As part of the Round Table’s yearlong celebration of our 50th Anniversary, Gordon Wood journeyed to our bailiwick from Brown University to tell our June meeting about his new book, Empire of Liberty, a History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. It is coming out in October, and Mr. Wood gave us an electrifying summary of one of its central theme – the controversy over whether the American presidency threatened the liberties of the country. It is an argument that is still raging today in the historical community, which made the talk relevant as well as illuminating. The new federal government that emerged from the Constitutional Convention, declared Mr. Wood, was a more drastic change in American politics than the Revolution itself. How did it come about? Wood said it was a direct result of the awful ineptitude of the state governments in the 1780s, after the Revolution was won. In fact, he said the 1780s are the most important decade in American history, and unfortunately one of the most neglected. He also noted how many Americans had become disillusioned with so-called popular government during the long struggle for independence. State legislatures repeatedly showed appalling cowardice in passing such things as tough militia service laws and badly needed taxes and governors were powerless creatures. On the other hand, voters also recoiled from Alexander Hamilton and the "high federalists," who wanted a centralized military state.
When James Wilson suggested a single person executive at the Constitutional Convention, there was a long uneasy silence. Only the availability of George Washington made the idea palatable. But even Washington came under fire if he showed the least hint of what small "d" democrats (aka anti-federalists) deemed monarchical style. They condemned the president-elect’s journey to New York to take the oath of office as a "royal procession" because so many towns rushed to hail him along his route with flags and cheers. Washington, for his part, remembered all too well eight Revolutionary years of dealing with a dithering Congress who had among other things broken their word to pay pensions to his officers. He was a wholehearted believer in the importance of the presidency, with as much power as possible. At first he unabashedly favored a royal style. In early discussions of what the president should be called, he favored "His High Mightiness." John Adams went even further with elaborate titles for the vice president and senate. But Washington had the flexibility to accept without demur the House of Representatives decision, engineered by James Madison, to favor "Mr. President." In this light, Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800 was in fact the revolution he claimed it was. He did his utmost to democratize presidential style, as did his Virginia successors, Madison and Monroe. All in all, Mr. Wood gave us a fascinating perspective on the Revolution we’ve been discussing for the past 50 years. The applause was long and resounding as Chairman Jacobs presented the speaker with a certificate for his lifetime contribution to our knowledge of the Revolutionary era.
Maria Dering added to our June festivities with a review of Johnny One Eye by Jerome Charyn. She found herself comparing it to Ettore Scola’s 1982 film, La Nuit de Varennes," which links fictional characters with the true story of the 1791 flight of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from revolutionary Paris. Maria wished Mr. Charyn had a similar ability to fuse fiction and history. Instead, he has created an historical fantasy, which does not deserve to be called historical fiction. There is no foundation in fact for this book. The characters are a-historical and implausible and the slang they speak is not true to its time and place.
Johnny One Eye claims he is the illegitimate son of George Washington. His mother is the redheaded madam of a New York bordello. Since we know Washington could not have children, the premise falls flat from the start. Only at the close of the book does Charyn reveal Johnny had another father. Meanwhile, Johnny is a weak wandering everyman blown this way and that by the winds of history.
Charyn puts dialogue in Washington’s mouth that is laughably wrong."Dost thou love thy mother, boy?" he asks Johnny. Maria says "thy" and "thou" disappeared from the English language around 1600 and cites experts to back her up. All in all, it’s a disappointing book. One expects better from writer who likes to be called "the Saul Bellow of the Bronx."
As the founder of the Round Table idea (Revolutionary department) we like to keep our members in touch with what’s happening in other Round Tables around the country. The ARRT of Philadelphia has a new website and hosting provider. Their domain name is now arrtop.com. Gone are the advertisements, slow response and down time of the previous site. Note you do not use www to log onto it. The Philly group has also created a site on FACEBOOK. Talk about being up to date and cool in the bargain! They made this move hoping to attract more young members. Are you listening, Chairman Jacobs?
While Philly thrives, the Western Pennsylvania Round Table is in danger of extinction. The cash strapped Keystone State has closed the Fort Pitt Museum and many other history sites, including the Brandywine battlefield. The WPRT met at the museum.. There is talk of transferring things to the Heinz History Center but nothing is certain in these rocky economic times. We’re still rooting for you, WPRT!
