This Day in Colonial History (Disgruntled But Divided Patriots Open First Continental Congress)

Sept. 5, 1774—Angered by a deteriorating relationship with the mother country, representatives from 12 of the 13 British colonies in North America convened in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, taking a long but still not inevitable step towards the American Revolution.

Georgia, the lone holdout among the colonies, sent no delegates to the Congress because it needed royal troops to defend against attacks by Native Americans—underscoring the vulnerability that partly motivated Parliament’s increasing resort to taxation over the prior decade.

The delegates gathered in Carpenters’ Hall, home of what today remains, 300 years after its establishment, the oldest craft guild in the United States.

The congress came together in solidarity with Boston, which for the last several months had been punished by the administration of British Prime Minister Lord North for the Boston Tea Party protest of taxation without representation. 

The Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) had ignited further protest by closing Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the dumped tea; abrogating the colony’s longtime charter; allowing British officials charged with capital offenses to be tried in England instead; and gave all colonial governors the right to requisition unoccupied buildings to house troops.

Parliament’s crackdown not just on the colonists’ exports but also their attempts at manufacturing led the delegates to debate how to implement a boycott of British goods.

Two days after the congress opened, Rev. Jacob Duché delivered an invocation--beginning a tradition of prayer in Congress that continues to this day. The delegates must have felt the necessity of it continually, because For much of the time before adjourning on October 26, they debated endlessly without moving much business. 

They were hamstrung from the outset because, as the first time the colonies had gathered for common action, no rules existed even for governing the proceedings.

But the divisions among them were not just deep, but multiple, involving splits:

*between large and small colonies;

*among loyalists seeking an accommodation with Britain, radicals like the Adamses of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia who were concluding that independence was inevitable, and a more cautious group that wanted to see how events transpired;

*among speakers who had operated within the political environments of their own colonies but were unused to cooperating with others outside them.

Pennsylvania conservative Joseph Galloway, attempting to ward off passage of a resolution calling for boycotting British goods, outlined a “Plan of Union” in which any legislation would require approval by both Parliament and an intercolonial assembly.

At first, it appeared that Galloway’s plan would carry. But opinion shifted when the congress received the Suffolk Resolves transported from Massachusetts by Paul Revere. Patriotic leaders, circumventing the royal governor’s recent ban on town meetings, had gathered in Suffolk County and passed a set of resolutions calling on colonists to ignore the Intolerable Acts, elect militia officers, and conduct weekly drills to defend themselves.

Reconsidering their position on Galloway’s plan, the Philadelphia delegates now rejected his belief that Parliament had the inherent right to tax and govern the colonies. Just before it adjourned, the Continental Congress created a Continental Association that called for a ban on all trade between America and Great Britain of all goods, wares or merchandise.

Nobody who has witnessed the self-interested dickering and nitpicking over proposals that has occurred in our Congress should be surprised to hear that something like the same situation obtained 250 years ago in Philadelphia.

While seemingly far-reaching—it involved not just a ban on importing British goods but also African slaves and tax-bearing commodities from elsewhere in the world—even this ended up watered down by individual colonies’ demands (e.g., Virginia received the right to sell its tobacco for one more year, and South Carolina was permitted to ship rice, one of its most important exports, to Britain).

More significant, though, the delegates left the door open for further action. They agreed to wait to see how Britain reacted, and if there was no improvement in Lord North’s dealings with the colonies, to reconvene the following year.

Ultimately, it was Lord North’s stubbornness in treating the colonies like errant children that forced them to band together.

Great Britain’s refusal to compromise led to armed resistance at Lexington and Concord the following April, and the resumption of delegate business at the Second Continental Congress, only this time with a more drastic—though still not irrevocable—task at hand: how to organize armed resistance to the harsh new measures imposed from across the Atlantic without their content.

The First Continental Congress was notable both for who attended and who did not. Among the latter who would serve on the committee assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence nearly two years later: Benjamin Franklin, making a last-ditch attempt for reconciliation between the Crown and the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson, who, though too sick to travel to Philadelphia late in the summer of 1774, managed to complete A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a tract so acclaimed for its eloquence that it would lead him to be chosen to write the Declaration.

Among those who did attend the Congress: two future military leaders, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and, from New Hampshire, John Sullivan, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, who became a brigadier general in the army.

One name that stuck out for me, from New Jersey, sounded awfully familiar, and that indeed turned out to be the case: Stephen Crane, great-great grandfather of the great American novelist famous for The Red Badge of Courage.

This Day in Colonial History (Patriots Vent Fury in Boston Tea Party)

Dec. 16, 1773—Agitation against imperial tax-collection efforts took an angrier turn as a mob disguised as Indians boarded three ships and dumped 342 heavy chests of tea into the harbor in what came to be called more than a half century later the ironically named Boston Tea Party.

For nearly a decade, London had sought to impose taxes on its colonies across the ocean, only to back down in the face of protests against the Stamp Act and Townshend Act. 

But it felt compelled to retain a tax on tea, partly as a reassertion of control, partly to prop up a company with a powerful lobby in Parliament--and with recent staggering losses that required unfettered access to the American colonies.

