That is the title that came to many minds as Edwin G. ("Ted") Burrows described British-occupied New York during the Revolution. Dr. Burrows is the Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his co-authorship of Gotham, a history of New York City. With intensity leavened by wry wit, he told us about writing his landmark new book, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War. His research has revealed for the first time how 18,000 men and a few women captives died during the seven years New York was in British hands. Most met their often agonizing fates on the so-called prison ships, the fetid hulks in Wallabout Bay off the Brooklyn shore. At least as interesting was what Dr. Burrows told us about the way this never-should-have-been forgotten story was blurred and buried by Anglophiles in the 19th and 20th centuries – the same people who discriminated savagely against the Irish, the Jews, the Italians and other ethnics who came to America in response to the promises of 1776. Even historians as reputable as Samuel Eliot Morison recommended we should "stop talking about it." Anyone who came to our meeting – or who reads Dr. Burrows’s superb book—will be unlikely to do this for the rest of their lives. The applause was tremendous and RTablers rushed to buy copies of the book and continue the discussion with Dr. Burrows while he signed them.
Our October ban on book reviews for our 50th anniversary celebration was followed by a flood of readers’ reports in December. Fred Cookinham told us about The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: the Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army by Paul Lockhart. Fred noted there have been only three biographies of the Baron, the most recent in 1937. He credits Lockhart with telling us for the first time the details of the tactics Steuben taught the Americans. Perhaps the most important was a new trick, recently invented by a French officer named Guibert – how to swiftly deploy a column into a firing line and return to a column again. This was the tactic that saved Lafayette’s little army when the British attacked his reconnaissance in force at Barren Hill, in the spring of 1778. Lockhart also dispels the myth that Steuben was a phony baron. He was the real thing, thanks to his connections with one of the many small duchies that dotted Germany at the time. But his barony had no land and paid no taxes into his empty pockets. It was a mere title, and the empty pockets were what brought him to America. Fred praises Lockhart for paying Steuben a long overdue tribute for his contribution to creating a victorious American army. The book is also a pleasure to read. Lockhart is a "born story teller."
Peter Ford filled us in on another general’s biography. Henry Knox, Visionary General of the American Revolution by Mark Puls is billed as the definitive book on the rotund commander of the American artillery and Peter is inclined to agree. The book also offers a thorough exploration of Knox’s youth and family relationships and his activities after the War for Independence. Early in the war, Knox became a critic of Congress’s "stupid parsimony." He spent most of the war in a running battle with the politicians about what the artillery needed in men, money and equipment. They returned the compliment by appointing a Frenchman to command the army’s big guns but that gentleman drowned in the Delaware when his horse bolted off a ferry and Knox remained the man in charge. Self educated, Knox knew more about his business than any other officer on either side of the firing line. He was also a good man to handle difficult tasks, from moving Fort Ticonderoga’s guns to Boston in 1775 to the less known but extremely crucial train of wagons he put together after the 1780 mutinies in Morristown to carry 2,213 barrels of flour to hungry troops in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts. As Nathanael Greene wrote later, "Knox is the man for the difficult undertaking." He was also the man who dubbed Washington "the father of his country," and persuaded him to head the Constitutional Convention in 1787. As the first secretary of war in Washington’s cabinet, Knox worked tirelessly to resuscitate the regular army that had all but vanished at the close of the war. His importance to his country far transcends his Revolutionary war rank of brigadier general. Peter saluted author Mark Puls as a "master craftsman" and highly recommended the book.
Andrea Meyer told us about David A. Clary’s biography of Lafayette, Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette and the Friendship that Saved the Revolution. She found Clary such a good story teller, at times the book read like a novel. But he also supplies extensive notes. He takes us from Lafayette’s youth as a hell-raising teenager out to diss the older generation in Paris to his later years as an elder statesman. Clary is not hesitant about pointing out the Marquis’ shortcomings, such as neglecting his lovely wife, Adrienne, and his fondness for madcap plans such as taking Washington to France for a visit in the middle of the Revolution. But Clary also convinces us of Lafayette’s abilities as a general and politician. However, Andrea was disappointed in Clary’s analysis of his relationship with Washington. He never convincingly proves that the Marquis was Washington’s "best friend." But the book is still an enlightening and pleasurable read.
