The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  December 2003

WHAT’S IN A WORD? — By D. Michael Ryan. While we use particular words and phrases often in our conversations, including 18th Century words, do we always know what they really mean or where they came from? For example, we know that many colonial newspapers were called a “gazette” (pronounced GAHZ-ette). Why? The word comes from the name of a Venetian coin which was the cost of the first newspapers distributed in Venice. As the item sold for a “gazette,” so was it called.

Often, we are made to “eat humble pie.” Originally it was a pie made from the entrails of a deer (umbles). At a hunter's feast, while the lord and his friends ate venison, the common folk were served “humble pie,” and thus made to feel lesser.

When a person is sick or thought to carry a disease, he may be placed in “quarantine” or isolated for a period of time. Used in common law, a woman followed the death of her husband by staying in her house for 40 days or quarantined (medieval Latin for the number 40) while the dower (her inheritance) was assigned. “Gossip” comes from the Saxon words for God and relation and meant to stand in for a child at baptism. Today it is a verb for telling personal, intimate, familiar details of another person or a noun when referring to the teller of such tales.

Did you know that a sewer was once the officer who tasted food before the King ate? What's in a word? (more next month!)

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  November 2003

Book Review
Brutal Virtue: The Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton
by Anthony J. Scotti, Jr.
(Heritage Books, 2002) 285 pgs
Submitted by Donald L. Hafner

As the British army passed through North Carolina in early 1781, Lord Cornwallis himself rode to the front of the column and ordered Col. Banastre Tarleton to dismount his cavalry regiment, the British Legion, and line up the men by the side of the road. Tarleton was only 27 years old, but he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel and had become one of Cornwallis’s favorite officers, for his energy and fearlessness in battle. As the Legion troopers stood at attention, Cornwallis and several civilians walked down the line, inspecting each face. They held a hushed consultation, then Cornwallis’s guards seized a sergeant and a private from the ranks. The two were briskly taken away, brought before a court martial, found guilty of rape and robbery, and promptly hanged.

If brutality toward the few, in order to influence the many, can ever be defended as a virtue, it is in the harsh discipline commanders must use with their soldiers, because an undisciplined army is a menace to itself and to all. Just months before, Cornwallis had warned Tarleton to bring his Legionnaires under stricter control. The ruthlessness of the Legion had earned its young commander his reputation as “Bloody Tarleton” and, had he lived in a different time, might also have earned him a place in the dock as a war criminal.

The British Legion survives today as a historical re-enactment unit in North Carolina, and the author of Brutal Virtue is a member of the Legion and a professor of American history. This book is Scotti’s argument that Tarleton was merely obeying an older concept of virtue, that he was no more ruthless nor brutal than many other commanders during a bloody Revolution, and that mitigating circumstances explain the instances of the Legion’s alleged brutality. Although Scotti’s argument is not always convincing, his book is well-researched and documented, written in an engaging and graceful style, and thought-provoking throughout.

Banastre Tarleton was the second son of a wealthy Liverpool merchant, and after an indifferent performance at Oxford, he squandered the bulk of his £5,000 inheritance in drink and gambling. At that point, his mother purchased a commission for him in the King’s Dragoon Guards, apparently with the warning that from then on, he was on his own. He arrived in the Colonies in early 1776, promptly ran up yet another £2,500 in debts, but also began his swift rise in rank through dash and daring. When the British Legion was formed in 1778, Tarleton was made lieutenant colonel at age 24 and put in command. Stunned by Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in 1777, the British shifted the focus of their campaign to the South, and it was there that the Legion earned its reputation through the relentless pursuit of Rebel militias and guerillas in the Carolinas.

