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“I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Street. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befur.” — Dunne, Finley Peter, OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY, New York, 1902
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project New York State HDT WHAT? INDEX
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440,000,000 BCE
Origin of the Taconic chain of mountains that now lies to the east of the Hudson River valley. This chain of mountains would be named by Ebenezer Emmons in 1844 — and his correct explanation of this early origin of these mountains would eventuate in his being driven from the state of New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
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1100
In what would become upstate New York, by this point, longhouse construction had begun.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
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John Bartram’s 1751 diagram of an Iroquois longhouse and the town of Oswego. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1300
Maize agriculture would be being introduced in what would become upstate New York during the 14th century, producing a population surge in the longhouse villages, and bringing other changes as well.
The 14th Century would suffer from four periods during which summer temperatures were markedly cooler than average. (The longest of these four cold spells would last for a couple of decades, from about 1343 to about 1362.)
Some 4-foot-long metal tubes jammed into the marshy soil and sediment layers at Succotash Marsh in East Matunuck, Rhode Island (at the west side of the ocean entrance of the Narragansett Bay) by Tom Webb of the Geological Sciences Department of Brown University, have revealed that there has been a series of overwash fans created by storm tidal surges, indicating that seven category-three hurricanes have struck Narragansett lowlands in about the past millennium. The first such overwash fan that has been revealed dates to the period HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John Bartram’s 1751 diagram of an Iroquois longhouse and the town of Oswego. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1295-1407. NEW ENGLAND
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
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1350
By this point the longhouse villages in what would become upstate New York had due to the adoption of maize agriculture become considerably larger, and due to increased warfare had needed to be fortified.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
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John Bartram’s 1751 diagram of an Iroquois longhouse and the town of Oswego. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1400
In what would become upstate New York, ritual cannibalism began (according to newspaper reports this is no longer a local practice).
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
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1450
At some point between this year and 1475, upon a merger between two villages, the Onondaga would become the first recognizable Iroquois tribe of the area that would become upstate New York. All the Iroquoian confederacies (Neutrals, Susquehannock, Huron, and Iroquois) would be in place prior to the first contact with Europeans. The Iroquois were still threatened by the Adirondack, but their bigger problem would be their own constant internal blood feuds and vengeance slayings.
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
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1451
It was possibly in about this year that the Iroquois tribes of the area that would become upstate New York were tugged out of their incessant internal struggles by the appearance of Deganawida (Two River Currents Flowing Together), a Huron who would become famous as the “Peacemaker.” This negotiator apparently was hindered, like Moses, by some sort of language or speech difficulty, but eventually won the support of Ayawentha (He Makes Rivers), an Onondaga who became a war chief among the Mohawk (and who would achieve a posthumous poetic fame as “Hiawatha”).1 The distinguished duo were somehow able to convince
the other Iroquois tribes that in order to achieve ascendancy over other redskins, they needed to bring their own incessant internal strugglings to an end. Since the legend has it that Deganawida produced a miracle of blotting out the sun, and since we know that a solar eclipse would have occurred in upstate New York in 1451 if it wasn’t too cloudy that day to be seen, this would be a possible year for the conciliation work that would bring peace and unprecedented prosperity, and political unity and unprecedented military power. At first, the Iroquois would function as two related alliances: the Seneca, Cayuga, and, to a lesser extent, the Onondaga would merge as the western Iroquois while the Mohawk and Oneida would merge as the eastern Iroquois.
1.The life of this politician has been cartoonized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem of 1855, which is approximately as historical as the more recent Disney biography of Pocahontas. Longfellow and Disney were strangely alike: each, pretending to build bridges to understanding, built only walls. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(Deganawida’s “Great Peace” would never be extended to anyone outside the Ongwi Honwi, superior people, of the Five Nations. From the outside, this “Great Peace” would more resemble a “Great War.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1524
April 17, Thursday: Giovanni da Verrazano entered New York bay to explore the Hudson River. He met a party of natives; relations were amicable.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
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1525
Portuguese navigator Estêvão Gomes (in Spanish, Estéban Gomés or Gómez, in French, Etienne or Étienne Gomez), explored in his La Anunciada from Cape Charles to Cape Cod and the Hudson River, Delaware River, and Connecticut River. Along the coast he captured enough natives that at least 58 would survive, although the Spanish would criticize these slaves as too thin to be of much use to anyone. He sailed up the Hudson far enough to be certain that it would not lead to China.
CAPE COD: The “Biographie Universelle” informs us that “An ancient manuscript chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has preserved the memory of the voyage of Gomez [a Portuguese sent out by Charles the Fifth]. One reads in it under (au dessous) the place occupied by the States of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Terre d’Etienne Gomez, qu’il découvrit en 1525 (Land of Etienne Gomez, which he discovered in 1525).” This chart, with a memoir, was published at Weimar in the last century.
The manuscript diary of his voyage would be published in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, with a map in which the present seaboard of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island is marked “Land of Esteban Gomez, discovered by him in 1525, by order of His Majesty; abundance of trees, game, salmon, turbot, and soles, but no gold is found.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1565
In what would become New York, this is the approximate point at which the Seneca in the western Finger Lakes began branching off, and migrating both to the northeast and the northwest. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1570
In what eventually would become upstate New York, the Huron prophet and philosopher Deganawidah, assisted by Ha-yo-went’-ha (Hiawatha), united the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca tribes into an Iroquois Confederacy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1600
New York: Population of Algonkin (Algonquin) tribes was about 6,000.
The approximate total population of Paumanok Long Island’s Metoac tribes was 10,000. A total of 13 tribes lived on the island.
The population of the five nations of the Iroquois was somewhere under 20,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1603
While bands of runaway slaves in Colombia were well armed with arquebuses, Spanish soldiers report that they were more dangerous when armed with bows. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1604
King Henry of Navarre granted to a favorite all North American lands north of the 40th parallel (New France). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1606
July 15, Tuesday (Old Style): Rembrandt van Rijn, painter, was born in Leiden, Netherlands. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1608
October: Captain Christopher Newport returned again to the Jamestown settlement with the Second Supply including the 1st two women and eight Dutchmen or Poles who were “glasse-men.” Although new consignments of settlers would be arriving, there would be no further such resupply ships from England until May 1610.
End of the year: Captain Christopher Newport returned to England from the Jamestown settlement carrying with him “tryals of Pitch, Tarre, Glasse, Frankincense, Sope Ashes ...” This had been, for Europe, a poor harvest year.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
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1630
A house was built within the New-York fort enclosure for the director-general.
The ship New Netherland was built by the West India Company. Nicknamed the “great ship,” it displaced 800 tons.
Meanwhile, considerably farther up the Hudson River, Amsterdam pearl merchant Killian van Rensselaer, the first patroon, founded Rensselaerwyck on lands purchased from the Mahican tribe. Receiving a grant for the land from the Dutch West Indies Company, he began recruiting and the first shipload of immigrants arrived. The first crops were planted at Fort Orange (present-day Albany, New York). The Pavonia patroonship was granted.
John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony has a ship built, named it Blessing of the Bay, and sailed it to Paumanok Long Island in the Dutch New York colony to purchase wampum.
On a map of New-York harbor, the mapmaker Johannes de Laet for the first time employed such names as Manhattes, N. Amsterdam, and Noordt River.
August 10, Tuesday (Old Style): The Patroon Michael Pauw, one of the four Patroons of New Netherlands, purchased Staten Island near the Dutch New Amsterdam colony from its native residents. It would form part of the province of Pavonia — but would soon revert to the West India Company.
October 1, Friday (Old Style): The Dutch New Amsterdam colony patroon Killian van Rensselaer signed a copartnership agreement with Samuel Godyn, Johannes de Laet, Samuel Bloemmaert, Adam Bissels, and Toussaint Moussart. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1631
When he refused to ban the private fur trade, Peter Minuit was recalled from New Amsterdam to Holland. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1632
The 1st public beer brewery was set up early in the year by New Amsterdam director-general Peter Minuit.
The English captured the Dutch vessel Eendracht at Plymouth.
March 19, day (1631, Old Style): New Amsterdam director-general Peter Minuit was recalled to Holland because of privileges he awarded patroons. He was succeeded by Bastiaen Jansz Krol as acting director. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1633
Adam Roelantsen arrived in New Amsterdam, founding the first school in the colony.
Five stone workshops were built near today’s Whitehall Street, New Amsterdam.
Van Twiller settled at Bossen Bouwerie, becoming the first European settler in the future Greenwich Village, New Amsterdam.
A tile-roofed brewery was erected in New Amsterdam.
March: Wouter van Twiller, a nephew of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, arrived in New Amsterdam in the Soutberg to replace Bastiaen Jansz Krol as director-general, accompanied by nearly 100 soldiers, the first regular troops in the colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1634
At New-York, Roeloff and Annetje Jans began building a farmhouse. They would accumulate land over the next two years that would form the nucleus of the holdings of Trinity Church.
December 11, day (Old Style): Dutch barber-surgeon Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, sent by an officer at Fort Orange (Albany, New York) to explore the area where the Mohawk River flowed into the Hudson River, noted that there was flooding at the site of an Indian village on the southern bank.
December 12, day (Old Style): Ice flows prevented the party of Dutch barber-surgeon Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert from crossing to the north bank of the Mohawk River. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1635
New York had produced 60,000 beaver pelts with a worth of 400,000 guilders.
March 10: The Grand Assembly Treaty of Taagonshi was signed by the Iroquois and the New York Dutch.
April 22: The northwest end of Paumanok Long Island (today’s Queens) was settled by the Dutch. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1636
The Dutch begin settling further out on Nieuw Amersfoort (Paumanok Long Island), moving into Brooklyn’s Flatbush. Governor Wouter Van Twiller begins purchasing Paumanok Long Island land from the Lenape, at what will become the Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New-York. Over the next two years he will acquire 15,000 acres. The natives would remain in the area for many years.
The West India Company granted D.P. De Vries part of Staten Island, New-York.
The partners Andries Hudde and Wolphert Gerritsen broke ground for a bouwerie (farm) at the future site of Flatbush, New-York.
The Delaware name Sewanhacky (place of shells), used to denote Paumanok Long Island, first appeared, in Dutch deeds for land on the western end of the island. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1637
The Dutch purchased Minnahannock Island in the East River from the Canarsie and begin raising hogs, naming it Hog Island. (This later would become Roosevelt Island.)
Englishman Thomas Foster received a royal grant for 600 acres on Alley Creek, off Paumanok Long Island’s Little Neck Bay, displacing the local Matinecocks. (The area will later be named Douglaston.)
Great Barcut or Great Barn Island (later to be known as Ward’s Island) was purchased by Van Twiller.
The Dutch Patroon Michael Pauw sold Pavonia (which would become parts of Staten Island and New Jersey) to the Dutch West India Company.
In the greater New York colony, the patroonship of Killian Van Rensselaer had come to encompass an area of 24 by 48 miles covering most of what would in the future become Albany and Rensselaer counties.
May 3, Wednesday (Old Style): Lion Gardiner purchased an island from Manhassets sachem Poggaticut and his wife Awaw, in return for ten coats. He would designate it the Isle of Wight (it would later become known, of course, as Gardiner’s Island). NEW YORK
End of June: More than anything else, the English wanted the Pequot grand sachem, Sassacus. Thomas Staughton landed at Pequot Harbor with 120 men. Finding the Pequot forts abandoned, he started west in pursuit. John Mason joined him at Saybrook with 40 men plus Uncas and his Mohegan scouts. With the Mohegan pointing the way, they followed the slow-moving band of Sassacus west. Intent on capturing Sassacus, other Pequot they encountered enroute were offed at the detection of the slightest reluctance to cooperate — one Pequot sachem near Guilford Harbor was beheaded and his head placed in a tree as a warning (the location is still known as Sachem Head). The English finally caught up with him at Sasqua, a Pequannock (Mattabesic) village near Fairfield, Connecticut. The Pequot retreated to a hidden fort in a nearby swamp but were surrounded when John Mason’s men were able to reach Mystic undiscovered. Some 700 Pequot were trapped inside while most of their warriors were absent on a raid against the Connecticut settlements. After negotiations, 200 Pequannock (mostly women and children) were allowed to leave, but the Pequot were well aware what awaited them and refused to surrender. Mason and his men set the fort afire, and began to kill all who attempted to escape. Sassacus gathered 80 warriors and managed to break free, and 180 Pequot were captured to be sold as slaves to the West Indies, the remainder evidently being incinerated. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“...the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” — Declaration of Independence HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The others were killed: “It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”
Sassacus and his escort fled west to the New York area. His logical choice for refuge should have been the Mahican (Dutch allies and close relatives), but the Mahican were subject to the Mohawk at the time, so Sassacus was forced to turn for refuge to some old enemies. The Mohawk had never forgotten who the Pequot were, and no sooner had the sachem reached the Mohawk village, than, without being allowed to speak in HDT WHAT? INDEX
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council, he and most of his warriors were killed. The few who escaped joined the Mahican at Schaghticoke. The Mohawk cut off Sassacus’s head and sent it to Hartford as a token of friendship. THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS
Since the General Court in Hartford levied a heavy fine on any tribe providing refuge to the Pequot, there was no place for them to go. The remaining Pequot were hunted down by the English, Mohegan, and Narragansett, and the war ended in a series of small but deadly skirmishes. The remaining Pequot sachems surrendered asking to be spared.
The whites had soon grown dissatisfied with their red allies, warriors who strangely seemed not to have any concept of the agenda of such war, “to conquer and subdue enemies” but instead regarded fighting as “more for pastime.” With the Pequot defeat, English settlement filled in Connecticut Valley and by 1641 would extend down the coast of western Connecticut as far as Stamford. The shame of the genocide would become so great that eventually it would be made a criminal offense in the Bay Colony to so much as mention that the Pequot had ever existed! “Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it’s a natural part after a society has committed genocide. First you kill, and then the memory of killing is killed.” — Iris Chang, author of THE RAPE OF NANKING (1997), when the Japanese translation of her work was cancelled by Basic Books due to threats from Japan, on May 20, 1999.
“Historical amnesia has always been with us: we just keep forgetting we have it.” — Russell Shorto HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 2, Saturday (Old Style): Amsterdam merchant Willem Kieft (Willem the Testy) replaced Wouter van Twiller as Director of New Amsterdam. NEW YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1638
The Swedish South Company sent out Swedish settlers to sites on Delaware River, founding New Sweden.
Adam Roelantsen founded the 1st school in New Amsterdam, New-York.
The Dutch established a cattle market on the site of today’s Bowling Green, New-York. This would last for nine years.
The Flatbush, Brooklyn, New-York bouwerie (farm) owned by Andries Hudde and Wolphert Gerritsen at this point included a house, a barn, and a hayrick.
The population of New-York had remained close to 400 for the last dozen years or so.
The local Mespaetches sold Brooklyn, New-York land to the colonists that would become Bushwick, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg.
In New-York an ordinance was passed forbidding adulterous relations with heathens and blacks.
The Dutch begin to refer to all land west of Albany, New York as Terra Incognita.
April 22: New Amsterdam governor Kieft and the Privileged Trading Company granted a lease for a tract of and near Fort Amsterdam, New York to former governor Wouter Von Twiller, to be used for cultivating tobacco. This would in 1651 become Peter Stuyvesant’s bouwerie (farm).
May 15: January Gybertsen stabbed New Amsterdam gunner Gerrit Jansen in a brawl, killing him, as New-York’s first murder.
July 20: Andries Hudde was given a goundbrief (grant of land) at today’s Harlem, New-York.
September 21: The Treaty of Hartford, Connecticut gave the Pequot territory to the white towns of the valley of the Connecticut River, dispersing the surviving Pequot amongst the Narragansett, the Mohican, and Paumanok Long Island’s Montauk. The Montauk, having at least nominally been allies of the Pequot, would be required to pay an annual tribute to the governor in New Haven.
November 1: Queens County was created from the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire on Paumanok Long Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1639
Governor Kieft banned the smoking of tobacco in New Amsterdam, as would happen again on March 31, 2003. (Doesn’t that sound like getting ahead of the curve?)
The Dutch West India Company purchased the area known today as “The Bronx,” New-York, to ease future overcrowding. Jonas Bronck purchased nearly 500 acres of land in the future Westchester County. The Company relinquished its monopoly on the North American fur trade, permitting colonists to enter the trade.
Slave quarters were reportedly established to the north of New-York, across from Hog Island.
Members of the Iroquois, Lenni Lenape (Delaware) and Mohican groups were at this point residing along the Hudson River of New York.
John Scrantom and other settlers purchased the future site of New Guilford, Connecticut from the Indian sachem Menunkatuc. Scrantom’s descendant would become one of the pioneers of Rochester, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Manatus Map (probably drawn by either Andries Hudde or Johannes Vingboons) was published, detailing the greater New York area. It indicated that there were Lenape longhouses in what is now Brooklyn. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1640
Walter Clarke was born in Newport, son of Friend Jeremiah (Jeremy) Clarke and Friend Frances Latham Clarke.
After touring New England, including Rhode Island, a Mr. Lechford reported for the benefit of the stay-at- home English that “at the island ... there is a church where one Master Clarke is pastor.” (He would add, while back in England revising his manuscript for the press, that he had since heard that this church was no more — BAPTISTS there had arisen a controversy respecting BIBLE authority and the existence upon earth of a visible church, which had caused some members of the congregation to become first Seekers and then Quakers.)
AQUIDNECK ISLAND
JOHN CLARKE
At this point a group of Massachusetts dissenters, who eventually would become Quakers, resettled themselves at Gravesend, Brooklyn, Paumanacke (Paumanok Long Island) in order to live under the protection of the Dutch government. NEW YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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David Pietersz De Vries leased out Staten Island for use as a pig farm because his plantation there had failed to attract settlers. When a few of the pigs were mysteriously unlocatable, Governor Willem Kieft sent 100 armed men to the island, who killed several Raritan tribespeople, including a sachem. In retaliation the Raritan burned a farm and killed four Dutch workmen. When a Dutch immigrant ship was wrecked on Sandy Hook, New Jersey, its crew and passengers managed to get ashore and set out for Manhattan Island. Penelope van Princis Kent (1622-1732) of Amsterdam, however, needed to remain behind with her seriously ill husband John Kent. A party of Raritan found them on the beach and killed the husband. They stripped and wounded Penelope and left her for dead. This would come to be known as the “Pig War.”
Penelope would be carried by Lenni Lenape natives to New Amsterdam, where she would remarry, with Richard Stout, return to New Jersey, bear ten children, and survive to the age of 110.
The story goes on to relate that all the shipwrecked people were safely landed from the stranded ship. But Penelope’s husband who had been sick for most of the voyage was taken so ill after getting on shore that he could not travel with the rest and for that reason could not march. The others were so afraid of the Indians that they would not remain until he recovered but hastened away to New Amsterdam promising to send relief as soon as they arrived. The wife alone remained behind with her HDT WHAT? INDEX
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husband. They were left on the beach and the others had not been long gone before a company of Indians coming down to the water side discovered them and hastening to the spot soon killed the man and cut and mangled the woman in such a manner that they left her for dead. They departed after having stripped them of all their clothing. The wife’s skull was fractured and her left shoulder so hacked that she could never use that arm like the other she was also cut across the abdomen so that the bowels protruded these she kept in with her hands. After the Indians were gone the wife revived and crawled to a hollow tree or log where she remained for shelter several days one account says seven subsisting on what she could find to eat. The Indians had left some fire on the beach and this she kept burning for warmth. At length two Indians an old man and a young one coming to the shore saw her. The Indians as she afterward learned disputed what should be done with her the elderly man was for keeping her alive while the younger was for killing her. The former had his way and taking her on his shoulders carried her to a place near where Middletown now stands and dressed her wounds and soon healed them. After this Benedict says he carried her to New Amsterdam and made a present of her to her countrymen. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1642
The Reverend Johannes Megapolenses became the pastor of Albany, New York’s new Reformed Protestant Dutch church.
Dutch-born Arent Van Curler made his first visit to the site of Schenectady, New York.
Mahican warriors begin arriving at villages of the Wecquaesgeek (Wappinger) Indians along the eastern bank of the lower Hudson River in New York, seeking tribute in order to pay for Dutch weapons. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1645
October 10, Friday (Old Style): (Another source says October 19th.) New York governor Willem Kieft issues letters of patent to English immigrants Thomas Applegate, Lawrence Dutch, Thomas Farrington, Robert Field, Robert Firmin or Forman, John Hicks, John Lawrence, William Lawrence, John Marsten or Marston, Thomas Saul (Soule), Henry Sawtell, Thomas Stiles, William Thorne, John Townsend, William Widgeon, and Michael Willard, for the Paumanok Long Island settlement of Flushing. The Oakland Gardens area of what is now the borough of Queens in New-York City would be settled by Flushing patentee John Hicks (attempting to evade his marital problems in Rhode Island). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1652
New Amsterdam: Director General Pieter Stuyvesant chartered “Flatbush,” which is to say Paumanok Long Island, and issued a patent for a village there henceforward to be known as Newtown (previously this settlement had ben known as Middleburg).
An Englishman, William Hallet, purchased 1,500 acres on Paumanok Long Island along the East River from Director General Pieter Stuyvesant. The indigenous people were appeased with a blanket, beads, 7 coats, and 4 kettles. The community would become Hallets Cove (later Astoria).
The first school of New Amsterdam was opened, meeting at the Stadt-Huys.
April: When some letters that were being hand-carried to William Coddington in Rhode Island by Dutch messengers fell instead into the hands of his political enemies, they were found to contain evidence, if not of a solicitation of military assistance from the Dutch of New Netherland in the control of the English colonists, at least to an offer by that government of such assistance. The Rhode Island Assembly immediately imagined the category “Treason.” READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT
April 1: New Netherland Director General Pieter Stuyvesant established the village of Beverwyck (Albany), which after Breuckelen (Brooklyn) would constitute the 2d municipality in the future New York State.
April 4: In New Netherland, a duty of 15 guilders was enacted on trade to Africa: “Conditions and Regulations” of Trade to Africa. O’Callaghan, LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, pages 81 and 127.
October 2, Saturday (Old Style): Roger Williams was able to obtain, through the influence of the younger Sir Henry Vane “the sheet-anchor of our ship,” and through warnings that in its present disordered condition the Rhode Island colony might well fall into the clutches of the Dutch of New Netherland, a revocation of the commission that had been granted to William Coddington. This new document merely empowered the magistrates and people of the colony, pending further instructions, to administer their government per previous instructions. READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1654
May 18, Monday: The directors of the East India Company write to governor Pieter Stuyvesant, informing him of a New Amsterdam city seal to be forwarded.
(It’s not a seal, it’s a beaver.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1655
The Witte paert was the 1st vessel to import slaves into New-York (O’Callaghan, LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, edition of 1868, page 191n). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 6: In New Netherlands, a 10% export duty was established on Negroes: “Ordinance of the Director General and Council of New Netherland, imposing a Duty on exported Negroes.” O’Callaghan, LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, page 191. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE NEW YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1658
The council of New-York banned kolven, a forerunner of golf.
The council of New-York outlawed privies with street level outlets. The order was pretty much ignored.
Failing to sustain a ban on loose pigs in the street, the council of New-York ordered them at least ringed through the nose, to make them easier to catch. The city of New-York considered digging a public well north of the wall; nothing was done.
Dutch immigrant Gerritt Remmersen arrived in Amersfoort (Gravesend, Brooklyn) on Paumanok Long Island.
In the New York colony, settlers from Onondaga Lake, fearing an imminent Indian attack, fled, pausing to bury gold and cannon on Stowell (Treasure) Island, in the Oswego River.
In the New York colony, settler Alexander Lindsay Glen erected a mansion on the bank of the Mohawk opposite Schenectady.
In the New York colony, the Iroquois, backed first by the Dutch, then the English, began nine years of devastating warfare against the French.
January 25, Monday (1657, Old Style): In the New York colony, Stuyvesant banned tennis during church service hours, and also prohibited something he referred to as “pulling the goose.”
February: In Maidstone in the New York colony, Lion Gardiner’s daughter Elizabeth Gardiner Howell fell ill, accused Joshua Garlicke’s wife of being a witch, and cursed her. When Elizabeth died, an investigation was necessary.
February 19, Monday (1657, Old Style): The court at Maidstone in the New York colony heard testimony against Goody Garlicke from Samuel Pasons, William Russell, and Elizabeth’s husband Arthur. WITCHCRAFT
February 23, Tuesday (1657, Old Style): In the New York colony, the father Lion Gardiner came to an agreement with the husband Arthur Howell that the husband will become legal guardian for Elizabeth Gardiner Howell’s infant daughter, including portions of Elizabeth’s state received from the Gardiners. WITCHCRAFT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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February 24, Wednesday (1657, Old Style): In the New York colony, Elizabeth’s nurse Goody Howell, and her mother, both make depositions before John Mulford, John Hand, and Thomas Baker. Both women testify that Elizabeth told them Goody Garlicke was tormenting her. WITCHCRAFT
February 27, Saturday (1657, Old Style): In the New York colony, testimony continued. Goody Brookes testified that Mrs. Gardiner had informed her that Elizabeth had been bewitched by a woman. Goody Burdsill testified that she had heard that Goody Davis’s infant had died because she had been cursed by Goody Garlicke. Goodman Vaile and his wife refuted this, claiming that Davis had given her child to an Indian woman to nurse and that it had died of starvation. WITCHCRAFT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1662
In Flushing, New York, Friend John Bowne was imprisoned and fined for allowing fellow Quakers to meet in the house he had erected in the previous year.
When the prison door was left unlocked so he might escape, Friend John chose not to avail himself of the opportunity. Instead he would appeal the case to the corporate offices of the Dutch West India Company. Although Governor Peter Stuyvesant would inform the Quaker that he might get off the ship anywhere he chose, and Friend John got off the vessel in Ireland, he then traveled through England to Holland for his trial — the result being that the Directors would instruct Governor Peter Stuyvesant that in the future he should overlook such cases where they did not directly interfere with local government: “The consciences of men at least ought ever to remain free and unshackled.” This was part of the struggle which now travels under the rubric “Flushing Remonstrance,” a significant precedent for the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.
Friend William Penn would visit the Bowne home in Flushing. In 1694 Friend John would participate in the erection of a regular meetinghouse for the Flushing Monthly Meeting. Visitors to this structure would include Friend John Woolman, plus once some gentleman stopped by who was calling himself George Washington. These walls would witness the beginnings of organization for the purpose of the elimination of American race slavery. (This structure still stands, as the oldest house of worship in the state of New York and the 2d oldest Quaker meetinghouse in America.) RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1664
March 12, Saturday (1663, Old Style): Grant of the Province of Maine. READ THE FULL TEXT
Early in this year governor Peter Stuyvesant had ordered Schenectady, New York lands to be surveyed and apportioned among the various settlers there. At this point King Charles II granted to the Duke of York –his brother– all the land between the Delaware River and the Connecticut River, irregardless of the Dutch. In the Duke of York’s Patent, published on Paumanok Long Island, slavery was regulated: “Lawes establisht by the Authority of his Majesties Letters patents, granted to his Royall Highnes James Duke of Yorke and Albany; Bearing Date the 12th Day of March in the Sixteenth year of the Raigne of our Soveraigne Lord Kinge Charles the Second.” First published at Long Island in 1664. “Bond slavery”: “No Christian shall be kept in Bond-slavery villenage or Captivity, Except Such who shall be Judged thereunto by Authority, or such as willingly have sould, or shall sell themselves,” etc. Apprenticeship allowed. CHARTER TO WILLIAM PENN, AND LAWS OF THE PROVINCE OF PENNSYLVANIA (1879), pages 3 and 12. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1665
A French colony was established in the area of the future Onondaga County near Jamesville, New York. Jesuit missionary Francis Creuxius described the Onondaga valley, mentioning salt springs.
New York royal governor Richard Nicolls signed a peace treaty with the Esopus Indians. These natives agreed to remain on their own lands.
New France’s new governor Daniel de Rémy de Courcelles and lieutenant-general Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy headed into the upstate region of New York with 600 troops to attack the Mohawks. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John Godfrey again was accused of witchcraft in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A complaint was made and some formal step such as petition or deposition was taken toward his prosecution. There was an indictment or presentment in which he appeared before the court preliminary to trial. There was a formal trial. Despite having been in court on similar charges before, he was acquitted.
James Wakeley was again accused of witchcraft in Hartford, Connecticut. A complaint was made and some formal step such as petition or deposition was taken toward his prosecution. There was an indictment or presentment in which he appeared before the court preliminary to trial. He then escaped.
Mary Hall was again accused of witchcraft in Setauket, New York. This time the complaint included her husband Ralph Hall. Some formal step such as petition or deposition was taken toward their prosecution. There was an indictment or presentment in which they appeared before the court preliminary to trial. There was a formal trial. Despite Mary’s having been in court on similar charges before, they were acquitted.
A woman with the family name of Gleason was accused of witchcraft in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A complaint was made and some formal step such as petition or deposition was taken toward her prosecution. There was an indictment or presentment in which she appeared before the court preliminary to trial. That’s all, we have no further information. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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February 2, Thursday (1664, Old Style): New Amsterdam officially became New York.
John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: John Evelyn’s Diary
I had a kind audience of my L[ord] Chancellor about a buisinesse: Saw a fine Mask at Court perform’d by 6 Gents: & 6 Ladys surprizing his Majestie, it being Candlemas day:
THIS DAY IN PEPYS’S DIARY
March 1, Wednesday (1664, Old Style): New York royal governor Richard Nicolls introduced the “Duke’s Laws” to an assembly from Westchester and Paumanok Long Island. This legal code required that those who had taken out patents under the Dutch acknowledge, by taking out new patents, the English proprietors’ hegemony over the land.
March 11, Saturday (1664, Old Style): Deputies of the New York colony meet at Hempstead, Paumanok Long Island, and approved the “Duke’s Laws” legal code. Offenses such as striking one’s mother or father, or denying the “true God,” became capital crimes. Protestants were granted continuing religious freedom. Paumanok Long Island, Staten Island, and parts of Westchester were designated as the new political entity “Yorkshire.” CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
June 12, Monday (Old Style): New York royal governor Richard Nicolls granted a charter to the city of New-York that denied self-government to its 1,500 citizens. The Governor appointed Thomas Willett to be the city’s mayor for the initial year. (For many years this post would remain appointive and primarily ceremonial.) The Governor opened the first court of admiralty at the old Stadt Huys.