The reaction of colonists was accurately encapsulated in how it was known for years—"The Destruction of the Tea"—reflecting that the protest took place in several American ports.

But the name by which we know the incident now reflects how London had come to see Boston as a particular hotbed of unrest, much the same way that Charleston, SC, was seen in the North in the years before the Civil War. 

And the British also focused on the city because of the presence of a local patriot they had correctly identified as the leader of the burgeoning, cross-colony dissension: Samuel Adams.

One of Adams' most influential 20th-century biographers, John C. Miller, correctly subtitled his book "Pioneer in Propaganda." 

A ne'er-do-well who, ironically, had failed in a prior job as a tax collector, Adams was careless in dress but extremely careful in how he communicated. 

In the case of the Boston Tea Party, both supporters and enemies agreed in later years that he had been instrumental behind the scenes in bringing out the more than seven thousand crowded into the Old South Meeting House, Boston’s largest building, on December 16. But, demonstrating how much he covered his tracks, scant documentary evidence has come to light detailing it.

What we do know is that early in the evening, when Adams dramatically announced to the throng that nothing more could be done to save their country, dozens of colonists dressed as Indians (the better to hide their identities from the authorities) rushed into the building letting out war whoops. 

When the wealthy merchant and patriot John Hancock followed with the equally startling "Let every man do what is right in his own eyes,” the crowd ran toward the trio of ships laden with tea, and watched as the "Indians" went about their business.

Facing an act not only brazen defiant but so costly to the East India Company (ninety thousand pounds of tea worth £10,000, or millions of dollars today), British Prime Minister Lord North thought that Boston needed to be taught a lesson. 

The Boston Port Art, part of a series of what the colonists came to call "the Intolerable Act," singled out the city for punishment, closing it to all commerce and requiring residents to compensate for the destroyed tea. All that did was make matters worse.

Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times article today wondered how Americans should view this “most famous act of politically motivated property destruction” in our history, in light of events like Black Lives Matter and the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Nowhere, however, did this piece mention a more direct, even brazen invocation of this legendary event: the Tea Party movement that began in 2009 as a conservative protest against the Obama administration’s mortgage relief plan before morphing into a right-wing coalition that has served as the shock troops for Trumpism.

If the Times piece had also considered the rise of the “Patriot” and “Middlemen” movements, it might also have analyzed why these “populist” groups had usurped the symbolism of the American Revolution—and the inappropriateness of this.

Superficially, the original Tea Party might be seen as a harbinger of the anti-tax grievances that came to the fore more than a decade ago, in the same way that the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 could be so interpreted.

But facts long forgotten or little taught have produced a far more complex picture of our formative revolutionary agitation.

First, while taxation has been a concern in American history across the centuries, it’s important to recall that the James Otis argument that quickly spread across the 13 colonies was not “Taxation is tyranny,” but “taxation without representation is tyranny.”

Or, as the Massachusetts lawyer put it less succinctly: “The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights, as freemen; and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right.”

Additionally:

*The British tax on tea was meant to prop up the East India Company’s monopoly—a state of affairs that interfered with a brisk colonial smuggling business.

*Collecting the tea tax amounted to a case of blatant special interest, with the six appointees consisting of two sons of Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson, two other relatives of his, and two friends, according to Stacy Schiff’s acclaimed biography of the mastermind behind the Tea Party, Samuel Adams, The Revolutionary.

*The Tea Party was not only careful not to commit violence against any businessmen, but even avoided destroying any non-tea merchandise.

For fascinating sidelights on this event, you might want to read Bruce Richardson’s blog post on the types of tea destroyed that night, as well as the National Constitution Center’s on the background.

This Day in Colonial History (Washington Escapes Ambush of British in Pennsylvania Wilderness)

July 9, 1755—Marching through the thick forests of Western Pennsylvania with too few advance scouts, approximately 1,500 British troops were attacked, then defeated by an outnumbered force of 900 Indians, French, and Canadians.

The panicked redcoats hardly even bothered to protect their mortally wounded leader, General Edward Braddock, the recently appointed commander in chief of all British troops in North America. The stinging defeat did, however, provide excellent experience for a 23-year-old Virginian hired by Braddock as a volunteer aide-de-camp, George Washington.

The debacle near present-day Pittsburgh wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Braddock was a soldier with 45 years’ experience. Moreover, his troops were among England’s best, drilled to maintain cohesion along the combat line and looking forward to reaching Fort Duquesne—the opening wedge in their attempt to supplant France as the dominant power in North America.

But, under fire from the French and their Indian allies using trees and rocks for cover, with their own scarlet uniforms serving as excellent targets, His Majesty’s troops found their training of little use in a new kind of asymmetrical warfare. After three hours, with 60 of 80 officers killed or wounded, they broke under the pressure, leaving wagons, provisions, clothing, and personal effects in their wake.

By the time they stumbled away from the Battle of the Monongahela, half of Braddock’s army had been killed or wounded, shocking the British public and their American colonies.

Braddock was not without virtues or insights. He did, after all, spot talent in young Washington, even though the Virginian had, in effect, inadvertently started the French and Indian War in a skirmish in the woods of the Ohio Valley. (See David Preston’s discussion in the October 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.) And he was justly annoyed by the lack of material support he was provided when he first reached the colonies (a situation quickly redressed by horses and wagons rounded up by Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin).

