“About the Time the prophetic Egg was laid in the Town of Plymouth”

After reading the nineteenth-century reports of a pro-William Howe message appearing mysteriously on an egg in Plymouth during the Revolution, I went looking for contemporaneous sources. I found only one reference in the America’s Historical Newspapers database.

That calls into question Dr. James Thacher’s statement in 1832 that “the story of the egg was the subject of newspaper speculation in various parts of the country.” Of course, there might be other articles not picked up by that system, or I may not have searched for the right terms. (Additional mentions welcome!)

The lone response to the egg appeared in The Freeman’s Journal, or New-Hampshire Gazette, published in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 28 Jan 1777. That date supports Elkanah Watson’s memory of this event occurring at the same time that Plymouth received word of the American victory at Trenton in late December 1776.

The item started by dismissing superstition—but then it went on to both parody and exploit that credulity:

To the PRINTER.

SIR,

As the Superstition and Weakness of human Nature is such, that sometimes the most trivial Circumstance or grossest Absurdity, is attended with serious Consequences; you are desired to acquaint the Timid & Credulous, that Characters inscribed on Adamant are much more durable than when wrote only on an Egg-Shell. And also to inform the Public, that about the Time the prophetic Egg was laid in the Town of Plymouth, with this wonderful Prediction wrote on its Shell, “Oh, oh, America Howe shall be thy Conqueror,” a Hermit resembling the Genius of America, who had resided in a certain Forest from the first Settlement of the Country, found the following Lines inscribed on a Fragment of Marble near his Cave, visited by the Curious from all Parts of Europe, for the remarkable Eccho which oft reverberated in loud Peals, heard beyond the Atlantic,

TOMORROW: The following lines.

Dr. James Thacher’s Story of the Egg

In 1832, Revolutionary War veteran Dr. James Thacher (1754-1844) published a History of the Town of Plymouth that included this anecdote:

An innocent trick was devised by some persons in this town, which occasioned at that time a general surprise and agitation. An egg was produced with the following words imprinted on the shell by the artifice of some tories. ‘O America, America, Howe shall be thy conqueror.’

The egg being taken from the hen roost of Mr. H. on Sunday morning, and exhibited to a concourse of people assembled for public worship excited the greatest agitation, and the meeting was for some time suspended. The tories affected to believe that the phenomenon was supernatural, and a revelation from heaven favoring their cause and predictions; and some whigs were ready to fall into the delusion, when one less credulous, observed that it was absurd to suppose that the Almighty would reveal his decrees to man through the medium of an old hen.

Thus ended the farce; but the story of the egg was the subject of newspaper speculation in various parts of the country, and the alarm which it occasioned in the minds of some people here was truly astonishing.

This story appears to be independent of the first-hand account I quoted yesterday from Elkanah Watson. Thacher inserted the story among anecdotes from before the war while Watson linked it to a Sunday in late 1776 or early 1777 when word of the Battle of Trenton reached Plymouth. Watson misspelled the name of the town’s Whig minister, which appears several times in Thacher’s book: Chandler Robbins.

The two writers also show different attitudes toward the event. Watson had to be convinced by “an ingenious painter” that the message could have been put onto the egg artificially. Thacher, on the other hand, suggested the notion of divine messages by that channel was prima facie “absurd” and a “farce.” Watson and his friends thought the egg was a Tory’s dirty trick. Thacher called it “an innocent trick.”

Both authors independently agreed on one detail: that the egg came from a hen owned by a family with the initial H.

TOMORROW: Tracking back to 1777.

Elkanah Watson’s Magic Egg

This anecdote is from Men and Times of the Revolution, the posthumously assembled memoirs of Elkanah Watson (1758-1842). It starts in December 1776 just after young Watson and some friends were inoculated against smallpox:

About the time we left the hospital, Major Thomas, of the army, arrived at Plymouth, from head-quarters. He had left Washington retreating through New-Jersey. I spent the evening with him, in company with many devoted Whigs. We looked upon the contest as near its close, and considered ourselves a vanquished people. The young men present determined to emigrate, and seek some spot where liberty dwelt, and where the arm of British tyranny could not reach us. Major Thomas animated our desponding spirits by the assurance that Washington was not dismayed, but evinced the same serenity and confidence as ever. Upon him rested all our hopes.

On the ensuing Sunday morning, as the people were on their way to church, I suddenly witnessed a great commotion in the street, and a general rush to the back door of Mrs. H—’s dwelling. Supposing the house to be on fire, I darted into the crowd, and on entering the house, heard the good woman’s voice above the rest, exclaiming, with an egg in her hand—“There, there, see for yourselves.” I seized the magic egg, and to my utter astonishment read upon it, in legible characters formed by the shell itself, “Oh, America, America, Howe shall be thy conqueror!”

The agitation and despondency produced, will hardly be appreciated by those unacquainted with the deep excitability of the public mind at that period. We were soon relieved from our gloom and apprehension, by ascertaining from an ingenious painter, who happily came in, that the supernatural intimation was the effect of a simple chemical process. We were convinced it was a device of some Tory to operate on the public feeling.

