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.

Quote of the Day (Kenneth Roberts, on a Colonial Action Hero)

“The man himself was thick That was my first impression, one of solid thickness: not mental thickness, but physical — a kind of physical unkillableness, it might be called.

“His lips were thick, and so was his long, straight nose. His hands, clasped before him on the table, were enormous and muscular; and their fingers, pallid by comparison with the brown of his face and hands, looked parboiled, as though left overlong in water. Beneath his large eyes the flesh was puffy; and his shoulders, sloping down from a bull-like neck, filled his buckskin hunting shirt so solidly that the leather might have been shrunk to fit them. The breadth of his chest and upper arms gave him the look of holding a deep breath….

“Yet when he spoke, his manner was genial, as though he addressed an equal — which was contrary to the attitude of important military men, according to my understanding. When he smiled, it was hard to tell the meaning of his smile. It might have been considered admonitory, or kindly, or even as sheepish, depending on the state of mind of the person to whom he spoke; but to me it seemed to indicate that he was, at heart, a good-natured man.”—American novelist Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957), Northwest Passage (1937)

For about two decades in the last century, Kenneth Roberts was a perennial presence on bestseller lists with his sprawling works of historical fiction. More than 40 years ago, when I was a student assistant at my local library, his novels could still be found on shelves. But when I went looking for a copy of Northwest Passage, perhaps his most famous one, I couldn’t get my hands on it, so I ordered it through Amazon.

I doubt that you’ll find many college English classes that will cite Roberts as a creator of an innovative or dazzling style, the way they might with Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. But as the above passage shows, he could write vividly.

You can practically see in your mind’s eye the historical figure he was describing: Major Robert Rogers, a colonial military leader in the French and Indian Wars whose unconventional tactics foreshadowed the modern “Special Forces.” (I briefly described his life in this blog post from four years ago.)

Once they bought this novel and dreamed of adapting it for film, executives at MGM must surely have had one of their studio actors in mind for the role: Spencer Tracy. The two-time Oscar winner might not have possessed the matinee-idol looks of Clark Gable. 

But his bulk (solid at this time in his late 30s, overweight as he aged) strongly suggested Rogers, and his naturalistic style of acting gave him an everyman quality seen more recently in the likes of Gene Hackman, Brian Dennehy and Ed Harris.

I remember as a child seeing Tracy in the 1940 movie made from Roberts’ novel. (Well, it turned out only to be the first half of it, but that’s a story for another day.) I couldn’t imagine anyone better able to lead a group of men through all manner of perils than the Major Rogers he created onscreen, including the memorable “human-chain” scene across a treacherous river.

Not unlike Tracy himself, Rogers— at least as imagined by Roberts—could find something within himself to win the respect of all kinds of men. But at bottom, his appeal may have rested—as suggested by Tracy’s smile in the accompanying picture here—on the fact that he was “a good-natured man.”

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.

Quote of the Day (The ‘Mayflower’ Pilgrims, With an Early Model for American Self-Government)

“Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”—Text of “The Mayflower Compact,” signed by 41 males aboard the Mayflower, Nov. 21, 1620

Next week, as they have taken to doing each year at this time since Abraham Lincoln, Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving. The holiday will serve as a kind of wish fulfillment for a country that looks to a past event—aid from Native-Americans that helped the Pilgrims survive hunger in their settlement in Plymouth—as a celebration of how different races, ethnic groups and religious sects can live together in harmony.

But 400 years ago today, an even more auspicious event occurred: the signing of the Mayflower Compact, America’s first experiment in self-government. That document was the product of desperate improvisation in a strange, perilous new country.

The Pilgrims—or, as they were known (more properly) then, “Separatists”—had been ceded land by King James I. Better to have them halfway around the world, he figured, than closer to home (even if, in this case, they had felt it expedient to migrate to Holland to escape his persecution of them), where they could spell trouble with their agitation for removing all traces of Roman Catholicism from the Church of England and the government.

But bad storms blew the Mayflower away from their destination: territory claimed by the Virginia Company near the mouth of the Hudson River. Assessing what passenger and future governor William Bradford called “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers,” the captain decided to disembark at Plymouth Rock, in modern Massachusetts.

The original signed in Europe, then, was null and void, and the group called the “Strangers”—the merchants, craftsmen, skilled workers and indentured servants, and several young orphans on board that were unrelated to the religious sect—were making noise about breaking off on their own.

To increase the new colony’s chances of success, the Pilgrims needed to keep the “Strangers” in the fold. The Mayflower Compact, with its 41 signers—virtually the entire adult male population on board—sought to cool these tensions while giving the majority Pilgrims the most significant voice in the settlement.