But each day, Braddock proved that his inflexibility was matched only by his irascibility. And, by the end of the campaign and his life, he would have proof that he was mistaken in believing that colonists’ “slothful and languid disposition renders them very unfit for military service.”

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Washington, Douglas Southall Freeman summarized succinctly the limitations of Braddock in a foreign environment:

“Braddock, of course, was entirely ignorant of the type of combat that prevailed in America. What was worse, he was not a man to learn. He lacked all originality of mind and exemplified the system that produced and schooled him, a system traditional, methodical and inflexible. A man of his training was not apt to fail to do everything the regulations and the accepted tactics prescribed. It was still less likely he would do anything more. Trained for war on the continent of Europe, where the masters employed their art, Braddock believed that the tactics in which he had been drilled for forty years were close to perfection…. As a matter of fact, few of the political elders who had the temerity to talk to Braddock about his chosen art of war had any personal experience in frontier fighting. Young men like Washington scarcely counted until they proved themselves.”

Proving himself was what Washington ended up doing in multiple ways in the ambush. Despite having two horses shot from under him, as well as four bullets flying through his hat or uniform, he helped Braddock rally his men; managed to get his wounded commander across the river with the yells of nearby Native Americans ringing in his ears; dug a makeshift grave for Braddock, then covered the evidence of it so the commander’s remains would not be desecrated by his foes; and coordinated the stunned army’s retreat, ensuring its remnants would fight another day.

Though a wave of second-guessing ensued after the battle over why the English forces as a whole performed so badly, young Washington emerged from the catastrophe with an enhanced reputation for coolness and bravery under fire. He finished his service in the French and Indian War as the highest-ranking officer among the Virginia troops, positioning him to be named commander in chief of the Continental Army when hostilities broke out between Britain and its colonies in 1775.

But the Battle of the Monongahela influenced Washington’s career in other key ways, too, through the lessons he took away:

*Native Americans were a powerful force that would have to be dealt with—diplomatically if possible, militarily if necessary. During the American Revolution, Iroquois attacks led Washington to authorize Gen. John Sullivan to crush harassment by the Indians and their Loyalists in southern New York. As President, he sought unsuccessfully to institute a just Indian policy, trying to simultaneously ward off British incitements of Indian raids and settlers' incursions into Indian lands in the Northwest Territory.

*The advice of aides was not to be dismissed lightly. At critical junctures, Braddock, believing that he knew best, ignored the advice of subordinates, including about the need to bolster their number of Indian scouts. In contrast, when he commanded the continentals, Washington was cautious and deliberate to a fault, listening carefully at councils of war.

*Inadequate attention to detail could harm an army. An officer noted that Braddock was “very indolent and seemed glad for anybody to take business off his hands.” In the crucial run-up to battle, his failure to ensure proper reconnoitering ensured that he would blunder into the wilderness. Freeman was scathing about this failure: “Great dangers often are rendered small by vigilance; lesser dangers always are enlarged by negligence.” Washington—who managed his plantation from afar as well as his army during the Revolutionary War—would never make the same mistake.

*British forces were not invincible. Always a realist, Washington knew just how great the odds were that he could defeat the far numerically superior British forces. But his experience with Braddock surely also convinced him that Britain commanders’ overconfidence rendered them vulnerable.

*Military intelligence was crucial. At the Monongahela, the French commander had used intelligence supplied by his network of intelligence scouts to expertly deploy his troops. Braddock’s failure to match this made his defeat inevitable. On the other hand, Washington’s constant attention to this in the American Revolution meant that he could shift the odds against victory more in his service.

*Surprise, even against a heavily favored foe, could carry the day. Shock helped break the will of Braddock’s troops. Two decades later, at the Battle of Trenton, Washington ensured the survival of the patriot cause with a dawn attack on British troops still hung over from Christmas revelry the night before.

This Day in Colonial History (Thomas Paine, Taxman, Loses Job)

April 8, 1774—As American anger over British-imposed taxes mounted, a 37-year-old ne’er-do-well in Lewes, England, moved the hard way toward taking up the colonists’ cause: by being dismissed from his own job as an excise or tax officer.

Fired after more than a decade in the excise service for being absent from his post without permission, Thomas Paine found himself in far tighter circumstances than he had ever known in his checkered career—and matters would get even worse within a few months before he decided to break with his past and cast his lot with America.

In a sense, America is about reinventing yourself. Our immigrant ancestors did this as a rite of passage. Some people have reinvested themselves not just with a change of location or job but with a change of name. Hollywood figures have done this as a matter of course (Frances Gumm became the far more euphonious-sounding Judy Garland), while others make slight but telling alterations in their names. (The fictional James Gatz became Jay Gatsby, while the actual Gary Hartpence changed, by subtraction, to Gary Hart.)

Paine was one of these believers in personal reinvention. It might have struck many as incongruous that Ronald Reagan, the herald of late-20th century conservatism, would quote Paine when he accepted the Republican nomination for President. But the line quoted, from Common Sense--"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"—was one that made the explicit leap from personal to national acts of starting over. And it was a sentiment with which Reagan, with a lifelong penchant for starting over (radio announcer, actor, TV pitchman, politician), could readily identify.