Tom Fleming reported on Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas M. Truxes. The story opens with New York celebrating General Wolfe’s 1759 capture of Quebec. But behind the scenes lurks anger and tension. Only a few weeks earlier, two of the city’s wealthiest merchants, James DePeyster and George Folliot, had been arrested on a charge of high treason "for giving aid and comfort to the enemy."
The indicted men had been betrayed by two informants who hoped to make a fortune from the condemnation and sale of the ships these gentleman had sent to the port of Cap Francois on St. Dominque (present day {Haiti) to sell food to French civilians and soldiers. Before the end of October, this deepening anger exploded when another informant, a bankrupt wine merchant named George Spencer, went to the lieutenant governor and named a dozen other merchants who were making fortunes in the same treasonous trade, using fictitious clearances purchased from New York customs officials to head for the West Indies with cargoes destined for French or Spanish ports.
On November 1, a dozen men gathered on the first floor of the Merchants Coffee House. They listened as George Harrison, former surveyor of customs for the port, and Waddell Cunningham, leader of the city’s numerous Irish merchants, told them that Spencer had to be terrorized into silence. That would send a message to the informers who had indicted DePeyster and Folliot that if they testified in court, similar things would happen to them. The next day, Harrison and Cunningham bought a £400 promissory note Spencer had signed and used it to arrest Spencer for debt. He was bound and hoisted on a cart which well-liquored sailors dragged through the streets while a mob pelted the informer with mud, stones and other debris from the city’s streets. At the end of this ordeal the bruised and beaten man was flung into jail, where he stayed for the next 27 months.
With the stage set in the most gripping imaginable way, Thomas Truxes devotes the middle pages of his book to a widespread and convincing description of this illegal trade with the enemy. Like a good play, the book closes with George Spencer finally getting out of jail vowing revenge on his persecutors and nurturing dreams of making as much as £200,000 pounds from his courtroom victories. But, surprise surprise, somehow witnesses he hoped would support him disappear or lie, death threats against him multiply, and he flees to England, penniless. None of the guilty parties go to jail; a few pay trifling fines.
Tom called Defying Empire "the most remarkable history book I have read in years." It reveals a degree of American alienation and/or indifference to British demands for imperial loyalty that sheds dramatic new light on the sources of the revolutionary mentality that became evident in the next decade. Among the embryonic nation’s leading merchants, independence was a state of mind long before General Gage’s men collided with American militia on Lexington Green.
Although the British shot him dead five years before the Revolution began, Crispus Attucks is probably the most famous black American of his era. Boston-1775, the popular blog, has discovered intriguing new information about him. Attucks’s name doesn’t appear in the first newspaper reports about British soldiers shooting into a violent crowd on March 5, 1770. The first newspaper reports describe him as a "molatto man named Michael Johnson, who was born in Framingham but lately belonging to New Providence, and was here in order to go to North Carolina." New Providence was the chief port of the Bahamas Islands. Four days later, another paper described the dead man as "Crispus Attucks," with no added information. Thus did Attucks enter history as a symbolic victim. In "Boston 1689-1776," G.B. Warden suggested Michael Johnson might have been a "John Doe alias." Until recently, confirming that intuition would have taken months of reading legal records and newspapers. But thanks to Readex’s Archive of Americana, Boston-1775 Blog’s editor, J.M. Bell, was able to find within minutes that the name "Michael Johnson" makes only a few appearances with nothing to connect it to the man killed on March 5. So Bell looked in the Archive’s Early American Imprint series, which gave him access to A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacres, a piece of propaganda with over a hundred depositions that supposedly prove the British soldiers were blood-thirsty killers. Also available was The Trial of William Wemms etc, a transcript of the trial of the soldiers in which John Adams won their acquittal. There are over a dozen references to Attucks as a mulatto and one each as an "Indian" and a "tall man." Next the Archive led him to an ad in the Boston Gazette of October 2, 1750, describing a runaway slave from Framingham who was "six feet two inches high" and was named "Crispas." The owner of said Crispas ran the ad two more times, offering a ten pound reward for his capture and return. It would seem more than evident that this runaway was the man who returned to Boston on a ship from New Providence and while waiting for a cargo that would take him and the ship to North Carolina, used the name "Michael Johnson." Case closed—wouldn’t you say?
