Communications

Burlington, Vermont 28 August 2012 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/735/1792807/tneq_c_00233.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

To the Editors: In J. Kevin Graffagnino’s review of my book, Ethan Allen, His Life and Times, the former director of the Vermont Historical Society makes much of criticizing small errors, some of which are merely perceptual. For example, when I wrote that Allen lived in a large rented house in Bennington after the Revolution, Graffagnino in- sists it was small. No doubt compared to modern big-box suburban dwellings, it was small, but to Ethan Allen, who lived most of his life among cabins and extremely modest one-story farm houses on the eighteenth-century New England frontier (except for the time he was caged in a cell as a prisoner of war of the British), it must have seemed capacious. A photograph in my book shows a row of five windows piercing the gambrel roof of a two-story dwelling, by most colonial standards considered generous. Graffagnino has contributed a careful and at times generous read- ing of this long book, but at times he introduces factual problems. Where I carefully laid out the opposing theories that attempt to explain just how all but two hundred of the fifteen hundred copies of Allen’s Reason the Only Oracle of Man, the first work of deist philosophy printed in the United States, went up in smoke in a mysterious fire, Graffagnino labels their destruction a disproven “old story” while himself not telling us the source of his explanation for the Bennington book burning. Most significant is Graffagnino’s denial of my claim that the printing press that ran off Allen’s longest political work, the 178-page A Vindication of the Opposition of the Inhabitants of Vermont to the Government of New-York, at Dartmouth College in Dresden (now Hanover), New Hampshire, in 1778–79 was the same press that had inaugurated American printing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638. Here, the evidence against Graffagnino’s contention is considerable.

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The odyssey of the Stephen Daye printing press from Harvard Uni- versity to Dartmouth College has long been documented. It was first chronicled at length by Harold Goddard Rugg, Dartmouth’s long- time assistant librarian and professor of the history of books, in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 1920. Rugg wrote that the Dresden Press, as it had become known, was “the first printing press used in the United States. . . . It was brought to this country in 1638 by Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/735/1792807/tneq_c_00233.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Stephen Daye, who died at sea. It was set up by his widow in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts.” Over the next ten years, in the Cambridge home of the Reverend John Glover, members of the Daye family ran off the pages, among other emissions, of the Bay Colony Psalmody and John Eliot’s Indian Bible. In 1649, the Daye press, writes Rugg, “came into the possession of the Green family” and was “taken by [Samuel Green’s] family of printers to Connecticut.” A Connecticut State Library website (www.CSLib.orgNewspaper ResearchRescouces) offers a genealogy of the Green family of printers that begins with the statement that the press Samuel Green pur- chased was “the first printing press in the American colonies, on which Stephen Daye and his son, Matthew, began printing about 1639;ten years later, [it] was taken over by Samuel Green, who ran it for many years. Samuel Green had sixteen children; twenty-two of his descen- dants [including] three of his sons and his wife’s brother became printers [and] took part in the first five newspapers in Connecticut.” Samuel’s great-grandson, Thomas, edited and printed the first newspaper in Connecticut, the 1755 New Haven Gazette, then launched the Hartford Courant, America’s longest-running newspaper. One of Thomas’s seven children, the third Timothy Green, took over the Connecticut Gazette and changed its name to the New London Gazette in 1763. It was to him that the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, founder and president of Dartmouth College, appealed for a printer in 1778. Reverend Wheelock was worried that, unless Dartmouth had a printing press, the more conservative eastern New Hampshire towns would acquire a press first and be able to run off propaganda that would prevent Hanover and fifteen other New Hampshire towns in the Connecticut River Valley from being annexed to neighboring Vermont, which had offered its protection against British and Indian raids. Reverend Wheelock had appealed to Ethan Allen and to Ver- mont’s General Assembly and was, at Allen’s urging, commissioned as Vermont justice of the peace for Hanover. COMMUNICATIONS 737

In June 1778, Wheelock dispatched his son and successor, Colonel John Wheelock, to Connecticut, where Governor John Trumbull offered to help him procure a printer and a press. Finding the one- hundred-ﬁfty-year-old Daye Press in Norwich available, the Whee- locks arranged for Green to send the press and types to Hanover. Green wrote President Wheelock that as soon as his apprentice,