At the point when Paine was fired, he was still spelling his surname without the “e.” It was only after he came to America—in fact, after he the most persuasive and brilliant pamphleteer of the American Revolution—that he adopted the new name.

Some years ago, at a lecture at Fairleigh Dickinson University, I heard John Steinbeck’s widow Elaine say that one reason behind the power and empathy underlying her husband’s work was the fact that he had taken so many different jobs before becoming a writer. Such was the case with Paine before coming to America.

It’s a good thing I have a book nearby to look this stuff up in, because I’d never be able to keep track of all Paine’s failed professions: seaman, corsetmaker, grocer, tobacco shop owner, teacher, even surprisingly, for the man who scandalized so many decades later with his brief for religious skepticism, The Age of Reason, independent Methodist preacher. Paine couldn’t make a go of any of them.

But you really had to try hard to get yourself fired as a taxman. Saddled with debt because of the obligation to defend its overseas colonies in the French and Indian Wars, Britain set about with a will to collect taxes.

Twice before, Paine had been fired from the excise service. But this time, for having published his first known pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise (London, 1772), in which he called for higher pay for his fellow tax officials, then for having spent too much time in London campaigning for his idea, the offense was regarded as a deal-breaker.

Now, a whole series of events occurred that would dishearten anyone. Six days after his dismissal, Paine was forced to put up his household possessions and shop stock at public auction to pay his debts. Two months later, he ended his three-year marriage by signing, along with his wife, a separation agreement.

Finally, Paine had the kind of stroke of luck he needed: a meeting with the most famous American of them all, Benjamin Franklin. The great Philadelphian, who had reinvented himself from teenage runaway into one of the richest men of his time, probably saw something of himself—the burning need to improve himself intellectually, the fascination with science, the willingness to argue his ideas, in print and in person—in the Englishman.

In early October, armed with a letter of introduction on his behalf by Franklin to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, Paine journeyed to the New World—and a new beginning for himself.

This Day in Colonial History (Benjamin Franklin Transformed into American Rebel)

January 29, 1774—The Massachusetts Assembly thought that it would be one step closer to seeing the last of their hated royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, by petitioning King George III for his dismissal. Instead, the petition furnished an excuse for reactionaries in Parliament to strike at the moderate agent for the firebrand colony, Benjamin Franklin.

The monarch’s advisory body, the Privy Council, may have felt it was removing a troublesome bit between its teeth by castigating Franklin from his role in leaking Hutchinson’s correspondence. Instead, it converted a colonial who thought of himself primarily as an Englishman into one of the Mother Country’s most dangerous enemies—a wily foe who gave the drive for American independence prestige, then won crucial support for the new nation as America’s diplomat to France.

Americans visiting London are understandably shocked to find Franklin’s home at 36 Craven Street preserved. Sites in Philadelphia, they can understand—this was the city to which he escaped as a teenage runaway apprentice and that, in turn, he devoted most of his philanthropy. Even sites in Boston, the city of Franklin’s birth, don’t nonplus tourists.

But London is the only city in the world to preserve, in original form, a home associated with Franklin. 36 Craven, just off Trafalgar Square, was where he lived for 18 years, from 1757 to 1775. The address reflected his desire to conquer the center of London as surely as he had the City of Brotherly Love.

He loved London—the adulation he received as a scientist, the friends he could meet in the fashionable new coffeehouses that were providing alternatives to alcoholic establishments, the society women he could flirt with—and his work as agent for the Massachusetts Assembly and as deputy postmaster-general for the colonies provided him with convenient excuses for why he couldn’t go home sooner. He had stayed away from home for more than a decade, constantly pleading urgent business, even when his wife suffered a partial stroke. Her death in late 1774, while he was still away from home, left him some guilt.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, Franklin sought unsuccessfully to make King George III and his ministers see reason regarding the colonies. In 1774, he had dragged his feet on presenting Massachusetts’ petition to remove Governor Hutchinson and the latter’s lieutenant governor and brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, arguing that patience was the colonies’ best course.

But then came the Hutchinson letter controversy. You think that the Valerie Plame leaking imbroglio was bad—not to mention the one nearly 40 years ago involving Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers? Well, take those two cases, multiply them, then take the product and square it. That’s how controversial the Franklin affair was.

Gov. Hutchinson had been indiscreet enough to write British minister Thomas Whately from 1768 through the following year on how to bring colonial agitators to heel by restricting their liberties. In Massachusetts, the tinderbox of the American Revolution, exposure of their contents would make a sensitive situation far worse than it already was.

Somehow, Franklin came into possession of this political nitroglycerin. He never said how, and we don’t know to this day. But he sent the dozen letters to friend Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Don’t copy them, he warned—just show them around to a few trusted friends.

One of the friends Cushing trusted was Samuel Adams. Big, big mistake! The agitator, as thrilled by this correspondence as Count Dracula would be by the presence of a blood bank, copied and distributed it. The reaction, as Adams hoped, was strong and powerful enough that the letters were specifically cited in the assembly’s petition to remove Hutchinson and Oliver.