A new exhibit, "Behind Every Great Man: The Continental Army in Winter, 1782-83 has opened at the New Windsor Cantonment Historic Site. It is definitely worth a visit. The show begins with an eye-catching nearly life size figure of George Washington at Verplanck’s Point in 1782, from a painting by John Trumbull. After a brief look at the widespread war that was still ongoing after Yorktown, the people behind the great man are introduced: life sized portraits by artist Dahl Taylor of two enlisted men, two of the officers and two of the women (and one of the babies) who followed the army to New Windsor. The exhibit wants to bring to life lesser known people who made up this community of 7500 soldiers and 500 civilian dependents. Along with the portraits, there are selections from the journals of Lt. Benjamin Gilbert of the 5th Massachusetts and Private Thomas Foster of the7th Massachusetts, along with a pension application from Sarah Osborn, who lived with her husband in the New York Line. Most of the artifacts on display have been discovered by archaeological digs at New Windsor. There is also a lively interactive exhibit which allows children and adults to picture themselves in outfits worn in 1783. Still on display for added pleasure is "The Last Argument of Kings: Revolutionary War Artillery," which features ten British and French guns. With a little imagination you can picture General Henry Knox standing nearby, beaming proudly at these formidable weapons.
Edward Johnson, a fictional character in Michael Crichton's novel Timeline is quoted as saying, "If you don't know history, you don't know anything."While this observer is not quite ready to totally agree with that opinion, there is much to be said for expanding one's universe through historical knowledge.
Consider, for instance, the famous picture of the statue of George Washington, depicting his taking the oath of office as our first President, dominating Wall Street. Some would believe that the only thing dealing with finance in the picture is the name of the street itself. They could not be more mistaken
Many captions state that the statue stands before Federal Hall, when the building is actually the Customs and Subtreasury Building that replaced our demolished first Capitol. Across the street can be seen the old Morgan Bank building where, in 1920, an explosion in a horse drawn cart killed 39 people: the pockmarks in the marble are still visible today.
Up Wall Street looming over the scene is Trinity Church, and some would say that it is a depiction of God's power over that of money. But others would recognize the fact that two of our most respected early Secretaries of the Treasury (Alexander Hamilton & Albert Gallatin) are buried in its churchyard, and that Trinity Parish is one of the richest churches in America, due to its real estate holdings in downtown Manhattan. But these references to the world of money pale by comparison to what GW's statue represents today! Would Washington even have considered the possibility that his infant nation would one day be supplying the financial backing to the banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies that now occupy Wall Street? Maybe Hamilton or Gallatin could have foreseen it but I doubt it.
We will repeat the questions here for those whose brains got bent out of shape thinking about them: Name the following U.S. Presidents: 1. I am the only President born east of the Mississippi and buried west of the Mississippi. 2. I am the only President born west of the Mississippi and buried east of the Mississippi. 3. I am the only President not buried in one of the 50 states. 4. Name all the U.S. Presidents buried in Virginia. 5. Besides U.S. Presidents, name another Head of State buried in Virginia. Super Prize!!! Anyone who answers all 5 questions correctly will win a free dinner to the next 3 ARRT meetings.
1. Ronald Reagan 2. Gerald Ford 3. Woodrow Wilson 4. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, W.H. Harrison, Tyler, Taylor 5. Jefferson Davis. All winners of the triple prize must use them by the June meeting. As previously announced, the Quiz Master will now be taking an extended sabbatical. "We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when; but we’ll meet again some lovely day!!"