John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: John Evelyn’s Diary
I went back to Dover, din’d with the Governor at the Castle, returnd to Deale: next day, hearing the Fleete was at Sold- bay, I went homeward, lay at Chattham, in which journey, my Coach, by a rude justle against a Cart, was dangerously brused:
THIS DAY IN PEPYS’S DIARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1666
February: Royal Governor of New York Richard Nicolls reconfirmed the letters patent that had been granted in 1645 for the village of Flushing on Paumanok Long Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1676
March: Work began on a new fort in Albany, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1679
Père Louis Hennepin reached the Niagara Falls. The first shipyard on the Great Lakes was created on the banks of Cayuga Creek, in the future Buffalo, New York area. René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle launched Le Griffin on Cayuga Creek above the falls. This was the 1st sailing vessel on the Great Lakes, and the expedition would be using it to explore Lake Erie and the western shore of Lake Michigan.
Hennepin was 39 when he sailed with LaSalle on Le Griffon from New France through the Great Lakes to explore the unknown western region of Canada. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Passing through Totiakton, De la Motte obtained corn for a journey down the Genesee River of New York.
Franciscan fathers established a bark mission, where today Rochester’s Mercy High School stands. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1680
The British Parliament granted the New York colony a monopoly on the bolting, or sifting and production of wheat, and as a result the demand for the labor of enslaved Africans in the Hudson Valley would be increasing significantly. By the Revolution, New York would be 2nd only to Charleston as an urban center of North American slavery.
In a continuous series of enactments designed to split the laboring class by fostering the contempt of poor whites toward both blacks and reds as their inherent inferiors, the Virginia legislature prescribed 30 lashes on the bare back “if any negro or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition against any Christian,” thereby allowing white indentured servants, considered at least nominally to be all Christians, to bully dark slaves without fear of retaliation, and thereby placing the light servants more on a psychological par with their masters. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The empire of the Iroquois nations reached its maximum. The original homeland of the Iroquois had been in upstate New York. At this point, through conquest and migration, the Ongwi Honwi, superior people, of these upstate villages between the Adirondack Mountains and Niagara Falls had ascendancy from the north shore of Chesapeake Bay through Kentucky to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; then north following the Illinois River to the south end of Lake Michigan where Chicago is now; east across all of lower Michigan, southern Ontario and adjacent parts of southwestern Québec; and south through northern New England west of the Connecticut River through the Hudson and upper Delaware Valleys across Pennsylvania to the Chesapeake. (Only in two cases would these people every reside elsewhere than in upstate New York: the Mingo would move into the upper Ohio Valley and the Caughnawaga would move into the upper St. Lawrence Valley.) The Seneca were the largest tribe of the League with the number of their warriors equal to number of warriors of the other four tribes combined. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1681
The Duke of York’s charter for the New-York colony was granted.
William Dyre was appointed mayor for the second year in a row.
The flour trade revenue over the past three years totaled £2,000.
Frederick Philipse erected a house on the Nepperhan River, at the future site of Yonkers, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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March 4, Friday (1680, Old Style): Friend William Penn had been granted a New-World charter by King Charles II of England in exchange for forgiveness of a substantial debt he owed to Admiral Sir William Penn, the father —
he would become that area of the world’s Quaker Proprietor for a “Holy Experiment” in a land to be called “Pennsylvania.” This included land overlapping the New York colony as far north as Syracuse.
(Having received royal permissions, for what such things are worth, the usual storyline has it that Penn immediately would solicit the permission and cooperation of the( actual owners and occupants of this land!) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Planning a Peaceable Kingdom on God’s Holy Mountain
Oh, all right, it’s a story. We all know that stories have to be simpler than what actually happens.
“Treaties” seems to me to be very much too strong and specific a term to mobilize in the originary William Penn context. “Meetings,” certainly, and “dialogs,” and “interactions,” and “consultations” — but the deployment of such a term as “treaties” would seem to necessitate that there had been a formal record made of a specific agreement which had been entered into, and there does not seem to be any claim made at that time that at any time there was placed on the record any such formal and specific record, or agreement. I very much honor the manner in which Penn approached the race-interaction problem, but the meaning of this interracial interaction should not be exaggerated by the utilization of such tropes from a general Western diplomacy context as “treaties.” It is a very interesting task, to follow the representation of the meeting with headman Tamanend under the tree, as found in all the various Hicks paintings of the Peaceable Kingdom, back in time HDT WHAT? INDEX
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and discover elements of its staging and composition in a previous engraving of a previous painting, and then discover the identities of various of the figures in this painting, as above — and discover that a number of the persons depicted as being present were demonstrably not so much as on this continent at the time in question.
A much more egregious problem comes when white people presume, as they very commonly did and still do, that because there was such an interaction on record between a visiting white man and various local personages, and because in a later period white people could be observed on the landscape and not red people, therefore a fully qualified land sale must have taken place. It is as if someone had come to your house for a party, bringing a bottle of wine and a hostess gift and weapons — and then afterward used that attendance as obvious proof that you had sold your home to them in exchange for that bottle of wine and hostess gift which had gotten you admitted to their house party. –It never does any good to object “But my home wasn’t on the real estate market” or “I thought that was just a pleasant social call” or “Is it not prudent for one to be quite tactful and agreeable and sociable when someone comes around to your home to visit with you, and that someone is packing a weapon?”
On the basis of his contact first with Jews in England, and then with these natives of the American forest, Friend William Penn would hypothesize that the American Indians were perhaps the Lost Tribes of Israel: “A man would think himself in Dukes Place or Bury Street in London, where he seeth them.” Native American faces looked to him like the faces of Jews — and their languages sounded a lot to him like Hebrew. Does that mean that Penn became a self-entitling American Exceptionalist? –Well, not necessarily, as there’s no record that he took this line of thought in any reprehensible direction.
Penn demonstrably did recommend that in the clearing of the woodlands of his Pennsylvania, “care be taken to leave one acre of trees for every five acres cleared.” But does that mean he was ecologically conscious? Not necessarily. It may merely have indicated that he was aware of the continuing value of woodlots as a source for domestic fuel. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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During this year, Proprietor Penn was trying to recruit colonists: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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SOME ACCOUNT OF THE PROVINCE Of PENNSYLVANIA IN AMERICA;
Lately Granted under the Great Seal Of ENGLAND To William Penn, &c.
Together with the Privileges and Powers necessary to the well-governing thereof.
Made Public for the Information of such as are or may be disposed to Transport themselves or Servants into those Parts.
LONDON: Printed, and Sold by Benjamin Clark, Bookseller in George Yard, Lombard Street, 1681. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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William Penn’s Invitation
Since (by the good providence of God) a Country in America is fallen to my lot, I thought it not less my duty than my honest Interest to give some public notice of it to the World, that those of our own, or other Nations, that are inclined to Transport themselves or Families beyond the Seas, may find another Country added to their choice, that if they shall happen to like the Place, Conditions and Constitutions, (so far as the present Infancy of things will allow us any prospect) hey may, if they please, fix with me in the Province hereafter described. But before I come to treat of my particular Concernment, I shall take leave to say something of the benefit of Plantations or Colonies in general, to obviate a common Objection.
Colonies then are the Seeds of Nations begun and nourished by the care of wise and populous Countries; as conceiving then best for the increase of Human Stock, and beneficial for Commerce.
Some of the wisest men in History have justly taken their Fame from this Design and Service: We read of the Reputation given on this account to Moses, Joshua and Caleb in Scripture Records; and what Renown the Greek story yields to Lycurgus, Theseus, and those Greeks that Planted many parts of Asia: Nor is the Roman account wanting of instances to the Credit of that people; They had a Romulus, a Numa Pompilius; and not only reduced, but moralized the Manners of the Nations they subjected; so that they may have been rather said to conquer their Barbarity than Them.
Nor did any of these ever dream it was the way of decreasing their People or Wealth: For the Cause of the decay of any of those States or Empires was not their Plantations, but their Luxury and corruption of Manners: For when they grew to neglect their ancient Discipline, that maintained and rewarded Virtue and Industry, and addicted themselves to Pleasure and Effeminacy, they debased their Spirits and debauched their Morals, from whence Ruin did never fail to follow any People: With Justice therefore I deny the vulgar Opinion against Plantations, That they weaken England; they have manifestly enriched, and so strengthened her; Which I briefly evidence thus.
1st. Those that go into a Foreign Plantation, their Industry their is worth more than if they stayed at home, the Product of their Labor being in Commodities of a superior Nature to those of this Country. For Instance; hat is an improved Acre in Jamaica or Barbados worth to an improved Acre in England? We know ‘tis three times the value, and the product of it comes for England, and is usually paid for in English Growth and Manufacture. Nay, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Virginia shows that an ordinary Industry in one man produces Three thousand pound weight of Tobacco and Twenty Barrels of Corn yearly: He feeds himself, and brings as much of Commodity into England besides as being returned in the Growth and Workmanship of this Country, is much more than he could have spent here: Let it also be remembered, that the Three thousand weight of Tobacco brings in Three thousand Two pences by way of Custom to the King, which makes Twenty-five Pounds; An extraordinary Profit.
2nd. More being produced and imported than we can spend here, we Export it to other Countries in Europe, which brings in Money, or the Growth of those Countries, which is the same thing; and this is the Advantage of English Merchants and Seamen.
3rd. Such as could not only marry here, but hardly live and allow themselves Clothes, do marry there, and bestow thrice more in all Necessaries and Conveniences (and not a little in Ornamental things too) for themselves, their Wives and Children, both as Apparel and Household stuff; which coming out of England, I say ‘tis impossible that England should not be a considerable Gainer.
4th. But let it be considered, That the Plantations employ many hundreds of Shipping, and many thousands of Seamen; which must be in diverse respects and Advantage to England, being an Island, and by nature fitted for Navigation above any Country in Europe. This is followed by other depending Trades, as Shipwrights, Carpenters, Sawyers, Hewers, Trunnel Makers, Joiners, Slopfellers, Dry salters, Iron workers, the Eastland Merchants, Timber fellers, Victuallers, with many more trades which hang upon Navigation: So that we may easily see the Objection (That Colonies or Plantations hurt England) is at least of no strength, especially if we consider how many thousands Blacks and Indians are also accommodated with Clothes and many sorts of Tools and Utensils from England, and their Labor is mostly brought hither, which adds Wealth and People to the English Dominions. But ‘tis further said, They injure England, in that they draw away too many of the people; for we are not so populous a country as formerly: I say there are other reasons for that. (PENN was writing after the Bubonic Plague of 1660s and the English Civil Wars).
1st. Country People are so extremely addicted to put their Children into Gentlemens Service, or send them to Towns to learn Trades, that Husbandry is neglected; and after a soft and delicate Usage there, they are for ever unfitted for the Labor of a Farming Life.
2nd. The Pride of the Age in its Attendance and Retinue is so gross and universal, that where a man of 1000 Pounds a year formerly kept but four or five Servants, he now keeps more than HDT WHAT? INDEX
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twice the number; He must have a Gentleman to wait upon him in his Chambers, a Coach man, a Groom or two, a Butler, a Man Cook, a Gardner, two or three Lackeys, it may be a Huntsman, and a Faulkner, the Wife of a Gentlewoman and Maids accordingly: This was not known by our Ancestors or like Quality. This hinders the Plough and the Dairy, from whence they are taken, and instead of keeping People to Manly Labor, they are effeminated by a lazy and luxurious Living; But, which is worse, these people rarely marry; though many of them do worse; but if they do, ‘tis when they are in Age; And the reason is clear, because their usual keeping at their Master’s is too great and costly for them with a Family at their own Charge, and they scarcely know how to live lower; so that too many of them choose rather to vent their Lusts at an evil Ordinary than honestly Marry and Work; The excess and sloth of the Age not allowing Marriage and the Charge that follows; all which hinders the increase of our People. If Men, they often turn either Soldiers, or Gamesters (gamblers), or Highwaymen (robbers). If Women, they too frequently dress themselves for a bad market, rather than know the Dairy again, or honestly return to Labor, whereby it happens that both the Stock of the Nation Decays and the Issue is corrupted.
3rd. Of old time the Nobility and Gentry spent their Estates in the Country, and that kept the people in it; and their Servants married and sate at easy Rents under their Masters’ favor, which peopled the place: Now the Great men (too much loving the Town and resorting to London) draw many people thither to attend them, who either don’t marry; or if they do, they pine away their small gains in some petty Shop; for there are so many, they prey upon one another.
4th. The Country being thus neglected, and no due Balance kept between Trade and Husbandry, City and Country, the poor Country man takes double Toil, and cannot (for want of hands) dress and manure his land to the Advantage it formerly yielded him, yet must he pay the old Rents, which occasions Servants, and such Children as go not to Trades, to continue single, at least all their youthful time, which also obstructs the increase of out people.
5th. The decay of some Country manufacturers (where no Provision is made to supply the people with a new way of living) causes the more Industrious to go abroad to seek their Bread in other Countries and gives the lazy an occasion to loiter and beg or do worse, by which means the Land swarms with Beggars: Formerly ‘twas rare to find any asking Alms, but the Maimed, or Blind, or very Aged; now thousands of both Sexes run up and down, both City and Country, that are sound and youthful, and able to work, with false Pretenses and Certificates; nor is there any care taken to employ or deter such Vagrants, which weakens the Country, as to People and Labor. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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To which let me add, that the great Debauchery in this Kingdom has not only rendered many unfruitful when married, but they live not out half their time, through Excess, which might be prevented by a vigorous execution of out good Laws against corruption of manners. These and the like Evils are the true grounds of the decay of our People in the Country, to say nothing of Plagues and Wars: Towns and Cities cannot complain of the decay of People, being more replentified than ever, especially, London, which with reason helps the Country man to this objection. And though some do go to the Plantations, yet numbering the Parishes in England, and computing how many live more than die, and are born than buried, there goes not over to all the Plantations a fourth part of the yearly increase of the People. And when they are there, they are not (as I said before) soft to England, since they furnish then with much Cloths, Household stuff, Tools, and the like necessaries and that in greater quantities than here their condition could have needed, or they could have bought, being there well to pass, that were but low here, if not poor; and now Masters of Families too, when here they had none, and could hardly keep themselves; and very often it happens that some of them, after their Industry and Success there have made them wealthy, they return and empty their Riches into England; one in this capacity being able to buy out twenty of what he was when he went over.
Thus much to justify the Credit and Benefit of Plantations; wherein I have not sought to speak my interest, but my Judgment; and I dare venture the success of it with al sober and considering men. I shall now proceed to giver some account of my own concern.
1st. I shall say what may be necessary of the Place or Province.
2nd. Touch upon the Constitutions.
3rd. Lay down the Conditions.
4th. Give my sense what persons will be fit to go.
5th. What Utensils, Furniture, and Commodities are fit to carry with them, with the charge of the voyage, and what is first to be done and expected there for some time.
And Lastly, I shall give an Abstract of the Grant by Letter Patents under the Great Seal of England, that an account may be given of the Estate and Power granted to me thereby.
I. Something of the Place
The place lies 600 miles nearer the Sun than England; for England being the 50th degree and ten minutes of North Latitude, and this Place begins at Forty, which is about the Latitude of Naples HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in Italy, or Mompellier in France. I shall say little in its praise, to excite desires in any, whatever I could truly write as to the Soil, Air and Water: This hall satisfy me, that by the Blessing of God, and the honesty and industry of Man, it may be a good and fruitful Land.
For Navigation it is said to have two conveniences; the one by lying ninescore (180) miles upon the Delaware River; that is to say, about three score and ten (70) miles, before we come to the Falls, where a Vessel of Two Hundred Tons may Sail, (and some Creeks and small Harbors in that Distance, where ships may come nearer than the River into the Country) and above the Falls, for Sloops and Boots, as I am informed, to the extent of the Patent. The other convenience is through Chesapeake Bay.
For Timber and other Wood there is a variety for the use of man. For Fowl, Fish and Wild Deer, they are reported to be plentiful in those Parts. Our English Provision is likewise now to be had there at reasonable Rates. The Commodities that the Country is thought to be capable of, are Silk, Flax, Hemp, Wine, Cider, Wood, Madder, Liquorices, Tobacco, Potash, and Iron, and it does actually produce Hides, Tallow, Pipe Staves, Beef, Pork, Sheep, Wool, Corn, as Wheat, Barley, Rye, and also Furs, as your Peltree, Minks, Raccoons, Martins, and such like; store Furs which is to be found among the Indians, that are profitable Commodities in Europe.
The way of trading in those Countries is thus: they send to the Southern Plantations Corn, Beef, Pork, Fish and Pipe Staves, and take their Growth and bring for England, and return with English Goods to their own Country.
Their Furs, they bring for England, and either sell them here, or carry them out again to other parts of Europe where they will yield a better price: And for those that will follow the Merchandise and Navigation there is conveniency, and Timber sufficient for Shipping.
II. The Constitutions
For the Constitution of the Country, the Patent shows, first, That the People and Governor have a Legislative Power, so that no Law can be made or Money raised, but by the People’s consent.
2nd. That the Rights and Freedoms of England (the best and largest in Europe) shall be in force there.
3rd. That no Law against Allegiance (which should we, it were by the Law of England void of itself that moment) we may Enact what Laws we please for the good prosperity and security of the said Province. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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4th. That so soon as any are engaged with me, we shall begin a Scheme or Draft together, such as shall give ample testimony of my sincerer Inclinations to encourage Planters, and settle a free, just and Industrious Colony there.
III. The Conditions.
My conditions will relate to three sorts of people: 1st. Those that will buy: 2nd. Those that take up Land upon Rent: 3rd. Servants. To the first, the Shares I sell shall be certain as to the number of Acres, free from any Indian encumbrance, the price of a hundred pounds, and for the Quit rent but one English shilling or the value of it yearly for a hundred Acres; and the said Quit Rent not to be paid until 1684. To the second sort, that take up Land upon Rent, they shall have liberty so to do paying yearly one penny per Acre, not exceeding Two hundred Acres. To the third sort, to wit, Servants that are carried over, Fifty Acres shall be allowed to the Master for every Head, and Fifty Acres to every Servant when their time is expired. And because some engage with me that may not be disposed to go, it were very advisable for every three Adventurers to send an Overseer with their Servants, which would well pay the Cost.
The Dividend may be thus; if the persons concerned please, a Tract of Land shall be surveyed; say Fifty thousand Acres to a hundred Adventurers; in which some of the best shall be set out for Towns or Cities; and there shall be so much Ground allotted to each in those Towns as may maintain some Cattle and produce some Corn; then the remainder of the Fifty thousand Acres shall be shared among the said Adventurers (casting up the Barrens for Commons, and allowing for the Same) whereby every Adventurer will have a considerable quantity of Land together; likewise everyone a proportion by a Navigable River, and then backward into the Country. The manner of Dividend I shall not be strict in; we can but speak roughly of the matter here; but let men skillful in Plantations be consulted, and I shall leave it to the majority of votes among the Adventurers when it shall please God we come there, how to fix it to their own content.
IV. These persons that providence seems to have most fitted for Plantations are,
1st. Industrious Husbandmen and Day Laborers, that are hardly able (with extreme Labor) to maintain their Families and portion their Children.
2nd. Laborious Handicrafts, especially Carpenters, Masons, Smiths, Weavers, Taylors, Shoemakers, Shipwrights, &c. where they may be spared or are low in the World: And as they shall want no encouragement, so their Labor is worth more there than here, and there provision cheaper. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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3rd. A Plantation seems a fit place for those Ingenuous Spirits that being low in the World, are much clogged and oppressed about a Livelihood, for the means of subsisting being easy there, they may have time and opportunity to gratify their inclinations, and thereby improve Science and help Nurseries of people.
4th. A fourth sort of men to whom a Plantation would be proper, takes in those that are younger Brothers of Small Inheritances; yet because they would live in site of their Kindred in some proportion to their Quality, and can’t do it without a labor that looks like Farming, their condition is too straight for them; and if they married, their Children are often too numerous for the Estate, and are frequently bred up to no Trades, but are a kind of Hangers on or Retainers to the elder Brothers Table and Charity: which is a mischief, as in itself to be lamented, so here to be remedied; For Land they have for next to nothing, which with moderate Labor produces plenty of all things necessary for Life, and such an increase as by Traffic may supply them with all conveniences.
Lastly, There are another sort of Persons, not only fit for, but necessary in plantations, and that is Men of universal Spirits, that have an eye to the Good of Posterity, and that both understand and delight to promote Good Discipline and just Government among a plain and well intending people; such persons may find Room in Colonies for their good Counsel and Contrivance, who are shut out from being of much use or service to the great Nations under settled Customs: These men deserve much esteem, and would be hearkened to. Doubtless twas this (as I observed before) that put some of the famous Greeks and Romans upon Transplanting and Regulating Colonies of People in diverse parts of the World; whole Names, for giving so great proof of their Wisdom, Virtue, Labor, and Constancy, are with Justice honorably delivered down by story to the praise of our own times; though the World, after all its higher pretences of Religion, barbarously errs from their excellent Example.
V. The Journey and its Appurtenances, and what is to be done there at first coming.
Next let us see, What is fit for the Journey and Place, when there, and also what may be the Charge of the Voyage, and what is to be expected and done there at first. That such as incline to go, may not be to seek here, or brought under any disappointments there. The Goods fit to take with them for use, or sell for profit; are all sorts of Apparel and Utensils for Husbandry and Building and Household Stuff. And because I know how much people are apt to fancy things beyond what they are, and that Imaginations are great flatterers of the minds of Men; To the end that none may delude themselves, with an expectation of Immediate Amendment of their conditions, so soon as it shall please God they Arrive there; I would have them understand, That HDT WHAT? INDEX
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they must look for a Winter before Summer comes, and they must be willing to be two or three years without some of the conveniences they enjoy at home; And yet I must needs say that America is another thing than it was at the first Plantation of Virginia and New England: For there is better Accomodation, and English Provisions are to be had at easier rates: However, I am inclined to set down particulars, as near as those inform me, that know the Place, and have been Planters both in that and in Neighboring Colonies.
1st. The passage will come for Masters and Mistresses at most to 6 Pounds a Head, for Servants Five Pounds a Head, and for Children under Seven Years of Age Fifty Shillings, except they Suck, then nothing.
Next being by the mercy of God, safely arrived in September or October, two Men may clear as much Ground by Spring (when they set the Corn of that Country) as will bring in that time twelve month Forty Barrels, which amounts to Two Hundred bushels, which makes Twenty Five quarters of Corn, So that the first year they must buy Corn, which is usually very plentiful. They may so soon as they come, buy Cows, more or less, as they want, or are able, which are to be had at easy rates. For Swine, they are plentiful and cheap; these will quickly Increase to a Stock. So that after the first year, what with the Poorer sort, sometimes laboring to others, and the more able Fishing, Fowling, and sometime Buying; They may do very well, till their own Stocks are sufficient to supply them, and their Families, which will quickly be and to spare, if they follow the English Husbandry, as they do in New England, and New York; and get Winter Fodder for their Stock
VI. and Lastly, An Abstract of the
P A T E N T GRANTED BY THE K I N G To William Penn, &c. The Fourth of March, 1681
I. We do Give and Grant (upon diverse considerations) to William Penn his Heirs and assigns for ever all that Tract of Land in America with all Islands thereunto belonging That is to say from the beginning of the fortieth degree of North Latitude unto the forty third Degree of North Latitude whose Eastern bounds from twelve English miles above Newcastle (alias Delaware Town) runs all along upon the side of Delaware River.
II. Free and undisturbed use and passage into and out of all Harbors Bays Waters Rivers Isles and Inlets belonging to or leading to the same Together with the Soil Fields Woods HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Underwoods Mountains Hills Fenns Isles Lakes Rivers Waters Rivulets Bays and Inlets Situate in or belonging unto the Limits and Bounds aforesaid. Together with all sorts of Fish Mines Metals, &c. To have and to hold to only the behoof of the said William Penn his Heirs and Assigns for ever To be holden of us as of our Castle of Windsor in free and common soccage paying only two Beaver Skins yearly.
III. And of our further Grace we have thought it fit to erect and we do hereby erect the aforesaid Country and Islands into a Province and Seigniory and do call it Pennsilvania and so from henceforth we will have it called.
IV. That reposing special confidence in the wisdom and justice of the said William Penn we do grant to him and his Heirs and their Deputies for the good and happy Government thereof to ordain and enact and under his and their Seals to publish any Laws whatever for the public uses of the said Province by and with the device and Approbation of the Freeholders of the said Country or their delegates so as they be not repugnant to the Law of this Realm and to the Faith and Allegiance due unto us by the legal Government thereof.
V. Full power to the said William Penn, &c. to appoint Judges Lieutenants Justices Magistrates and Officers for what causes soever and with what Power and in such Form as to him seems convenient Also to be able to Pardon and Abolish Crimes and Offenses and to do all and every other thing that to the complete Establishment of Justice unto Courts and Tribunals forms of Judicature and manner of proceedings do belong And our pleasure is and so we enjoin and require that such Laws and Proceedings be most Absolute and advisable in Law and that all the Liege People of us our Heirs and Successors inviolably keep the same in those parts saving to us final appeals.
VI. That the Laws for regulating Property as well as for the descent of Lands as enjoyment of Goods and Chattels and likewise as to Felonies shall be the same there as here in England until they shall be altered by the said William Penn his Heirs and Assigns and by the Freemen of the said Province or their Delegates or Deputies or the greater part of them.
VII. Furthermore that this new Colony may the more happily increase by the multitude of People resorting thither therefore we for us our Heirs and Successors do Hereby grant License to all the liege People present and future of us, &c. (excepting such as shall be especially forbidden) to Transport themselves and Families into the said Country there to Inhabit and Plant for the public and their private good.
VIII. Liberty to Transport what Goods or Commodities are not forbidden paying here the legal Customs due to us, &c. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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IX. Power to divide the Country into Counties hundreds and towns to Incorporate Towns into Boroughs and Boroughs into Cities to make Fairs and Markets with convenient Privileges according to the merit of the Inhabitants or the fitness of the place and to do all other thing or things touching the premises which to the said William Penn his Heirs and Assigns shall seem Meet and requisite albeit they be such as of their nature might otherwise require a more special commandment and warrant then in these presents is expressed.
X. Liberty to Import the Growth or Manufactures of that Province into England paying here the legal duty.
XI. Power to erect Ports Harbors Creeks Havens Keys and other places for Merchandise with such Jurisdictions and Privileges as to the said William Penn, &c. shall seem expedient.
XII. Not to break the Acts of Navigation neither Governor nor Inhabitants upon the penalties contained in the said Acts.
XIII. Not to be in League with any Prince or Country that is in War against us our Heirs and Successors.
XIV. Power of Safety and defense in such way and manner as to the said William Penn, &c. seems meet.
XV. Full power to Assign Alien Grant Demise or ENFEOFF (in fief) (of the premises so many and such parts and parcels to those that are willing to purchase the same as the said William Penn thinks fit to have and to hold to them the said Persons their Heirs or Successors in fee Simple or fee Tail or for Term of Life or Lives or years to be held of the law William Penn, &c. as of the said Seigniory of Windsor by such services Customs and Rents as shall seem fit to the said William Penn his Heirs and Assigns and not immediately of us our Heirs or Successors and that the said Persons may take the premises or any Parcel thereof of the said William Penn, &c. and the same hold to themselves their Heirs and Assigns the Statute OUIA EMPTORES TERRARUM in any wise notwithstanding.
XVI. We give and grant License to any of those Persons to whom the said William Penn, &c. has granted any Estate of Inheritance as aforesaid with the consent of the said William Penn to erect any parcel of Lands within the said Province into Manners to hold Courts Baron and view of Frank, pledge, &c. by Themselves or Stewards.
XVII. Power to those Persons to Grant to others the same Tenures in fee Simple or otherwise to be held of the said Manners respectively and upon all further Alienations the Land to be held of the Manner that it held of or before Alienation. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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XVIII. We do covenant and Grant to and with the said William Penn his Heirs and Assigns that we will not set or make any Custom or other Taxation upon the Inhabitants of the said Province upon Lands Houses Goods Chattels or Merchandise except with the consent of the Inhabitants and the Governor.
XIX. A charge that no Officers nor Ministers of us our Heirs and Successors do presume at any time to attempt any thing to the contrary of the premises or in any sort withstand the same but that they be at all times aiding to the said William Penn and his Heirs and Assigns in the full use and benefit of this our Charter.
XX. And if any doubts or questions shall hereafter arise about the true sense or meaning of any Word Clause or Sentence contained in this our Charter We will ordain and Command that at all times and in all things such Interpretation be made thereof and allowed in any of our Courts whatsoever as shall be adjudged most advantageous and favorable unto the said William Penn his Heirs and Assigns so as it be not against the Faith and Allegiance due to us our Heir and Successors.
In witness whereof we have caused our Letters to be made Patents. Witness our self at Westminster, &c.
To conclude, I desire all my dear Country Folk, who may be inclined to go into those Parts, top consider seriously the premises, as well as the present inconveniences, as future ease and Plenty, that so none may move rashly or from a fickle but solid mind, having above all things, and Eye to the providence of God, in the disposal of themselves. And I would further advise all such at least, to have the permission, if not the good liking of their near relations, for that is both Natural and a Duty Incumbent upon all; and by this means will natural affection be preserved, and a friendly and profitable correspondence be maintained between them. In all which I beseech Almighty God to direct us, that his blessing may attend our honest endeavor, and then the Consequence of all our undertaking will turn to the Glory of his great Name, and the true happiness of us and our Posterity. Amen
WILLIAM PENN
POSTSCRIPT, Whoever are desirous to be concerned with Me in this Province, they may be treated with and further Satisfied, at Philip Fords in Bow Lane in Cheapside, and at Thomas Rudyards or Benjamin Clarks in George Yard in Lumbard Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1684
Father Louis Hennepin, in DESCRIPTION DE LA LOUISIANE, NOUVELLEMENT DECOUVERTE AU SUD’OÜEST DE LA NOUVELLE FRANCE, PAR ORDRE DU ROY. AVEC LA CARTE DU PAYS: LES MŒURS & LA MANIERE DE VIVRE DES SAUVAGES, DEDIÉE À SA MAJESTÉ PAR LA R. P. LOUIS HENNEPIN, MISSIONAIRE RÉCOLLET & NOTAIRE APOSTOLIQUE, published in Paris, reported having viewed a giant waterfall between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in New York — Niagara Falls. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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War broke out again between the Five Nations and France, in western New York. Mr. de la Barre made an unsuccessful inroad into the territories of the Five Nations; this was settled by the peace of September 5th, at Famine Cove, on Lake Ontario, and De la Barre with his whole army returned to Montréal. CANADA HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1685
February 6, 11:45 A.M., Friday (1684, Old Style): Charles II died at Whitehall Palace. On his deathbed he had asked his brother, James, the Duke of York, to look after some of his mistresses, of which he had had many and by whom he had sired any number of bastards (“be well to Portsmouth, and let not poor Nelly starve”), and also commented “I am sorry, gentlemen, for being such a time a-dying.” On the last evening of his life, presumably to honor his secret treaty with France, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, though the extent to which he was fully conscious or committed, and with whom the idea of conducting this ceremony originated, is unclear.