In England, things got really crazy because of the affair. By this time, Thomas Whately, the original recipient of the correspondence, had died. But his brother William thought he knew the culprit—an American named John Temple, former governor of New Hampshire, now deeply sympathetic to the colonists.

The incensed Temple didn’t sue William Whately for everything he had, as he would today. Instead, he challenged him to a duel. The two men had at each other in England’s Hyde Park. They survived for probably the most common reason why anyone did in those days: the participants’ incompetence with weapons. Neither Whately nor Temple could wield a sword very well, and when Temple nicked Whately, the requirements of honor were judged to have been met. Only Whately’s friends claimed that Temple hadn’t fought fairly, leading the American to reschedule a rematch with the minister.

Enough already, Franklin decided. He owned up in a public display that he’d been the only one responsible for the letters’ distribution. Early in January 1774, sensing that trouble was ahead, he had asked permission to have counsel by his side when he appeared before the Privy Council.

That may have been a mistake: by allowing counsel to represent him, he gave up the ability to speak on his own behalf. This turned out to be critical, because it soon became apparent that it would be him, not the Massachusetts petition, that would occupy the council’s attention.

Franklin’s supporters were outnumbered in the crowded room by detractors by a 4-to-1 margin. The British Solicitor-General, Alexander Wedderburn, subjected Franklin to more than an hour of abuse—rancor so bad, supposedly, that the worst of it never ended up being printed.

What we do know of it was bad enough. Wedderburn charged Franklin with being “the prime agitator” behind the controversy. As Wedderburn continued his assault, with the anti-Franklin crowd of peers hooting and hollering for all they were worth, Franklin remained silent, fuming. Though the court’s manner of conducting busy left him unable to speak, he also believed that the manifest unfairness of Wedderburn’s conduct would turn reasonable men away from the abuse.

The proud 68-year-old bottled up his emotions for as long as he could, then, as soon as the proceedings had adjourned for the day, with the council issuing its previously prepared report exonerating Hutchinson, turned on Wedderburn. Bumping into his tormenter outside the hearing room, he said, with unmistakable intent that would be fulfilled more than a year later: “I will make your master a little king for this.”

That he did. The day after the proceedings, the Council delivered another blow to Franklin by dismissing him from his postmaster job. By that time, he had crossed a mental Rubicon in his attitude toward the Mother Country. Taking off the clothes he had worn to the Privy Council hearings, he vowed that he would never wear them again until he could help dismember the British empire. It took ten years before he could make good on his claim, but he wore the clothes when he signed the Treaty of Paris ensuring American independence.

The breach with England also led Franklin to break off relations with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, who had become a confirmed Loyalist, as well as several friends in the U.K. who had not signed with him. It was part of the process that turned this long-loyal British subject into what biographer H.W. Brands termed “The First American.”

This Day in Colonial History (Patrick Henry Seizes the Public Stage)

Dec. 1, 1763—The verdict had already been decided, with only damages to be determined, and the attorney about to address the jury—a 27-year-old of careless appearance, with a history of one failed profession after another behind him—made a distinctly unprepossessing appearance. But by the time Patrick Henry was finished, the audience was spellbound, word had spread of his oratorical powers, and the career of one of the great firebrands of the American Revolution had begun in earnest.

“The Parson’s Cause” not only won Henry his first significant public notice, however, but represented a signpost in the American movement toward separation of church and state. It brought into question the system of public funding for the Anglican Church. Two decades later, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom would be passed, and within another five years the separation of church and state would be enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The case in which Henry made his mark stemmed from the manner in which ministers of the Church of England were paid by Virginia colonists. From the colony’s founding, Anglican ministers received their pay through tobacco. When prices for this much-desired commodity boomed, they benefited; when low, they were forced to scrimp, save and do without.

It sounds to me a little like getting pay in the form of stock—living high on the hog, so to speak, in a bull market, but groaning when it hits the skids.

Now, if they had wanted, colonists could have used an analogy that these men of the cloth would have understood: “During the Seven Fat Years, make sure you save for the Seven Lean Years.”

Notice I say “understood,” not “appreciated,” because, like anyone else, the ministers didn’t like living in uncertainty. So another payment approach was tried, beginning in 1748: setting annual salaries for ministers at 16,000 pounds of tobacco, which they could sell for what they could get.

But a spell of bad crops led the Virginia House of Burgesses to tinker with the formula again. Now paper money became the preferred form of ministerial payment, at a fixed price per pound of tobacco. The so-called “Two Penny Act” did not please the ministers at all.

The Anglican ministers were not awfully popular—particularly so with colonists who weren’t members of the church but were still obligated to pay for their upkeep and maintenance, like the increasingly numerous Baptists and Presbyterians. The legislature, listening to their views, wouldn’t allow the ministers any traction on the issue. Nor would the governor. So the divines took their case to the King’s Council in London, which not only agreed with them but said they could sue for damages in Virginia’s courts.

One of the many ministers who looked to the courts for redress was a Dublin-born minister, the Rev. James Maury, who had the distinction not only of teaching three U.S. Presidents and five signers of the Declaration of Independence (the lessons evidently never took with one pupil, the fiercely anti-clerical Jefferson) but also of being the grandfather of the great 19th-century oceanographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury. The Court of Hanover County sided with Maury, setting Dec. 1, 1763 as the date for determining how much he would be owed.