The news from this enterprise is nothing less than revolutionary. After nine years of trying to build the Center in Valley Forge, first on a site inside the national park, then on land they purchased for seven million dollars on the north side of the Schuylkill River, the new ARC president, Bruce Cole, and his board decided there was no hope of a solution to their differences with the officials of Valley Forge National Park. Cole announced they were moving to Philadelphia to build the Center on three acres at Third and Chestnut Street, within Independence National Historic Park.
Bruce Cole is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is an ideal choice to lead the ARC in this new environment. Cole called the new property "the perfect place. You’ve got the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - what’s missing down there? The full story of the Revolution." The New York Round Table and other believers in the relevance of the American Revolution wish the ARC well in their new location. The Center is still our best hope of seeing the entire story of the Revolution told in a single well-designed building, with ample use of artifacts and a narrative created by knowledgeable historians, such as Tom Fleming, who is on the ARC’s Board of Scholars.
Did you know that President George Washington sometimes appeared in public wearing a gold and silver eagle encrusted with no less than 160 diamonds of various cuts and sizes, 28 marquis-shaped emeralds and 10 rubies? Stay calm. George was not thinking of doing an end run on the Constitution. This unique fowl was a gift of the French branch of the Society of the Cincinnati and he only wore it at meetings of the Society and at his annual birthday ball. Exactly how it was made, and who paid for it, remains one of the Revolution’s mysteries.
Pierre L’Enfant, the French born artist and military engineer, who had a great deal to do with planning Washington DC, among other weighty matters, designed the Society’s insignia, a fierce gold eagle with outspread wings. The design won everyone’s approval and L’Enfant sailed for Europe in the fall of 1783 with a commission from Washington to create eight of these eagles, which he planned to distribute to ranking members of the Cincinnati. Other members also gave L’Enfant similar commissions.
There is no mention of a diamond eagle in L’Enfant’s papers. The creature suddenly appears in a letter from Charles Hector, Comte d’Estaing, the newly elected president of the French branch of the Society. As an admiral, the Comte had had little success in America. Apparently he was touchy about this chapter in his life and took an intense interest in getting naval officers into the Society. In the letter, he tells former French ambassador Ann Cesar, Chevalier de la Luzerne, that he had heard about a diamond eagle being created for Washington and persuaded the jeweler to allow him to purchase it as a personal gift for the General. D’Estaing added a banderole stating it was presented "by French sailors." The Comte called it "a little token" that would gain value by being "placed in the buttonhole of General Washington."
This tale does not alter L’Enfant’s role in the creation of this and other eagles. He ordered scores more than he was commissioned to acquire. But there is another player in this glorify-Washington game: the Marquis de Lafayette. He agreed with d’Estaing’s desire to include sailors in the Cincinnati and encouraged everyone to let the admiral nominate French naval officers and distribute eagles to them. As one of the wealthiest men in France, the Marquis would not have flinched at the diamond eagle’s cost, which he may have shared with the admiral.
L’Enfant brought the diamond eagle and his gold siblings to America early in 1784. On May 15, 1784, Washington thanked d’Estaing for his "absolutely inestimable gift" and told him that all admirals and captains of the French navy, whose rank would correspond to army colonels "who have cooperated with the armies of the United States" had a right to join the Society.
When Washington died on December 14, 1799, Martha Washington gave the diamond eagle to Alexander Hamilton, who was elected the following year as the Society’s second president. It is a startling indication of how high Hamilton still stood in Washington’s opinion, in spite of the 1797 sexual scandal that had tarnished his fame. When Hamilton died in his duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, his wife gave the eagle to South Carolina’s Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who was elected third president of the Cincinnati in 1805. In 1811, Pinckney decided to donate the eagle to the Society. Since that time, each new president general has had the privilege of wearing it as a treasured symbol of the bonds between Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors.
Program Chair Tom Fleming and Chairman Dave Jacobs shared an interesting afternoon this summer. They were both invited to a reception at the Museum of Early Technology in Westbrook, Ct. to help the museum’s founder, industrialist Leighton Lee, celebrate the 40th anniversary of the landing on the moon. Dave is an old friend of Mr. Lee. Amid a wealth of scientific relics from early computers and slide rules to pieces of various space ships, who did they encounter? None other than our old Revolutionary friend and scientist, David Bushnell, in the person of his famous submarine. Mr. Lee acquired a copy of The Turtle, made by the shop students in nearby Old Saybrook High School. Dave, who knows more about the Turtle than almost anyone except maybe Arthur Lefkowitz, who wrote a book on it, gave us an entertaining lecture on how the weird looking creature operated. He didn’t suggest taking an undersea voyage in her, however. Some of the student builders had wanted to submerge in the Connecticut River but wiser heads, including Dave’s, said no.