Since this health event placed James, the Duke of York, in line to be crowned as King James II, New York became in effect a royal province.
John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows:
’Tis not to be express’d the teares & sorrows of Court, Citty & Country: Prayers were solemnly made in all the Churches, especialy in both the Court Chapells, where the Chaplaines relieved one another every halfe quarter of an houre, from the time he began to be in danger, til he expir’d: according to the forme prescribed in the Church office: Those who assisted his Majesties devotion were the A[rch]Bish[op] of Cant[erbury] of London, Durrham & Ely; but more especialy the B[ishops] of Bath & Wells. It is sayd they exceedingly urged the receiving the H:Sacrament but that his Majestie told them he would Consider of it, which he did so long, ’til it was too late: others whispered, that the Bishops being bid withdraw some time the night before, (except the Earls of Bath, & Feversham), Hurlston the Priest, had presum’d to administer the popish Offices; I hope it is not true; but these buisie emissaries are very forewarde upon such occasions:2 [see September 16:] He gave his breeches & Keys to the Duke, who was almost continualy kneeling by his bed side, & in teares; he also recommended to him the care of his natural Children, all except the D[uke] of Monmoth, now in Holland, &
2.John Huddlestone, priest (1608-1698), aided CII’s Worcester flight. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in his displeasure; he intreated the Queene to pardon him, [(Nor without cause)] who a little before had sent a Bishop to excuse her not more frequently visiting him, in reguard of her excessive griefe, & with all, that his Majestie would forgive it, if at any time she had offended him: He spake to the Duke to be kind to his Concubines the DD: of Cleveland, & especialy Portsmouth, & that Nelly might not sterve; I do not heare he said any thing of the Church or his people, now falling under the government of a Prince suspected for his Religion, after above 100 yeares the Church & Nation had ben departed from Rome: Thus died K[ing] Charles the 2d, of a Vigorous & robust constitution, & in all appearance capable of a longer life. A prince of many Virtues, & many greate Imperfections, Debonaire, Easy of accesse, not bloudy or Cruel: his Counten-ance fierce, his voice greate, proper of person, every motion became him, a lover of the sea, & skillfull in shipping, not affecting other studys, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many Empyrical Medicines, & the easier Mechanical Mathematics: Loved Planting, building, & brought in a politer way of living, which passed to Luxurie & intollerable expense: He had a particular Talent in telling stories & facetious passages of which he had innumerable, which made some bouffoones and vitious wretches too presumptuous, & familiar, not worthy the favors they abused: He tooke delight to have a number of little spaniels follow him, & lie in his bed-Chamber, where often times he suffered the bitches to puppy & give suck, which rendred it very offensive, & indeede made the whole Court nasty & stinking: An excellent prince doubtlesse had he ben lesse addicted to Women, which made him uneasy & allways in Want to supply their unmeasurable profusion, & to the detriment of many indigent persons who had signaly serv’d both him & his father: Easily, & frequently he changed favorites to his greate prejudice &c: As to other publique transactions and unhappy miscarriages, ’tis not here I intend to number them; but certainely never had [a] King more glorious opportunities to have made himselfe, his people & all Europ happy, & prevented innumerable mischiefs, had not his too Easy nature resign’d him to be menag’d by crafty men, & some abandoned & prophane wretches, who corrupted his otherwise sufficient parts, disciplin’d as he had ben by many afflictions, during his banishment: which gave him much experience, & knowledge of men & things; but those wiccked creatures tooke him [off] from all application becoming so greate a King: the History of his Reigne will certainely be the most wonderfull for the variety of matter & accidents above any extant of many former ages: The [sad tragical] death of his father, his banishment, & hardships, his miraculous restauration, conjurations against him; Parliaments, Warrs, Plagues, Fires, Comets; revolutions abroad happning in his time with a thousand other particulars: He was ever kind to me & very gracious upon all occasions, & therefore I cannot without ingratitude [but] deplore his losse, which for many respects (as well as duty) I do with all my soule: [See 2.Octob:1685:]
His Majestie dead, The Duke (now K[ing] James the 2d) went immediately to Council, before entering into any buisinesse, passionately declaring his sorrow, Told their Lordships, That since the succession had falln to him, he would endeavor to follow the example of his predecessor in his Clemency & tendernesse to his people: That however he had ben misrepresented as affecting arbitrary power, they should find the contrary, for that the Laws of England had made the King as greate a Monarch as he could desire; That he would endeavour to maintaine the Government both in Church & state as by Law establish’d, its Principles being so firme for Monarchy, & the members of it shewing themselves so good & Loyal subjects; & that as he would never depart from the just rights & prerogative of the Crown, so would he never Invade any mans propriety: but as he had often adventured his life in defence of the Nation, so he would still proceede, & preserve it in all its lawfull rites & libertyes: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
This being the substance of what he said, the Lords desired it might be published as containing matter of greate satisfaction to a jealous people, upon this change: which his Majestie consented to: Then were the Counsel sworn, & proclamation ordered to be publish’d, that all officers should continue in their station; that there might be no failure of publique Justice, ’til his farther pleasure should be known:
Then the King rose, the Lords accompanying him to his bed Chamber, where, whilst he reposed himselfe (tired indeede as he was with griefe & watching) They immediately returned againe into the Council-Chamber to take order for the Proclayming of his Majestie which (after some debate) they consented should be in the very forme, his Grandfather K[ing] James the first was, after the death of Q[ueen]Elizabeth, as likewise that the Lords &c: should proceede in their Coaches through the Citty for the more solemnity of it; upon this was I and severall other Gent[lemen] (waiting in the privy Gallerie), admitted into the Council Chamb[er] to be wittnesse of what was resolv’d on: & Thence with the Lords (the Lord Martial & the Herraulds & other Crowne Officers being ready) we first went to Whitehall gate, where the Lords stood on foote beareheaded, whilst the Herauld proclaimed His Majesties Titles to the Imperial Crowne, & succession according to the forme: The Trumpets & Kettle drumms having first sounded 3 times, which after also ended with the peoples acclamations:
Then an Herauld called the Lords Coaches according to ranke, my selfe accompanying the solemnity in my Lord Cornwallis Coach, first to Temple barr, where the Lord Major & his breathren &c met us on horseback in all their formalities, & proclaymed the King; Thence to the Exchange in Cornhill, & so we returned in the order we set forth: being come to White-hall, we all went and kissed the King & Queenes hands, he had ben on the bed, but was now risen, & in his Undresse. The Queene was in bed in her appartment, but put forth her hand; seeming to be much afflicted, as I believe she was, having deported herselfe so decently upon all occasions since she came first into England, which made her universally beloved: Thus concluded this sad, & yet Joyfull day:
[I am never to forget the unexpressable luxury, & prophanesse, gaming, & all dissolution, and as it were total forgetfullnesse of God (it being Sunday Evening) which this day sennight, I was witnesse of; the King, sitting & toying with his Concubines Portsmouth, Cleaveland, & Mazarine: &c: A french boy singing love songs, in that glorious Gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate Courtiers & other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in Gold before them, upon which two Gent[lemen] that were with me made reflexions with astonishment, it being a sceane of uttmost vanity; and surely as they thought would never have an End: six days after was all in the dust.] HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1686
During the interruption in government caused by King James II’s abortive effort to merge the Massachusetts Bay settlements under Royal Governor Sir Edmund Andros, the Huguenots would manage to establish a
French congregation of 45 families in the southeastern part of East Greenwich (for instance, the Mawney family, whose name in France had been “Le Moigne”). Purchasing some 5000 acres of Narragansett land from the Atherton Land Company, they allotted their farms, planted trees and hedgerows, and began raising crops. There would be friction, however, with their English-speaking neighbors in Rhode Island, over meadows and hay, and the French would remain only until 1691. READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT
In the autumn of 1686 about forty-five of these French families had come to Rhode Island, and on November 4 had purchased of the Atherton proprietors a large tract of land in the northern part of Kingstown. Here two dozen dwellings were soon erected, lands were cultivated, and a church established. Hardly was the settlement begun when the refugees unwittingly became involved in the bitter dispute over the Narragansett lands that had been so long in progress. In July 1687, some residents of East Greenwich and of Kingstown forcibly carried off forty loads of hay from the Frenchmen’s meadows. The Huguenot minister immediately hurried to Boston to make complaint before Governor Andros. When summoned to explain their proceedings, the Greenwich men asserted that the lands in question had been laid out to them nine years before by the Rhode Island government. Andros, unable to make any final decision upon the case, ordered that the cut hay should be equally divided between the English and the French. Although no further encroachment was made upon the settlement during Andros’s rule, the precedent thus set was followed a few years later, this time with more harmful results. In the summer of 1691 some inhabitants of East Greenwich, evidently of the more rude and lawless portion of the population, subjected the Huguenots to many annoyances and indignities. Monsieur Ayrault, the old French doctor, thus quaintly refers to their afflictions: “We were molested by the vulgar sort of the people, who, flinging down our fences, laid open our lands to ruin, so that all benefit thereby we were deprived of. Ruin looked on us in a dismal state, our wives and children living in fear of the threats of many unruly persons.” He describes how finally the ill treatment became so pronounced that his companions were compelled to flee from the colony, thus HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
being “forced away from their lands and houses, orchards and vineyards.” Rhode Island has been accused, and perhaps justly, of not doing enough to repress such disorderly proceedings. There was some justice in the claim of the East Greenwich men that the Atherton proprietors had unscrupulously sold to the refugees a tract of land to which Rhode Island had the prior claim; but the claimants should have sought retribution by legal means and not taken the law into their own hands. We can excuse to a certain extent the Westerly participants in the broils and frays upon the southwest border, but the injuries inflicted upon these inoffensive Huguenots can only be condemned as hasty and willful. The Rhode Island legislators, although evidently disapproving of these actions, were either too indifferent or else too familiar with such disorders to repress the persecutors with the arm of the law.
King James II banned the first New York House of Representatives and prohibited printing presses. The colony’s new Charter of Liberties was disallowed. The Crown established the Dominion of New England, covering all lands from New Jersey to Maine.
Businessman Stephanus Van Cortlandt would be appointed mayor of New-York for this and each of the next two years. A new seal was granted to the city, bearing a beaver, a windmill, a flour barrel, a cross, and two Indians. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
April 27, Tuesday (New Style): New York colonial governor Thomas Dongan granted New-York a “charter of Libertyes,” confirming and enlarging the city’s municipal powers. The city was given control over vacant Manhattan shore lands extending to the low water mark. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1687
September 26, Monday (Old Style): Over five days all the male Dutch residents of King’s County, New York needed HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
to sign an oath of allegiance to King James II. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1689
Approximately 2,250 Seneca were present in the colony of New York.
April 27: Virginia acknowledged William and Mary as its new sovereigns.
In the New York colony, Albany learned that France has declared war on England.
May 31: Fearing an invasion from a French and Catholic Canada, the New Amsterdam militia assumed control of the city’s fort and chose Captain Jacob Leisler to command. NEW YORK
June 22 (June 12, Old Style): An embassy of officials from Connecticut notified Captain Jacob Leisler that William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen of England, and he announced that news to the city of New Amsterdam. Meeting with Governor van Cortlandt, he agreed to give over the city’s government — upon van Cortlandt’s declaration of allegiance to these new monarchs. The governor, however, stalled, in hopes of forcing Leisler into some official seizure of power that would free him personally of any recriminations. Leisler adherents made a claim that, in Fort George, three fires had been set. NEW YORK
June 25 (June 15, Old Style): Captain Jacob Leisler called an assembly at the fort of New Amsterdam to authorize a provincial defense force. NEW YORK
August 1: The Albany Convention was established for protection against a French attack. NEW YORK
September: During this month the Bloody Assizes occurred in western England.
September: Meeting with Mohawk chiefs at Albany, New England commissioners formed an alliance against the French, with the Five Nations. NEW YORK
October: New York election results were confirmed by Captain Jacob Leisler.
For a 2d time, Louis de Buade de Frontenac was the governor of New France. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
December 11, Wednesday (Old Style): Captain Jacob Leisler seized the entire colony of New York.
In the diary of John Evelyn, we see: To Deptford to see my Grandson falln ill of a scarlet feaver at the French Schoole at Greenewich, which, after blood letting so abated that by Gods mercy I left him in an hopefull way. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1690
August 30, Sunday (Old Style): Colonel Cuthbert Potter reached Flushing on Paumanok Long Island. Hearing that governor Jacob Milborne might have his person and effects searched, he promptly departed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1692
In New-York, Abraham De Peyster was appointed mayor, for the first of three consecutive annual terms. Benjamin Fletcher became Royal governor and asked the Dutch church’s Dominie Varick for a list of Leislerians in order to pressure them to return to the church, thus improving attendance rates. A bridge was built over Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Dutch settlers from the Hudson Valley begin moving into the Berkshires. Augustus Jay, grandfather of John Jay, was captured by a French privateer while on a business trip to Europe, and jailed at St. Malô for a brief period before being released and returning to New York.
Friend John Bowne and John Rodman bought three acres of land from John Ware adjoining the Quaker burial ground on Northern Boulevard in Flushing on Paumanok Long Island, to be used for a meetinghouse site.
Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard, purchased from the Earl of Sterling by the Earl of York, and up to this point under New York’s jurisdiction as Dukes County, were granted to Massachusetts.
October 21, Tuesday: King William and Queen Mary commissioned the New York governor, Benjamin Fletcher, as governor of Pennsylvania. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1694
When Captain John Hore of Rhode Island (related to the Hoar family of Concord), under a privateer’s commission issued in Jamaica, captured a French ship and sailed his prize home, there was no legal body in that colony to certify the legitimacy his possession of this vessel and its cargo. In response to Captain Hore’s petition, Rhode Island for the first time established an Admiralty Court which duly declared the seizure to have been legitimate. Captain Hore would rename his prize the John and Rebecca and refit it as a privateer — and in the following year would sail off to the Red Sea and the East Indies to engage in flat out piracy.
Captain Hore’s career as a pirate skipper aboard his John and Rebecca would not prove long and successful.
The Pelican would also originate in Rhode Island as a prize seized from the French, duly condemned and then refitted with 16 guns, some pateraras which fired stones, and a crew of 100. Rhode Island Governor Walter Clares would issue a customs commission for the ship to voyage to Jamaica. Captain Colly appointed the Deputy Collector of Customs, Gardiner, as legal attorney to take care of business for them. Several of the original sailors, who wanted to return to Jamaica, refused to sail on the vessel because they knew it wasn’t actually heading for Jamaica. It seemed to be common knowledge locally, that Captain Colly and his crew intended “to cruise on the Moors, not intending to Pirate among the Europeans, but honestly and quietly to rob what Moors be in their way.” When Captain Colly took the Pelican to sea, it headed for Madagascar and a career as a pirate vessel.
August 15, Wednesday (Old Style): Colonial delegates meeting in Albany, New York signed a treaty with the Iroquois in order to keep them from siding with the French. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1696
The New York colony faced a scarcity of bread.
March 19, Monday: New York governor Benjamin Fletcher granted a petition by Church of England congregants on Manhattan to build a church, between the “Kings Garden and the burying Place” at Wall Street (the first, downtown Trinity Church).
According to the Concord Town Record, “Mary Hayward ye daughter of Simeon Hayward & Elizebeth his wife was Borne march ye 19th 1695.6”
July 23, Thursday: New York governor Benjamin Fletcher licensed the congregation of Trinity Church in New-York to solicit contributions to cover their building costs. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1703
Quakers established the 1st school in Flushing on Paumanok Long Island. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1709
At the Great Carrying Place (Fort Edward) of New York, Peter Schuyler created Fort Nicholson, naming it in honor of Colonel Francis Nicholson of Connecticut.
September 24, Saturday (Old Style): New York enacted a £3 “Duty on the Tonnage of Vessels and Slaves ... not inported directly from their native country.” “An Act for Laying a Duty on the Tonnage of Vessels and Slaves.” [Continued by Act of Oct. 30, 1710. ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, 3 pages 97, 125, and 134; LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1691-1773, page 83.] INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The early ordinances of the Dutch, laying duties, generally of ten per cent, on slaves, probably proved burdensome to the trade, although this was not intentional.4 The Biblical prohibition of slavery and the slave- trade, copied from New England codes into the Duke of York’s Laws, had no practical application,5 and the trade continued to be encouraged in the governors’ instructions. In 1709 a duty of £3 was laid on Negroes from elsewhere than Africa.6 This was aimed at West India slaves, and was prohibitive. By 1716 the duty on all slaves was £1 12½s., which was probably a mere revenue figure.7 In 1728 a duty of 40s. was laid, to be continued until 1737.8 It proved restrictive, however, and on the “humble petition of the Merchants and Traders of the City of Bristol” was disallowed in 1735, as “greatly prejudicial to the Trade and Navigation of this Kingdom.”9 Governor Cosby was also reminded 3. The following is a summary of the legislation of the colony of New York; details will be found in W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: — 1709, Duty Act: £3 on Negroes not direct from Africa (Continued by the Acts of 1710, 1711). 1711, Bill to lay further duty, lost in Council. 1716, Duty Act: 5 oz. plate on Africans in colony ships. 10 oz. plate on Africans in other ships. 1728, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1732, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1734, Duty Act: (?) 1753, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. (This act was annually continued.) [1777, Vermont Constitution does not recognize slavery.] 1785, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. [1786, Sale of slaves in Vermont prohibited.] 1788, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. 4. O’Callaghan, LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, 1638-74, pages 31, 348, etc. The colonists themselves were encouraged to trade, but the terms were not favorable enough: DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, I. 246; LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, pages 81-2, note, 127. The colonists declared “that they are inclined to a foreign Trade, and especially to the Coast of Africa, ... in order to fetch thence Slaves”: O’Callaghan, VOYAGES OF THE SLAVERS, etc., page 172. 5. CHARTER TO WILLIAM PENN, etc. (1879), page 12. First published on Long Island in 1664. Possibly Negro slaves were explicitly excepted. Cf. MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN HISTORY, XI. 411, and N.Y. HIST. SOC. COLL., I. 322. 6. ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, pages 97, 125, 134; DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 178, 185, 293. 7. The Assembly attempted to raise the slave duty in 1711, but the Council objected (DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 292 ff.), although, as it seems, not on account of the slave duty in particular. Another act was passed between 1711 and 1716, but its contents are not known (cf. title of the Act of 1716). For the Act of 1716, see ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, page 224. 8. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 37, 38. 9. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 32-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
that no duties on slaves payable by the importer were to be laid. Later, in 1753, the 40s. duty was restored, but under the increased trade of those days was not felt.10 No further restrictions seem to have been attempted until 1785, when the sale of slaves in the State was forbidden.11 The chief element of restriction in this colony appears to have been the shrewd business sense of the traders, who never flooded the slave market, but kept a supply sufficient for the slowly growing demand. Between 1701 and 1726 only about 2,375 slaves were imported, and in 1774 the total slave population amounted to 21,149.12 No restriction was ever put by New York on participation in the trade outside the colony, and in spite of national laws New York merchants continued to be engaged in this traffic even down to the Civil War.13 Vermont, who withdrew from New York in 1777, in her first Constitution14 declared slavery illegal, and in 1786 stopped by law the sale and transportation of slaves within her boundaries.15
10. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VII. 907. This act was annually renewed. The slave duty remained a chief source of revenue down to 1774. Cf. REPORT OF GOVERNOR TRYON, in DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VIII. 452. 11. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), ch. 68, page 121. Substantially the same act reappears in the revision of the laws of 1788: LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), ch. 40, page 676. 12. The slave population of New York has been estimated as follows: — In 1698, 2,170. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, IV. 420. In 1703, 2,258. N.Y. COL. MSS., XLVIII.; cited in Hough, N.Y. CENSUS, 1855, Introd. In 1712, 2,425. N.Y. CENSUS, 1855, LVII., LIX. (a partial census). In 1723, 6,171. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 702. In 1731, 7,743. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 929. In 1737, 8,941. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 133. In 1746, 9,107. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 392. In 1749, 10,692. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 550. In 1756, 13,548. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 123; cited in Hough, as above. In 1771, 19,863. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 144; cited in Hough, as above. In 1774, 21,149. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 144; cited in Hough, as above. In 1786, 18,889. DEEDS IN OFFICE SEC. OF STATE, XXII. 35. Total number of Africans imported from 1701 to 1726, 2,375, of whom 802 were from Africa: O’Callaghan, DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF NEW YORK, I. 482. 13. Cf. below, Chapter XI.
14. VERMONT STATE PAPERS, 1779-86, page 244. The return of sixteen slaves in Vermont, by the first census, was an error: NEW ENGLAND RECORD, XXIX. 249. 15. VERMONT STATE PAPERS, page 505. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1710
June 14, Wednesday (Old Style): Ester Le Roy Bernon died in Newport, Rhode Island at the age of 56.
New York’s new Royal governor Robert Hunter arrived at New-York harbor, bringing with him from Europe some 3,000 Palatine Germans whom he intended to use to produce naval stores. These families would move up the Hudson River to the Schoharie region later in the year. Peter Loring Borst reports that: Schoharie, with the exception of its Indian inhabitants, was first settled by the Germans and Dutch, and to religion and the love of liberty is that settlement mostly to be attributed. In saying Schoharie, I allude to all the settlements first made in Schoharie county, without distinction of towns; as a territory of many miles in extent, now making a part of several towns, was, at first, known by no other name than that of Schoharie. I find it somewhat difficult to harmonize the contradictory statements, tending to fix the precise year in which the Germans first arrived in that valley. Brown says “they sailed on new year’s day in the year 1710, from some port on the Rhine, down that river to Holland, from whence they sailed to England; that being there further provided, they sailed for America; and after a tedious voyage in which a great many died, they landed at New York on the 14th day of June, 1712; having been one year five months and several days (over two years,) on their journey; that they were then sent up the Hudson river to East and West Camp, (so called from the circumstance of their having encamped there,) where they wintered in ground and log huts. — That from there the spring following, they went to Albany, from whence some found their way to Schoharie, after a journey of four days by an Indian foot path, bearing upon their backs tools and provisions with which they had been provided by agent of the queen.” The Borst Family were early settlers, and of which descendants may still be found. They came as early as 1713 or 1714, and were Germans. The head of the family we believe to have been Jacob, whose sons were Joseph and Jacob, of Cobleskill, and Peter, of this town. Peter built a grist-mill a short time previous to the Revolution, which stood till the year 1795. That year the present “Davis mill” was built, and is now an interesting relic of other days. The frame is chiefly pine, and so well constructed that, upon the abutments being washed away a few years ago, the building sagged but one-half of an inch. The flooring was also pine, split out of large pine logs, to the thickness of three inches. One Forsyth was the builder, and tradition says he was assisted by one hundred men, in its erection. Peter’s son Peter, called “Tauty,” followed him in the milling business , who was brother to Michael, the inn-keeper near the reformed church. The second Peter’s son, Peter P., was also a miller, and brother of Milton Borst, now of the Cobleskill mill. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
William and Peter, sons of the last Peter P., are now owners of the mill above, of late years known as the “Borst mill.” Mr. J. W. Davis purchased the old “Borst mill” property in 1858, after it had been in the Borst family’s possession, at least one hundred and thirty years, and he is anticipating a gala day when the centennial year of the present structure arrives. During the war, this immediate neighborhood was in sympathy with the royal cause, and the old mill was left standing to furnish supplies, and to it, the citizens of all principles were compelled to come, after the Eckerson mill was burnt. One of the family lived upon the farm now owned and occupied by Peter Zeh, and was true to the colonial cause. When Johnson’s army was marching down the valley, on the 17th, Colonel Vroman dispatched Joseph Borst, then a lad of fourteen, to Albany on horseback for assistance... HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1711
Recently arrived Palatine immigrants traveled from the port of New-York up the Hudson River to Albany, New York. Scouts sent to the west to check out the Mohawk Valley were delighted with the spot where Fox’s Creek emptied into the Schoharie River and recommended the area. Between 600 and 700 encamped at East Camp and West Camp.
July: The East India Company swapped its land at Sandy Bay on St. Helena with Thomas Cason, for his land between Plantation House and High Peak.
In this month and the following one the New York assembly strengthened its previous act placing a duty on the tonnage of vessels and slaves. “An Act for the more effectual putting in Execution an Act of General Assembly, Intituled, An Act for Laying a Duty on the Tonnage of Vessels and Slaves.” ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, page 134.16 INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY
December: The New York assembly attempted to increase the duty on slaves, but in the state Council this proposal was defeated. Bill for laying a further duty on slaves. Passed Assembly; lost HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
in Council. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 293. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY
16. The following is a summary of the legislation of the colony of New York; details will be found in W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: — 1709, Duty Act: £3 on Negroes not direct from Africa (Continued by the Acts of 1710, 1711). 1711, Bill to lay further duty, lost in Council. 1716, Duty Act: 5 oz. plate on Africans in colony ships. 10 oz. plate on Africans in other ships. 1728, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1732, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1734, Duty Act: (?) 1753, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. (This act was annually continued.) [1777, Vermont Constitution does not recognize slavery.] 1785, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. [1786, Sale of slaves in Vermont prohibited.] 1788, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1712
Settlers in the Mohawk Valley founded the village of Schoharie, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1716
It as at about this point that New Bedford, a Quaker whaling town, began its formal opposition to the institution of slavery, and thus began its career as a sanctuary for runaway slaves. This would be the city of origin for Friend Daniel Ricketson, and would be the city of refuge for Frederick Douglass. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Here is an American bill of sale for a human being, dating to July 16th of this year:
In this year New York enacted a rather mysterious “5 oz. and 10 oz. plate Duty Act,” rather mysterious because we have only the title and none of the text. According to the title it had something to do with a Duty laid on HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Negroes, and other Slaves, imported into this Colony: “An Act to Oblige all Vessels Trading into this Colony (except such as are therein excepted) to pay a certain Duty; and for the further Explanation and rendring more Effectual certain Clauses in an Act of General Assembly of this Colony, Intituled, An Act by which a Duty is laid on Negroes, and other Slaves, imported into this Colony.” The act referred to is not to be found. ACTS 17 OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, p. 224. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY
17. The following is a summary of the legislation of the colony of New York; details will be found in W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: — 1709, Duty Act: £3 on Negroes not direct from Africa (Continued by the Acts of 1710, 1711). 1711, Bill to lay further duty, lost in Council. 1716, Duty Act: 5 oz. plate on Africans in colony ships. 10 oz. plate on Africans in other ships. 1728, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1732, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1734, Duty Act: (?) 1753, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. (This act was annually continued.) [1777, Vermont Constitution does not recognize slavery.] 1785, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. [1786, Sale of slaves in Vermont prohibited.] 1788, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1719
Near the Niagara River, up-colony in New York on the future site of Lewiston, the French emissary to the Seneca, Joincare, built his log home. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1725
Governor William Burnet built Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario, New York.
King George I issued letters patent to settlers of East Camp (Germantown), New York.
The approximate date Dutch immigrants from Kinderhook settled in the Chatham area of New York.
In Concord, John Barker, Daniel Brooks, William Wheeler, George Farrar, and John Flint were Selectmen. Ordinarily, Concord’s five selectmen acted as Overseers of the Poor and as Assessors, but in this period there was in addition a board of five Overseers of the Poor.
In Concord, John Flint continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Samuel Chandler continued as Town Treasurer.