The Hanover County tax collector, Thomas Johnson, was in a bind—doubly so now since his attorney, now that he’d lost the case, was leaving the mop-up work to his young friend, Patrick Henry.

To call Henry a late bloomer would be doing him far more justice than he deserved. He had a fine mind, all right, but family finances prevented him from attending college. He failed at keeping a country store, failed at farming, failed at keeping another country store. He finally succeeded in obtaining a law degree, but put off going full-tilt into practice, on the advice of an associate who urged him to read more widely in his new discipline. Henry didn’t mind, since it meant he could yack with friends to his heart’s content.

And so, a ne’er-do-well was trying to get Johnson from being taken to the cleaners. Everyone expected it, including other Anglican parsons who crowded into the Hanover County Courthouse, expecting to see what would be established as a baseline for their own suits. They didn’t even worry that Henry’s father John was presiding at the trial: Henry Sr. had a brother who was a minister, and besides, there wasn’t even a doubt of the verdict—now it would all be a division of the spoils.

As young Henry began his defense, all their suspicions seemed to be confirmed. He started “with apparent embarrassment and some awkwardness,” according to his biographer, William Wirt. Think Joe Pesci at the start of My Cousin Vinny (one of my favorite comedies, incidentally).

Can you imagine how John Henry must have felt while beholding his son’s stumbling performance? Maybe something like this: I taught you Latin, Greek and mathematics for five years. I know we were poor and I couldn’t afford anything better for you, but please—don’t embarrass your old man in front of this crowd!

And then, something remarkable occurred: Young Henry found his groove and didn’t let up. It even manifested itself physically, as his posture straightened and his eyes flashed. Maury’s lawyer left him an opening by requesting triple damages and praising the Anglican Church. Big mistake!

We’ve been ruined by C-Span to accept the most meager porridge as oratory. If you want a real stemwinder of an address, see what Henry does with this notion of a reverent crew:

We have heard a great deal about the benevolence and holy zeal of our reverend clergy, but how is this manifested? Do they manifest their zeal in the cause of religion and humanity by practicing the mild and benevolent precepts of the Gospel of Jesus? Do they feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Oh, no, gentlemen! Instead of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these rapacious harpies would, were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoecake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow! The last bed, nay, the last blanket from the lying-in woman!

Then the young lawyer turned to the king. “A King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people degenerated into a Tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects’ obedience,” he said.

Think of what’s happening here: a Southern answer to James Otis, a young Massachusetts attorney who’d resigned from the office of Advocate General for his colony so he could represent merchants being prosecuted under the Writs of Assistance. And it was not merely the wisdom of Parliament being called into question—it’s the King’s. The intellectual foundations of rebellion were being set.

The jurors could render a monetary judgment for Rev. Maury, Henry said, but they need not give him more than a farthing.

The effect of all this was electric. The jurors sat slackjawed at the young attorney’s audacity, so stunned by his eloquence that they awarded Rev. Maury only a penny.

Ironically, an attorney who made his name through opposition to religious authority would become associated in his later years with a conservatism derived from his own personal piety. The statute of religious freedom passed with the help of Jefferson and Madison, as I explained in a prior post, arose in opposition to Governor Henry’s plan for a general tax assessment on all freeholders to support churches and schools. In the late 1790s, alarmed by the French Revolution’s anticlerical tendencies, he was lured out of retirement to enter the political arena again.

But all of that was still a long way in the future. In 1763, the buzz was all about this young attorney, who, as a result of the Parsons’ Cause, would gain not only an enhanced legal practice but a political following fervent enough to win him election to the House of Burgesses. This was the first real hint of the man who would become known as “the Son of Thunder” for utterances such as “If this be treason, make the most of it!” and “Give me liberty and give me death.”

For a particularly intriguing take on this seminal moment in the early career of the great orator, I urge you to look at this post from the blog "Diana’s Golden Apples."

This Day in Colonial History (James Otis, Patriot “Flame of Fire,” Killed by Lightning)

May 23, 1783—James Otis, the lawyer who represented what fellow patriot John Adams called “a flame of fire” in the cause of American liberty, only to be struck down by madness when the struggle for American independence reached its climax, died in the same manner he had hoped for: by a lightning bolt.

The death of Otis was much like his life: unnerving, unexpected, violent, and tragic. A vicious coffeehouse brawl 14 years earlier had resulted in a blow to the head, ending, for all intents and purposes, his legal and political career. Except for all-too-short periods of lucidity, the rest of his life had been anticlimactic.

Even schoolchildren not taught to learn much history nowadays are still likely to have heard of (if not recall precisely) such patriots as Thomas Jefferson, John and Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. It’s much less likely that they’ve heard of Otis. In fact, they might even know more about his younger sister, the brilliant woman of letters Mercy Otis Warren.

Otis deserves better. Even before the Stamp Act, Otis had rallied opposition to arbitrary rule by England with a powerful 1761 speech that became one of the early landmarks of civil liberties in North America. As John C. Miller’s Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda relates, Otis was known as the “American Hampden” and was more important than Sam Adams in the early days of colonial protest.