A “democracy” as we know it was the last thing on these settlers’ minds. But thousands of miles away from the authority they took for granted, they needed to create their own structure. The practical experience in self-government that took root then—a secular covenant—led eventually to the notion of the “consent of the governed” in the Declaration of Independence.

(For a concise but informative account of the circumstances surrounding the Mayflower Compact, see Melissa Love Koenig’s November 2010 post on the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog.)

(The image accompanying this post is Signing the Mayflower Compact 1620, an 1899 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.)

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 Military History (Robert Rogers, Special Ops Pioneer, Dies)

May 18, 1795—Major Robert Rogers, a New Hampshire soldier whose tactics and leadership of an elite unit of unconventional warriors in the French and Indian War foreshadowed the modern “Special Forces,” died alone and impoverished at age 63 in London, far removed from the brilliant exploits in the North American wilderness that made him famous throughout the 13 American colonies.

If you are wondering what a picture of buckskin-clad Spencer Tracy is doing in a post about an 18^th-century military commander, it is because the great actor spurred my interest in this legendary but flawed soldier by playing him, with his usual intensity and conviction, in Northwest Passage, King Vidor’s 1940 adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kenneth Roberts. 

I can still remember being enthralled as a child by numerous scenes in this epic Technicolor tale of daring and survival—notably, a “human chain” that enables “Rogers’ Rangers” to cross a torrential river.

With America more than a year away from entering World War II, Rogers’ exploits showed how America, with little of the intense training that characterized Continental soldiers, could still revolutionize warfare by teaching a motley force unconventional new tactics. 

“Rogers’ Rangers” represented a sharp break with the English tradition of military service, where commissions were bought and common soldiers were drilled to march in strict formation. In contrast, the soldiers that Rogers molded were woodsmen, provincials, farmers, and Indian scouts, all ready to follow their charismatic leader in asymmetrical warfare where traditional methods could not find traction.

The film ended in triumph for Rogers and his soldiers. MGM had originally subtitled their feature “Book One: Rogers’ Rangers,” in the hope that its success would convince the studio’s most acclaimed male star that he should come back for the second half of the Roberts novel. 

But Tracy, exhausted by its arduous on-location filming, saw the downbeat second half of the book as a reason why it should not be filmed. “I’ll play him [Rogers] up to the point where he has achieved his objective, but I’ll be damned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of life.”

Offhand, I can think of only two epic films that challenged audiences with second halves that saw their real-life heroes suffer the kind of shattering disillusionment and death that Tracy saw as box-office poison: Lawrence of Arabia and Reds, about the American journalist who served as an eyewitness-participant in the Russian Revolution, John Reed. Northwest Passage, about an American further removed in time, would have been an even harder sell in tracing how its hero subsequently failed at politics, business, and marriage. 

The great 19^th-century historian of the colonial conflict between England and France, Francis Parkman, summed up Rogers’ opposing tendencies in Montcalm and Wolfe: 

“He had passed his boyhood in the rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in the wilderness between the French and English settlements...He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment; but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada. His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the French and Spaniards in the west. He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable.”

A few of Rogers’ exploits were especially noteworthy, not only for the way he employed speed and surprise against the French and their Native American allies but also for the hardships endured by him and his men:

*The St. Francois Raid, the climax of a 150-mile march, much of it through marshy bog, that ended in the destruction of an Indian village that had served as the launching pad for several deadly raids into the northern colonies; 

*The Second Battle of the Snowshoes, in which, after attempting to ambush the French, Rogers’ men had the tables turned on them—surviving by the skin of their teeth (including, a possibly apocryphal tale claims, by sliding 400 feet down a sheer cliff to a frozen Lake George; and 

*The 1760 capture of Fort Detroit and other French outposts, secured after Rogers and the Rangers marched west—through enemy forests not even charted by the English.

Rogers’ career after the end of the French and Indian Wars marked a tragic fall from grace. He had made an enemy of General Thomas Gage, a rival of Rogers’ commander and mentor, British General Jeffrey Amherst. Gage, as Parkman indicated in the passage I quoted earlier, brought charges of treason against Rogers and had him hauled to Detroit in chains.

Rogers was acquitted following a trial. But, at the start of the American Revolution, he made a worse enemy in George Washington, who, because of the major’s extensive travels in the colonies as unrest spread against English rule, suspected that Rogers was a Loyalist spy. 

Forced to choose side, Rogers elected to fight against the New Englanders he grew up with, even playing a role in one of the earliest English intelligence coups of the war: the capture of Nathan Hale. But he was removed from a leadership role of “The Queen’s Rangers,” and his drinking and indebtedness mounted until he faded into obscurity far from home. 