William Wilson was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
There were 6,000 blacks in the former Dutch colony of New York. Almost all, at this point in the English ascendancy, had become slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
There are some problems with the following table. The first problem is that it makes it appear that there were considerably fewer persons of color in Concord, than there actually were, because it counts only heads of households. The second problem, more important, is that it makes the magic date 1780 of the “Massachusetts Bill of Rights” far more significant, in the elimination of Northern slavery, than actually it had been. Precious little seems actually to have happened in that year to improve the lives of persons of color in Massachusetts, or their societal standing! Concord MA Population
1679 ? 480 whites 1706 ? 920 whites 1725 6 slaves 1,500 whites 1741 21 slaves ? 1754 19 slaves ? 1780: Passage of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights 1783 15 blacks 1,306 whites 1790 29 blacks 1,556 whites 1800 38 blacks 1,641 whites 1810 28 blacks 1,605 whites 1820 34 blacks 1,754 whites 1830 28 blacks 1,993 whites HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1728
August 31, Saturday (Old Style): New York enacted a £2 and £4 duty that may have had to do, among other things, with duties on slave cargoes. “An Act to repeal some Parts and to continue and enforce other Parts of the Act therein mentioned, and for granting several Duties to His Majesty, for supporting His Government in the Colony of New York” from Sept. 1, 1728, to Sept. 1, 1733. Same duty continued by Act of 1732. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1691-1773, pages 148 and 171; DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW Y ORK, VI. 32, 33, 34, 37, 38.18 INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The early ordinances of the Dutch, laying duties, generally of ten per cent, on slaves, probably proved burdensome to the trade, although this was not intentional.19 The Biblical prohibition of slavery and the slave-trade, copied from New England codes into the Duke of York’s Laws, had no practical application,20 and the trade continued to be encouraged in the governors’ instructions. In 1709 a duty of £3 was laid on Negroes from elsewhere than Africa.21 This was aimed at West India slaves, and was prohibitive. By 1716 the duty on all slaves was £1 12½s., which was probably a mere revenue figure.22 In 1728 a duty of 40s. was laid, to be continued until 1737.23 It proved restrictive, however, and on the “humble petition of the Merchants and Traders of the City of Bristol” was disallowed in 1735, as “greatly prejudicial to the Trade and Navigation of this Kingdom.”24 Governor Cosby was also reminded that no duties on 18. The following is a summary of the legislation of the colony of New York; details will be found in W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: — 1709, Duty Act: £3 on Negroes not direct from Africa (Continued by the Acts of 1710, 1711). 1711, Bill to lay further duty, lost in Council. 1716, Duty Act: 5 oz. plate on Africans in colony ships. 10 oz. plate on Africans in other ships. 1728, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1732, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. 1734, Duty Act: (?) 1753, Duty Act: 40s. on Africans, £4 on colonial Negroes. (This act was annually continued.) [1777, Vermont Constitution does not recognize slavery.] 1785, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. [1786, Sale of slaves in Vermont prohibited.] 1788, Sale of slaves in State prohibited. 19. O’Callaghan, LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, 1638-74, pages 31, 348, etc. The colonists themselves were encouraged to trade, but the terms were not favorable enough: DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, I. 246; LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, pages 81-2, note, 127. The colonists declared “that they are inclined to a foreign Trade, and especially to the Coast of Africa, ... in order to fetch thence Slaves”: O’Callaghan, VOYAGES OF THE SLAVERS, etc., page 172. 20. CHARTER TO WILLIAM PENN, etc. (1879), page 12. First published on Long Island in 1664. Possibly Negro slaves were explicitly excepted. Cf. MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN HISTORY, XI. 411, and N.Y. HIST. SOC. COLL., I. 322. 21. ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, pages 97, 125, 134; DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 178, 185, 293. 22. The Assembly attempted to raise the slave duty in 1711, but the Council objected (DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 292 ff.), although, as it seems, not on account of the slave duty in particular. Another act was passed between 1711 and 1716, but its contents are not known (cf. title of the Act of 1716). For the Act of 1716, see ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, page 224. 23. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 37, 38. 24. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 32-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
slaves payable by the importer were to be laid. Later, in 1753, the 40s. duty was restored, but under the increased trade of those days was not felt.25 No further restrictions seem to have been attempted until 1785, when the sale of slaves in the State was forbidden.26 The chief element of restriction in this colony appears to have been the shrewd business sense of the traders, who never flooded the slave market, but kept a supply sufficient for the slowly growing demand. Between 1701 and 1726 only about 2,375 slaves were imported, and in 1774 the total slave population amounted to 21,149.27 No restriction was ever put by New York on participation in the trade outside the colony, and in spite of national laws New York merchants continued to be engaged in this traffic even down to the Civil War.28 Vermont, who withdrew from New York in 1777, in her first Constitution29 declared slavery illegal, and in 1786 stopped by law the sale and transportation of slaves within her boundaries.30
25. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VII. 907. This act was annually renewed. The slave duty remained a chief source of revenue down to 1774. Cf. REPORT OF GOVERNOR TRYON, in DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VIII. 452. 26. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), ch. 68, page 121. Substantially the same act reappears in the revision of the laws of 1788: LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), ch. 40, page 676. 27. The slave population of New York has been estimated as follows: — In 1698, 2,170. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, IV. 420. In 1703, 2,258. N.Y. COL. MSS., XLVIII.; cited in Hough, N.Y. CENSUS, 1855, Introd. In 1712, 2,425. N.Y. CENSUS, 1855, LVII., LIX. (a partial census). In 1723, 6,171. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 702. In 1731, 7,743. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 929. In 1737, 8,941. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 133. In 1746, 9,107. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 392. In 1749, 10,692. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 550. In 1756, 13,548. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 123; cited in Hough, as above. In 1771, 19,863. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 144; cited in Hough, as above. In 1774, 21,149. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 144; cited in Hough, as above. In 1786, 18,889. DEEDS IN OFFICE SEC. OF STATE, XXII. 35. Total number of Africans imported from 1701 to 1726, 2,375, of whom 802 were from Africa: O’Callaghan, DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF NEW YORK, I. 482. 28. Cf. below, Chapter XI.
29. VERMONT STATE PAPERS, 1779-86, page 244. The return of sixteen slaves in Vermont, by the first census, was an error: NEW ENGLAND RECORD, XXIX. 249. 30. VERMONT STATE PAPERS, page 505. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1730
Immigrants from the ship George & Ann, having remained during the winter where they landed, on Cape Cod, came to New York and purchased land at Little Britain (which was then in Ulster County, although after 1789 it would be in Orange County).
The state of New York granted to New-York City jurisdiction over land beneath the surface of the Hudson River to a distance of 400 feet, between Charlton and Washington streets and Marketfield Street, and beneath the surface of the East River between Whitehall and Houston streets. This amounted to 209.5 acres.
In about this year, Palatine Germans were building a church near Newburgh, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1733
July 28: The colonial governor, William Cosby, summoned the commander of Fort Hunter, Captain Walter Butler, to his office in Albany, New York, and offered him the possibility of laying claim to 86,000 acres of Mohawk land surrounding his fort — a land claim supposedly belonging not to him but to the Corporation of Albany. Let’s wheel and deal. We’ll be the big boys, the insiders.
August 4: Captain Walter Butler arrived back at Fort Hunter from Albany, New York, and met with local Mohawks led by Teantontalogo, persuading them to sign the 86,000 acres around the fort over to him for colonial governor William Cosby. The governor, to make this wheeling and dealing effective, would destroy the Corporation’s deed. Who’s to know?
November 5: Opponents of Governor William Cosby founded the New York Weekly Journal and established John Peter Zenger as its editor. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1734
November: In New York, a Duty Act of 1 shilling yearly on Negroes and Slaves: “An act to lay a duty on Negroes & a tax on the Slaves therein mentioned during the time and for the uses within mentioned.” The tax was 1s. yearly per slave. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 38. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
November 28: In New York, a £2 and £4 (?) Duty on Goods and Tax on Slaves Act. The question would be, do these two entries refer to one revenue act, or were there in this year two different revenue acts? “An Act to lay a Duty on the Goods, and a Tax on the Slaves therein mentioned, during the Time, and for the Uses mentioned in the same.” Possibly there were two acts this year. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1691-1773, p. 186; DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 27. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1735
The trial on charges of seditious libel of New York’s governor, and the acquittal of John Peter Zenger in New- York, helped establish freedom of the press in North America.31
31. A note for the student: “Freedom of the press” is a restricted sort of one-way freedom of speech, that establishes a certain freedom of wideband communication to those wealthy enough to be the proprietors of printing establishments, so that they can communicate at will to you, top down, although they are under no obligation to allow you any effective means of communicating back to them, bottom up. –“Freedom of the press” is why, when a newspaper columnist publishes some assertion that you know to be flat-out inaccurate, you cannot discover anywhere the email address of that newspaper columnist and are prevented from belaboring him or her with corrected information. “Freedom of the press” in America thus amounts to a rich-people’s freedom from molestation by feedback and freedom from correction and freedom from any obligation to accuracy. (You can see that this freedom of the press, although quite limited, was an important initial step in the trend which has led us eventually in this 21st Century to the freedoms from censorship created by the word-processing program, and by the copy machine, and by self-publication, and we have John Peter Zenger to thank for having helped establish it for us in 1735.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1736
John Peter Zenger published an account of his 1734 trial for seditious libel.
March 10, Wednesday (1735, Old Style): According to a will proven in Ipswich on this date and recorded in Salem Registry of Essex Probate, Hannah Emerson Duston had recently died. (Hannah had died in the home of her son Jonathan in Haverhill. A granite monument had been erected more or less near this site, but the city had not paid for it and so the stone works repossessed the materials and hauled them off and sandblasted away the inscriptions, and sold the monument to somebody else intending it for some other purpose. A glacial erratic, cheaper because excavated out of Bradley Brook where it empties into the Merrimack River (the point at which Hannah stepped out of the canoe after her escape), now marks this site.
The tomahawk used by Hannah to kill and scalp four adults and six children, or one like unto it, is on display at the Haverhill Historical Society at 240 Walter Street, as well as a crude knife found sticking in one of the corpses.)
New York’s Governor William Cosby died of consumption. Captain Peter Warren, brother-in-law of Governor Cosby’s associate James Delancey, would pay £110 for Crosby’s 14,000 acres on the south bank of the Mohawk River. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1737
A farmhouse was built in Kinderhook, New York for Luykas Van Alen.
During this year or the following one Venture Smith was taken on the Middle Passage from the coast of Africa to Barbados, where 196 of the perhaps 200 slaves who had survived the small pox would be sold and four, including him, would be taken on to New England. He had “completed his eighth year” by the time he arrived at Robert Mumford’s home on Fishers Island, which although it was just off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island was considered part of the New York colony. The first of the time of living at my master’s place, I was pretty much employed at the house, carding wool and other household business. In this situation I continued for some years, after which my master put me to work out of doors. My behavior had as yet been submissive and obedient. I then began to have hard tasks imposed on me. Some of these were to pound four bushels of ears of corn every night for the poultry, or be rigorously punished. At other seasons of the year, I had to card wool until a very late hour. These tasks I had to perform when only about nine years old.
April 9, Saturday (Old Style): A closed council of Iroquois chiefs was called at Onondaga, New York to decide the fate of the Delaware, who had signed away Iroquois land to the Proprietors of Pennsylvania. Iroquois chief Canassatego condemned these people to move from their homes immediately to Pennsylvania’s Wyoming and Shamokin valleys — and cautioned them to never again trade land. (Some moved on to the Ohio country, away from Iroquois power.)
April 29, Friday (Old Style): New York landowner Peter Warren wrote to his sister’s son, 21-year-old William Johnson, who was serving as a military officer in County Meath, Ireland, offering him a job as manager of his lands along the Mohawk River and asking him to recruit fellow villagers to settle the new lands.
June 7, Tuesday (Old Style): In Ireland, William Johnson received the letter from New York landowner Peter Warren, offering him a job as manager of his lands along the Mohawk River and asking him to recruit fellow villagers to settle the new lands.
June 10, Friday (Old Style): William Johnson traveled around County Meath recruiting settlers to go with him to New York. (During this year, William Johnson would arrive in New-York harbor from England.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1738
New Jersey had been administered as part of the New York colony. In this year Lewis Morris was appointed as the royal governor of a separated New Jersey colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
March 16: William Johnson, newly arrived from Ireland along with a dozen families from County Meath whom he had recruited as settlers, met his uncle and boss Peter Warren in Boston and learned of his new duties in the Mohawk Valley of New York colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1739
June 30, Tuesday: William Johnson traveled to Albany, New York and for £180 purchased a strip of land a quarter mile long and a mile deep to the north across the Mohawk River from his farm.
July 24, Tuesday (Old Style): William Johnson wrote to his uncle Peter Warren in defense of his purchase of a strip of land a quarter mile long and a mile deep to the north across the Mohawk River from his farm in New York, indicating that his intention was not to live there but to erect a mill.
July 26, Thursday (Old Style): Future governor of New York George Clinton was born at Little Britain in Ulster (later Orange) County. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1740
January 10: The British purchased a 20-by-30-mile tract of land on Lake Ontario’s Irondequoit Bay in what would become New York (but did not place a settlement there).
February 9: In the New York colony, Mohawk Valley landowner William Johnson wrote to his uncle Peter Warren, using a return address of “Mount Johnson” at the top instead of “Warrensburg.”
June 8, Sunday (Old Style): The current mistress of Mohawk Valley landowner William Johnson, Catherine Phillips, gave birth, and the infant was named Ann. NEW YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1744
Canassatego, an Onondaga leader, began to be of considerable influence. At the Lancaster Council in backwoods New York and elsewhere Canassatego spoke for the entire Iroquois Confederacy. He was the Atotarho or President of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy — the officer who presided over their Council of the Six Nations. He advised the leaders of several English colonies who had gathered at Lancaster: “Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk). This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy, and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another.” This quote is per Benjamin Franklin’s account of the meeting as cited in Professor Bruce E. Johansen’s FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE IROQUOIS AND THE RATIONALE FOR THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (Ipswich MA: 1982). According to what we may here term the “Iroquois Influence Thesis,” the Iroquois Confederacy was based upon a Constitution that predated ours by about four centuries. Their Constitution, while not written, had been passed on orally and all of their leaders, as well as many other citizens of their nations memorized it in its entirety. They recited it to their people at least once a year. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy also had three branches of government, 50 representatives for the five nations, who were selected by, and could also be impeached by, the respected female elders of each tribe. Veto power was vested in the executive branch (the Onondagas), and the power to override a veto was granted to the two other branches (operating in tandem). Their leaders were considered to be servants of the people, and could be impeached if they did not live up to that expectation. Thus, according to this Iroquois Influence Thesis, the Constitution has a suppressed non-white ethnic origin.32
October 14, Sunday (Old Style): A 3rd child, Mary Johnson, was born to New York trader and superintendent of Indian affairs William Johnson and his mistress Catherine Weisenberg.
32. This “Iroquois Influence Thesis” has been deconstructed by William A. Starna and George R. Hamell in “History and the Burden of Proof: The Case of the Iroquois Influence on the US Constitution,” New York History 77 (1996): 427-52. (Also, there were in that year a couple of articles critical of this thesis in William and Mary Quarterly 53: 587-636.) For scholarly support for this “Iroquois Influence Thesis,” refer to: Donald Grinde’s THE IROQUOIS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE AMERICAN NATION (San Francisco: 1977) Sharon O’Brien’s AMERICAN INDIAN TRIBAL GOVERNMENTS (Norman OK: 1989) Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen’s EXEMPLAR OF LIBERTY: NATIVE AMERICA AND THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY (Los Angeles: 1991) Bruce Johansen, NATIVE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (Westport CT: 1996) EXILED IN THE LAND OF THE FREE: DEMOCRACY, INDIAN NATIONS, AND THE US CONSTITUTION, ed. Oren Lyons, Vine Deloria, Laurence Hauptman, and several other scholars (Sante Fe NM: 1992). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1745
Frederick Philipse added a brick north wing to the Philipse Manor Hall in Yonkers, New York.
It would have been in about this period that the co-founder of Avon, New York, Doctor Timothy Hosmer, was born in Connecticut.
The French raided Fort Edward in the New York colony.
November 28, Thursday (Old Style): French military forces out of Canada, accompanied by 220 Caughnawaga Mohawk and Abenaki Indians, attacked and burned the English settlement at Saratoga, New York and killed or took prisoner its 101 inhabitants. The population of Albany would go into a panic.
December 12, Sunday: US Supreme Court chief justice and New York State governor John Jay was born in New-York to Peter and Hannah McVickar Jay. The infant would be baptized at Trinity Church.
In Concord, 20 men defiantly signed a new covenant organizing a “West Church” separate from the 1st Parish Church. On the 12th of December, 1745, twenty male communicants subscribed to a covenant, and organized the West Church. Among them were some of the most wealthy, respectable, influential, and pious men in town. Others soon after united with them, and, in conjunction with some who were not communicants, they were accustomed to hold public worship regularly in a house which stood near the present [1835] residence of the Hon. Nathan Brooks.33 From this time there were two incorporated religious societies in Concord. Individuals living in the easterly part of the town had also several times petitioned to be set off into a separate precinct or parish; and they were successful in 1746. In that year, what is now Concord was incorporated as the first precinct or parish, and what is now Lincoln, as the second. In the latter precinct, many of the aggrieved brethren united with others, and formed the third church in the town.34
33. This was a public house. The sign had a black horse painted on it. Hence this church was called, by way of derision, the black- horse church. 34. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1746
Captains John Dennis and Robert Morris, privateers out of Rhode Island, captured a French vessel near Cape Tiburon and brought it to Newport, where its black crewmembers were sold into slavery in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. This brought a protest from the Governor of Cuba, that these particular black seamen had in Cuba been not slaves but free men. Learning of this, the Rhode Island General Assembly voted that an apology be tendered, and that the black sailors be purchased from their purchasers –who were to be fully reimbursed– and the seamen set free and allowed to depart at will. Of course, no consideration was given to the paying of back wages for services rendered, but a message was sent to Cuba: this adventure into the international slave trade had been a mere inadvertent error (RHODE ISLAND COLONIAL RECORDS, V. 170, 176- 7; Dawson’s Historical Magazine, XVIII. 98.
July: The Mohawks gathered in war council near Mount Johnson in backwoods New York. William Johnson gained their allegiance to the British cause.
On St. Helena, Thomas Greentree was charged with selling liquor without a licence.
August 11, Monday (Old Style): William Johnson, along with Iroquois chiefs Tiyanoga and Wascaugh, at the head a large party of Indians, marched into Albany in backwoods New York, the warriors saluting governor George Clinton as they passed the fort.
August 15, Friday (Old Style): A small patrol of Captain Daniel Ladd’s New Hampshire militia was surprised by a war party of pro-French Indians and Canadian voyageurs, in New York near Lake Champlain’s Crown Point. Another patrol arrives to find five mutilated bodies and one survivor, learn that two others had been carried off. Ladd headed to his base in Rumford for replacements. He encountered 14-year-old Robert Rogers there.
August 19, Tuesday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, the Albany Indian Congress convened, with over 700 Indians in attendance. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 31, Sunday (Old Style): Tiyanoga returned to Johnson Hall in backwoods New York from a journey to Montréal, where he had been entertained by Governor Galissonière and had told this French official what he wanted to hear, then had gone on to visit Caughnawaga chiefs, who had expressed dissatisfaction with the French. On the way back he and his party killed one French soldier and captured another near Crown Point. Tiyanoga told William Johnson his story and then departed for Canajoharie.
November 25, Tuesday (Old Style), 1746: Ten of Johnsons’ scouts and 12 Mohawks arrive at Albany with the scalps of a man, two women and a boy, and eight white prisoners, a French militia captain, two Canadians, two women and three French girls - the Vitry sisters. Johnson will leave on a sloop for New-York with the prisoners later in the day.
December 1746: In backwoods New York, William Johnson took Angélique Vitry as his mistress. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1748
Michel Adanson, a student of Bernard de Jussieu, arrived in Africa to collect until 1754.
Professor Peter Kalm of London disembarked in Philadelphia, as the locals were coming on board his vessel to inquire if it carried any letters addressed to them. He noted that, strangely, the unclaimed letters from abroad were then dropped off at the local coffee-house — it did not seem to have occurred to these Philadelphians as yet, that such unclaimed correspondence from abroad should be being distributed by the local postoffice. “Kalm, in his travels in this country in 1748-9, writes, ‘On my travels through the country of the Iroquois, they offered me, whenever they designed to treat me well, fresh maize bread, baked in an oblong shape, mixed with dried huckleberries, which lay as close in it as the raisins in a plumb pudding.’” After William Penn, the most important visitor to early Germantown was Prof. Peter Kalm, of Aobo, Sweden, a naturalist, who with his servant, Lars Youngstroem, a skilled gardener, came to America to study its natural resources, and who is remembered in Kalmia Latifolia, the laurel common to our woods. In America, Peter Kalm spent three and a half years, much of this time being passed in eastern Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Philadelphia, and at Raccoon, now Swedesboro, in western New Jersey, he leaving the country by the way of Canada, and on reaching Stockholm, published his “Travels in America” an interesting book, translated and reprinted in two volumes, which gives much valuable information. Peter Kalm made three visits to Germantown, spending each time from two to three days with his countryman and friend Peter Cook, who had a farm on west side of Main Street, immediately above Limekiln Road, now Mermaid Lane. — Jellett, Edwin Costley (1860-1929), GERMANTOWN GARDENS AND GARDENERS (Germantown: Horace F. McCann, 1914).
Friend John Bartram, tongue in cheek, informed the visiting Swedish botanist that when an American bear catches a cow, it kills the cow by biting a hole in its hide and blowing with full force into the hole, “till the animal swells excessively and dies, for the air expands greatly between the flesh and the hide.” (Kalm turned out to be so credulous, that he actually would print this preposterous jape by his “American cousin” as if it were fact.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
CAPE COD: It is generally supposed that they who have long been PEOPLE OF conversant with the Ocean can foretell, by certain indications, CAPE COD such as its roar and the notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm; but probably no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they know no more, at least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we are all embarked. Nevertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old sailors, and their accounts of natural phenomena, which totally ignore, and are ignored by, science; and possibly they have not always looked over the gunwale so long in vain. Kalm repeats a story which was told him in Philadelphia by a Mr. Cock, who was one day sailing to the West Indies in a small yacht, with an old man on board who was well acquainted with those seas. “The old man sounding the depth, called to the mate to tell Mr. Cock to launch the boats immediately, and to put a sufficient number of men into them, in order to tow the yacht during the calm, that they might reach the island before them as soon as possible, as within twenty-four hours there would be a strong hurricane. Mr. Cock asked him what reasons he had to think so; the old man replied, that on sounding, he saw the lead in the water at a distance of many fathoms more than he had seen it before; that therefore the water was become clear all of a sudden, which he looked upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane in the sea.” The sequel of the story is, that by good fortune, and by dint of rowing, they managed to gain a safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its height; but it finally raged with so much violence, that not only many ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their own vessel in harbor was washed so far on shore that several weeks elapsed before it could be got off.
PETER KALM “A MR. COCK”
September 5, Friday, 1851: … It is remarkable that Kalm says in 1748 (being in Philadelphia)– “Coals have not yet been found in Pensylvania; but people pretend to have seen them higher up in the country among the natives. Many people however agree that they are met with in great quantity more to the north, near Cape Breton” As we grow old we live more coarsely–we relax a little in our disciplines–and cease to obey our finest instincts. We are more careless about our diet & our chastity. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of Sanity. All wisdom is the reward of a discipline conscious or unconscious.35
35. This thought would be put into Henry Thoreau’s early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as:
[Paragraph 93] As we grow old, we live more coarsely—we relax a little in our disciplines, and to some extent cease to obey our finest instincts. We are more careless about our diet and our chastity. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity. All wisdom is the reward of a discipline conscious or unconscious. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Kalm visited Albany, New York, and discovered the water supply there to be inferior. He would remain, however, in the area, into the next year. Until the year 1751, Kalm would be collecting plant specimens in northeastern North America. His botanical collections would be extensively cited by Professor Carolus Linnaeus in 1753 in SPECIES PLANTARUM, and would constitute nomenclatural types for many of our northeastern US and southeastern Canadian species.
In backwoods New York, in the Ogdensburg district, to influence the Iroquois, the French founded a Suplican Mission.
March: A group of six Mohawks scouting north of Mount Johnson, New York, were surprised by a party of Caughnawaga and Abenaki Indians, accompanied by French rangers. Two of them (including Gingego) were killed and three were captured, including Chief Nichus (father of Molly and Joseph Brant). Although one member of the party escaped to Teantontalogo, there were not enough people there to give chase. When a party returned to the site two days later with William Johnson, they found there the mutilated remains of the two dead, and later they would learn that the three men who had been captured had been taken to Montréal.
April 11, Monday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, William Johnson, Mississaugi chief Tiyanoga, 50 white volunteers and 13 Mohawks left Mount Johnson to make a 200-mile swing through Iroquois country.
April 23, Saturday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, William Johnson and Tiyanoga arrived at Onondaga. Headman Red Hand complained in counsel about the natives having endured a two-year period of patient waiting for the British to make an attack on Canada. William Johnson promised to reply the next morning.
April 24, Sunday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, in counsel, William Johnson, who had no authorization to make such an offer, attempted to convince the headmen of the Iroquois that they should not travel to Montréal to retrieve their captives, but instead should allow the English government to exchange French prisoners for them. They headmen said they would reply to him on the following day. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
April 25, Monday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, Headman Canassatego of the Iroquois made a reply to the proposal of William Johnson. Yes, the Iroquois would allow William Johnson to attempt to exchange French prisoners for their fellow tribesmen.
April 26, Tuesday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, William Johnson and Tiyanoga left Onondaga for Mount Johnson.
The Reverend Daniel Bliss preached at the 1st Parish Church in Concord. Here are his notes:
August 10, Wednesday (Old Style): In backwoods New York, William Johnson wrote Governor George Clinton that the native Americans had all departed from Mount Johnson with the exception of one Seneca, Grota Younga, who had stayed behind so that an ulcer on his leg could be tended to.
Fall: William Johnson began building a new Mount Johnson residence along the Mohawk River in backwoods New York, a mile from the old Mount Johnson. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1749
193 Indian canoes brought 1,385 packs of fur to Oswego, New York to trade with the British. (In our current currency, this amounted to nearly $2,000,000 worth of pelts.)
Suplican father Francis Picquet established La Presentation, an Indian mission, at the mouth of the Oswegatchie River in the northwestern Adirondacks of backwoods New York.
William Johnson wrote Governor George Clinton of the New York colony proposing a settlement on Irondequoit Bay, to shut out the French who were trying to purchase English land there.
January 1, Sunday (1748, Old Style), 1749: Hampshire Grant governor Benning Wentworth created the township of Bennington, first settlement in the Vermont grant claimed by the New York colony.
April 28, Friday (Old Style), 1749: William Johnson returned to Mount Johnson after a 5-week tour of Iroquois villages in backwoods New York, during which he had found the more western tribes to be wary of English promises. He dispatched a report to Governor George Clinton. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
June 2, 1749: Antoine-Louis Rouillé, Comte de Jouy, the French colonial minister, wrote the governor of Canada, the Marquis de Galissonière from Versailles, backing his plan to use Iroquois forces to destroy Fort Oswego in backwoods New York. He then wrote to Galissonière’s upcoming successor Jacques Pierre de Taffanel, the Marquis de Jonquière, who was still in France, encouraging the future use of the Iroquois. Galissonière issued orders to officer Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Bienville to lead a force to the Ohio Valley, along the way burying tin (not lead?) sheets carrying the French coast-of-arms.
June 25, 1749: Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Bienville emerged from the rapids of the St. Lawrence River, arriving at the mouth of the Oswegathchie River, and visited Fort Presentation in backwoods New York.
June 26, 1749: The expedition of Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Bienville left the Oswegathchie River in backwoods New York, continuing up the St. Lawrence River. Two hours after they departed from Fort Presentation, the fort was burnt in an Iroquois attack.
July 1749: Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Bienville and his party, traveling across the western part of backwoods New York, reached Fort Niagara. They would proceed to the Ohio Valley via Chautauqua Lake, depositing lead (not tin?) sheets carrying the French coast-of-arms at each important river mouth.
July 25, Tuesday (Old Style) 1749: Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Bienville reached Kanaouagon (today’s Conewangeo) Creek in backwoods New York.
July 31, Monday (Old Style) 1749: William Johnson wrote to governor Clinton threatening to resign if held accountable to the New York Assembly. He then sent messengers to native villages warning of French incursions into the region.
October 21: New York land agent and politician Oliver Phelps was born in Poquonock, Connecticut. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1750
It was in about this year that Sagoyewatha “Red Jacket” was born, the son of Ahweyneyonh of the Seneca Wolf clan, at Canoga on Cayuga Lake in western New York or Kanadesaga near what is now Geneva NY or possibly near what is now Branchport NY.
Adolph Philipse, a member of the New York Assembly, died. Although he had rarely visited there, Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, built in the 1680s, which is now a National Historical Landmark, had been the center of his commercial trade between New-York, the West Indies, and Europe. Albert, a nearby white tenant farmer, functioned as the overseer of the Philipse estate in Sleepy Hollow. In addition to trading in grain and farm goods, Philipse had engaged extensively in the slave trade. He had published various advertisements for runaway slaves in the local gazettes. Enslaved Africans who spoke several languages ran his international shipping operations. His mill on the Pocantico near the Hudson River was managed by Caesar, an enslaved African man. His dairy was managed by Susan, an enslaved African woman. The Philipse family was among the wealthiest in the colony. His probate inventory listed 30 sheep, 6 spinning wheels, silverware, pewter dishes, 3 feather beds, and 23 named men, women, and children slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1752
William Murray, solicitor general to the King of England, granted the area now known as Vermont to the New Hampshire colony, disappointing the claims of the New York colony.
By some accounts the charter of the town of Walpole, New Hampshire dates to this year: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1753
December 12: New York enacted a 5 oz. and 10 oz. plate Duty Act. “An Act for granting to His Majesty the several Duties and Impositions, on Goods, Wares and Merchandizes imported into this Colony, therein mentioned.” Annually continued until 1767, or perhaps until 1774. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1752-62, p. 21, ch. xxvii.; DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VII. 907; VIII. 452. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1754
June 19, Wednesday: 25 delegates from seven colonies, including Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin, held an Albany Congress to discuss confederation. Representatives came from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, and Maryland. Franklin advised the formation of a series of land companies as a barrier against the French. Presumably it was in this context that Franklin made his “Albany Plan of Union” remarks on the Iroquoian League. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1755
August 14, Thursday: English troops under the command of General Phineas Lyman had been erecting Fort Lyman (later Fort Edward) on the upper Hudson River in New York. When Sir William Johnson reached the location on this day, he found that his army had come to consist of 2,850 men fit for duty. Capt. Stephen Hosmer commanded a company at Fort Edward. He left Concord in September, and returned in December, 1755. Jonathan Hoar, one of the native graduates [from Harvard College], was a major in this expedition. Col. James Minot was also there. The Rev. Mr. Bowes, who had been minister of Bedford, was chaplain of the regiment. The journal of Capt. Hosmer is before me. While at Fort Edward, he says, “Nov. 1st. Sat in a court of enquiry on the complaint of Major Hoar against Colonel Gilbert.” “Nov. 9, Sabbath, Rev. Mr. Bowes preached.” “Nov. 23d Col. Minott and the rest of the commissioners arrived.” “Nov. 27th Major Richardson died at evening.” A company from Acton under Capt. Gershom Davis was mustered with one of the Concord companies in this town, September 1755 and soon after marched for Fort Edward.36
36. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1756
Some 6,000 men assembled in Warren County, New York to fight the French.
Nothing, however, came of it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1757
It would have been in approximately this year that Otetiani was born at Canoga near Waterloo, New York. He was named after a nearby stream, “Always Ready.” As an adult he would live along the Genesee River.
In New-York, the 1st colonial art exhibit was held.
Publication at London of William Smith’s THE HISTORY OF THE PROVINCE OF NEW-YORK FROM THE FIRST DISCOVERY TO THE YEAR M.DCC.XXXII.
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
READ SMITH TEXT I READ SMITH TEXT II
March 17, Thursday: French forces attacked Fort William Henry in New York but were driven off after burning a few buildings and several Lake Champlain vessels.
Robert Rogers the Ranger: “We returned and marched round by the bay to the west of Crown Point, and at night got into the cleared land among their houses and barns. Here we formed an ambush, expecting their labourers out to tend their cattle and clean their grain, of which there were several barns full. We continued there that night, and next day till dark; when discovering none of the enemy, we set fire to the houses and barns, and marched off.”