Jonah Paddock Spooner, returned from a privateering mission, he Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/735/1792807/tneq_c_00233.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 would send off the press. But Spooner was captured by the British, and one of the oxen needed to haul the leaden cargo over the White Mountains became lame. By autumn, the ox recovered and Green dispatched his other apprentice, Alden Spooner, to Hanover, where he installed the Daye Press at the south end of Dartmouth Hall in October 1778. Alden Spooner’s son, Wyman, would write in the Ver- mont Journal of 26 May 1826, confirming that “Alden Spooner bought the press used in 1772 and removed it from Norwich, Connecticut, to Dresden in 1778.” According to a bibliography compiled by Professor Rugg, Alden Spooner produced the first Dresden Press printing by October 1778. Ethan Allen’s four hundred fifty copies of Vindication was the penul- timate of thirty-three orders printed by June 1779, when Vermont State Treasurer Ira Allen paid Spooner £2,258 3s. 11d. for his work. The annexation of Hanover and fifteen other New Hampshire towns only lasted from 15 June 1778 to 12 February 1779 before Ethan Allen, worried that Vermont’s chances for admission to the conti- nental union would be jeopardized unless Vermont relinquished the territory, urged Vermont’s assembly to nullify their annexation. To retain the lucrative business of the Vermont state printer, Spooner had to hitch up the oxen once again and cross the frozen Connecticut River. On 15 March 1780, the Vermont General As- sembly “resolved for Alden Spooner to remove his press as quick as possible to Westminster.” After Kevin Graffagnino left the Vermont Historical Society in 2008, his successor as executive director, Jacqueline Calder, published a pamphlet for the Society entitled Harold Goddard Rugg, A Collector’s Story, now visible on a Harold Rugg website (www .vermonthistory.org/index.php/. . . /harold-g-rugg-collection.html). Ac- knowledging Vermont native Rugg’s bequest of eleven thousand books and pamphlets to the VHS, she stated unequivocally that “the Daye Press (now known as the Dresden Press), the first printing press usedinVermont...isownedbytheVermontHistoricalSociety.” 738 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Or, as Rugg had put it so long ago, “the Dresden, or Daye Press, after leaving Dresden was located in some Vermont towns and ﬁnally came into the possession of the Vermont Historical Society and may now be seen at Montpelier.”

Sincerely, Willard Sterne Randall Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/735/1792807/tneq_c_00233.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