The Legion moved swiftly, often far afield from the main British army, confiscating such supplies as it needed from the local populace. Tarleton rarely had as many as 550 men; more often he had fewer than 300. Roughly half the Legion were cavalry dragoons who fought from horseback with sabers. The others were mounted light infantry soldiers who rode to the battle on horses and then dismounted to fight with muskets. As the wretched climate and hard fighting took their toll, the Legion replenished its ranks with Loyalist volunteers and Rebel deserters. The Legionnaires were encouraged to think of themselves as elite troops, and while the rest of the British army wore red coats, the Legion wore green. They rode hard. They preferred to strike at night. They attacked even when the opposing forces were two and three times their number. Tarleton’s own words explain his policy: “I have promised the young men who choose to assist me in this expedition the plunder of the leaders of the [Rebels]. If warfare allows me, I shall give these disturbers of the peace no quarter. If humanity obliges me to spare their lives, I shall convey them as prisoners to Camden. For a confiscation must take place in their effects. I must discriminate with severity.” “Nothing will serve these people,” he asserted, “but fire & sword.”

By early 1780, the Legion’s reputation for plunder, arson, rape, brutality, and terror was already growing. It was sealed at Waxhaws, South Carolina, in May 1780, when the Legionnaires hacked away at defeated American soldiers who were attempting to surrender. “I have cut 170 officers and men to pieces,” Tarleton bragged to Cornwallis. In fact, the number was closer to 300, including one Captain John Stokes who was stabbed four times with bayonets even after his sword hand had been severed from his arm.

Scotti’s defense of Tarleton has many parts. In fact, so many that they undercut each other. An ethic that views ruthlessness in war as a virtue is as old as Machiavelli and as modern as destroying the village in order to save it. Yet if Tarleton’s effort to spread terror by “fire & sword” is defensible as a harsh but ancient virtue, then Scotti gains nothing with the added arguments that the Legion was no more barbarous than others, was in any case provoked in each brutal instance by extenuating circumstances, and was singled out for vilification by American myth makers only because Tarleton was “a young, arrogant, ambitious favorite of a British general.” Virtue should need no other defense.

In the end, all these arguments confront a genuine difficulty, which Scotti acknowledges: the Legion’s behavior was condemned as barbarous at the time, not just by Americans but also by the British press, by Tarleton’s fellow officers, and by Cornwallis himself. Yet this does not diminish the value of Brutal Virtue. Indeed, Scotti’s effort to make all these arguments brings a real historical richness to his book and vivacity to a struggle in the South that was fundamentally a civil war between two groups of Americans, wearing different uniforms and spurred by different visions of who should govern and how. It was a battle fought largely by irregular and undisciplined guerilla and militia units, and Scotti is correct that we have no reliable history of which side was more ruthless in the tit-for-tat of revenge and retaliation.

So was Tarleton a war criminal? An argument Scotti does not present, but his evidence does, is that Tarleton was simply too young and inexperienced for the responsibility he was given. Everything about the Legion made it like a cult. It moved and fought detached from the rest of the British army, surrounded by a populace whose sentiments it could neither know nor trust and whose property it was compelled to steal in order to survive. The Legion fought from horseback, and all things being equal, a horseman with a two-foot saber stood no chance against a squad of soldiers armed with five-foot muskets and eighteen-inch bayonets. Even a well-trained horse will halt before such a threat, yet high attrition among its horses forced the Legion to make do with confiscated and untrained steeds. The British army judged that it took three years for a trooper to learn his skills, yet disease and battle losses forced the Legion to refill its ranks constantly with raw recruits. To steel himself for battle in the company of such horses and comrades, a Legionnaire had to possess a strong belief in his own invulnerability and a conviction that his enemies were contemptible cowards who would turn and run rather than fight. Legionnaires had to believe they were exalted men.