March 19, Saturday: French attackers appeared in the vicinity of Fort William Henry in New York. They had intended to surprise the British garrison but alert sentries under the command of John Stark had taken notice of their campfires and the fort was standing on the alert. While thinking they were making a sneak attack, the French suddenly found themselves the target of cannon fire. The French force outnumber the British and colonials inside Fort William Henry by 4 to 1, so Francois-Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil sent one of his officers into the fort with terms for its surrender. Major William Eyre, the British commander, replies that he would “defend His Majesty’s Fort to the last extremity.” Rigaud gave up the idea of capturing the fort and determined to instead do as much damage as possible to its outbuildings and surroundings. Several icebound vessels were destroyed, plus a hospital, several storehouses, huts for the Rangers, and a large amount of supplies such as lumber that had been being stored outside the walls. The British would send a 400-man force under the command of a Colonel Parker from Fort William Henry to attempt to seize the French works at Carillon. This force would be ambushed and decimated — only two of its officers and seventy of its men would ever return to Fort William Henry. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1759
April 21, Saturday: With his agenda being to rally the Iroquois to attack the French at Fort Niagara, Sir William Johnson, Baronet, convened an Indian council at Canajoharie, New York. The Seneca, some of them from Ganuskago otherwise known as Dansville –people who were dependent on the British for ammo and trade goods– would agree to such an alliance.
June 30, Saturday: Colonel John Prideaux and Sir William Johnson left Fort Oswego by boat to prepare the invasion of Fort Niagara.
The Marrano37 Jacob Rodrigues Rivera, and two Ashkenazi Jews, Moses Levy and Isaac Hart, of Newport, purchased a small parcel of land for £1500 in Rhode Island currency, on what was then Griffin Street, from Ebenezer Allen of Sandwich, Massachusetts. TOURO SYNAGOGUE
July 2, Monday: Near Lake George, 16 soldiers from New Jersey were surprised while gathering firewood by a force of perhaps up to 240 Indians, who killed and scalped 6 of them. They taunted the rest of the Army before escaping in their canoes. NEW YORK
July 6, Friday: Joshua Barney was born in Maryland.
British forces under Colonel John Prideaux and Sir William Johnson landed four miles from Fort Niagara.
July 7, Saturday: The French in Fort Niagara spotted the British forces.
July 10, Tuesday: Little Fort Niagara, an outpost, was destroyed by its French troops.
July 17, Tuesday: British forces began firing on Fort Niagara.
July 20, Friday: When Colonel John Prideaux was killed by an explosion, Sir William Johnson took charge. NEW YORK FORT NIAGARA
37. Marrano = a Spanish or Portuguese Jew of the late Middle Ages who converted to Christianity, especially one forcibly converted but adhering secretly to Judaism. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
July 22, Sunday: A multi-pronged attack was being launched to force the French to pull Montcalm and his forces back to defend the main cities of New France against some 9,000 soldiers under Wolfe who were sailing up the St. Lawrence River to attack Québec City. Leaving only a small force of 2,300 men to fend off invasion from the south, Montcalm retired to Québec to meet the British under Wolfe. A massive British force under General Jeffrey Amherst was sailing from the southern shores of Lake George against Carillon. His superiors being preoccupied with defense of the capitol city, Brigadier Chevalier de Bourlamaque, who had come to be in command of Carillon, knew very well that no relief would be available for such frontier fortresses. On this day the army of General Jeffrey Amherst disembarked on the eastern shore of Lake George, nearly opposite the former landing place of Abercrombie. As the British force advanced from the south, Bourlamaque would retire from Carillon to St. Frédéric at Crown Point, leaving behind a small force of 400 men of the La Reine regiment under Hebencourt to delay the attackers and destroy Carillon behind them.
July 23, Monday: While General Jeffrey Amherst was preparing for a siege at Carillon, Brigadier Chevalier de Bourlamaque, the French commander, retired from Carillon to St. Frédéric at Crown Point, leaving behind a force of 400 men of the La Reine regiment under Hebencourt to delay the attackers and destroy Carillon behind them.
July 26, Thursday: The French abandoned Fort Ticonderoga to the British. NEW YORK
July 27, Friday: The Union Jack was raised over what remained of the fort of Carillon. When rebuilt by the English, the fort would be named Ticonderoga. NEW YORK
July 31, Tuesday: General Jeffrey Amherst dispatched Major Robert Rogers and his Rangers to Crown Point, to report on the condition of the French at St. Frédéric. Before the Rangers arrived, the French blew up the fort and retreated to make a stand at Isle aux Noix in the Richelieu River. The French have abandoned the Lake Champlain and Lake George region. St. Frédéric, unlike Carillon, would not be rebuilt by the English. NEW YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1760
Cadwallader Colden became acting governor of the New York colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1762
Robert Monckton replaced Cadwallader Colden as acting governor of the New York colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1763
Cadwallader Colden became again acting governor of the New York colony.
The waterpower of Broad Brook near Williamstown was harnessed by John Smedley. BERKSHIRE, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1765
Cadwallader Colden was replaced as acting governor of the New York colony.
In New-York, merchants agreed to boycott English goods until the Stamp Act was repealed. A local Sons of Liberty was formed to protest the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act Congress met in Albany, New York (this was the 1st inter-colony Congress).
March 17, Sunday: There was a passenger revolt aboard the brigantine Hope38 while it was bringing slaves from the coast of Senegal and Gambia to Connecticut. How did that happen? –Well, the captain, who had beaten several of his crewmen, had been killed and his body thrown overboard, and so the black cargo, seeing such discord among their captors, figured they maybe had a chance. In their revolt they killed one crew member and wounded several others. On this day their revolt was suppressed by killing seven of them. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
March 21, Thursday: According to an advertisement in the New-York Gazette, a Likely Negro Fellow who was said to be an extraordinary good cook, was “for want of Employ” in need of getting himself a new owner. This person, a 25-year-old probably, was said to understand setting or tending a table very well, and likewise was able at all kinds of housework such as washing, scouring, scrubbing, etc.
(Also being offered for sale was a Negro Wench who was this Likely Negro Fellow’s wife, born in the city of New-York, a 17-year-old probably, who like her husband understood all sorts of housework. The ad refrains from stating, but one gets the idea that the seller would be looking to vend these slaves as a matched set and would only reluctantly sell them off separately if it were possible in that way to realize a greater return on his investment.)
38. “Hope” is the motto of Rhode Island, as in “I hope to make a profit from this human flesh.” Do you suppose this slaver bound for the coast of Connecticut might have been a Rhode Island vessel??? HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1768
June 14: John Harper, Sr., Alex Harper, General William Joseph and others purchase 250,000 acres in New York’s Montgomery Country from its Indian tenants, at Johnson Hall.
July: New York land jobber John Kelly inspected land north of Lake Champlain for the four Beekman brothers, who soon would apply for a 30,000-acre grant.
August 12, Friday: A British Order in Council confirmed the Québec/New York border.
December 16, Friday: Royal governor Sir Henry Moore suggested to the New York assembly the importance of improving the stretch of the Mohawk River between Schenectady and Fort Stanwix. Nothing would come of the idea. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1769
Upon the death of Henry Moore, Cadwallader Colden became Royal Governor of the New York colony. At his request the New York Assembly, under James Delancey, appropriated funds for a British army garrison in the city of New-York (the Livingston family, opposed in principle to the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime, voting in the negative). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1771
John Murray succeeded Cadwallader Colden as governor of the New York colony.
Captain Nehemiah Smedley built his house in Williamstown, considered the oldest in town today. BERKSHIRE, MASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1774
In New-York, to comply with Article 7 of the Association, residents required that a merchant remove 16 sheep from his vessel before being permitted to set sail for the West Indies.
John Jay was elected to New-York’s conservative Committee of Fifty-One, a committee that had been formed to combat the threat of anarchy.
Ten farms on New York’s Blenheim Patent were sold.
Cornplanter’s son Henry was born.
Future New York governor Daniel D. Tompkins was born in Scarsdale, to Jonathan and Sarah Hyatt Tompkins.
A Council of Safety was organized by settlers on the Vrooman Patent along New York’s Mohawk River. Johannes Ball was named chairman.
In New York, an act was passed to settle debts owed by Ulster County to Albany County (nothing would ever be done to enforce this act). Another act called for marking the boundaries of Ulster and Orange counties from east of the Shawangunk Mountains to the Delaware River.
In New York, King’s College Loyalist president Myles Cooper prepared an anonymous pamphlet entitled A FRIENDLY ADDRESS TO ALL REASONABLE AMERICANS.
The border between New York and New Jersey was marked.
The local committee in Newark, New Jersey recommended a boycott of the loyalist New-York newspaper Rivington’s Gazette. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
In the years preceding the American Revolution a charismatic movement had begun among Narragansett, Mohegan, and other Great Awakening native converts. It weren’t just the white folks, white folks! Largely through the inspiration of a Mohegan minister, the Reverend Samson Occum, plans were made to move west from the Cape Cod and Narragansett Bay area of New England onto the less densely settled lands of the Oneida Iroquois in northern New York, where there would be founded a Christian New England town on the Connecticut town government model. The new community was to be named Brothertown. By this move they planned to unite the serious red Christians into one community, discard the hereditary form of government which had functioned often at the expense of the tribe, remove themselves from the influences of immoral whites and backsliding reds and “monigs,”39 escape the relentless efforts of whites to obtain their tribal resources, and obtain better land than the leftover parcels which they then possessed. The Oneida granted a large tract for this purpose in 1774 but we can notice that they added a racial-purity clause:
With this particular clause or reservation that the same shall not be possessed by any persons deemed of the said Tribes who are descended from or have intermixed with negroes and mulattoes.
Friends were beginning to encourage one another to bring their African-American servants to meeting for worship, to see to their education, and to arrange special meetings for them.
The New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends was beginning to ban its members from owning slaves but Friend Elias Hicks was noting “a great unwillingness in most of them to set their slaves free.” In his Jericho meeting for worship on Paumanok Long Island in this year, he spoke for the first time.
The New England Yearly Meeting appointed a committee to recommend new laws that would “tend to the abolition of slavery.” Friend Thomas Hazard III of the South Kingstown monthly meeting, and Friends Moses Farnum and Thomas Lapham of the Smithfield monthly meeting, were on this committee.
August 6, Saturday: Shaker (Shaking Quaker) movement founder Mother Ann Lee arrived in New-York from Liverpool, along with eight disciples. After a couple of years they would move upstate, to Albany County in New York, to become the Watervliet Society.
39. Note well that this local term “monig” is not a pleasant one. Whether employed by a red person or by a white person, it is not only racist but also derogatory and offensive (it is a truncation of the description “more nigger than Indian”). It is a term used here in Rhode Island by racist Native Americans to describe other Native Americans with whom they do not wish to be associated, and by racist whites to describe people whom they consider to be “putting on as Indians when they ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of niggers with attitude.” It might be useful for you, in considering the later trajectory of the Mashpee reservation on Cape Cod, to bear in mind that these were tribal rejects who had been left behind for racist reasons. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1775
August: The Favourite reached New-York.
American brigadier general Richard Montgomery set off from Crown Point, New York with 1200 men, to attack Montréal.
Some New-York residents, fearing the city might be attacked by the HMS Asia, evacuated the city.
The New York Provincial Congress alerted the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety to the danger of war and requested they keep their militia ready to come to New-York’s aid.
New-York’s council ordered another issue of waterworks banknotes, in the amount of £2,600.
August 23, Wednesday: Mass in C by Luigi Cherubini was performed for the initial time, in Florence.
People were still trying to kill each other at Flatbush on Long Island.
When General Schuyler convened an Indian council at Albany, New York the turnout of native Americans was disappointingly small — there were some Oneidas, some Tuscaroras, some Caughnawagas, a few Canadian Iroquois, and a few Mohawks including Steyawa. Among those attending on behalf of the white colony were Colonel Oliver Wolcott, Colonel Turbott Francis, Commissioner Volkert P. Douw, and the missionaries James Dean and Samuel Kirkland.
August 26, Saturday: James Burgh died with the final three volumes of his POLITICAL DISQUISITIONS not yet ready for publication. His widow would serve as a “fairy godmother” for Mary Wollstonecraft.
A conference at Albany, New York between white colonists and native Americans broke up after the few natives who attended pledged they would refuse to assist the British side in the struggle.
August 29, Tuesday: People were trying to kill each other at New-York.
August 30, Wednesday: General Schuyler, sick with rheumatic pains, arrived in Ticonderoga, New York, finding there that Brigadier General Richard Montgomery had already set off in an attack on Montréal.
August 31, Thursday: General Schuyler set off from Ticonderoga, New York to catch up with Brigadier General Richard Montgomery. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1776
During the Revolutionary War, Flushing, Paumanok Long Island was occupied by the British. Local Quakers would not participate in the war effort and a number of them suffered the confiscation of property as punishment. Flushing Meeting spoke out against members who aided the British or accepted military service. Consequently, the Friends meetinghouse was seized by the army and used for various purposes including a hospital, stable, and storage. It is believed that the army burned the original benches and picket fence as their
firewood, since this was in short supply. With this meetinghouse unavailable, New York Yearly Meeting moved its gatherings to Westbury, never to return. Monthly meetings in New York and other areas were HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
formed, and Flushing Meeting became merely a local monthly meeting (which it remains today).
The American colonies were in revolt, and loyalties were divided. With all the pressures, divided loyalties were to be found even within the Religious Society of Friends. As an example of how Quaker disownment was used as a tool in this incendiary situation, here is a disownment that was announced in this year at the Fairfax, Maryland monthly meeting: “W.R. who by birth had a right of membership in our Religious Society but through levity and a disregard to that principle which would preserve if adhered to, he hath been seduced and drawn away with the Spirit of the Times so far as to inlist and join in the active part of war, leaving his place of abode to that end, and having given us no opportunity to treat with him on this sorrowful occasion, we, agreeable to our antient practice, think it requisite to deny him the right of membership among us, which is hereby confirmed by our monthly meeting and he so to stand until by due contrition he condemns his conduct which we can but desire on his behalf.” As an example of an acknowledgement of disownment due to warlike activity, here is a statement that was duly received and placed on file in this year by that same meeting: “Whereas I the subscriber have several times stood Centry in a military manner and having considered the same, I see it to be wrong, for which misconduct I am sorry, and hope to be more careful for the future, desiring that Friends would accept this my acknowledgment and continue me under their care as my future HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
conduct shall render me worthy. J.L.”40 On Paumanok Long Island, Friend Elias Hicks was standing steadfast and refusing to participate in the American Revolution or “use any coercive force or compulsion by any means whatever; not being overcome by evil, but overcoming evil with the good.”
THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY He well knew that any suggestion that we attempt to kill the Devil with a gun or a sword could have been a suggestion sponsored only by the Devil himself. Instead he chose to make his contribution to the cause of American liberty by paying visits to Quaker slavemasters on Paumanok “Long Island,” entreating them to strike a direct blow for human freedom by manumitting their black slaves.
As you can see, even Quakers have such cannon:
This cries out for explanation but first you need to think about it because there are several levels at which explanation must be attempted.
Papermaker Nathan Sellers of New-York joined the Continental Army to fight, but would soon be put to work in his professional capacity, to provide raw material for a paper currency.
40.These are per Morse, BALTIMORE YEARLY MEETING, page 59. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
The New-York Hospital was founded.
David Matthews would be appointed mayor of New-York for following next nine one-year terms.
The British began construction on Fort Number 8, in Fordham, the Bronx.
Merchant and former British officer Sidney Breese, grandfather of telegraph inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse, was buried in Trinity churchyard in New-York.
Andrew Brock was named treasurer of Ryegate, New York.
John Church sold half of his upstate New York holdings to John Pagan.
English Shakers arrived in Albany County, New York from New-York city and organized themselves into the Watervliet Society of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s First and Second Appearing.
The first ships of the US Navy were built at Skenesborough (later Whitehall), New York.
The English drove French settler John La Frombois off his land in the future Clinton County, New York, burning his home.
January: When Colonel Heard’s New Jersey forces arrived in New York State’s Queens County, the Loyalists there yielded up their arms. The ringleaders of the local loyalists were nowhere to be found.
January 19: In upstate New York, the troops under Kingsborough Patent (later Fulton County) Loyalist Sir John Johnson, after several days of negotiations with General Philip Schuyler’s patriot force of 700 militiamen, surrendered their arms and pledged to abstain from further hostile activities.
January 24, Wednesday: Colonel Henry Knox arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with 43 cannon and 16 mortars that had been captured at Ticonderoga, New York.
February: New York congressional delegate Francis Lewis was authorized to buy shoes for the Continental army. He would find a supplier in New Jersey. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
April: Wagons loaded with powder for New York were moved from Boston to Norwich, Connecticut. Private David Howe was part of the escort.
May 17, Friday: The Reverend Asa Dunbar recorded in his journal: “Continental fast.”
Amos Eaton was born at what has now become Chatham, New York to the farmer Captain Abel Eaton, and Azuba Hurd Eaton.
September: The New York Convention requested that George Washington remove all public bells to New Jersey, to prevent the British from melting down the bronze to cast cannon.
George Washington wrote from Harlem Heights to General Hugh Mercer in New Jersey, directing him to set up an intelligence network to monitor the movements of Admiral Howe’s ships.
Congress authorized replacing the phrase “United Colonies” with “United States” in all American commissions.
Benedict Arnold called upon Congress to provide winter clothing, rum, and artillery.
September 24: People were trying to kill each other at Montressor’s Island, New York.
Treaties with France: Instructions to the Agent. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
September 25: Delegates from the western slopes of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Seth Warner among them, met at Deacon Cephas Kent’s house in Dorset and agreed to withhold their support from the New York colony during the revolution — placing themselves instead directly under the Continental Congress.
October 18, Friday: The British advance out of New-York, transferred from Throg’s Neck, was delayed by an American defense at Pell’s Point — which is to say, to put this another way, people were trying to kill each other at Pelham Manor (New Rochell), New York.
Gideon Manchester of Providence, in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Merchant, of his own free voluntary Will and Accord manumitted, fet free, and discharged his Negro Man Servant “Colette” from all Servitude, Slavery and Bondage whatfoever, requesting that all Magistrates and others permit this former slave to go and pafs freely about his own Bufinefs and Concernements without Molestation or Interruption for so long as He behaved Himfelf peaceably and in Subjection to the Law: gÉ tÄÄ cxÉÑÄx àÉ ã{ÉÅ à{xáx cÜxáxÇàá y{tÄÄ vÉÅx ZÜxxà|Çz? ^ÇÉã çx à{tà \ Z|wxÉÇ `tÇv{xáàxÜ ÉycÜÉä|wxÇvx? |Ç à{xfàtàx Éye{Éwx\áÄtÇw tÇwcÜÉä|wxÇvxcÄtÇàtà|ÉÇá?`xÜv{tÇà?Éy Åç ÉãÇ yÜxx äÉÄâÇàtÜç j|ÄÄ tÇw TvvÉÜw Wb {xÜuç ÅtÇâÅ|à? yxà yÜxx? tÇw w|áv{tÜzx Åç axzÜÉ `tÇ fxÜätÇà vtÄÄxw VÉÄxààx yÜÉÅ tÄÄ fxÜä|àâwx? fÄtäxÜç tÇw UÉÇwtzx ã{tàyÉxäxÜA TÇw \ ÜxÖâxáà tÄÄ `tz|áàÜtàxá tÇw Éà{xÜá àÉ ÑxÜÅ|à à{x yt|w axzÜÉ `tÇ àÉ zÉ tÇw Ñtyá yÜxxÄç tuÉâà {|á ÉãÇ Uây|Çxyá tÇw VÉÇvxÜÇxÅxÇàá? ã|à{Éâà `ÉÄxáàtà|ÉÇ ÉÜ \ÇàxÜÜâÑà|ÉÇ? [x ux{tä|Çz [|ÅyxÄy ÑxtvxtuÄç tÇw |Ç fâu= }xvà|ÉÇ àÉ à{x _tãA Z|äxÇ âÇwxÜ Åç [tÇw tÇw fxtÄ? tà cÜÉä|wxÇvx? à{x X|z{àxxÇà{ Wtç Éy bvàÉuxÜ |Ç à{x lxtÜ Éy ÉâÜ _beW? bÇx g{ÉâytÇw fxäxÇ [âÇwÜxw tÇw fxäxÇàç f|åA ((L.S.)) Z|wxÉÇ `tÇv{xáàxÜA bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb j|àÇxyá VtÄxuZÉwyÜxç g{x yÉÜxzÉ|Çz |á t àÜâx VÉÑçA exvÉÜwxw à{|á f|åà{ Wtç Éy]âÄç V{Ü|yàÉÑ{xÜ[âyáxç ]âÇAÜ } TAWA DJJKA j|àÇxyá g{xÉwÉÜxYÉáàxÜ gÉãÇVÄxÜ~
October 21, Monday: People were trying to kill each other at Mamaroneck, New York.
October 23, Wednesday: George Washington evacuated Manhattan, marching toward White Plains, New York.
William Emerson Faulkner was born, a son of Francis Faulkner.
October 28, Monday: People were trying to kill each other at White Plains, New York. Colonel Eleazer Brooks was in command of a regiment of the Middlesex militia. General Howe forced George Washington to withdraw to North Castle. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1777
January: A resident of the New York colony, John Cumming (this is not the Dr. John Cuming of Concord, Massachusetts), went to the city of New-York to determine how best he might handle his delicate political situation, his delicate political situation being that he was a Loyalist rather than a revolutionary. While in the city he refused a commission in the British army.
People were trying to kill each other at the Assumpsick Bridge in Trenton, New Jersey.
At the women’s meeting for business of the Religious Society of Friends at the upper meetinghouse in Smithfield, Rhode Island, “Benjamin Arnold informs this meeting that he hath read the denials of Jemimah and Patience Wilkinson agreeable to appointment.”
JEMIMAH WILKINSON QUAKER DISOWNMENT Three more Quaker men of Worcester County, Massachusetts were imprisoned for adhering to the Peace Testimony. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
January 15, day: The New Hampshire Grants, claimed both by New York and by New Hampshire, declared their independence, deeming themselves the “republic” of “New Connecticut.”
January 17, day: People were trying to kill each other at King’s Bridge, New York.
January 25, day: People were trying to kill each other at West Farms, New York.
February 28, Friday: Burgoyne met with Lord George Germain in London and presented his plan for an attack on Continental forces in New York State. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
March 16, Sunday: Ward’s House in West Chester County, New York.
March 22, Saturday: People were trying to kill each other at Peekskill, New York.
March 24, Monday: People were trying to kill each other at Highlands, New York.
GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August: St. Leger gathered his forces at Three Rivers before proceeding toward Rome, New York.
Four Quaker men of East Hoosack, Massachusetts were imprisoned for adhering to the Peace Testimony, until the General Court ordered their release. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
August 1: On or about this date Burgoyne’s forces reached New York’s Hudson River and took over Fort Edward.
August 2, Saturday: People were trying to kill each other at GOMoses TO M Kill,ASTER New YorkINDEX. OF WARFARE
In Rhode Island, at Dutch Island, a black unit consisting of 300 local slaves who had been promised freedom after the war was able to kill approximately a thousand Hessian mercenary soldiers. (This black unit would also see action under Colonel Green at Ponts Bridge in New York.)
August 3, day: St. Leger began a siege of Fort Stanwix in the Mohawk Valley of New York.
August 4, day-22, day: People were trying to kill each other at Fort Schuyler (Fort Stanwix), New York.
August 6, day: A force under Nicholas Herkimer, including newly-acquired Oneida Indian troops lead by Honyere Tehawenkarogwen, coming to the aid of Fort Stanwix in the Mohawk Valley of New York, was ambushed at Oriskany by Loyalists, and Mohawks under their chief Joseph Brant. Herkimer was mortally wounded. Honyere and his wife and son killed a dozen of the enemy. St. Leger failed to take Fort Stanwix.
August 21, Thursday-22, Friday: People were trying to kill each other on Staten Island, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 22, Friday: Benedict Arnold arrived at Fort Stanwix in the Mohawk Valley of New York with reinforcements. St. Leger ended his siege, returning toward Canada.
September 21, Sunday: Colonel Benjamin Bellows’s Regiment of Militia (AKA 16th New Hampshire Militia Regiment) was called up at Walpole, New Hampshire as reinforcements for the Continental Army during the Saratoga Campaign. The regiment would join the forces of General Horatio Gates and face off against the British army under General John Burgoyne in northern New York. (The 16th New Hampshire would then serve in General William Whipple’s brigade until, just after the surrender and grounding of arms of Burgoyne’s army was witnessed by two Americans on October 27, 1777, it would disband.)
(Presumably this was the struggle that the intellectually marginal Jonathan Plummer would have meant to indicate, when later in his life he would remember having participated in the 1st and 2d Battles of Saratoga under Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold.)
October 7, Tuesday: People were trying to kill each other at Stillwater, New York.
October 7, Tuesday-17, Friday: People were trying to kill each other on Bemis Heights near Saratoga, New York. Gates, Arnold, Morgan, and General Ebenezer Learned defeated and captured General Burgoyne’s forces. Arnold was wounded in the leg.
October 13, Monday: People were trying to kill each other at Esopus and at Kingston, New York.
Joseph Emerson was born in Hollis, New Hampshire, which is right across the state line from Pepperell, Massachusetts (since his father Deacon/Captain Daniel Emerson was a grandson of the Reverend Daniel Emerson and Hannah Emerson, he would be a 2d cousin to Ralph Waldo Emerson). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
October 17, Friday: Moses Greenleaf Junior was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts to Lydia Parsons Greenleaf in the absence of Captain Moses Greenleaf, who was then in the Revolutionary army.41
In the Convention of Saratoga, New York, General Burgoyne handed over his sword to the American revolutionary forces under General Gates on the Hudson River, formally surrendering his forces to Gates.
41. Per Vital Records of Newburyport, Massachusetts to the end of the year 1849, in the list of births, on page 168 under family name Greenleaf: “Moses, s. Moses and Lydia, Oct. 17, 1777.”
The Reverend Jonathan Greenleaf (a younger brother of Moses Greenleaf) would be born on September 4, 1785 in Newburyport and would die in Brooklyn, New York on April 24, 1865. He would be licensed to preach in 1814, and would be pastor at Wells, Maine, in 1815-1828. He would then take charge of the Mariner’s Church, Boston, remove to New York in 1833, and edit the Sailor’s Magazine. He would also be secretary of the Seamen’s Friend Society, initially in Boston and then in New York, until 1841. He would in 1843 organize the Wallabout Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, and would be its pastor until his death. Bowdoin College would in 1824 award him the degree of MA, and Princeton College would in 1863 award him the degree of DD. The reverend would publish SKETCHES OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF MAINE (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1821); HISTORY OF NEW YORK CHURCHES (New York, 1846); and GENEALOGY OF THE GREENLEAF FAMILY (1854). Professor Simon Greenleaf (another younger brother of Moses Greenleaf): would be born on December 5, 1783 in Newburyport and would die in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 6, 1853. He would remove with his father to Maine when a child, and in 1801 begin the study of law in New Gloucester, Maine, with Ezekiel Whitman, afterward chief justice of the state. In 1806 he would begin to practice in Standish, but in the same year would remove to Gray. He would go to Portland in 1818, and in 1820, after the admission of Maine to the Union, and the establishment of a Supreme Court, would become its reporter, holding the office till 1832. He would be appointed Royal Professor of Law in the Harvard Law School in 1833, and in 1846, on the death of Judge Story, would be transferred to the Dane professorship. He would resign in 1848. The professor would be for many years president of the Massachusetts Bible society. Harvard would in 1834 award him the degree of LLD. His works would be ORIGIN AND PRINCIPLES OF FREEMASONRY (Portland, 1820); FULL COLLECTION OF CASES, OVERRULED, DENIED, DOUBTED, OR LIMITED IN THEIR APPLICATION (1821; 3d ed., by E. Hammond, New York, 1840, afterward expanded to 3 vols.); REPORTS OF CASES IN THE SUPREME COURT OF MAINE, 1820-’31 (9 vols., Hallowell and Portland, 1822-1835; digest, Portland, 1835; revised ed., 8 vols., Boston, 1852); TREATISE ON THE LAW OF EVIDENCE (3 vols., 1842-1853; 14th ed., with large additions by Simon Greenleaf Croswell, 1883); EXAMINATION OF THE TESTIMONY OF THE FOUR EVANGELISTS, BY THE RULES OF EVIDENCE ADMINISTERED IN COURTS OF JUSTICE, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE TRIAL OF JESUS (1846; London, 1847); and an enlarged edition of William Cruise’s DIGEST OF THE LAWS OF ENGLAND RESPECTING REAL PROPERTY, adapted to American practice (3 vols., 1849-1850). He would also publish his inaugural discourse on entering upon his professorship (Boston, 1834), and one on the life and character of Joseph Story (1845). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
William Dorrell was one of the 3,500 redcoats present at the surrender, a 6-footer at about the age of 25.