The City Journal is published by The Manhattan Institute, one of the foremost conservative think tanks in America, City spends most of its time pummeling liberals for their short-sighted solutions to America’s problems. (Broadside hastily adds that it is neutral in this particular war.) Along with their hard hitting politics, the magazine maintains a fervent interest in history. Not a little of this enthusiasm can be traced to Myron Magnet, one of City’s founders. A former editor of Fortune, Mr. Magnet is active in trying to resuscitate Alexander Hamilton’s The Grange, which has fallen into decrepitude in the hands of the National Park Service. This good cause has led him to take a conservative’s look at other aspects of the Revolution.
In the summer issue of the City Journal he has a fascinating essay on the Lees of Virginia, builders of Stratford Hall. Mr. Magnet tells how these "conservative revolutionaries" first made and then unmade the British empire. That is a large claim, at first glance, but Magnet has done his homework on the Lee clan. He goes back to the 17th Century and tells us how they began their American careers. Three young male Lees became wards of a prosperous uncle, who sent two of them to London to open a mercantile house and the third, twenty one year old Richard, to Virginia in 1639 to represent the firm. Richard was a mercantile genius and he flourished in this raw, precarious colony, opening a trading post in the western wilderness and somehow finding time to serve as secretary to two governors. He made a handsome fortune and went home to build a country house to which he planned to retire. But the more he saw of the mother country, the more convinced he became that the real money was in America. On his deathbed, he told his wife to sell the house and take his sons to Virginia. By 1740, his descendants were building Stratford Hall and presiding over a veritable cornucopia of wealth for themselves and other Virginians and for the mother country. With this entrepreneurial background, it is not hard to see why the Lees of the 1760s took a dim view of George III’s determination to extract money from their pockets by harumphing about what the colonists owed the mother country. As the Lees saw things, it was the other way around. It was no accident that the leader of the family, Richard Henry Lee, ultimately made the decisive statement on the floor of the Continental Congress: "These United Colonies are and of a right ought to be free and independent states." Mr. Magnet tells the rest of the story ably too – giving younger brother Arthur Lee credit for being a strident but effective spokesman for Americans in London and cousin Light Horse Harry Lee his due as a cavalry leader of extraordinary courage and daring. Finally, Richard Henry returned to preside over a Congress that issued two crucial democratic measures, the land ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which made it possible for ordinary citizens to buy land on this new frontier—and forever banned slavery from the new states. All in all the essay is a startling look at the many meanings of "conservative."
A recent article in the NY Daily News related the work of scholar David Gary who is attempting to raise Rufus King beyond his status as a "second-tier Founding Father." Those of us in the know from Queens have never thought of him as such.
Born in 1755 in northeastern Massachusetts (in what is now Maine), King signed the Constitution as a New England delegate, but soon (at Alexander Hamilton's urging) moved to Queens where he became one of New York State's first two Senators (the other was Philip Schuyler) and later minister to Great Britain. According to Gary, King's stance in 1820, during the debate on the Missouri Compromise, that slavery was illegal, is his greatest contribution. King died in 1827, the same year that NY State declared the end to slavery, and is buried in Jamaica where his home "King Manor" has been preserved as a member of the Historic House Trust. His family tree contains NY Governor John Alsop King, two Civil War namesakes (one a general), actress Jane Wyatt ("Father Knows Best") and singer David Crosby of "Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young."
Another notable colonial King family, though not related to Rufus, lived in Flushing. British sea captain James King married a daughter of Charles Doughty, who had built a farmhouse in 1785. His daughter, in turn, married Lindley Murray. These are the same Murrays of Manhattan's Murray Hill, whose women, legend says, entertained Lord Howe while Washington's forces escaped north to Harlem, probably on land now occupied by the Williams Club. The section of Flushing where the "Kingsland Homestead" is located (another HHT member) is similarly named Murray Hill. This King family tree includes the founder of the Flushing Female Society which advanced African-American education, the owner of the Bloodgood nursery, a civil war soldier captured at the Siege of Petersburg who died in the Confederate prison camp in Salisbury, NC, and two brothers who served in the Spanish-American War aboard the USS Yankee during the Battle of Santiago.