In the afternoon, an express arrived from Boston; a hand-bill was sent into the pulpit, and at the close of the service our venerable Whig Parson [Chandler] Robins, read from his desk the heart-thrilling news of the capture of the Hessians at Trenton—a happy retort upon the Tories.

Watson’s memoir was published in 1856, or nearly eighty years after this reported event.

TOMORROW: An earlier version of the same anecdote.

(Click on the portrait above or here for the Princeton University Art Museum’s exploration of John Singleton Copley’s 1782 portrait of Elkanah Watson.)

The King’s Bathtub Rediscovered

From the Guardian, 5 February:

As two centuries of lumber was cleared out of the abandoned Georgian kitchens at Kew Palace in west London – the smallest of the royal residences – a unique and poignant piece of royal history was uncovered.

The brown tin tub found stashed away in a chimney opening was the bath in which King George III took regular soakings in hot water, a prescription to calm him as he and his attendants wrestled with his terrifying bouts of mania.

At that time, the early 1800s, he was assumed to have been mad; he is now believed to have developed the hereditary condition porphyria. He was virtually imprisoned at Kew to prevent a political crisis if the full extent of his condition became known, as the previously gentle and clever king roared obscenities and terrified his wife, Queen Charlotte.

The discovery bears out a Kew legend that the tormented king took his baths not in the sumptuously furnished main house, but amid the domestic clatter of the royal kitchen.

Here’s the link to the Guardian article, but I have to warn you that page kept crashing my browser. It doesn’t show the actual tub, which will go on display at the palace.

George Washington: “when I was young”

On 28 May 1754, Lt. Col. George Washington of Virginia was involved in an embarrassing skirmish that helped to spark the global conflict called the Seven Years’ War. (This little event is sometimes grandly called the Battle of Jumonville Glen.)

Three days later, the twenty-two-year-old officer wrote a letter to his brother John Augustine (Jack) Washington about the experience. It included the line: “I heard the bullet’s whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound…”

That letter got to the Virginia press, and thence to other North American newspapers, and eventually to the August issue of the London Magazine. It made George Washington famous across the British Empire—as an idiot. Or at least a callow youth.

According to Horace Walpole, even George II commented on Washington’s claim to be charmed by whistling bullets: “He would not think so, if he had been used to hear many.”

Meanwhile, Washington suffered a well-deserved and embarrassing loss at Fort Necessity. The next year, he volunteered as an aide to Gen. Edward Braddock. That commander’s British column was caught in an ambush by Native and French soldiers, and Washington was the only aide not killed or wounded. He helped to lead the surviving British forces to safety, keeping the disaster from being even worse.

Once again, reports of that battle, many including Washington’s name, spread across the empire. On 31 Mar 1756, the Earl of Halifax wrote: “I know nothing of Mr. Washington’s character, but that we have it under his own hand, that he loves the whistling of Bullets, and they say he behaved as bravely in Braddocks action, as if he really did.”

More than twenty years after his first skirmish, Washington arrived in Massachusetts as general of the newly adopted Continental Army. The Rev. William Gordon wrote that at some point a gentleman—probably Gordon himself—asked the general about that old “heard the bullet’s whistle” line. Gordon said Washington answered, “If I said so, it was when I was young.”

Fun & Games at the Paul Revere House, 22-23 Feb.

School vacation week is coming up, and the Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End is planning two special programs on “Fun and Games in the 1700s” on Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon.

The site’s write-up says:

In colonial Boston did men, women, and children work from sunrise to sunset? The answer is a resounding NO! During a tour of the Revere House, children (and accompanying adults) search for beans, a thimble, bed wrench and other examples of household items the Reveres likely used for both work and play. Then, all participants will try their hands at popular colonial games such as Snail, Ninepins, Jackstraws, and Beast-Fish-Fowl.

Families will leave inspired to turn everyday objects into toys and games and with rules for these and other colonial amusements!

The two sessions are:

• Wednesday, 22 February, 10:30 A.M. to 12:00 noon
• Thursday, 23 February, 2:00-3:30 P.M.

The fee is $4.50 for children aged 7-11 and accompanying adults. The price includes admission to the Revere House. Each presentation is limited to 20 people, and reservations are required; call the Revere House at 617-523-2338.

(Picture on top: Thomas Rowlandson’s “Dr. Syntax Playing a Game of Ninepines” from the 1810s but set in an earlier time.)

Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills

This is a little outside my self-imposed period, but it’s too good to ignore. From Romeo Vitelli’s Providentia blog:

Even today, archaeologists tracing the campsites used by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their historic expedition across the Great Plains from 1804 to 1806 can still rely on the relatively high mercury deposits to be found in the soil where the explorers dug their latrines. According to Sam Kean and his excellent book, The Disappearing Spoon, not only did Lewis and Clark set out on their expedition armed with microscopes, compasses, three mercury thermometers, and other scientific instruments, they also carried more than six hundred mercury laxatives, each four times the size of an aspirin, to be used for any digestive problems that they might encounter along the way.