Quaker conscripts, a total of 14, were taken to Colonel George Washington’s winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and there muskets were tied onto their backs because they declined to hold them in their hands. They did not deviate from the peace testimony, but insisted and continued to insist that this whole thing about warfare, and about the spirit of war that inspired it, was a whole lot of foolishness, and eventually their tormenters gave up and these cowardly resistors were sent back home to resume their lives as productive citizens. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
“Even of those great conflicts, in which hundreds of thousands have been engaged and tens of thousands have fallen, none has been more fruitful of results than this surrender of thirty-five hundred fighting-men at Saratoga. It not merely changed the relations of England and the feelings of Europe towards these insurgent colonies, but it has modified, for all times to come, the connection between every colony and every parent state.” —Lord Mahon. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
“Brilliant generalship in itself is a frightening thing — the very idea that the thought processes of a single brain of a Hannibal or a Scipio can play themselves out in the destruction of thousands of young men in an afternoon.” — Victor Davis Hanson, CARNAGE AND CULTURE: LANDMARK BATTLES IN THE RISE OF WESTERN POWER (NY: Doubleday, 2001) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Of the four great powers that now principally rule the political destinies of the world, France and England are the only two whose influence can be dated back beyond the last century and a, half. The third great power, Russia, was a feeble mass of barbarism before the epoch of Peter the Great; and the very existence of the fourth great power, as an independent nation, commenced within the memory of living men. By the fourth great power of the world I mean the mighty commonwealth of the western continent, which now commands the admiration of mankind. That homage is sometimes reluctantly given, and accompanied with suspicion and ill will. But none can refuse it. All the physical essentials for national strength are undeniably to be found in the geographical position and amplitude of territory which the United States possess; in their almost inexhaustible tracts of fertile, but hitherto untouched, soil; in their stately forests, in their mountain-chains and their rivers, their beds of coal, and stores of metallic wealth; in their extensive sea-board along the waters of two oceans, and in their already numerous and rapidly increasing population. And, when we examine the character of this population, no one can look on the fearless energy, the sturdy determination, the aptitude for local self government, the versatile alacrity, and the unresting spirit of enterprise, which characterize the Anglo-Americans, without feeling that he here beholds the true moral elements of progressive might. Three quarters of a century have not yet passed away since the United States ceased to be mere dependencies of England. And even if we date their origin from the period, when the first permanent European settlements, out of which they grew, were made on the western coast of the North Atlantic, the increase of their strength is unparalleled, either in rapidity or extent. The ancient Roman boasted, with reason, of the growth of Rome from humble beginnings to the greatest magnitude which the world had then ever witnessed. But the citizen of the United States is still more justly entitled to claim this praise. In two centuries and a half his country has acquired ampler dominion than the Roman gained in ten. And, even if we credit the legend of the band of shepherds and outlaws with which Romulus is said to have colonized the Seven Hills, we find not there so small a germ of future greatness, as we find in the group of a hundred and five ill-chosen and disunited emigrants who founded Jamestown in 1607, or in the scanty band of the Pilgrim Fathers, who, a few years later, moored their bark on the wild and rock- bound coast of the wilderness that was to become New England. The power of the United States is emphatically the “Imperium quo neque ab exordio ullum fere minus, neque incrementis tote orbe amplius humana potest memoria recordari.” - Eutropius. Nothing is more calculated to impress the mind with a sense of the rapidity with which the resources of the American Republic advance, than the difficulty which the historical inquirer finds in ascertaining their precise amount. If he consults the most HDT WHAT? INDEX
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recent works, and those written by the ablest investigators of the subject, he finds in them admiring comments on the change which the last few years, before those books were written, had made; but when he turns to apply the estimates in those books to the present moment, he finds them wholly inadequate. Before a book on the subject of the United States has lost its novelty, those states have outgrown the description which it contains. The celebrated work of the French statesman, De Tocqueville, appeared about fifteen years ago. In the passage which I am about to quote, it will be seen that he predicts the constant increase of the Anglo-American power, but he looks on the Rocky Mountains as their extreme western limit for many years to come. He had evidently no expectation of himself seeing that power dominant along the Pacific as well as along the Atlantic coast. He says: “The distance from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico extends from the 47th to the 30th degree of latitude, a distance of more than 1200 miles, as the bird flies. The frontier of the United States winds along the whole of this immense line; sometimes falling within its limits, but more frequently extending far beyond it into the waste. It has been calculated that the Whites advance every year a mean distance of seventeen miles along the whole of this vast boundary. Obstacles, such as an unproductive district, a lake, or an Indian nation unexpectedly encountered, are sometimes met with. The advancing column then halts for a while; its two extremities fall back upon themselves, and as soon as they are reunited they proceed onwards. This gradual and continuous progress of the European race towards the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a Providential event: it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onwards by the hand of God. “Within this first line of conquering settlers towns are built, and vast estates founded. In 1790 there were only a few thousand pioneers sprinkled along the valleys of the Mississippi: and at the present day these valleys contain as many inhabitants as were to be found in the whole Union in 1790. Their population amounts to nearly four millions. The city of Washington was founded in 1800, in the very center of the Union; but such are the changes which have taken place, that it now stands at one of the extremities; and the delegates of the most, remote Western States are already obliged to perform a journey as long as that from Vienna to Paris. “It must not, then, be imagined that the impulse of the British race in the New World can be arrested. The dismemberment of the Union, and the hostilities which might ensue, the abolition of republican institutions, and the tyrannical government which might succeed it, may retard this impulse, but they cannot prevent it from ultimately fulfilling the destinies to which that race is reserved. No power upon earth can close upon the emigrants that fertile wilderness, which offers resources to all industry and a refuge from all want. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Future events, of whatever nature they may be, will, not deprive the Americans of their climate or of their inland seas, or of their great rivers, or of their exuberant soil. Nor will bad laws, revolutions, and anarchy be able to obliterate that love of prosperity and that spirit of enterprise which seem to be the distinctive characteristics of their race, or to extinguish that knowledge which guides them on their way. “Thus, in the midst of the uncertain future, one event at least is sure. At a period which may be said to be near (for we are speaking of the life of a nation), the Anglo-Americans will alone cover the immense space contained between the Polar regions and the Tropics, extending from the coast of the Atlantic to the shores of the Pacific Ocean; the territory which will probably be occupied by the Anglo-Americans at some future time, may be computed to equal three quarters of Europe in extent. The climate of the Union is upon the whole preferable to that of Europe, and its natural advantages are not less great; it is therefore evident that its population will at some future time be proportionate to our own. Europe, divided as it is between so many different nations, and torn as it has been by incessant wars and the barbarous manners of the Middle Ages, has notwithstanding attained a population of 410 inhabitants to the square league. What cause can prevent the United States from having as numerous a population in time? “The time will therefore come when one hundred and fifty millions of men will be living in North America, equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms. The rest is uncertain, but this is certain; and it is a fact new to the world, a fact fraught with such portentous consequences as to baffle the efforts even of the imagination.” Let us turn from the French statesman writing in 1535, to an English statesman, who is justly regarded as the highest authority on all statistical subjects, and who described the United States only seven years ago, Macgregor tells us- “The States which, on the ratification of independence, formed the American Republican Union, were thirteen, viz.:- “Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“The foregoing thirteen states (the whole inhabited territory of which, with the exception of a few small settlements, was confined to the region extending between the Allegheny mountains and the Atlantic) were those which existed at the period when they became an acknowledged separate and independent federal sovereign power. The thirteen stripes of the standard or flag of the United States, continue to represent the original number. The stars have multiplied to twenty-six, [Fresh stars hare dawned since this was written.] according as the number of States have increased. “The territory of the thirteen original States of the Union, including Maine and Vermont, comprehended a superficies of 371,124 English square miles; that of the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 120,354; that of France, including Corsica, 214,910; that of the Austrian Empire, including Hungary and all the Imperial States; 257, 540 English square miles. “The present superficies of the twenty-six constitutional States of the Anglo-American Union, and the district of Columbia, and territories of Florida, include 1,029,025 square miles; to which if we add the northwest, or Wisconsin territory, east of the Mississippi, and bounded by Lake Superior on the north, and Michigan on the east, and occupying at least 100,000 square miles, and then add the great western region, not yet well-defined territories, but at the most limited calculation comprehending 700,000 square miles, the whole unbroken in its vast length and breadth by foreign nations, comprehends a portion of the earth’s surface equal to 1, 729,025 English, or 1,296,770 geographical square miles.” We may add that the population of the States, when they declared their independence, was about two millions and a half; it is now twenty-three millions. I have quoted Macgregor, not only on account of the clear and full view which he gives of the progress of America to the date when he wrote, but because his description may be contrasted with what the United States have become even since his book appeared. Only three years after the time when Macgregor thus wrote, the American President truly stated:— “Within less than four years the annexation of Texas to the Union has been consummated; all conflicting title to the Oregon territory, south of the 49th degree of north latitude, adjusted; and New Mexico and Upper California have been acquired by treaty. The area of these several territories contains 1,193,061 square miles, or 763,559,040 acres; while the area of the remaining twenty-nine States, and the territory not yet organized into States east of the Rocky Mountains, contains 2,059,513 square miles, or 1,318,126,058 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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acres. These estimates show that the territories recently acquired, and over which our exclusive jurisdiction and dominion have been extended, constitute a country more than half as large as all that which was held by the United States before their acquisition. If Oregon be excluded from the estimate, there will still remain within the limits of Texas, New Mexico, and California, 851,595 square miles, or 545,012,720 acres; being an addition equal to more than one-third of all the territory owned by the United States before their acquisition; and, including Oregon, nearly as great an extent of territory as the whole of Europe, Russia only excepted. The Mississippi, so lately the frontier of our country, is now only its center. With the addition of the late acquisitions, the United States are now estimated to be nearly as large as the whole of Europe. The extent of the sea-coast of Texas on the Gulf of Mexico is upwards of 400 miles; of the coast of Upper California, on the Pacific, of 970 miles; and of Oregon, including the Straits of Fuca, of 650 miles; making the whole extent of sea coast on the Pacific 1620 miles; and the whole extent on both the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, 2020 miles. The length of the coast on the Atlantic, from the northern limits of the United States, round the Capes of Florida to the Sabine on the eastern boundary of Texas, is estimated to be 3100 miles, so that the addition of seacoast, including Oregon, is very nearly two-thirds as great as all we possessed before; and, excluding Oregon, is an addition of 1370 miles; being nearly equal to one-half of the extent of coast which we possessed before these acquisitions. We have now three great maritime fronts— on the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific, making, in the whole, an extent of sea-coast exceeding 5000 miles. This is the extent of the seacoast of the United States, not including bays, sounds, and small irregularities of the main shore, and of the sea islands. If these be included, the length of the, shore line of coast, as estimated by the superintendent of the Coast Survey, in his report, would be 33,063 miles.” The importance of the power of the United States being then firmly planted along the Pacific applies not only to the New World, but to the Old. Opposite to San Francisco, on the coast of that ocean, lie the wealthy but decrepit empires of China and Japan. Numerous groups of islets stud the larger part of the intervening sea, and form convenient stepping-stones for the progress of commerce or ambition. The intercourse of traffic between these ancient Asiatic monarchies, and the young Anglo-American Republic, must be rapid and extensive. Any attempt of the Chinese or Japanese rulers to check it, will only accelerate an armed collision. The HDT WHAT? INDEX
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American will either buy or force his way. Between such populations as that of China and Japan on the one side, and that of the United States on the other — the former haughty, formal, and insolent, the latter bold, intrusive, and unscrupulous — causes of quarrel must, sooner or later, arise. The results of such a quarrel cannot be doubted. America will scarcely imitate the forbearance shown by England at the end of our late war with the Celestial Empire; and the conquests of China and Japan, by the fleets and armies of the United States, are events which many now living are likely to witness. Compared with the magnitude of such changes in the dominion of the Old World, the certain ascendancy of the Anglo-Americans over Central and Southern America, seems a matter of secondary importance. Well may we repeat De Tocqueville’s words, that the growing power of this commonwealth is, “Un fait entierement nouvcau dans le monde, et dont l’imagination elle-meme ne saurait saisir la portee.” [These remarks were written in May 1981, and now, in May 1853, a powerful squadron of American war-steamers has been sent to Japan, for the ostensible purpose of securing protection for the crews of American vessels shipwrecked on the Japanese coasts, but also evidently for important ulterior purposes.] An Englishman may look, and ought to look, on the growing grandeur of the Americans with no small degree of generous sympathy and satisfaction. They, like ourselves, are members of the great Anglo-Saxon nation, “whose race and language are now overrunning the world from one end of it to the other.” And whatever differences of form of government may exist between us and them; whatever reminiscences of the days when, though brethren, we strove together, may rankle in the minds of us, the defeated party; we should cherish the bonds of common nationality that still exist between us. We should remember, as the Athenians remembered of the Spartans at a season of jealousy and temptation, that our race is one, being of the same blood, speaking the same language, having an essential resemblance in our institutions and usage’s, and worshipping in the temples of the same God. All this may and should be borne in mind. And yet an Englishman can hardly watch the progress of America, without the regretful thought that America once was English, and that, but for the folly of our rulers, she might be English still. It is true that the commerce between the two countries has largely and beneficially increased; but this is no proof that the increase would not have been still greater, had the States remained integral portions of the same great empire. By giving a fair and just participation in political rights, these, “the fairest possessions” of the British crown, might have been preserved to it. “This ancient and most noble monarchy” [Lord Chatham] would not have been dismembered; nor should we see that which ought to be the right arm of our strength, now menacing HDT WHAT? INDEX
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us in every political crisis, as the most formidable rival of our commercial and maritime ascendancy. The war which rent away the North American colonies of England is, of all subjects in history, the most painful for an Englishman to dwell on. It was commenced and carried on by the British ministry in iniquity and folly, and it was concluded in disaster and shame. But the contemplation of it cannot be evaded by the historian, however much it may be abhorred. Nor can any military event be said to have exercised more important influence on the future fortunes of mankind, than the complete defeat of Burgoyne’s expedition in 1777; a defeat which rescued the revolted colonists from certain subjection; and which, by inducing the courts of France and Spain to attack England in their behalf, ensured the independence of the United States, and the formation of that transatlantic power which, not only America, but both Europe and Asia, now see and feel. Still, in proceeding to describe this “decisive battle of the world,” a very brief recapitulation of the earlier events of the war may be sufficient; nor shall I linger unnecessarily on a painful theme. The five northern colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont, usually classed together as the New England colonies, were the strongholds of the insurrection against the mother-country. The feeling of resistance was less vehement and general in the central settlement of New York; and still less so in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the other colonies of the south, although everywhere it was formidably active. Virginia should, perhaps, be particularized for the zeal which its leading men displayed in the American cause; but it was among the descendants of the stern Puritans that the spirit of Cromwell and Vane breathed in all its fervor; it was from the New Englanders that the first armed opposition to the British crown had been offered; and it was by them that the most stubborn determination to fight to the last, rather than waive a single right or privilege, had been displayed. In 1775, they had succeeded in forcing the British troops to evacuate Boston; and the events of 1716 had made New York (which the royalists captured in that year) the principal basis of operations for the armies of the mother-country. A glance at the map will show that the Hudson river, which falls into the Atlantic at New York, runs down from the north at the back of the New England States, forming an angle of about forty- five degrees with the line of the coast of the Atlantic, along which the New England states are situate. Northward of the Hudson, we see a small chain of lakes communicating with the Canadian frontier. It is necessary to attend closely to these geographical points, in order to under stand the plan of the operations which the English attempted in 1777, and which the battle of Saratoga defeated. The English had a considerable force in Canada, and in 1776 had completely repulsed an attack which the Americans had made upon that province. The British ministry resolved to avail HDT WHAT? INDEX
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themselves, in the next year, of the advantage which the occupation of Canada gave them, not merely for the purpose of defense, but for the purpose; of striking a vigorous and crushing blow against the revolted colonies. With this view, the army in Canada was largely reinforced. Seven thousand veteran troops were sent out from England, with a corps of artillery abundantly supplied, and led by select. and experienced officers. Large quantities of military stores were also furnished for the equipment of the Canadian volunteers, who were expected to join the expedition. It was intended that the force thus collected should march southward by the line of the lakes, and thence along the banks of the Hudson river. The British army in New York (or a large detachment of it) was to make a simultaneous movement northward, up the line of the Hudson, and the two expeditions were to unite at Albany, a town on that river. By these operations all communication between the northern colonies and those of the center and south would be cut off. An irresistible force would be concentrated, so as to crush all further opposition in New England; and when this was done, it was believed that the other colonies would speedily submit. The Americans had no troops in the field that seemed able to baffle these movements. Their principal army, under Washington, was occupied in watching over Pennsylvania and the south. At ally rate it was believed that, in order to oppose the plan intended for the new campaign, the insurgents must risk a pitched battle, in which the superiority of the royalists, in numbers, in discipline, and in equipment, seemed to promise to the latter a crowning victory. Without question the plan was ably formed; and had the success of the execution been equal to the ingenuity of the design, the re-conquest or submission of the thirteen United States must, in all human probability, have followed; and the independence which they proclaimed in 1776 would have been extinguished before it existed a second year. No European power had as yet. come forward to aid America. It is true that England was generally regarded with jealousy and ill-will, and was thought to have acquired, at the treaty of Paris, a preponderance of dominion which was perilous to the balance of power; but though many were willing to wound, none had yet ventured to strike; and America, if defeated in 1777, would have been suffered to fall unaided. In Lord Albemarle’s “Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham” is contained the following remarkable state paper, drawn up by King George III himself respecting the plan of Burgoyne’s expedition. The original is in the king’s own hand. “REMARKS ON THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR FROM CANADA. “The outlines of the plan seem to be on a proper foundation. The rank and file of the army now in Canada (including the 1lth Regiment of British, M’Clean’s. corps, the Brunswick’s and Hanover), amount to 10,527; add the eleven additional companies and four hundred Hanover Chasseurs, the total will be 11,443. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“As sickness and other contingencies must be expected, I should think not above 7000 effectives can be spared over Lake Champlain; for it would be highly imprudent to run any risk in Canada. “The fixing the stations of those left in the province may not be quite right, though the plan proposed may be recommended. Indians must be employed, and this measure must be avowedly directed, and Carleton must be in the strongest manner directed that the Apollo shall be ready by that day, to receive Burgoyne. “The magazines must be formed with the greatest expedition, at Crown Point. “If possible, possession must be taken of Lake George, and nothing but an absolute impossibility of succeeding in this, can be an excuse for proceeding by South Bay and Skeenborough. “As Sir W. Home does not think of acting from Rhode Island into the Massachusetts, the force from Canada must join him in Albany. “The diversion on the Mohawk River ought at least to be strengthened by the addition of the four hundred Hanover Chasseurs. “The Ordnance ought to furnish a complete proportion of entrenching tools. “The provisions ought to be calculated for a third more than the effective soldiery, and the General ordered to avoid delivering these when the army can be subsisted by the country. Bourgoyne certainly greatly undervalues the German recruits. “The idea of carrying the army by sea to Sir W. Howe, would certainly require the leaving a much larger part of it in Canada, as in that case the rebel army would divide that province from the immense one under Sir W. Howe. I greatly dislike this last idea.” Burgoyne had gained celebrity by some bold and dashing exploits in Portugal during the last war, he was personally as brave an officer as ever headed British troops; he had considerable skill as a tactician; and his general intellectual abilities and acquirements were of a high order. He had several very able and experienced officers under him, among whom were Major-General Phillips and Brigadier-General Frazer. His regular troops amounted, exclusively of the corps of artillery, to about seven thousand two hundred men, rank and file. Nearly half of these were Germans. He had also an auxiliary force of from two to three thousand Canadians. He summoned the warriors of several tribes of the Red Indians near the western lakes to join his army. Much eloquence was poured forth, both in America and in England, in denouncing the use of these savage auxiliaries. Yet Burgoyne seems to have done no more than Montcalm, Wolfe, and other French, American, and English generals had done before him. But, in truth, the lawless ferocity of the Indians, their unskillfulness in regular action, and the utter impossibility HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of bringing them under any discipline, made their services of little or no value in times of difficulty: while the indignation which their outrages inspired, went far to rouse the whole population of the invaded districts into active hostilities against Burgoyne’s force.
Burgoyne assembled his troops and confederates hear the river Bouquet, on the west side of Lake Champlain. He then, on the 21st of June, 1777, gave his Red Allies a war-feast, and harangued them on the necessity of abstaining from their usual cruel practices against unarmed people and prisoners. At the same time he published a pompous manifesto to the Americans, in which he threatened the refractory with all the horrors of war, Indian as well as European. The army proceeded by water to Crown Point, a fortification which the Americans held at the northern extremity of the inlet by which the water from Lake George is conveyed to Lake Champlain. He landed here without opposition; but the reduction of Ticonderoga, a fortification about twelve miles to the south of Crown Point, was a more serious matter, and was supposed to be the critical part of the expedition. Ticonderoga commanded the passage along the lakes, and was considered to be the key to the route which Burgoyne wished to follow. The English had been repulsed in an attack on it in the war with the French in 1758 with severe loss. But Burgoyne now invested it with great skill; and the American General, St. Clair, who had only an ill equipped army of about three thousand men, evacuated it on the 5th of July. It seems evident that a different course would have caused the destruction or capture of his whole army; which, weak as it was, was the chief force then in the field for the protection of the New England states. When censured by some of his countrymen for abandoning Ticonderoga, St. Clair truly replied, “that he had lost a post, but saved a province.” Burgoyne’s troops pursued the retiring Americans, gained several advantages over them, and took a large HDT WHAT? INDEX
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part of their artillery and military stores.
The loss of the British in these engagements was trifling. The army moved southward along Lake George to Skenesborough; and thence, slowly, and with great difficulty, across a broken country, full of creeks and marshes, and clogged by the enemy with felled trees and other obstacles, to Fort Edward, on the Hudson river, the American troops continuing to retire before them. Burgoyne reached the left bank of the Hudson river on the 30th of July. Hitherto he had overcome every difficulty which the enemy and the nature of the country had placed in his way. His army was in excellent order and in the highest spirits; and the peril of the expedition seemed over, when they were once on the bank of the river which was to be the channel of communication between them and the British army in the south. But their feelings, and those of the English nation in general when their successes were announced, may best be learned from a contemporary writer. Burke, in the “Annual Register” for 1777, describes them thus:— “Such was the rapid torrent of success, which swept everything away before the northern army in its onset. It is not to be wondered at, if both officers and private men were highly elated with their good fortune, and deemed that and their prowess to be irresistible; if they regarded their enemy with the greatest contempt; considered their own toils to be nearly at an end; Albany to be already in their hands; and the reduction of the northern provinces to be rather a matter of some time, than an arduous task full of difficulty and danger. “At home, the joy and exultation was extreme; not only at court, but with all those who hoped or wished the unqualified subjugation, and unconditional submission of the colonies. The loss in reputation was greater to the Americans, and capable of more fatal consequences, than even that of ground, of posts, of artillery, or of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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men. All the contemptuous and most degrading charges which had been made by their enemies, of their wanting the resolution and abilities of men, even in their defense of whatever was dear to them, were now repeated and believed. Those who still regarded them as men, and who had not yet lost all affection to them as brethren, who also retained hopes that a happy reconciliation upon constitutional principles, without sacrificing the dignity or the just authority of government on the one side, or a dereliction of the rights of freemen on the other, was not even now impossible, notwithstanding their favorable dispositions in general, could not help feeling upon this occasion that the Americans sunk not a little in their estimation. It was not difficult to diffuse an opinion that the war in effect was over; and that any further resistance could serve only to render the terms of their submission the worse. Such were some of the immediate effects of the loss of those grand keys of North America, Ticonderoga and the lakes.” The astonishment and alarm which these events produced among the Americans were naturally great but in the midst of their disasters none of the colonists showed any disposition to submit. The local governments of the New England States, as well as the Congress, acted with vigor and firmness in their efforts to repel the enemy. General Gates was sent to take the command of the army at Saratoga; and Arnold, a favorite leader of the Americans, was dispatched by Washington to act under him, with reinforcements of troops and guns from the main American army. Burgoyne’s employment of the Indians now produced the worst possible effects. Though he labored hard to check the atrocities which they were accustomed to commit, he could not prevent the occurrence of many barbarous outrages, repugnant both to the feelings of humanity and to the laws of civilized warfare. The American commanders took care that the reports of these excesses should be circulated far and wide, well knowing that they would make the stern New Englanders not droop, but rage. Such was their effect; and though, when each man looked upon his wife, his children, his sisters, or his aged parents, the thought of the merciless Indian “thirsting for the blood of man, woman, and child,” of “the cannibal savage torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating the mangled victims of his barbarous battles,” [Lord Chatham’s speech on the employment of Indians in the war.] might raise terror in the bravest breasts; this very terror produced a directly contrary effect to causing submission to the royal army. It was seen that the few friends of the royal cause, as well as its enemies, were liable to be the victims of the indiscriminate rage of the savages; [See in the “Annual Register” for 1777, page 117, the “Narrative of the Murder of Miss M’Crea, the daughter of an American loyalist.”] and thus “the inhabitants of the open and frontier countries had no choice of acting: they had no means of security left, but by abandoning their habitations and taking up arms. Every man saw HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the necessity of becoming a temporary soldier, not only for his own security, but for the protection and defense of those connections which are dearer than life itself. Thus an army was poured forth by the woods, mountains, and marshes, which in this part were thickly sown with plantations and villages. The Americans recalled their courage; and when their regular army seemed to be entirely wasted, the spirit of the country produced a much greater and more formidable force.” While resolute recruits, accustomed to the use of firearms, and all partially trained by service in the provincial militias, were thus flocking to the standard of Gates and Arnold at Saratoga; and while Burgoyne was engaged at Fort Edward in providing the means for the further advance of his army through the intricate and hostile country that still lay before him, two events occurred, in each of which the British sustained loss, and the Americans obtained advantage, the moral effects of which were even more important than the immediate result of the encounters. When Burgoyne left Canada, General St. Leger was detached from that province with a mixed force of about one thousand men, and some light field-pieces, across Lake Ontario against Fort Stanwix: which the Americans held. After capturing this, he was to march along the Mohawk river to its confluence with the Hudson, between Saratoga and Albany, where his force and that of Burgoyne were to unite. But, after some successes, St. Leger was obliged to retreat, and to abandon his tents and large quantities of stores to the garrison. At the very time that General Burgoyne heard of this disaster, he experienced one still more severe in the defeat of Colonel Baum with a large detachment of German troops at Benington, whither Burgoyne had sent them for the purpose of capturing some magazines of provisions, of which the British army stood greatly in seed. The Americans, augmented by continual accessions of strength, succeeded, after many attacks, in breaking this corps, which fled into the woods, and left its commander mortally wounded on the field: they then marched against a force of five hundred grenadiers and light infantry, which was advancing to Colonel Baum’s assistance, under Lieutenant-Colonel Breyman; who, after a gallant resistance, was obliged to retreat on the main army. The British loss in these two actions exceeded six hundred men: and a party of American loyalists, on their way to join the army, having attached themselves to Colonel Baum’s corps, were destroyed with it. Notwithstanding these reverses, which added greatly to the spirit and numbers of the American forces, Burgoyne determined to advance. It was impossible any longer to keep up his communications with Canada by way of the lakes, so as to supply his army on his southward march; but having by unremitting exertions collected provisions for thirty days, he crossed the Hudson by means of a bridge of rafts, and, marching a short distance along its western bank, he encamped on the 14th of September on the heights of SARATOGA, about sixteen miles from Albany. The Americans had fallen back from Saratoga, and were HDT WHAT? INDEX
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now strongly posted near Stillwater, about half way between Saratoga and Albany, and showed a determination to recede no farther. Meanwhile Lord Howe, with the bulk of the British army that had lain at New York, had sailed away to the Delaware, and there commenced a campaign against Washington, in which the English general took Philadelphia, and gained other showy, but unprofitable successes. But Sir Henry Clinton, a brave and skillful officer, was left with a considerable force at New York; and he undertook the task of moving up the Hudson to cooperate with Burgoyne. Clinton was obliged for this purpose to wait for reinforcements which had been promised from England, and these did not arrive till September. As soon as he received them, Clinton embarked about 3000 of his men on a flotilla, convoyed by some ships of war under Commander Hotham, and proceeded to force his way up the river, but it was long before he was able to open any communication with Burgoyne. The country between Burgoyne’s position at Saratoga and that of the Americans at Stillwater was rugged, and seamed with creeks and water-courses; but after great labor in making bridges and temporary causeways, the British army moved forward. About four miles from Saratoga, on the afternoon of the 19th of September, a sharp encounter took place between part of the English right wing, under Burgoyne himself, and a strong body of the enemy, under Gates and Arnold. The conflict lasted till sunset. The British remained masters of the field; but the loss on each side was nearly equal (from five hundred to six hundred men); and the spirits of the Americans were greatly raised by having withstood the best regular troops of the English army. Burgoyne now halted again, and strengthened his position by fieldwork’s and redoubts; and the Americans also improved their defenses. The two armies remained nearly within cannon-shot of each other for a considerable time, during which Burgoyne was anxiously looking for intelligence of the promised expedition from New York, which, according to the original plan, ought by this time to have been approaching Albany from the south. At last, a messenger from Clinton made his way, with great difficulty, to Burgoyne’s camp, and brought the information that Clinton was on his way up the Hudson to attack the American forts which barred the passage up that river to Albany. Burgoyne, in reply, on the 30th of September, urged Clinton to attack the forts as speedily as possible, stating that the effect of such an attack, or even the semblance of it, would be to move the American army front its position before his own troops. By another messenger, who reached Clinton on the 5th of October, Burgoyne informed his brother general that he had lost his communications with Canada, but had provisions which would last him till the 20th. Burgoyne described himself as strongly posted, and stated that though the Americans in front of him were strongly posted also, he made no doubt of being able to force them, and making his way to Albany; but that he doubted whether he could subsist there, as the country was drained of provisions. He wished Clinton to meet him HDT WHAT? INDEX