I first became aware of this fascinating, brilliant and often neglected patriot through the Esther Forbes novel Johnny Tremain. (I was surprised to hear that this Newbery Award-winner from 1944 was still being read by youngsters—or at least by Bart Simpson, persuaded that it would be cool by sister Lisa.)

The scene with Otis is still the one that stands out most vividly in my memory, nearly 40 years after I read it. Late in the novel, just before the outbreak of war, young Johnny is meeting with the Patriot group the Observers when one of its founders, Otis, climbs into the attic.

You can just see the current members of the group rolling their eyes or looking away from their brilliant former colleague. Why couldn’t he just go away? Couldn’t he take a hint that they didn’t want him around? His indiscreet remarks might blow everything.

And now, the madman confounds them, just as he had once confounded Tories. You haven’t been bothered by crown, he says to each of the Observers in turn, until he identifies the cause they’re really fighting for—not the liberties of Bostonians, or even simply Americans, but of people everywhere. “We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills….we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.”

How much of this was true? From all appearances, Esther Forbes invented this dialogue.

But that fictional encounter with Otis had its counterparts in both his eloquent, five-hour, pro bono 1761 defense of 13 merchants who had run afoul of Britain’s Writs of Assistance and an appearance nine years later before his friends that led John Adams to lament, in his diary: "He talks so much and takes up so much of our time, and fills it with trash, obsceneness, profaneness, nonsense and distraction, that we have none left for rational amusements and inquiries...In short, I never saw such an object of admiration, reverence, contempt, and compassion, all at once, as this. I fear, I tremble, I mourn, for the man and his country; many others mourn over him, with tears in their eyes."

Otis' death allowed old comrades such as Adams to remember him at his brilliant best, as the orator who helped popularize the notion that "taxation without representation is tyranny."

This Day in Colonial History (Deerfield Massacre Foreshadows American Struggles of Uncertainty and Terror)

February 29, 1704—After trekking 300 miles through winter snow and cold, a combined French-Indian war party of nearly 300 attacked the frontier town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, while the inhabitants were still fast asleep. With a night watchman away from his post and heavy snowdrifts muffling sound, the settlers inside the fort were taken completely by surprise.

By the end of the attack, 56 men, women and children lay dead; 109 were carried away into captivity; and half of this Connecticut River Valley town’s houses were burned.

I wrote “end” in the last sentence, but the ordeal had only begun for the survivors of the Deerfield Massacre. 

In a certain sense, long after the English colonists had died, the vocabulary used to describe the experience continued to live on in American literature and, in a curious half-life, even classic Hollywood films.

I visited Deerfield in October 2001 (when I took this picture), only a month after another surprise attack in which Americans viewed scenes of burning and mourned their dead: the World Trade Center bombing. Talking with the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying, I relived my shock on 9/11 and my numbness in the days immediately afterward.

Some of the same feelings must have been experienced by the survivors of the Deerfield Massacre—human nature hasn’t changed all that much over three centuries.

The massacre formed just one incident in a long series of wars that took place between the English and French colonists, with Native-Americans assuming a complex, often dreaded, role. 

In my high school, a troubled administrator demonstrated, in a small but telling way, why he had been deeply admired as a history teacher when he told our class one morning an excellent mnemonic device for recalling these assorted conflicts that almost nobody cared about anymore—the acronym WAGS, standing for King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War, and the Seven Years War.

Deerfield played a significant part early on in WAGS. 

In September 1675, Indian forces led by King Philip beat English settlers at Bloody Break, only two miles from Deerfield, then proceeded to massacre 64 Deerfield men. The town was abandoned twice before settlers finally were able to erect, with the help of stronger fortifications, a permanent settlement.

Or, at least, what looked permanent until the night of February 29, 1704.

The First “Long, Twilight Struggle”

Francis Parkman’s history of the period is called A Half Century of Conflict. In an unusual parallel, nearly three centuries later, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union might be described in the same way. And, with no end in sight to the West’s encounter with Islamic fundamentalism, I would argue that we live in an age that might last just as long.

In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy memorably called on Americans to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” In the early years of his state, especially in Deerfield, citizens were asked to engage in a struggle of similar duration and uncertainty.

Though most Indian raids seldom reached the bloodbath levels of Deerfield, settlers were continually picked off one or two at a time, away from fortifications, when they were most isolated and vulnerable.

“This system of petty, secret, and transient attack put the impoverished colonies to an immense charge in maintaining a cordon of militia along their northern frontier--a precaution often as vain as it was costly,” observed Parkman.

The volume on Massachusetts in the justly famous “American Guide” series, produced by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, called Deerfield “a beautiful ghost,” representing “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and acute moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.”

I don’t think I’d go that far: after all, the town retains the tony prep school Deerfield Academy, the Yankee Candle headquarters (in nearby South Deerfield), and enough money made off of tourists to keep the tumbleweeds away. 

But as I walked the mile-long stretch of Old Deerfield Street, with its carefully preserved colonial homes, I sensed something unique about the setting. 