Ann Arbor, Michigan 26 September 2012

To the Editors: Thank you for the opportunity to respond to Professor Randall’s comments. On Ethan Allen’s Bennington rental, which Randall calls “a large, hipped-roof house,” I’m glad he’s backed off “hipped-roof,” but I don’t think referring to the mid-1780s as “colonial” or insisting that “capacious” is the right adjective for a dwelling considerably smaller than the houses (some still standing in Old Bennington) in which Ethan’s prominent neighbors—the Deweys, Isaac Tichenor, the Robinsons—lived is well considered on his part. My guess is that Randall conflated Ethan’s rental with the nearby Catamount Tavern, a large, hipped-roof building also illustrated in his book, and that his editor failed to catch the minor error. If Randall has an early source for the story that much of the first printing of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man perished in a Bennington, Vermont, fire, Green Mountain historians would be delighted to learn of it. The tradition apparently begins with Bennington authors in the Victorian era, but attempts to trace it back to Allen’s generation have not succeeded. Until some primary source does emerge, the fire and its various explanations—God’s vengeance, printer Haswell’s arson, a coincidental lightning bolt—remain entertaining Vermont counter- parts to George Washington chopping down the cherry tree rather than historical fact. It would also be useful to know the basis for Randall’s assertion that Ethan had Anthony Haswell print “fifteen hundred leather-bound copies” (p. 502), which would have been an enormous print run and an expensive binding job on a large book for a small frontier shop in the 1780s. Randall muddies the numerical wa- ters, I think, by saying without documentation that the fire consumed “five hundred uncirculated copies,” that “[o]nly the forty copies Allen COMMUNICATIONS 739 had already shipped and some he had at home escaped the flames” (p. 507), and, here in his response, that “200 copies” survived. Randall devotes most of his response to whether the printing press that Alden Spooner (Randall misidentifies Alden’s brother as Jonah rather than Judah P. Spooner) used at Dresden in 1778–79 and in Westminster and Windsor after that was the same instrument on which the Daye family printed at Cambridge beginning in 1638.He Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/735/1792807/tneq_c_00233.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 cites Harold Goddard Rugg’s 1920 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article on the Dresden Press as his principal source, referring as well to websites at the Connecticut State Library and the Vermont Histor- ical Society for additional information and declaring that Jacqueline Calder “unequivocally states” that the Daye Press and the Dresden Press were one and the same. In fact, consensus on this point began to erode decades ago. When Ray Nash published Pioneer Printing at Dartmouth (Hanover, 1941), he included a quote from a letter by Lawrence C. Wroth, one of the leading authorities on early American printing: “There is no certainty whatever that the press at Montpelier is the original Stephen Daye Press, and it seems to me that the burden of proof is definitely upon anyone who claims it as the first printing machine in the United States. There is no doubt, of course, that the press at Montpelier is old and that it possesses the mechanical fea- tures which would have been present in the Stephen Daye Press. It has a good deal of distinction as being the machine employed by the proprietors of the ‘Dresden Press,’ but it seems to me unwise to make a broader claim for it without substantiating data” (pp. 17–18). Mar- cus A. McCorison’s “The Old Press at the Vermont Historical Society” in the September 1959 issue of Printing and Graphic Arts traced the Daye-Dresden story back to the 1790s, mostly as a Spooner family oral tradition, but McCorison also quoted an 8 August 1792 letter from Timothy Green III to Isaiah Thomas, who was then at work on his history of printing in America. Green, who sent his brother-in-law Alden Spooner north to Hanover in 1778, told Thomas, “The History which I can give you of Mr. Spooner’s Press, is but short.—How it came to be asserted the first press in America I know not—the Story didnotoriginatewithme....ThePresswhichMr.Spooner has, I believe to be the only one he [Timothy Green I] ever had—but whether he had it from his Father, and was the press he brought with him from England, I know not” (pp. 87–88). McCorison con- cluded, “Nor do we. The old press in Montpelier has a fine heritage in any event as the second press in Connecticut and Vermont’s first” (p. 88). 740 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Mr. Randall is incorrect on the Vermont Historical Society con- tinuing to assert the Daye-Dresden lineage. No doubt influenced by Mr. McCorison’s article, the Society dropped that claim no later than 1966, when the VHS brochure “Museum of the Vermont Historical Society,” with a photograph of the press on the front cover, said only, “The venerable printing press was the first to be used in Vermont by Alden Spooner.” I checked with Ms. Calder, head of the VHS Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/85/4/735/1792807/tneq_c_00233.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 museum for more than twenty years (but never the Society’s Exec- utive Director, as Mr. Randall claims), and she confirmed that the sentence Mr. Randall quotes from the VHS website means that the Society can document the press as the first used in Vermont, not as the Daye Press. It’s possible that the Spooner press did migrate from Cambridge to New London, Connecticut, in 1714 and then north to Dresden in 1778, but “possible” is a long way from the certainty Randall presents in his book and in his response to my review. Read- ers interested in Alden Spooner’s printing at Dresden, an important backwoods example of the power of the press during the American Revolution, may wish to consult my articles on the Dresden shop in the April and November 1977 issues of the Dartmouth College Library Bulletin and the Winter 1979 issue of Vermont History; it appears that these, along with the Nash and McCorison titles, have escaped Professor Randall’s notice. I will leave it to the Quarterly’s subscribers to ponder a route for taking a printing press and types from Norwich, Connecticut, to Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1778 that would “haul the leaden cargo over the White Mountains,” as Randall believes to have been the case; I’d have thought Norwich west to Hartford, then north up the more easily traversed Connecti- cut River Valley, the likely path. Willard Sterne Randall is an engaging writer, a fine storyteller, and a knowledgeable student of early America. Ethan Allen: His Life and Times is an impressive book that will be popular with general readers, will sell well, and merits excellent notices in newspapers and magazines. If he wanted it to receive glowing reviews in scholarly journals like The New England Quarterly, Professor Randall should have done more primary-source research, absorbed the interpretive perspectives of the post-WWII generations of early Americanists, and hired a fact checker familiar with eighteenth-century Vermont history.

Sincerely, J. Kevin Graffagnino