The danger with such an elite unit is that it will become a law unto itself, readily able to justify all manner of violence toward those who are not of the cult. Sharing in acts of brutality may even become a bond among the unit’s members. Such men may easily run amok unless reined in by the moral sensibilities of a strong leader. What young Tarleton lacked, and his swift rise in rank had not given him, was moral maturity and strength of character. He had gambled away his inheritance, and he gambled away the lives of his men. At Blackstocks Hill in November, 1780, he threw his 250 soldiers against a Rebel force of a thousand, and lost perhaps 190 men dead and wounded. At Cowpens in January 1781, he plunged into battle against a well-prepared American force, and in the space of an hour lost perhaps 900 dead, wounded, or captured among the 1,100 British soldiers entrusted to him. The Legion itself lost virtually all its infantry and a third of its dragoons. Whatever moral restraints Tarleton may have felt, he failed to convey or enforce them with his officers and men. Cornwallis warned Tarleton repeatedly “to prevent the troops under your command from committing irregularities.” In reply, Tarleton revealed his weakness of character and leadership: “I am sorry your Lordship has cause to complain of the plundering of the Legion. The officers have kept me in ignorance, or steps should have been taken immediately to suppress it.” It was an excuse unworthy of a lieutenant colonel, and a more mature man would have been embarrassed to offer it.

Tarleton was among the British soldiers forced to surrender at Yorktown in October, 1781. A few days later, as he awaited passage on a ship back to England, he was confronted in the street by the steward of a nearby plantation. The steward announced that Tarleton’s horse had been stolen from his employer and demanded it back. Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton of the King’s British Legion dismounted and stood in the dirt while on-lookers laughed. He returned to Britain, dabbled in politics, boasted that he “had killed more men and ravished more women than any man in America,” and died in comfort on his estate in Shropshire in 1833, at the age of 79.

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  November 2003

WHY LINEN, NOT COTTON? — When describing our 18th century garb to contemporary audiences, we tell them that common clothing would have been made of linen or wool rather than cotton, because cotton was expensive. To give some sense of the difference, consider this. At the time of the Revolution, the fiber hairs of cotton had to be separated from the cotton seeds by hand. For every pound of cotton fiber, three pounds of cotton seeds had to be removed. Eli Whitney did not invent the cotton gin, which could separate the two by machine, until 1794. So at the time of the Revolution, it took twelve to fourteen days of labor to produce a pound of cotton thread, but it took only one or two days to produce a pound of wool thread.

Um, wool underwear rubbing against the skin. Ah, now we understand why our colonial ancestors didn’t wear any.

YOU SAY HUZZAY, AND I SAY HUZZAH! — By D. Michael Ryan. Although the years 1774 and 1775 were most difficult in Lincoln and Massachusetts, there were still reasons to give forth an enthusiastic shout of joy and cheer.

In the current day reenacting, the terms often used for this emotional outburst are “huzzah” and “hurrah.” According to Capt. Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796), the term “huzza” came from the cry of the Hungarian light horse known as huzzars. Eventually this (and presumably goulash) took hold in England as a military and civilian shout.

However, according to extensive research by Mark Hilliard, the correct shout, particularly in New England, was “huzzay.” This is quite well documented with one diarist noting that upon the announcement of the alliance with France, “three Whoosais” were given. Of course, as with all things entrenched to the reenacting mind and manner (i.e., calling the musket a “Brown Bess”), changing this cheer or shout to the correct term will be like pulling wooden teeth! Oh well... HUZZAY!

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  October 2003

“QUICK, BEN, GIMME A PHRASE!” — On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia appointed a five-man committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Rhode Island, and Robert Livingston of New York were its members. The opening sentence of the Declaration they produced contains the assertion that Americans were claiming the independence “to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” A nice turn of phrase. Where did it come from?

Well, consider this. In 1747, The Maryland Gazette carried the text of a speech identified as having been made before a magistrate in Connecticut by one Polly Baker, an unwed woman with five illegitimate children, each by a different man. When called to account for her behavior, Polly delivered her speech to the court, asserting that she was only obeying the “great command of Nature, and of Nature’s God.” The speech caused quite a literary sensation and was hailed as an early feminist proclamation.

So what has all this to do with the Declaration of Independence? Well, Polly Baker’s speech was a hoax. The Gazette article had in fact been written by Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps, with a twinkle in his eye thirty years later, he suggested the phrase to Thomas Jefferson?