The laxatives, marketed under the name of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills, were supplied by Meriwether Lewis’ chief medical advisor and the foremost health authority for the still-growing United States, Dr. Benjamin Rush.

The rest of that posting discusses Rush’s eminence as a physician in the early republic. Vitelli’s Part 2 mainly discusses Rush’s ideas on mental illness and how he had to treat his own son.

Rev. Bentley Returns to Salem, 15 Feb.

Last week I sat in a Dublin Seminar meeting with Donald Friary, former director of Historic Deerfield and now a consultant to historical organizations. As usual, he was knowledgeable, helpful, and wise. I had no idea that Donald also does first-person history interpretation.

Which is to say, he’ll be holding forth as the Rev. William Bentley (shown here, looking rather little like Donald) at Salem’s Old Town Hall on Wednesday, 15 February, starting at 7:30 P.M.

Bentley was minister in that town’s East Parish from 1783 to 1819. He left an extensive diary full of gossip, opinions, and observations about life in Salem, which was then reaching its economic and cultural peak. It’s a terrific source that I’ve never explored in depth, but keep being led back to. There’s no doubt he’d be an interesting evening companion.

Tickets for this event are $10 for general admission, and $5 for students. You can buy them in advance at Old Town Hall Lectures or at the door.

This presentation is the first of the 2012 Old Town Hall Lecture Series in Salem. Upcoming events include:

• 21 March: Bonnie Hurd Smith on her new book, We Believe in You: 12 Stories of Courage, Action, and Faith from Massachusetts Women’s History
• 18 April: Maryellen Smiley, curator, on the history of Brookhouse Residence for Women in Salem.
• 16 May: public-television producer Andrew Giles Buckley on the 1787 Columbia Expedition, the first American trade voyage around the globe.

Measuring the U.S. Constitution’s Influence

A couple of days ago the New York Times published a front-page article by Adam Liptak headlined, “‘We the People’ Loses Appeal with People Around the World.” The information presented in that article didn’t strike me as a supporting the headline, so I went to look for the abstract of the underlying paper in the New York University Law Review.

David S. Law and Mila Versteeg summarize their findings this way:

In this Article, we show empirically that other countries have, in recent decades, become increasingly unlikely to model either the rights-related provisions or the basic structural provisions of their own constitutions upon those found in the U.S. Constitution. . . .

We find some support in the data for the notion that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has influenced constitution-making in other countries.

The Times article focuses almost entirely attention on the rights enumerated in different constitutions. There’s even a chart. It says little about governmental structure, but the paper does cover that topic.

The Canadian Charter was instituted in 1982. I’m not surprised that it reflects today’s understanding of human rights better than the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees, which come mainly from the first federal Congress. The oldest parts of our Constitution reflect eighteenth-century Whig ideology and controversies, with the inherent limitations of that society.

Some of the rights that Law and Veerstag looked for, such as a presumption of innocence in criminal trials, aren’t part of the U.S. Constitution but nonetheless part of U.S. law. They’re probably part of U.S. culture as well; we citizens would be upset not to have them. Perhaps they should be in the national charter, but as a nation we’ve been reluctant to amend the Constitution—or maybe its amendment process is too difficult.

It’s also no surprise to anyone who reads a newspaper that a lot more governments have a prime minister reflecting a parliamentary majority than the U.S. of A.’s structure of divided government. Even our own government chose a parliamentary system for Japan after World War 2. And no country, to my knowledge, has copied the American Electoral College.

On the other hand, one important aspect of the U.S Constitution has remained very influential, it seems to me: the fact that there is a written constitution that takes its authority from “We the People.” The requirement of a written constitution, drafted and ratified by people who at least claimed to represent the population, underlies most of the world’s present constitutions. There weren’t a lot of examples of that in 1787. Many of them, in fact, came from the American states. For most statesmen then, a nation’s “constitution” was an abstraction, a status rather than a set document, like an individual’s medical constitution.

In that respect, every country that sits down to write a national constitution has been influenced by the U.S. document, even if they choose models that offer more individual protections and a different structure of government. Article 2 or the Third Amendment might not be models, but “We the People” still has appeal.

Thomas Marshall, Tailor and Town Officer

Yesterday I tripped across this webpage from the National Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C., highlighting a portrait from its collection.

The subject is Thomas Marshall (1719-1800), a Boston tailor. That profession included very poor men and rather rich ones. Marshall was on the rich side, as the mere existence of this portrait shows. He served as colonel of the Boston militia regiment and a selectman.

Marshall shows up at a number of notable moments in the town’s Revolutionary history:

• When angry merchants confronted pistol-wielding printer John Mein during the non-importation arguments of October 1769, Marshall swung at Mein’s back with a handy shovel.
• Marshall testified about the night of the Boston Massacre in 1770, saying he saw fights between soldiers and locals, and insisting there were no more than 100 people in King Street during the shooting.
• As a selectmen Marshall stayed in Boston through the siege; at the end, he was one of the officials who helped to convey an unofficial message from Gen. William Howe to Gen. George Washington in March 1776.

The painter was John Singleton Copley, early in his career. His technique hadn’t fully developed, but already he was conveying a sense of individual character.