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there, and to keep open a communication with New York. Burgoyne had over-estimated his resources, and in the very beginning of October found difficulty and distress pressing him hard. The Indians and Canadians began to desert him; while, on the other hand, Gates’s army was continually reinforced by fresh bodies of the militia. An expeditionary force was detached by the Americans, which made a bold, though unsuccessful, attempt to retake Ticonderoga. And finding the number and spirit of the enemy to increase daily, and his own stores of provision to diminish, Burgoyne determined on attacking the Americans in front of him, and by dislodging them from their position, to gain the means of moving upon Albany, or at least of relieving his troops from the straitened position in which they were cooped up. Burgoyne’s force was now reduced to less than 6000 men. The right of his camp was on some high around n little to the west of the river; thence his entrenchment’s extended along the lower ground to the bank of the Hudson, the line of their front being nearly at a right angle with the course of the stream. The lines were fortified with redoubts and field-works, and on a height on the flank of the extreme right a strong redoubt was reaped, and entrenchment’s, in a horse-shoe form, thrown up. The Hessians, under Colonel Breyman, were stationed here, forming a flank defense to Burgoyne’s main army. The numerical force of the Americans was now greater than the British, even in regular troops, and the numbers of the militia and volunteers which had joined Gates and Arnold were greeter still. General Lincoln, with 2000 New England troops, had reached the American camp on the 29th of September. Gates gave him the command of the right wing, and took in person the command of the left wing, which was composed of two brigades under Generals Poor and Leonard, of Colonel Morgan’s rifle corps, and part of the fresh New England Militia. The whole of the American lines had been ably fortified under the direction of the celebrated Polish General, Kosciusko, who was now serving as a volunteer in Gates’s army. The right of the American position, that is to say, the part of it nearest to the river, was too strong to be assailed with any prospect of success: and Burgoyne therefore determined to endeavor to force their left. For this purpose he formed a column of 1500 regular troops, with two twelve- pounders, two howitzers, and six six-pounders. He headed this in person, having Generals Philips, Reidesel, and Fraser under him. The enemy’s force immediately in front of his lines was so strong that he dared not weaken the troops who guarded them, by detaching any more to strengthen his column of attack. It was on the 7th of October that Burgoyne led his column forward; and on the preceding day, the 6th, Clinton had successfully executed a brilliant enterprise against the two American forts which barred his progress up the Hudson. He had captured them both, with severe loss to the American forces opposed to him; he had destroyed the fleet which the Americans HDT WHAT? INDEX
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had been forming on the Hudson, under the protection of their forts; and the upward river was laid open to his squadron. He had also, with admirable skill and industry, collected in small vessels, such as could float within a few miles of Albany, provisions sufficient to supply Burgoyne’s army for six months. He was now only a hundred and fifty-six miles distant from Burgoyne; and a detachment of 1700 men actually advanced within forty miles of Albany. Unfortunately Burgoyne and Clinton were each ignorant of the other’s movements; but if Burgoyne had won his battle on the 7th, he must on advancing have soon learned the tidings of Clinton’s success, and Clinton would have heard of his. A junction would soon have been made of the two victorious armies, and the great objects of the campaign might yet have been accomplished. All depended on the fortune of the column with which Burgoyne, on the eventful 7th of October, 1777, advanced against the American position. There were brave men, both English and German, in its ranks; and in particular it comprised one of the best bodies of grenadiers in the British service. Burgoyne pushed forward some bodies of irregular troops to distract the enemy’s attention; and led his column to within three quarters of a mile from the left of Gates’s camp, and then deployed his men into line. The grenadiers under Major Ackland, and the artillery under Major Williams, were drawn up on the left; a corps of Germans, under General Reidesel, and some British troops under General Phillips, were in the center, and the English Light Infantry, and the 24th regiment, under Lord Balcarres and General Fraser, were on the right. But Gates did not wait to be attacked; and directly the British line was formed and began to advance, the American general, with admirable skill, caused General Poor’s brigade of New York and New Hampshire troops, and part of General Leonard’s brigade, to make a sudden and vehement rush against its left, and at the same time sent Colonel Morgan, with his rifle corps and other troops, amounting to 1500, to turn the right of the English. The grenadiers under Ackland sustained the charge of superior numbers nobly. But Gates sent, more Americans forward, and in a few minutes the action became general along the center, so as to prevent the Germans from detaching any help to the grenadiers. Morgan, with his riflemen, was now pressing Lord Balcarres and General Fraser hard, and fresh masses of the enemy were observed advancing from their extreme left, with the evident intention of forcing the British right, and cutting off its retreat. The English light infantry and the 24th now fell back, and formed an oblique second line, which enabled them to baffle this maneuver, and also to succor their comrades in the left wing, the gallant grenadiers, who were overpowered by superior numbers, and, but for this aid, must have been cut to pieces. The contest now was fiercely maintained on both sides. The English cannon were repeatedly taken and retaken; but when the grenadiers near them were forced back by the weight of superior HDT WHAT? INDEX
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numbers, one of the guns was permanently captured by the Americans, and turned upon the English. Major Williams and Major Ackland were both made prisoners, and in this part of the field the advantage of the Americans was decided. The British center still held its ground; but now it was that the American general Arnold appeared upon the scene, and did more for his countrymen than whole battalions could have effected. Arnold, when the decisive engagement of the 7th of October commenced, had been deprived of his command by Gates, in consequence of a quarrel between them about the action of the 19th of September. He had listened for a short time in the American camp to the thunder of the battle, in which he had no military right to take part, either as commander or as combatant. But his excited spirit could not long endure such a state of inaction. He called for his horse, a powerful brown charger, and springing on it, galloped furiously to where the fight seemed to be the thickest. Gates saw him, and sent an aide-de-camp to recall him; but Arnold spurred far in advance, and placed himself at the head of three regiments which had formerly been under him, and which welcomed their old commander with joyous cheers. He led them instantly upon the British center; and then galloping along the American line, he issued orders for a renewed and a closer attack, which were obeyed with alacrity, Arnold himself setting the example of the most daring personal bravery, and charging more than once, sword in hand, into the English ranks. On the British side the officers did their duty nobly; but General Frazer was the most eminent of them all restoring order wherever the line began to waver, and infusing fresh courage into his men by voice and example. Mounted on an iron-gray charger, and dressed in the full uniform of a general officer, he was conspicuous to foes as well as to friends. The American Colonel Morgan thought that the fate of the battle rested on this gallant man’s life, and calling several of his best marksmen round him, pointed Frazer out, and said: “That officer is General Frazer; I admire him, but he must die. Our victory depends on it. Take your stations in that clump of bushes, and do your duty.” Within five minutes, Frazer fell mortally wounded, and was carried to the British camp by two grenadiers. Just previously to his being struck by the fatal bullet, one rifle-ball had cut the crupper of his saddle, and another had passed through his horse’s mane close behind the ears. His aide-de-camp had noticed this, had said: “It is evident that you are marked out for particular aim; would it not be prudent for you to retire from this place?” Frazer replied: “My duty forbids me to fly from danger;” and the next moment he fell. Burgoyne’s whole force was now compelled to retreat towards their camp; the left and center were in complete disorder, but the light infantry and the 24th checked the fury of the assailants, and the remains of the column HDT WHAT? INDEX
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with great difficulty effected their return to their camp; leaving six of their cannons in the possession of the enemy, and great numbers of killed and wounded on the field; and especially a large proportion of the artillery men, who had stood to their guns until shot down or bayoneted beside them by the advancing Americans. Burgoyne’s column had been defeated, but the action was not yet over. The English had scarcely entered the camp when the Americans, pursuing their success, assaulted it in several places with remarkable impetuosity, rushing in upon the entrenchment’s and redoubts through a severe fire of grape-shot and musketry. Arnold especially, who on this day appeared maddened with the thirst of combat and carnage, urged on the attack against a part of the entrenchment’s which was occupied by the light infantry under Lord Balcarres. But the English received him with vigor and spirit. The struggle here was obstinate and sanguinary. At length, as it grew towards evening, Arnold, having forced all obstacles, entered the works with some of the most fearless of his followers. But in this critical moment of glory and danger, he received a painful wound in the same leg which had already been injured at the assault on Québec. To his bitter regret he was obliged to be carried back. His party still continued the attack, but the English also continued their obstinate resistance, and at last night fell, and the assailants withdrew from this quarter of the British entrenchment’s. But in another part the attack had been more successful. A body of the Americans, under Colonel Brooke, forced their way in through a part of the horse-shoe entrenchment’s on the extreme right, which was defended by the Hessian reserve under Colonel Breyman. The Germans resisted well, and Breyman died in defense of his post; but the Americans made good the ground which they had won, and captured baggage, tents, artillery, and a store of ammunition, which they were greatly in need of. They had by establishing themselves on this point, acquired the means of completely turning the right. flank of the British, and gaining their rear. To prevent this calamity, Burgoyne effected during the night an entire change of position. With great skill he removed his whole army to some heights near the river, a little northward of the former camp, and he there drew up his men, expecting to be attacked on the following day. But Gates was resolved not to risk the certain triumph which his success had already secured for him. He harassed the English with skirmishes, but attempted no regular attack. Meanwhile he detached bodies of troops on both sides of the Hudson to prevent the British from recrossing that river, and to bar their retreat. When night fell, it became absolutely necessary for Burgoyne to retire again, and, accordingly, the troops were marched through a stormy and rainy night towards Saratoga, abandoning their sick and wounded, and the greater part of their baggage, to the enemy. Before the rear-guard quitted the camp, the last sad honors were paid to the brave General Frazer, who expired on the day after HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the action. He had, almost with his last breath, expressed a wish to be buried in the redoubt which had formed the part of the British lines where he had been stationed, but which had now been abandoned by the English, and was within full range of the cannon which the advancing Americans were rapidly placing in position to bear upon Burgoyne’s force. Burgoyne resolved, nevertheless, to comply with the dying wish of his comrade; and the interment took place under circumstances the most affecting that have ever marked a soldier’s funeral. Still more interesting is the narrative of Lady Ackland’s passage from the British to the American camp, after the battle, to share the captivity and alleviate the sufferings of her husband, who had been severely wounded, and left in the enemy’s power. The American historian, Lossing, has described both these touching episodes of the campaign, in a spirit that does honor to the writer as well as to his subject. After narrating the death of General Frazer on the 8th of October, he says that “It was just at sunset, on that calm October evening. that the corpse of General Frazer was carried up the hill to the place of burial within the ‘great redoubt.’ It was attended only by the military members of his family and Mr. Brudenell, the chaplain; yet the eyes of hundreds of both armies followed the solemn procession, while the Americans, ignorant of its true character, kept up a constant cannonade upon the redoubt. The chaplain, unawed by the danger to which he was exposed, as the cannon-balls that struck the hill threw the loose soil over him, pronounced the impressive funeral service of the Church of England with an unfaltering voice. The growing darkness added solemnity to the scene. Suddenly the irregular firing ceased, and the solemn voice of a single cannon, at measured intervals, boomed along the valley, and awakened the responses of the hills. It was a minute gun fired by the Americans in honor of the gallant dead. The moment the information was given that the gathering at the redoubt was a funeral company, fulfilling, at imminent peril, the last- breathed wishes of the noble Frazer, orders were issued to withhold the cannonade with balls, and to render military homage to the fallen brave. “The case of Major Ackland and his heroic wife presents kindred features. He belonged to the grenadiers, and was an accomplished soldier. His wife accompanied him to Canada in 1776; and during the, whole campaign of that year, and until his return to England after the surrender of Burgoyne, in the autumn of 1777, endured all the hardships, dangers, and privations of an active campaign in an enemy’s country. At Chambly, on the Sorel, she attended him in illness, in a miserable hut; and when he was wounded in the battle of Hubbardton, Vermont, she hastened to him at Henesborough from Montreal, where she had been persuaded to remain, and resolved to follow the army hereafter. Just before crossing the Hudson, she and her husband had had a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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narrow escape from losing their lives in consequence of their tent accidentally taking fire. “During the terrible engagement of the 7th October, she heard all the tumult and dreadful thunder of the battle in which her husband was engaged; and when, on the morning of the 8th, the British fell back in confusion to their new position, she, with the other women, was obliged to take refuge among the dead and dying; for the tents were all struck, and hardly a shed was left standing. Her husband was wounded, and a Prisoner in the American camp. That gallant officer was shot through both legs. When Poor and Learned’s troops assaulted the grenadiers and artillery on the British left, on the afternoon of the 7th, Wilkinson, Gates’s adjutant- general, while pursuing the flying enemy when they abandoned their battery, heard a feeble voice exclaim ‘Protect me, sir, against that boy.’ He turned and saw a lad with a musket taking deliberate aim at a wounded British officer, lying in a corner of a low fence. Wilkinson ordered the boy to desist, and discovered the wounded man to be Major Ackland. He had him conveyed to the quarters of General Poor (now the residence of Mr. Neilson) on the heights, where every attention was paid to his wants. “When the intelligence that he was wounded and a prisoner reached his wife, she was greatly distressed, and, by the advice of her friend, Baroness Reidesel, resolved to visit the American camp, and implore the favor of a personal attendance upon her husband. On the 9th she sent a message to Burgoyne by Lord Petersham, his aide-de-camp, asking permission to depart. ‘Though I was ready to believe,’ says Burgoyne, ‘that patience and fortitude, in a supreme degree, were to be found, as well as every other virtue, under the most tender forms, I was astonished at this proposal. After so long an agitation of spirits, exhausted not only for want of rest, but absolutely want of food, drenched in rains for twelve hours together, that a woman should be capable of such an undertaking as delivering herself to an enemy, probably in the night, and uncertain of what hands she might fall into, appeared an effort above human nature. The assistance I was able to give was small indeed. I had not even a cup of wine to offer her. All I could furnish her with was an open boat, and a few lines, written upon dirty wet paper, to General Gates, recommending her to his protection.’ The following is a copy of the note sent by Burgoyne to General Gates — ‘Sir, — Lady Harriet Ackland, a lady of the first distinction of family, rank, and personal virtues, is under such concern on account of Major Ackland, her husband, wounded and a prisoner in your hands, that I cannot refuse her request to commit her to your HDT WHAT? INDEX
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protection. Whatever general impropriety there may be in persons of my situation and yours to solicit favors, I cannot see the uncommon perseverance in every female grace, and the exaltation of character of this lady, and her very hard fortune, without testifying that your attentions to her will lay me under obligations. I am, sir, your obedient servant, J. Burgoyne.’ She set out in an open boat upon the Hudson, accompanied by Mr. Brudenell, the chaplain, Sarah Pollard, her waiting- maid, and her husband’s valet, who had been severely wounded, while searching for his master upon the battle- field. It was about sunset when they started, and a violent storm of rain and wind, which had been increasing since the morning, rendered the voyage tedious and perilous in the extreme. It was long after dark when they reached the American out-posts; the sentinel heard their oars, and hailed them. Lady Harriet returned the answer herself. The clear, silvery tones of a woman’s voice amid the darkness, filled the soldier on duty with superstitious fear, and he called a comrade to accompany him to the river bank. The errand of the voyagers was made known, but the faithful guard, apprehensive of treachery, would not allow them to land until they sent for Major Dearborn. They were invited by that officer to his quarters, where every attention was paid to them, and Lady Harriet was comforted by the joyful tidings that her husband was safe. In the morning she experienced parental tenderness from General Gates, who sent her to her husband, at Poor’s quarters, under a suitable escort. There she remained until he was removed to Albany.” Burgoyne now took up his last position on the heights near Saratoga; and hemmed in by the enemy, who refused any encounter, and baffled in all his attempts at finding a path of escape, he there lingered until famine compelled him to capitulate. The fortitude of the British army during this melancholy period has been justly eulogized by many native historians, but I prefer quoting the testimony of a foreign writer, as free from all possibility of partiality. Botta says: “It exceeds the power of words to describe the pitiable condition to which the British army was now reduced. The troops were worn down by a series of toil, privation, sickness, and desperate fighting. They were abandoned by the Indians and Canadians; and the effective force of the whole army was now diminished by repeated and heavy losses, which had principally fallen on the best soldiers, and the most distinguished officers, from ten thousand combatants to less than one-half that number. Of this remnant, little more than three thousand were English. “In these circumstances, and thus weakened, they were HDT WHAT? INDEX
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invested by an army of four times their own number, whose position extended three parts of a circle round them; who refused to fight them, as knowing their weakness, and who, from the nature of the ground, could not be attacked in any part. In this helpless condition, obliged to be constantly under arms, while the enemy’s cannon played on every part of their camp, and even the American rifle-balls whistled in many parts of the lines, the troops of Burgoyne retained their customary firmness, and while sinking under a hard necessity, they showed themselves worthy of a better fate. They could not be reproached with an action or a word, which betrayed a want of temper or of fortitude.” At length the 13th of October arrived, and as no prospect of assistance appeared, and the provisions were nearly exhausted, Burgoyne, by the unanimous advice of a council of war, sent a messenger to the American camp to treat of a convention. General Gates in the first instance demanded that the royal army should surrender prisoners of war. He also proposed that the British should ground their arms. Burgoyne replied, “This article is inadmissible in every extremity; sooner than this army will consent to ground their arms in their encampment, they will rush on the enemy, determined to take no quarter.” After various messages, a convention for the surrender of the army was settled, which provided that “The troops under General Burgoyne were to march out of their camp with the honors of war, and the artillery of the entrenchment’s, to the verge of the river, where the arms and artillery were to be left. The arms to be piled by word of command from their own officers. A free passage was to be granted to the army under Lieutenant- General Burgoyne to Great Britain, upon condition of not serving again in North America during the present contest.” The articles of capitulation were settled on the 15th of October; and on that very evenings a messenger arrived from Clinton with an account of his successes, and with the tidings that part of his force had penetrated as far as Esopus, within fifty miles of Burgoyne’s camp. But it was too late. The public faith was pledged; and the army was, indeed, too debilitated by fatigue and hunger to resist an attack if made; and Gates certainly would have made it, if the convention had been broken off. Accordingly, on the 17th, the convention of Saratoga was carried into effect. By this convention 5790 men surrendered themselves as prisoners. The sick and wounded left in the camp when the British retreated to Saratoga, together with the numbers of the British, German, and Canadian troops, who were killed, wounded, or taken, and who had deserted in the preceding part of the expedition, were reckoned to be 4689. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The British sick and wounded who had fallen into the hands of the Americans after the battle of the 7th, were treated with exemplary humanity; and when the convention was executed, General Gates showed a noble delicacy of feeling. which deserves the highest degree of honor. Every circumstance was avoided which could give the appearance of triumph. The American troops remained within their lines until the British had piled their arms; and when this was done, the vanquished officers and soldiers were received with friendly kindness by their victors, and their immediate wants were promptly and liberally supplied. Discussions and disputes afterwards arose as to some of the terms of the convention; and the American Congress refused for a long time to carry into effect the article which provided for the return of Burgoyne’s men to Europe; but no blame was imputable to General Gates or his army, who showed themselves to be generous as they had proved themselves to be brave. Gates, after the victory, immediately dispatched Colonel Wilkinson to carry the happy tidings to Congress. On being introduced into the hall, he said, “The whole British army has laid down its arms at Saratoga; our own, full of vigor and courage, expect your order. It is for your wisdom to decide where the country may still have need for their service.” Honors and rewards were liberally voted by the Congress to their conquering general and his men, “and it would be difficult (says the Italian historian) to describe the transports of joy which the news of this event excited among the Americans. They began to flatter themselves with a, still more happy future. No one any longer felt any doubt about their achieving their independence. All hoped, and with good reason, that a success of this importance would at length determine France, and the other European powers that waited for her example, to declare themselves in favor of America. There could no longer be any question respecting the future; since there was no longer the risk of espousing the cause of a people too feeble to defend themselves.” The truth of this was soon displayed in the conduct of France. When the news arrived at Paris of the capture of Ticonderoga, and of the victorious march of Burgoyne towards Albany, events which seemed decisive in favor of the English, instructions had been immediately dispatched to Nantz, and the other ports of the kingdom, that no American privateers should be suffered to enter them, except from indispensable necessity, as to repair their vessels, to obtain provisions, or to escape the perils of the sea. The American commissioners at Paris, in their disgust and despair, had almost broken off all negotiations With the French government; and they even endeavored to open communications with the British ministry. But the British government, elated with the first successes of Burgoyne, refused to listen to any HDT WHAT? INDEX
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overtures for accommodation. But when the news of Saratoga reached Paris, the whole scene was changed. Franklin and his brother commissioners found all their difficulties with the French government vanish. The time seemed to have arrived for the House of Bourbon to take a full revenge for all its humiliations and losses in previous wars. In December a treaty was arranged, and formally signed in the February following, by which France acknowledged the Independent United States of America. This was, of course, tantamount to a declaration of war with England. Spain soon followed France; and before long Holland took the same course. Largely aided by French fleets and troops, the Americans vigorously maintained the war against the armies which England, in spite of her European foes, continued to send across the Atlantic. but the struggle was too unequal to be maintained by this country for many years: and when the treaties of 1783 restored peace to the world. the independence of the United States was reluctantly recognized by their ancient parent and recent enemy, England.
“A victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.” — Jean-Paul Sartre HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1778
Per New York’s 1st Militia Act, all persons working either for the new state government or for the new national structure were exempt from conscription. If, however a Quaker needed to obey the Peace Testimony, the price of his exemption from military service would be £10 per year. Non-commissioned coroners were exempted from this year through 1782. The owner of a mill was automatically exempted but ferrymen would need to obtain a license from the governor or the commander-in-chief before being considered exempt. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
January: The New York State legislature convened in Poughkeepsie, meeting at the Van Kleeck House. They acted to strengthen the powers of the state and to ratify the Articles of Confederation.
March: New York’s Secretary of State and various county clerks were advised to pack up all government records, in case it would become necessary to evacuate them.
May 30, Friday: Goaded by the British, 300 Iroquois burned Cobleskill, New York.
There was a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette that a reward of eight dollars, plus reasonable expenses, was being offered by Thomas Maybury for the capture and return of his Mulattoe slave Anthony: “EIGHT DOLLARS REWARD. Runaway from the subscriber living at Carlisle Iron Works, a Mulattoe slave, named Anthony, about 26 years of age, 5 feet 6 or 7 inches high; had on an old blanket coat with brown stripes: buckskin breeches, white woolen stockings and old shoes. Whoever takes up the said slave, so as his master may have him again, shall have the above reward, and reasonable charges, paid by Thomas Maybury.”
June 1, Monday: People were trying to kill each other at Cobbleskill, New York.
The voters of the town of Concord concurred in the choice of its 1st Parish Church members, in electing the Reverend Ezra Ripley as the new town minister, to fill the shoes of the deceased Reverend William Emerson. On the 11th of May, 1778, Mr. Ezra Ripley was unanimously chosen pastor on the part of the church, in which the town concurred on the 1st of June following, 94 to 1. He was ordained, November 11, 1778. In the religious services on the occasion, the Rev. Josiah Bridge of E. Sudbury made the first prayer; the Rev. Jason Haven of Dedham preached from 2 Timothy ii. 2; the Rev. Josiah HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Dana of Barre “prayed after sermon”; the Rev. Ebenezer Bridge of Chelmsford “prayed before and gave the charge”; and the Rev. Jonas Clark of Lexington gave the right hand of fellowship. The council was composed of these gentlemen, and delegates from their respective churches; and also the churches of the Rev. Eli Forbes of Gloucester, the Rev. Peter Thatcher of Malden, the Rev. Jonathan Newell of Stow, and the Rev. Moses Adams of Acton. The town agreed to give Mr. Ripley £550 currency as a settlement, and £100 as an annual salary, founded on the prices of articles of produce, — rye at 4s. per bushel, corn at 3s.; beef at 2½d. per pound, and pork at 4d.; the salary to rise and fall according to the variation of the prices of these articles. He was also to enjoy all the ministerial perquisites, and to be provided with 30 cords of firewood. A salary thus established was found to be attended with much uncertainty; and some years to fall short of £100. This was the occasion of much embarrassment. The town ascertained that the real value of the £550, when paid, was but £40, and the first year’s salary £41; and in 1785, £200 were specially granted to make up the deficiency. In 1793, £100 were also granted. In 1812 the contract was very properly altered; and instead of this uncertain income it was agreed to give him $750 as his permanent salary, which, with his firewood, estimated at $100, and the perquisites $15, gave him the annual salary of $865. At the ordination of his colleague, in 1830, he relinquished $250 of his salary and 10 cords of wood.42
July 9, Thursday: The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were signed in Philadelphia by Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. The citizens of the various former American colonies of Great Britain would be asked to sign an Affirmation of Allegiance and Fidelity to the new state governments thus formed.
November 11, Wednesday: In Concord, John White got married with Esther Kettell.
Tories and Iroquois led by Captain Walter Butler and Joseph Brant massacred white settlers in Cherry Valley, New York.
42. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1779
The property of the wealthy Philipse family, including Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York, was confiscated because the family had been loyal to the king of England. Everything, including every one of their numerous slaves, now belonged to somebody else — some one or another of the victorious Freedom Fighters who had struck a blow for human dignity. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141
An invention important to the development of the cloth industry occurred during this year. Samuel Compton developed a mule. Because this development would have an impact on the demand for bales of cotton as a raw material for cloth, it would have an impact on the demand for field labor to grow this cotton, and therefore would eventually have consequences in terms of human slavery — and in terms of the international slave trade.43
W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The history of slavery and the slave- trade after 1820 must be read in the light of the industrial revolution through which the civilized world passed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between the years 1775 and 1825 occurred economic events and changes of the highest importance and widest influence. Though all branches of industry felt the impulse of this new industrial life, yet, “if we consider single industries, cotton manufacture has, during the nineteenth century, made the most magnificent and gigantic advances.”44 This fact is easily explained by the remarkable series of inventions that revolutionized this industry between 1738 and 1830, including Arkwright’s, Watt’s, Compton’s, and Cartwright’s epoch-making contrivances.45 The effect which these inventions had on the manufacture of cotton goods is best illustrated by the fact that in England, the chief cotton market of the world, the consumption of raw cotton rose steadily from 13,000 bales in 1781, to 572,000 in 1820, to 871,000 in 1830, and to 3,366,000 in 1860.46 Very early, therefore, came the query 43. Bear in mind that in early periods the Southern states of the United States of America produced no significant amount of cotton fiber for export — such production not beginning until 1789. In fact, according to page 92 of Seybert’s STATISTICS, in 1784 a small parcel of cotton that had found its way from the US to Liverpool had been refused admission to England, because it was the customs agent’s opinion that this involved some sort of subterfuge: it could not have originated in the United States. 44. Beer, GESCHICHTE DES WELTHANDELS IM 19TEN JAHRHUNDERT, II. 67. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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whence the supply of raw cotton was to come. Tentative experiments on the rich, broad fields of the Southern United States, together with the indispensable invention of Whitney’s cotton-gin, soon answered this question: a new economic future was opened up to this land, and immediately the whole South began to extend its cotton culture, and more and more to throw its whole energy into this one staple. Here it was that the fatal mistake of compromising with slavery in the beginning, and of the policy of laissez-faire pursued thereafter, became painfully manifest; for, instead now of a healthy, normal, economic development along proper industrial lines, we have the abnormal and fatal rise of a slave-labor large farming system, which, before it was realized, had so intertwined itself with and braced itself upon the economic forces of an industrial age, that a vast and terrible civil war was necessary to displace it. The tendencies to a patriarchal serfdom, recognizable in the age of Washington and Jefferson, began slowly but surely to disappear; and in the second quarter of the century Southern slavery was irresistibly changing from a family institution to an industrial system. The development of Southern slavery has heretofore been viewed so exclusively from the ethical and social standpoint that we are apt to forget its close and indissoluble connection with the world’s cotton market. Beginning with 1820, a little after the close of the Napoleonic wars, when the industry of cotton manufacture had begun its modern development and the South had definitely assumed her position as chief producer of raw cotton, we find the average price of cotton per pound, 8½d. From this time until 1845 the price steadily fell, until in the latter year it reached 4d.; the only exception to this fall was in the years 1832-1839, when, among other things, a strong increase in the English demand, together with an attempt of the young slave power to “corner” the market, sent the price up as high as 11d. The demand for cotton goods soon outran a crop which McCullough had pronounced “prodigious,” and after 1845 the price started on a steady rise, which, except for the checks suffered during the continental revolutions and the Crimean War, continued until 1860.47 The steady increase in the production of cotton explains 45. A list of these inventions most graphically illustrates this advance: — 1738, John Jay, fly-shuttle. John Wyatt, spinning by rollers. 1748, Lewis Paul, carding-machine. 1760, Robert Kay, drop-box. 1769, Richard Arkwright, water-frame and throstle. James Watt, steam-engine. 1772, James Lees, improvements on carding-machine. 1775, Richard Arkwright, series of combinations. 1779, Samuel Compton, mule. 1785, Edmund Cartwright, power-loom. 1803-4, Radcliffe and Johnson, dressing-machine. 1817, Roberts, fly-frame. 1818, William Eaton, self-acting frame. 1825-30, Roberts, improvements on mule. Cf. Baines, HISTORY OF THE COTTON MANUFACTURE, pages 116-231; ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, 9th ed., article “Cotton.” 46. Baines, HISTORY OF THE COTTON MANUFACTURE, page 215. A bale weighed from 375 lbs. to 400 lbs. 47. The prices cited are from Newmarch and Tooke, and refer to the London market. The average price in 1855-60 was about 7d. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the fall in price down to 1845. In 1822 the crop was a half- million bales; in 1831, a million; in 1838, a million and a half; and in 1840-1843, two million. By this time the world’s consumption of cotton goods began to increase so rapidly that, in spite of the increase in Southern crops, the price kept rising. Three million bales were gathered in 1852, three and a half million in 1856, and the remarkable crop of five million bales in 1860.48 Here we have data to explain largely the economic development of the South. By 1822 the large-plantation slave system had gained footing; in 1838-1839 it was able to show its power in the cotton “corner;” by the end of the next decade it had not only gained a solid economic foundation, but it had built a closed oligarchy with a political policy. The changes in price during the next few years drove out of competition many survivors of the small-farming free-labor system, and put the slave régime in position to dictate the policy of the nation. The zenith of the system and the first inevitable signs of decay came in the years 1850-1860, when the rising price of cotton threw the whole economic energy of the South into its cultivation, leading to a terrible consumption of soil and slaves, to a great increase in the size of plantations, and to increasing power and effrontery on the part of the slave barons. Finally, when a rising moral crusade conjoined with threatened economic disaster, the oligarchy, encouraged by the state of the cotton market, risked all on a political coup-d’état, which failed in the war of 1861-1865.49
New York: Red Jacket urged neutrality, predicts possible disaster for the Iroquois Nation.
A patrol of Rangers is ambushed by the Seneca in the spring. A third of the troops are killed and another third, including Horatio Jones, are captured. The rest escape. Jones is taken to Nunda and then on to Caneadea. He runs the gauntlet without a scratch. After one of his companions is killed and beheaded, Jones attempts escape twice but is foiled and settles into Indian life, eventually earning the name Handsome Boy.
The first church services (Presbyterian) are held at the Orange County village of Hopewell.
May: Pennsylvania Militiaman Moses Van Campen joined Washington’s army as a quartermaster. The army would march into New York State with General John Sullivan. By this month the army had reached Easton, Pennsylvania.
May 31, day: The British under James Clinton took Stony Point and Verplanck Point, on the Hudson River.
48. From United States census reports. 49. Cf. United States census reports; and Olmsted, THE COTTON KINGDOM. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June: The Oneida headman Honyere was commissioned as a captain in the US Army.
June 1, Tuesday: People were trying to kill each other at Stony Point, Verplanck’s Point near Fayette, New York.
June 18, day: The expedition of General John Sullivan left Easton, Pennsylvania. Among the men on this expedition was Captain John Ganson.
July: New York’s royal governor Tryon led an expedition along the Connecticut coast, burning Fairfield, Norwalk, and ships in New Haven harbor.
July 15, day: Mad Anthony Wayne, guided by the black soldier Pompey, retook Stony Point from the British, capturing the entire garrison.