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  Febuary 2003

“Bay Road Politics: Hartwell & Whittemore”
Submitted by D. Michael Ryan, LMM Historian

Chambers Russell, whose ancestral roots were in Lincolnshire, England had little difficulty in selecting the name “Lincoln” to become the newly incorporated town name for Concord’s Second Precinct.. This was formalized on 19 April (of all dates!) 1754, but the naming came easier than did the actual change of address for some gentlemen in the North section, along what would become known as Battle Road.
Ephraim Hartwell (cordwainer and farmer yeoman) and Nathaniel Whittemore (farmer yeoman and early owner of the Capt. William Smith House) were neighbors and good friends. Both had supported Rev. Daniel Bliss of Concord’s Christ Church (First Parish) and attempted to stop the 1745 “West Church” or “Black Horse Church” schism. When the Second Precinct was formed of East Concord, neither of these two men were supporters and thus were exempted from joining. In 1752 and 1753, Ephraim had risen to a status wherein he was elected a Concord Selectman, and thus was not enthusiastically in favor of a new town, torn asunder from his family’s old village.

When incorporation finally occurred, Hartwell became a reluctant follower to Lincoln. Having attained to the position of “gentleman”, he was elected as the new town’s first Selectmen in 1754 (repeated in 1755, 1758-59, 1764-66, 1768 and 1774).

Meanwhile his friend Nathaniel, having his family roots in the old settlement, and serving as Concord Selectman 1743-46, 1749-50 and 1754, became the single strongest opponent of the new town. When Lincoln laid a road over his farm, he sued and not only did he boycott political involvement, he stubbornly continued to list his address (even in 1756) as “Concord Alis Dick (alias distus – otherwise called) Lincoln”.

By 1758, Whittemore, deciding that he had endured enough, sold his Lincoln land to a William Dodge of Harvard and moved. Dodge would deed a house plus some 120 acres (1770) to his step-daughter Catherine Louisa Salmon, who in January 1771 would marry a failed merchant and brother of Abigail Adams, one William Smith. And you know the rest of the story!

Thus, even in the pre-Lincoln/Revolutionary days, the Town’s small sector on what we call Battle Road was already steeped in political drama and intrigue. Such would only be added to in 1775.

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  January 2003

Book Review:
The Shoemaker and the Tea Party
by Alfred F. Young
(Beacon Press, 1999) 262 pgs.
Submitted by Donald L. Hafner

When George Robert Twelves Hewes was 93 years old, he traveled the long distance from his home in Richfield Springs, New York, to be feted as a celebrity in Boston. While he was there, he sat for a long interview with a historian, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, and they talked about that December night in 1773, sixty-two years earlier, when Hewes had helped dump chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. They talked for hours, and soon after, Thatcher published his account as Traits of the Tea Party: Being a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, One of the Last of Its Survivors. George Hewes lived out the next, and last, five years of his life in Richfield Springs, and there he died in 1840, widely believed by his family and community to have been the oldest survivor of the Tea Party. He may well have been, but there was no way to be certain. Like many others who had boarded the tea ships that night, Hewes had concealed his face in the crude disguise of an Indian. Later generations would suppose this mockery was intended to insult and fool the British authorities. But in truth, the men also sought to conceal themselves from each other, so that none need fear being betrayed by an informer. Decades later, even Hewes himself could not say for sure who else had been with him on the deck that night, laboring for three hours until the last tea chest was torn open and tossed overboard. Hewes swore that for a brief while, John Hancock himself helped him rip apart one crate. Thatcher included this “curious reminiscence” about Hancock in his Memoir. “But we believe it a mistake,” he added skeptically.