I didn't grasp what it was until I came across the statement by historian Richard Slotkin that, with its incessant demands for vigilance, "The frontier made Europeans into Americans."

The “Redeemed Captive” and the Unredeemed One

An entire literary genre evolved, a kind of spiritual crisis memoir, written by survivors of attacks by Native Americans: captivity narratives. The first I encountered in Carl Hovde’s brilliant American Literature class at Columbia University was Mary White Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, A Minister's Wife in New-England (1682). 

These “captivity narratives” combined two literary forms: the jeremiad, or a call on the faithful to return to the way of truth before it’s too late, and a cracking good adventure story.

Another landmark of the form was produced by the most important Deerfield captive, the Reverend John Williams. His 1707 account of the massacre, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, became the colonial equivalent of a bestseller, going through six editions by the end of the eighteenth century.

Far more palpable than Williams’ gratitude to God for deliverance from his ordeal, however, was his revulsion at witnessing the slaughter of his wife and a couple of his children. 

While the minister was one of 88 prisoners who had survived the forced march to Canada, and among the 59 eventually ransomed, he was horrified that his daughter Eunice was among the 29 captives who refused to return.

According to a penetrating analysis in Richard I. Melvoin’s New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield, Eunice and the 28 other intransigents were overwhelmingly young and female. Thus, they had few if any memories of the life and culture from which they had been snatched, and were more open to psychological manipulation by their captors.

Three years after the attack, the minister’s daughter had forgotten to speak English and her catechism. Nine years later she married a Caughnawaga Indian, thereafter going by the name of Marguerite A’ongote Gannenstenhawi—with its evocation of her new Catholic and Native-American identity, a double poke in the eye of the Puritans.

In 1740, a decade after her father’s death, Eunice/Marguerite was prevailed upon to visit Deerfield again with her husband, and made three more trips after that. On the one occasion when she stepped inside her old church in her “civilized” garb, “she impatiently discarded her gown and resumed her blanket,” wrote Parkman.

In their loathing of Eunice/Marguerite’s Catholicism, the Rev. Williams and Parkman sound an awful lot like late 20th-century parents ready to hire a deprogrammer to snatch a child from religious cults.

Yet another feeling, more alien now to a country in a post-civil rights era, also emerges in their accounts: fear of miscegenation. It’s the same panic, in a different setting, shared by Southern slaveholders over the possibility of mixture of blood with another race. 

More than that, it speaks to a violation of hearth and home—a psychic and even physical rape—and the impotence of the white male protector of community and family order.

The Redemption Narrative on Film

That same disgust is the coiled spring that propels the plot of the great John Ford western, The Searchers. In that 1956 film, an Indian attack on the Edwards homestead at the edge of the wilderness leaves all dead but for two young daughters carried off by the war party.

At the heart of the Puritan venture into the New World was what minister Samuel Danforth called, in one of the most famous jeremiads, an “errand into the wilderness.” 

Yet the isolation of the wilderness not only afforded the colonists unfettered freedom to worship as they pleased but also exposed them to Satan’s temptations: desire, for sex and for vengeance for wrongs committed against them.

The religious element does not enter into the Ford film, but the same elements of the captivity narrative endure: homes in a fragile outpost between civilization and wilderness, where people long for freedom and a chance to advance in life, suddenly left smoking ruins (in a scene alluded to in George Lucas’ Star Wars); a young girl carried off to God-knows-what fate; and a long, often fruitless multiyear search to bring her back to her relatives.

Now, however, in a subtle shift, the captivity narrative morphs into a redemption narrative, with the emphasis now on a would-be savior who seeks not only to return a long-lost loved one but to redeem a family, a community, and especially his own heart hardened by bitterness.

The agent of that redemption is the Edwards’ uncle Ethan, with little of the Rev. Williams’ piety but every bit of his revulsion over the disturbing mixture of blood.

Ethan Edwards is surely one of the most problematic heroes in American culture. As embodied by John Wayne in perhaps the most complex role he ever took on, he is gifted with all the hardy self-reliance and know-how of the archetypal American frontiersman, but also cursed with a loner streak that has left him fatally unable to have a family of his own.

Mix into all of this Ethan’s guilt over his unacknowledged love for his brother’s wife and over his inability to prevent what the movie implies is her torture, rape and death. By the time Ethan learns that one of his nieces, Debbie, has become the squaw of the Native American mastermind of the raid, the rescuer has become an avenger ready to destroy what he now regards as his polluted flesh and blood—and whatever soul he himself has left.

The climax of the film shows Ethan finally catching up with his niece, years later, roughly seizing her and lifting her body toward the sky. The question is posed in its starkest terms now: Will the hero become the destroyer?

But suddenly, the presence of God so often missing from the film returns as the force of love. The white racist, the mirror image of Debbie's Indian husband, the appropriately named chief Scar, softens. With utter tenderness, Edwards says softly, “Let’s go home, Debbie.”

Like Ethan Edwards and the Rev. Williams, America in the age of terror looks to snatch back something seized from it—a dream of innocence, a moment of peace—and, as the anxious initial days turn to years, it struggles with feelings of resentment. 

Facing the necessary task of remembering and rebuilding, we are less far removed than we imagine from our wilderness origins.