said that slavery was wrong (which was one thing he had against the Americans), while Boswell said it was right and necessary. Johnson said:

It must be agreed that in most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion.

But Boswell, in the biography he wrote about Johnson, put in his response to Johnson’s opinion:

I beg leave to enter my most solemn protest against his general doctrine with respect to the Slave Trade. For I will resolutely say — that his unfavorable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and imperfect or false information… To abolish a status, which in all ages GOD has sanctioned and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. To abolish this trade would be to “…shut the gates of mercy on mankind.”

Boswell wasn’t nearly the only one who used those arguments. Some people probably just did it because they made money from the slave trade, or because other people did it. But some — and Boswell may have been one of them — honestly had that opinion. It was not uncommon. And at the time that Boswell wrote the biography, there was a lot of debate in England about the slave trade, because some people were working hard to abolish it.

If you think that Boswell’s arguments were strange or stupid or mean or whatever (and I do), then ask yourself this: Do you think slavery is wrong because you were always told, since the time you were a little kid, that slavery is wrong? Or because you studied and thought and read and debated about it, and came to that conclusion yourself? Perhaps Boswell was misinformed, but at least he did some homework and came to his own conclusions, and he didn’t just say what other people said; he was even willing to disagree with the man whom he admired more than anyone else.

But at any rate, Johnson’s opinion of slavery was as immovable as Boswell’s. In a pamphlet called “Taxation no Tyranny,” which said that England had a right to tax America, he asked a question that pointed out one of the great paradoxes of the American Revolution: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Source

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, Esq., vol. 2, pp. 134-136. (The biography was first published in 1791; my copy, of course, was printed much later, in New York, but it was long enough ago that it doesn’t have the usual copyright page, with dates, etc., so I don’t know exactly when it was published.)