Nevertheless, his contribution to American warfare remains. It not only was maintained through his aide John Stark, who would win the Battle of Bennington for the colonials in the American Revolution, but through his “Rules of Ranging,” a set of guidelines for guerrilla warfare that is still distributed by the U.S. Army Ranger School.

Quote of the Day (Francis Parkman, on St. Rene Goupil)

“Three of the Hurons had been burned to death, and [Fr. Isaac Jogues and lay missionary Rene Goupil] expected to share their fate. A council was held to pronounce their doom but dissensions arose, and no result was reached. They were led back to the first village, where they remained, racked with suspense and half dead with exhaustion. Jogues, however, lost no opportunity to baptize dying infants, while Goupil taught children to make the sign of the cross. On one occasion, he made the sign on the forehead of a child, grandson of an Indian in whose lodge they lived. The superstition of the old savage was aroused. Some Dutchmen had told him that the sign of the cross came from the Devil, and would cause mischief. He thought that Goupil was bewitching the child; and, resolving to rid himself of so dangerous a guest, applied for aid to two young braves. Jogues and Goupil, clad in their squalid garb of tattered skins, were soon after walking together in the forest that adjoined the town, consoling themselves with prayer, and mutually exhorting each other to suffer patiently for the sake of Christ and the Virgin, when, as they were returning, reciting their rosaries, they met the two young Indians, and read in their sullen visages an augury of ill. The Indians joined them, and accompanied them to the entrance of the town, where one of the two, suddenly drawing a hatchet from beneath his blanket, struck it into the head of Goupil, who fell, murmuring the name of Christ. Jogues dropped on his knees, and, bowing his head in prayer, awaited the blow, when the murderer ordered him to get up and go home. He obeyed, but not until he had given absolution to his still breathing friend, and presently saw the lifeless body dragged through the town amid bootings and rejoicings.”—Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867)

I had heard about Fr. Isaac Jogues before, but the story of his associate, Rene Goupil—the first canonized martyr in what is now the United States, in present-day Ossernenon, N.Y.— only came to my attention this past weekend, when he was mentioned in a newsletter from Fr. Joseph O’Brien, the current director of Carmelite Missions who has long been associated with my parish of St. Cecilia in Englewood, NJ.

On this day in 1642, Fr. Jogues experienced one of the most agonizing days of his life. On September 29, Rene Goupil had been murdered in the fashion described by Francis Parkman in the above passage. The next day, Jogues—who had not only witnessed Goupil’s killing but also, like him, had been subjected to extreme torture by his Native-American captors over the last few days--found the corpse of his friend at the bottom of a ravine, stripped naked and gnawed by dogs. Jogues had covered the corpse with stones, intending to secretly bury it to prevent further desecration.

But a storm overnight disrupted Jogues’ plans, and when he came out on October 1, Goupil’s remains were gone. A search in nearby rocks, thicket and forest turned up nothing. By the side of the stream, the sobbing priest had to chant the services of the dead.

It was not until the following spring that Jogues discovered that Goupil’s corpse had been carried way not by the storm, but by the Mohawks, the same tribe that had subjected the pair to relentless beating with knotted sticks, tearing off hair, beards, and nails, and the biting of their forefingers. Mohawk children told him that Goupil’s further-decomposed remains were further downstream. Jogues gathered up the scattered bones and hid them in a hollow tree, hoping to eventually bury them in consecrated ground.

It was a lonely end for a young doctor filled not only with religious zeal but also with care and concern for those he treated. Goupil had intended to be a Jesuit, but had to leave the novitiate because of deafness. Yet such was his devotion that, after studying surgery, he had offered his services to the Jesuits in New France (modern Canada). Just before his murder, he had, in the presence of Jogues, professed vows as a Jesuit lay brother.

Religious commitment can not only require humility, but reinforce it in the most devastating fashion. So it was with the prophet Jeremiah, St. Paul, and Jesus himself, who, while hanging on the cross, asked, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” That lesson was compounded in the case of the North American Jesuit Martyrs. By 1650, the religious order was backpedaling on its commitment in North America, with virtually nothing to show for their heroic efforts.

The full story of this awaited a New England historian—Francis Parkman, who came from venerable Protestant stock and, predictably, evoked the “contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism.” For all his prejudices against Catholics, though, Parkman had to acknowledge the bravery of Goupil, Jogues and their Jesuit colleagues, even when it was accompanied by another slap at a faith he saw as alien and inimical to the United States:

“Let those who have prevailed yield due honour to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.”

Goupil was canonized on 29 June 1930 by Pope Pius XI along with seven other Canadian Martyrs or "North American Martyrs" (including Jogues, who met his fate two years after the killing of Goupil)..