Thatcher failed to notice another curious element of Hewes’ reminiscence. They had talked for hours, just as Hewes had talked with another biographer a year earlier, yet never once had the old man called the event a Tea Party. Thatcher hadn’t noticed, but historian Alfred Young did, and it provoked this book about a lowly shoemaker and America’s recovered memory of an event, sixty two years after it occurred. “People did not call it the Tea Party after it happened in Boston the night of December 16, 1773, at least not in print. … ‘The destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor’ was the way contemporaries, friend and foe alike, referred to the serious political event in public accounts and private letters.” “As surprising as it may seem, the two biographies of George Robert Twelves Hewes, A Retrospect of the Tea-Party (1834) and Traits of the Tea Party (1835), were not only the first books to feature ‘tea party’ in the title, they were also the first of any sort to focus on the event itself and the first biographies of any participant, high or low.”

Alfred Young’s book is two stories intertwined, as he searches the life of George Hewes to discover why it took Americans a full generation to find an acceptable way of “remembering” a pivotal event in the Revolution. The key to the puzzle lies in Hewes’ occupation: he was a shoemaker. Defiant as a boy, always ready with his fists, and indifferent to punishment, he had been placed as a shoemaker’s apprentice by his desperate parents. When he reached age 21, Hewes started his own shop in Boston’s wharf area, making and repairing footwear for customers hardly more prosperous than he was. It was not a promising trade, for already the factories of nearby Lynn were mass-producing 80,000 pairs of shoes each year. Hewes went into debt for “a sappled coat & breeches of fine cloth” in which to court the daughter of a washer woman, got chucked into debtors prison for failing to repay, and a decade later, he and his wife and children were still desperately poor and living with relatives.

By his own account, Hewes had no interest in patriotic politics until he happened upon the crowd of enraged citizens harassing a squad of British soldiers on Kings Street in March of 1770. The soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five men in the Boston Massacre. Hewes knew four of the slain men. One was shot in the back while standing next to Hewes and fell into his arms. Over the next three years, Hewes was involved in several altercations with loyalists and British troops, including one in which he was nearly killed. These episodes seem to have been as much about social class resentment as about politics, and Hewes never formally joined any patriotic group. He remained just one of a teeming throng of angry workingmen along the docks, ready to form a mob when signaled by someone’s shrill whistle. Hewes’ talent as a loud whistler apparently got him recruited to board the tea ships in December 1773.

Hewes is such a colorful character that we are bound to share Alfred Young’s curiosity about why America lost interest in him and the event he helped make, and then a generation later revived the memory and attached a label that conjures up a genteel social occasion of no consequence — a Tea Party. Young devotes the second half of his book to this forgetting and remembering.

Young’s account of the forgetting will sound familiar to those who have read David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, and recall that Revere’s own narrative of his ride was suppressed until long after the Revolution, because it revealed meticulous planning in anticipation of the “unprovoked attacks” committed by British troops on April 19th. The destruction of the tea in Boston by characters such as Hewes — an impoverished, illiterate, apolitical ruffian — was soon overshadowed by the Revolution itself. Yet if the purpose of such political action is to put your opponent in the wrong and keep him there, the destruction of the tea was also problematic for the patriotic cause. A rebel conspiracy had set to work, not in hot anger but in cold deliberation, to destroy (in today’s value) roughly a million dollars of property over the span of three hours. Refusing to buy the tea, with its hated tax, was a Whig’s own choice. Destroying the tea, so that others could not make their own choices, was an act of coercion and intimidation aimed at other Americans as much as at the Crown. And after the Revolution was won, why dwell on an event whose remembrance could only spark divisive questions about who provoked the war, and who was on which side and when.

Young’s account of how the next generation came to remember the destruction of the tea carries his book into the social and political turmoil of America during the early Republic. Young’s explanation is elegant and engaging and deserves to be read in his own words. One need not accept the full Revisionist or Post-Modernist implications of Young’s argument to see his point — a society’s “history,” in the sense of those past events that it resurrects and celebrates, is in some measure a social invention, and this invites questions about who does the inventing and for what purposes. A radical Revisionist or Post-Modernist might ask only, “Who has the power, and who stands to gain?” Young is more nuanced, but he does see politics in the answer. The early Republic was an era of vicious, often bloody contention over the purpose and legacy of the Revolution. Which events were recalled, and how they were labeled and interpreted, reflected the political battles of the day. For those who worried about the increasingly strident demands of a rising, urban working class — and Benjamin Bussey Thatcher was one who worried — labeling the destruction of the tea as a Tea Party transformed this radical attack on property from a dangerous precedent into a frivolous prank, and the genteel imagery linked the event to society’s “betters” rather than to wharf mobs and the likes of George Hewes. At the same time, urban radicals had their own interests in recalling the Tea Party, as a mockery of the manners of those who claimed to be their “betters” and as a reminder (and an implied threat) of their own rising power in American society.

George Robert Twelves Hewes, his wife, and their eleven children lived in relentless poverty. After she died in 1828, he shuttled among the homes of his children, each in turn too poor to shelter him for very long. In his final years, he was often asked to say a few words at Fourth of July celebrations. At one such gathering, he offered this toast: “May we meet hereafter, where the wicked will cease from troubling, and the true Sons of Liberty will be forever at rest.” He was never much of a shoemaker.

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  January 2003

BENEDICT ARNOLD ACCORDING TO THE HISTORY CHANNEL: “A QUESTION OF HONOR” — By D. Michael Ryan.  A question of honor? How about a question of accuracy? As bad as the movie “The Patriot.” You’re lucky you didn’t sit next to me last night as I picked this one apart.

Just a few minor details:

1. Quebec citadel looked like a frontier fort, and a poor one at that. And why were most Brits dressed as Grenadiers throughout?

2. The fact that Arnold got wound was a key to the loss of the Quebec battle, but what about the death of Gen. Montgomery?

3. Battle of Saratoga was weak. First of all, Saratoga was where the British surrendered; there was never a battle there.  And Arnold did not run by foot into the decisive battle ... he rode and was shot on his horse. And Arnold throwing tomohawks? Plus, he always had an endless supply ... like the old cowboy movies where a six-shooter had 30 rounds! And the “Betsy Ross” flag at Saratoga? Where was the scene of Arnold being relieved of command, then going to the front anyway and riding into the battle ... the real story?

4. What’s with the brand new Continental Army uniforms on the troops at Saratoga and elsewhere? And the various colored cockades on the hats?

5. Arnold’s line “God bless America” ... who’s he... Kate Smith? And his “I became a cripple in service to my country” line, stolen from George Washington's speech to his officers at New Windsor, “I have nearly gone blind in service to my country.”

6. And what’s with Arnold’s aide Maj. Franks wearing a Star of David necklace and having it outside his uniform collar?

7. Much facial hair, even among American officers!

8. In the mutiny scene, the militia approached the deserters and presented their muskets, all of which, even in the close-ups, were not in the cocked position to fire! And in the execution scene, the command “take aim” was given ... done elsewhere also.

9. Did Andre attempt to kill Arnold in the scene on the river? Was this accurate? Was Arnold ever fired on (by a gunboat) while attempting to rendevous with British officers?

10. What’s with the British dragoons (patrol-size unit) riding about carrying the King’s Colours? And the American dragoons carrying the “Betsy Ross” flag? The producer idiots don’t think we can tell who is who by the uniforms (some of which in the British case were French & Indian War era!!!)?

11. Arnold challenging everyone to a dual with the same wording got a bit old!

12. Arnold's wife Peggy did not seem to act too “mad” or “crazy” after Arnold fled. She was a bit more “stupid,” as was the poor reaction by Grammer!

One interesting point for further research — did Reed blackmail Washington by stating that if Arnold was not found guilty in a court-martial, the Pennsylvania militia would not respond to support the Army and perhaps Pennsylvania would leave the union? If so, a critical political aspect of the war which George Wwashington had to face regularly, I am sure.

Good portrayal of Arnold forsaking all for Peggy, and in response to his hatred of Congress and politics.