August 11: General John Sullivan’s forces forded the Susquehanna River at its junction with the Tioga River, reached the former site of Tioga, New York, marched on to the Indian town of Shamong (Chemung), arriving in the evening of this day to find it evacuated. They destroyed crops and returned to Tioga. (Note that it has been alleged by some reputable historians that General Sullivan was operating under direct orders, from General George Washington, his commander, that he was to perpetrate a genocide.)
August 26, day: Delayed a day by heavy rain, General John Sullivan’s forces departed Tioga, New York.
August 29, day: People were trying to kill each other at Newtown (Chemung) near Elmira, New York. Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Handsome Lake fought on the British side. The forces of General John Sullivan and James Clinton defeated the forces of Loyalist commander Sir John Johnson and Joseph Brant, ridding the colony of these Loyalists and their native allies.
August 30, day: People were trying to kill each other at Tarrytown, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 1, Wednesday: General John Sullivan began a 2-week series of retaliatory raids against the Seneca and Cayuga Indian villages throughout central New York’s Finger Lake region. After the Seneca defeat at Newtown they would end up at Niagara. Sullivan arrived at the deserted Indian village of French Catharine (named for a former captive) by midnight on this date.
Concord allowed for 20 of its citizen soldiers to be in Rhode Island for a couple of months. 50 TABLE OF REVOLUTIONARY CAMPAIGNS
WHEN REQUIRED MEN TIME WHERE EMPLOYED BOUNTY AMOUNT
April 27, 1779 5 6 weeks Rhode Island
June 8, 1779 8 9 months Continental Army 3248
The town chose a committee June 16th, to hire the men [both lines above] for these two cam- paigns, consisting, of Col. Nathan Barrett, the four commanding officers of the militia compa- nies, the Selectmen, Col. John Cuming, Mr. Jonas Heywood, Capt. David Brown, Capt. Joseph Butler, and James Barrett, Esq. Acton furnished four; Bedford, three; Lincoln, five; and the whole county, two hundred and forty-five in the nine months’ campaign. The detachment to Rhode Island took one hundred men more from this county, who were under Col. Jacobs. The 3d Regiment was required to furnish one Sergeant and eleven privates. Thaddeus Blood was a Lieu- tenant in the United States’ service; Jonas Wright was Sergeant.
June 8, 1779 4 6 months Rhode Island
The town received orders for these men [the above] September 1st and chose the Selectmen, Col. Nathan Barrett, Jonas Heywood, Esq., and the four militia Captains, a committee to procure these and other four militia captains, a committee to procure these and all others, “when small drafts are called,” without calling the town together. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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WHEN REQUIRED MEN TIME WHERE EMPLOYED BOUNTY AMOUNT
August 9, 1779 9 Rhode Island
September 1779 4 Works at Boston 12 48
These [the above] belonged to a company of thirty-eight men from this and the adjoining towns, under Samuel Heald, Captain; Enoch Kingsbury, Lieutenant; Stephen Hosmer, 2d Lieutenant; and John Jacobs, Colonel. Henry Flint was Sergeant Major. They were discharged in November, and the whole amount of their wages was 10s. 6p. in silver each!
September 1, 1779 20 2 months Rhode Island
The names of these [the above] men were, Charles Shepherd, Lot Lamson, Francis Baker, Timo- thy Wesson, Nathan Page, Asa Piper, Timothy Sprague, Nathaniel Breed, Charles Hanley, John Stratten, Ezekiel Hager, Jeremiah Shepherd, Nathaniel French, Josiah Melvin Jr., Joshua Ste- vens, Phillip Barrett, Lemuel Wheeler, Chandler Bryant, Daniel Cole. Acton furnished eleven; Bedford, seven; Lincoln, nine; Carlisle, seven. These men were procured by a committee chosen by the town, June 12th, in addition to that chosen in September previous, consisting of John Cuming, Esq., Capt. David Brown, Capt. Andrew Conant, Capt. David Wheeler, Lieut. Stephen Barrett. They were also to procure others, “if the draught does not exceed sixteen; if it does, the town to be called together.”
September 2, day: Lieutenant William Barton, of General John Sullivan’s forces, reconnoitered the area around Seneca Lake, New York.
September 5, Sunday: General John Sullivan’s forces arrived at the village of Appletown (Kendae, Condoy), already fired by the Indians.
People were trying to kill each other at Lloyd’s Neck, New York.
September 7, day: General John Sullivan’s forces crosses the outlet of Seneca Lake and arrived at the Indian capital, Kanadasaga (Canadesaga, Cunnusedago, known today as Geneva, New York).
50. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston MA: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy, 1835 (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 10, day: General John Sullivan’s forces reached Genesee Lake (Canandaigua Lake) and burned the village of Kanandarqua (Veruneudaga, today’s Canandaigua).
September 11, day: General John Sullivan’s forces reached Onyauyah (Honeoye).
September 12, day: General John Sullivan’s forces neared Genesee Castle or Little Beard’s Town (Cuylerville), named for its chief.
September 13, day: General John Sullivan’s forces reached Canessah (Conesus, or Big Tree’s Town), defeating an Indian force there, then forged on to Casawavalatetah, on a small branch of the Genesee River, and encamped. Sullivan sent Lieutenant Thomas Boyd to scout the area of Genesee Castle. Boyd took a party of 28, including the Oneida headman Honyere (Hanyerry) and Captain Jehoiakim, a Stockbridge Indian. Not knowing the way, they arrived at Gatht-seg-war-o-hare, about 5 miles south-southeast of their goal. Lieutenant Boyd sent four men to report back to Sullivan, and had an Indian horseman killed in the deserted village. Three other mounted natives escaped, to sound the alarm. Boyd began the return to Sullivan, sending two men ahead. They returned and advised Boyd that 5 natives were ahead on the trail. Despite advice from Hanyerry, Boyd pursued and was ambushed by a party of more than 500 natives and Tories. He and Michael Parker were taken prisoner and taken to Cuylerville. Questioned, they refused to buy their freedom with information, and were tortured to death and beheaded.
September 14, Tuesday: General John Sullivan’s forces reached Little Beard’s Town, finding the remains of Boyd and Parker, and that night they would bury the remains.
People were trying to kill each other at Geneseo, New York.
September 15, day: General John Sullivan’s forces burned the natives’ crops and food supply. Sullivan declared that the objectives of the mission have been met. Mary Jemison fled to Niagara with the remaining Seneca, but she would soon return to the Genesee Valley of New York.
September 16, day: The bodies of the remainder of Lieutenant Thomas Boyd’s party were found at Canessah (Conesus, or Big Tree’s Town), all (including Hanyerry) mutilated. They were buried that day.
September 17, day: General John Sullivan’s forces returned to Honeoye. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 18, day: General John Sullivan’s forces returned to Canandaigua.
September 19, day: General John Sullivan’s forces returned to Kanadasaga.
September 30, day: General John Sullivan reported to Congress that his forces had destroyed 40 villages and at least 160,000 bushels of corn, losing fewer than 40 men. Along the way they had also been chopping down or girdling fruit trees. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1780
In New York, a 2d Militia Act revision obligated “Associated Exempts” –that is, militia members between the ages of 50 and 60– to cross state borders if ordered to do so out of military necessity. It increased the amount Quaker adherents of the Peace Testimony would be required to pay for conscientious exemption status, from £10 to £80. Public school teachers were, however, to be made exempt so long as they were actively employed for the full year. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1782
In New York, a third revision was made to the 1778 Militia Act. Gaolers were once again made exempt from any military service. However, Quakers were to be required to pay £10 for exemption from military service.
At the age of 22 a Massachusetts woman, Deborah Sampson, cut her hair and enlisted in the Continental Army, calling herself Robert Shurtliff and fighting in New York. She wrote letters for illiterate soldiers and did her best to avoid rough soldiers’ games such as wrestling (the one time she did wrestle, she was flung to the ground). After the war she would marry, and in 1838 her husband would become the 1st man to receive a pension from the United States government on the basis of his wife’s military service (Sampson’s maritime equivalents of this period included Fanny Campbell and Mary Anne Talbot).
As a teacher, Noah Webster, Jr. was exempt from wartime conscription. However, it seems that when he arrived in Goshen, New York in this timeframe, he had but 75¢ in his pocket. He began to teach at the Farmer’s Hall Academy, to which several signers of the Declaration of Independence were sending their children. In this period he was struggling to compile a spelling book. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December 5, Thursday: In Kinderhook, New York, the 1st US President to be “born in the USA” was born: Martin Van Buren, who would become our 8th President (1837-1841), was born to Abraham and Maria Hoes Van Buren.
King George III formally acknowledged the independence of the former North American colonies. Having won a lottery in Europe Elkanah Watson commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint his portrait, and we can see in the background of this painting that a sailing vessel is displaying the US flag of the period, honoring the original thirteen colonies and their alliance with France. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1783
Construction began on New York State’s Little Falls Canal.
While on a trip through the Mohawk Valley west of Albany, New York, George Washington became persuaded that this would be a great pathway for a great canal.
The horticulturist Alexander Walsh was born.
Andrew Brock becomes assessor for Ryegate, New York. Whitelaw was named deputy to Vermont’s surveyor general and quits his post as Ryegate’s assessor.
Quaker merchants founded the town of Hudson, New York.
The town of Veedersburg (Amsterdam), New York was founded.
Future Syracuse, New York pioneer Comfort Tyler became a surveyor and schoolteacher at Caughnawego, on the Mohawk River.
Ebenezer “Indian” Allen moved from Gardeau Flats, New York to nearby Mount Morris, where he opened a trading post.
Although New York and Massachusetts appoint commissions to settle the final boundary between them, no consensus would be reached. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Francis Faulkner represented the town of Acton in the Massachusetts Legislature.
As many as 32,000 Loyalists may have fled the United States of America by this date, about a third of them from New York. It was payoff time, and the qualifications of veterans of the Revolution for the acquisition of lands in the New Military Tract were established. The concessions ranged from 500 acres (for a private) to 5,500 acres (for a major general).
Their property forfeit to the revolutionary Freedom Fighters, everything including their numerous slaves (slavery would continue in New York State until 1828) now belonging to somebody else, the previously wealthy Loyalist family of Frederick Philipse III fled from New York to England. For some years Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow would be owned by a Beekman family and then it would be purchased by the actress Elsie Janis. The property would be in receivership in 1940 when purchased by John D. Rockefeller, who would open it to the public in 1943. (Of course, in showing the property to the American public, there would be no mention that this had been a slave plantation.)
August 21, day: The deadline for Loyalists to receive permission to evacuate New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 3, Wednesday: Thomas Wagstaff wrote from London to Friend Moses Brown about the attitude of the Queen of England toward Quakerism. She allegedly had declared: “I love the Quakers. I love to see them, I have read their writings, I am one in judgement with them.”
Great Britain and the new government of its former North American colonies signed a peace treaty in Paris — more or less, for the time being, ending the American Revolution. The new American nation held all land from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. England retained Canada, and Spain held Louisiana and East and West Florida. Well, anyway this was a time-out. READ THE FULL TEXT
Great Britain signed a peace treaty with France and Spain, at Versailles, ceding Florida to Spain. Spain returned the Bahamas to England. France returned Minorca and Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands, to Great Britain, which also received Saint Kitts-Nevis. The northern boundary of New York State was confirmed as the 45th parallel. Great Lakes boundary lines were set. Great Britain ceded most of the Alabama and Wisconsin areas to the United States. Britain and the US received navigation rights on the Mississippi River.
St. Kitts HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November: The British vessel Peggy sailed out of Staten Island, New York for Nova Scotia, with many former American slaves, freed in recognition of their labor services to the British army and in fulfilment of manumission promises made, aboard. GOODBYE, COLUMBUS by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker, issue of 2006-05-08)
When America won its independence, what became of the slaves who fled for theirs?
What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it’s good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York’s East River and boarded the British ship L’Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.” Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” a cousin of Washington’s wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.” In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore’s all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto “Liberty to Slaves.” Liberty may not have been as sweet as he’d hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to “Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets.” The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Washington repossessed it, and him. No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore’s regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, fifteen thousand blacks went with them, though not necessarily to someplace better. From the moment that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, American allies reported seeing “herds of Negroes” fleeing through Virginia’s swamps of pine and cypress. A few made it to a warship that Washington, under the terms of the British surrender, had allowed to sail to New York. Some ran to the French, on the not unreasonable supposition that earning wages polishing shoes in Paris had to be better than planting tobacco in Virginia for nothing but floggings. “We gained a veritable harvest of domestics,” one surprised French officer wrote. Hundreds of Cornwallis’s soldiers and their families were captured by their former owners, including five of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves and two women owned by George Washington. Those who escaped raced to make it behind British lines before the slave catchers caught up with them. Pregnant women had to hurry, too, but not so fast as to bring on labor, lest their newborns miss their chance for a coveted “BB” certificate: “Born Free Behind British Lines.” As runaways flocked to New York, or Charleston, or Savannah, cities from which the British disembarked, their owners followed them. Boston King, an escaped slave from South Carolina, saw American slave owners “seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” A Hessian officer reported, “Almost five thousand persons have come into this city to take possession again of their former property.” (It was at Washington’s insistence that the names of those who boarded British ships were recorded in the “Book of Negroes,” so that owners might later file claims for compensation.) In Charleston, after the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the black men, women, and children who were frantic to leave the country. A small number managed to duck under the redcoats’ raised bayonets, jump off the wharves, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet, whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off. But those who did leave America also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it. Theirs is not an HDT WHAT? INDEX
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undocumented story (the “Book of Negroes” runs to three volumes); it’s just one that has rarely been told, for a raft of interesting, if opposing, reasons. A major one is that nineteenth-century African-American abolitionists decided that they would do better by telling the story of the many blacks who fought on the patriot side during the Revolution, and had therefore earned for their race the right to freedom and full citizenship and an end to Jim Crow. “Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled” in the cause of American independence, Peter Williams, Jr., declared in a Fourth of July oration in New York in 1830. (Williams’s own father, who had joined American troops in defiance of his Loyalist master, later managed to purchase his freedom and went on to help found the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.) When the Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell published “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution,” in 1855, Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied an introduction: The colored race have been generally considered by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, as deficient in energy and courage. Their virtues have been supposed to be principally negative ones. This little collection of interesting incidents, made by a colored man, will redeem the character of the race from this misconception. Best not to mention those who fled to the British. Having abandoned the United States, they not only were of no use in redeeming “the character of the race”; they had failed to earn the “passport” to citizenship that Nell believed patriot service conferred. They were also too shockingly unfree to be included in grand nineteenth-century narratives of the Revolution as a triumph for liberty. As the historian Gary Nash observes in “The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution” (Harvard; $19.95), slavery is so entirely missing from those histories that “it would appear that the British and the Americans fought for seven years as if half a million African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent.” In 1891, the Harvard scholar John Fiske took notice of Dunmore’s proclamation in his two-volume “American Revolution,” only to dismiss it. “The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant,” Fiske wrote, that Britain’s “offer of freedom fell upon dull uninterested ears.” It wasn’t until Benjamin Quarles’s landmark “The Negro in the American Revolution,” in 1961, that what Harry Washington might have had to say about that became clear: Liberty is sweet. Many fine scholars have followed in Quarles’s wake, but it would be fair to say that their work has yet to challenge what most Americans think about the times that tried men’s souls. With no place in any national historical narrative, black refugees of the American Revolution have been set adrift. Perhaps, then, it is hardly surprising that they have been taken HDT WHAT? INDEX
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up recently not by American historians but by historians of the places they went to. Two new histories of their travels, the most ambitious yet, have just been published, one written by an Englishman, the other by an Australian. The British historian Simon Schama’s “Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution” (Ecco; $29.95) follows the exiles to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone but keeps London, and English antislavery activists, at its center; Cassandra Pybus’s “Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty” (Beacon; $26.95) follows them everywhere, including to the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay; she teaches at the University of Sydney. Schama writes like no one so much as Dickens. Here is how he introduces the founder of England’s antislavery movement, leaving his brother’s house on Mincing Lane, “neither the worst nor the best address in the City of London,” in 1765: The door opened and out stepped an angular man looking older than his thirty years. His tall but meagre frame, hollow cheeks, lantern jaw and short curled wig gave him the air of either an underpaid clerk or an unworldly cleric; the truth is that Granville Sharp was something of both. Schama’s book is divided into two parts. The first part chronicles Sharp’s career. With close colleagues, including the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, Sharp led Britain’s extraordinary campaign to put an end to what he called the “Accursed Thing”: human bondage. It took years, but they succeeded. England took a dramatic step toward abolishing slavery on its soil in 1772, in a landmark case in which a man named James Somerset won his freedom. In 1807, the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade. The following year, the U.S. Congress did the same. In other words, England banned domestic slavery decades before making it illegal for British merchants and ships’ captains to buy and sell slaves. The United States did the reverse, outlawing the overseas slave trade in 1808 but not declaring an end to slavery until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863. Schama points out that news of the Somerset case, as much as Dunmore’s proclamation, is what led so many American slaves to flee to British lines during the American Revolution. They wrongly believed that the Somerset judgment’s nuanced and limited ruling meant that “as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground he becomes free.” For one American refugee, the link between England and liberty was so close that he renamed himself British Freedom. Or consider “Yankee Doodle, or, The Negroes Farewell to America,” a minstrel song popular in London in the seventeen-eighties: Now farewell my Massa my Missey adieu More blows or more stripes will me e’er take from you... Den Hey! for old Englan’ where Liberty reigns HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Where Negroe no beaten or loaded with chains But, more often than not, the price of British freedom was poverty. “I am Thirty Nine Years of Age & am ready & willing to serve His Britinack Majesty,” Peter Anderson told a relief commission in London. “But I am realy starvin about the Streets.” At the beginning of the war, Anderson had left behind his wife and three children in Virginia to join Dunmore’s regiment. He was wounded, captured, and sentenced to be hanged. After six months as a prisoner, he escaped and foraged in the woods until he found his way back to the British Army. All this he endured only to land in London, reduced to begging. The commissioners were not sympathetic. “Instead of being sufferers of the wars,” they concluded, black veterans had benefitted from it. Penniless they might be, but they had “gained their liberty and therefore come with a very ill-grace to ask for the bounty of government.” Not everyone who evacuated with the British sailed to England. Like thousands of white Loyalists, black Loyalists were relocated to Britain’s northern colonies: mostly to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Some fifteen hundred settled in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, making it the largest free black community in North America. It was also a disaster. By the time Harry Washington arrived there, in August of 1783, there was nothing to eat, it was too late to plant, and the topsoil was too thin for anything much to grow. In 1789, the settlers were still starving. Boston King reported, “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats.” Meanwhile, in London, Granville Sharp and his colleagues on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor began making plans to send England’s beleaguered blacks to Africa. This seems now, as it did to many people then, a preposterous plan, as if the slave trade could somehow be undone by this reverse voyage, settling freed slaves just a stone’s throw from British slave- trading forts. While the emigrants waited on board ships in Portsmouth Harbor, the African-born writer and former slave Quobna Ottobah Cugoano warned that they “had better swim to shore, if they can, to preserve their lives and liberties in Britain, than to hazard themselves at sea ... and the peril of settling at Sierra Leone.” But sail they did. In May of 1787, nearly four hundred reached Sierra Leone, where they settled at a place they named Granville Town, and elected as their governor a runaway slave and Revolutionary War veteran from Philadelphia named Richard Weaver. Within five months, plagued by disease and famine, a hundred and twenty-two of the settlers were dead. And, just as Cugoano had predicted, some were kidnapped and sold into slavery all over again. In 1790, a local ruler burned Granville Town to the ground. That was not to be the end of it. In the second part of “Rough HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Crossings,” Schama turns to the journey of John Clarkson (“the ‘other’ Clarkson-second born, perfectly affable, sweet-tempered Johnny”), chosen by Sharp and the elder Clarkson to head a second attempt to settle Sierra Leone, this time with the “poor blacks” who had settled in Nova Scotia. In January, 1792, nearly twelve hundred black men, women, and children found berths on fifteen ships in Halifax Harbor. Among them were British Freedom and Harry Washington. Before the convoy left the harbor, Clarkson rowed from ship to ship, handing to each family a certificate “indicating the plot of land ‘free of expence’ they were to be given ‘upon arrival in Africa.’” The colony’s new capital, on the Sierra Leone peninsula, was called the Province of Freedom; it did not live up to its name. There was death: along with dozens of others, Boston King’s wife, Violet, died of “putrid fever” within weeks of arrival. There was intrigue: in 1792, Clarkson took what he thought would be a brief trip to England, but the colony’s directors, dissatisfied with his failure to turn a profit from plantation crops, never sent him back. And there was avarice: despite the promise of free land, Clarkson’s successors demanded exorbitant rents. “We wance did call it Free Town,” some weary settlers wrote to Clarkson in 1795, “but since your absence we have a reason to call it a town of slavery.” By 1799, Sierra Leone’s settlers had grown so discontented, so revolutionary in their rejection of the colony’s tyrannical government, that they were, in the words of one London abolitionist, “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” The next year, a group of rebels declared independence. They were crushed. Tried by a military tribunal, they were banished from Freetown to the other side of the Sierra Leone River. In their exile, they elected Harry Washington as their leader, just months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon, having freed his slaves in his will. Cassandra Pybus wants to rescue Harry Washington from the “callous indifference of history,” to call attention to what he shared with the first President of the United States: “a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self- determination.” Schama is more interested in one of Harry Washington’s fellow-rebels. “Rough Crossings” begins by imagining British Freedom “scratching a living from the stingy soil” of Nova Scotia and ends with his exile outside the Province of Freedom: We can picture him surviving . . . on a few acres, or more likely finding a way to do business with the local chiefs. And if he did indeed cling to that name, he could only do so by not crossing the river to Freetown. For he must have understood that he had had his day. Over there, no one had much use for British freedom any more. Over there was something different. Over there was the British Empire. But picturing British Freedom is about all that we can do; apart HDT WHAT? INDEX
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from his name, we know almost nothing about him. (Because Freedom renamed himself, he can’t be traced in records like the “Book of Negroes.”) “British Freedom’s name said something important: that he was no longer negotiable property,” Schama writes. Names count-they mattered to the parents who named their BB-certified daughter Patience Freeman-but sometimes names aren’t enough. Among Schama’s many enviable talents as a historian and as a stylist is his ability to turn a name into a meditation on liberty and empire. But the asymmetry, borne of the asymmetry of the evidence, is not without consequences: the black expatriates in “Rough Crossings” have names and ages and imagined motives, while the lantern-jawed architect of their freedom, Granville Sharp, is rendered in all his Dickensian detail. Sharp is focussed; the settlers are a bit of a blur. Pybus uses a different lens. She pays scant attention to the likes of Granville Sharp. Instead, she trails the fugitives relentlessly, including the unlucky few who, convicted of petty crimes in London, were shipped thirteen thousand miles away, to Botany Bay, a place whose staggering deprivations made it worse than London, worse than Birchtown, worse than Granville Town, worse than the Province of Freedom. Here’s a hint: in 1790, the punishment for stealing food was increased from a thousand to two thousand lashes. What Pybus offers is a collective biography, made possible through her painstaking-breathtaking-examination of tax lists, muster rolls, property deeds, court dockets, parish records, and unwieldy uncatalogued manuscripts like the papers of General Henry Clinton. It allows her to rattle off details like this: in Botany Bay in 1788, “John Randall, the black ex-soldier from Connecticut convicted of stealing a watch chain in Manchester, was married to Esther Howard, a white London oyster seller, convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing a watch.” In case it escaped your notice, that’s months of eye-straining archival research on three continents in just thirty-four words. (She later, and still more casually, throws out that Randall eventually found work as a kangaroo-hunter; that by 1792 he had received a land grant of sixty acres; and that, widowed twice, he married three times and had nine children before his death, in 1822.) Men like Randall, Pybus argues, “carried to the far corners of the globe the animating principles of the revolution that had so emphatically excluded them.” Maybe. But, at journey’s end, it’s hard to know what to make of the travails of British Freedom or Harry Washington or John Randall. To follow them is, still, to leave American history behind. The story of the British abolition movement has been elegantly told by Adam Hochschild, in “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves” (Houghton Mifflin; $26.95). It is also at the heart of an excellent new biography by Vincent Carretta, “Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man” (University of Georgia Press; $29.95). These, like Schama’s and Pybus’s, are rich and wonderful books. All the same, with their praise of prophets and rebels and self- HDT WHAT? INDEX
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made men on a global quest for liberty, some readers might conclude that English abolitionists and American runaways ought to serve as honorary Founding Fathers, as though the likes of Washington and Jefferson will no longer do. (Damn those slave- owning sons of liberty!) In the midst of this, it’s easy to forget that many eighteenth- century Americans considered the British hypocritical about slavery. After the Somerset decision, Benjamin Franklin complained: Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity! Moreover, it was far easier for Britain, where there were few slaves to begin with, to free its slaves than it was for the American colonies, where there was considerable support for ending the slave trade, something many patriots had come to see as having been imposed on them by a tyrannical king, to Britain’s profit and not their own. In Thomas Jefferson’s mind, promising freedom to the very people whom British slave traders had enslaved constituted George III’s last, and most unforgivable, act of treachery. In a breathless paragraph at the end of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson blamed the King for the slave trade (“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery”); for his vetoes of the colonists’ efforts to abolish it (“Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”); and for Dunmore’s proclamation (“He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them”). It was the Declaration’s last, longest, and angriest grievance. The other delegates could not abide it: they struck it out almost entirely. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn’t go far enough. And, as everyone knew, it was they, and not the British, who were by now most vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. (As Samuel Johnson had wryly inquired in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) Best, then, to leave slavery out altogether. Historians have hardly known what to make of Jefferson’s rant. Nash deems it “patently false.” Schama calls it a “tour de force of disingenuousness.” But at least part of what Jefferson meant was that it was the Revolution itself that derailed the American antislavery movement. In the seventeen-sixties and early HDT WHAT? INDEX
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seventeen-seventies, the colonists were arguably more ardent opponents of slavery than the British were. In 1764, the patriot James Otis, Jr., declared that nothing could be said “in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant.” Not long after the Boston Massacre, in 1770, John Hancock’s uncle preached a sermon urging the provincial legislature of Massachusetts to support the abolition of slavery, warning, “When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!” In April, 1775, just five days before a shot was heard round the world, Philadelphians founded the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. By no means did everyone in the colonies oppose the slave trade, and even fewer could imagine emancipation. Still, if the patriots hadn’t needed to forge a union to protect their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they might have come to some agreement on ending slavery. But uniting the colonies in their opposition to the King and Parliament meant, by 1776, putting slavery to one side. It meant editing the Declaration of Independence. It also meant that Harry Washington, and John Randall, and British Freedom, and thousands more, decided to leave. They did not fare well. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1784
The New York state legislature recommended a plan by Christopher Colles for improving navigation on the Mohawk River. He intended to bypass the Cohoes Falls with a 4-1/2-mile canal with 20 locks (nothing would ever come of this).
George Washington visited Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York), and proposed canals on the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. ERIE CANAL
New-York city became the capital of New York State. Colonial public records were moved there from Poughkeepsie. Lawyer James Duane, just out of Congress, would be appointed mayor of New-York for each of the next five one-year terms. The New York State legislature moved to New-York city.
The University of the State of New York was formed.
A Mrs. Farmer, grand-daughter of Dutch governor of New York Jacob Leisler, donated portraits of Christopher Columbus (they now hang in Albany’s State House).
American Revolution heroine Sybil Ludington married a lawyer and moved from Fredericksberg to Unadilla, New York.
Simeon De Witt was named New York State Engineer and Surveyor.
Future governor of New York Enos Thompson Throop was born in Johnstown, to George B. and Abiah Throop.
Benjamin Keyes purchased land, from Oliver Phelps, that would soon become East Bloomfield, New York.
The Paumanok Long Island town of North Hempstead separated itself from Hempstead. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The New York state legislature fined Paumanok Long Island for slacking off during the American Revolution.
Flushing Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends began arranging for regularly held gatherings of African- American worshipers at Westbury, Cow Neck, Matinecock, and Bethpage on Paumanok Long Island.
The township size in Jessup’s Patent and in unappropriated state lands of New York was reduced from 7 square miles to 6. Lot size remained at 500 acres.
“Mother” Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, died at the Watervliet colony in upstate New York, in her late forties.
Lieutenant Ebenezer “Indian” Allen was dismissed on half-pay by the British Indian Department. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1785
April 12, Tuesday: Along the way, as the New York legislature dealt with such important matters as the granting of “a bounty on hemp to be raised within this State,” they also laid out an agenda for gradual elimination of the local slavery system, through discontinuance of supply and emancipation of the remaining slaves: “ ... And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any negro or other person to be imported or brought into this State from any of the United States or from any other place or country after the first day of June next, shall be sold as a slave or slaves within this State, the seller or his or her factor or agent, shall be deemed guilty of a public offence, and shall for every such offence forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds lawful money of New York, to be recovered by any person,” etc. “And be it further enacted ... That every such person imported or brought into this State and sold contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act shall be freed.” LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785- 88 (edition of 1886), pages 120-21. MANUMISSION INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The early ordinances of the Dutch, laying duties, generally of ten per cent, on slaves, probably proved burdensome to the trade, although this was not intentional.51 The Biblical prohibition of slavery and the slave-trade, copied from New England codes into the Duke of York’s Laws, had no practical application,52 and the trade continued to be encouraged in the governors’ instructions. In 1709 a duty of £3 was laid on Negroes from elsewhere than Africa.53 This was aimed at West India slaves, and was prohibitive. By 1716 the duty on all slaves was £1 12½s., which was probably a mere revenue figure.54 In 1728 a duty of 40s. was laid, to be continued until 1737.55 It proved restrictive, however, and on the “humble petition of the Merchants and Traders of the City of Bristol” was disallowed in 1735, as “greatly prejudicial to the Trade and Navigation of this Kingdom.”56 Governor Cosby was also reminded that no duties on
51. O’Callaghan, LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, 1638-74, pages 31, 348, etc. The colonists themselves were encouraged to trade, but the terms were not favorable enough: DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, I. 246; LAWS OF NEW NETHERLAND, pages 81-2, note, 127. The colonists declared “that they are inclined to a foreign Trade, and especially to the Coast of Africa, ... in order to fetch thence Slaves”: O’Callaghan, VOYAGES OF THE SLAVERS, etc., page 172. 52. CHARTER TO WILLIAM PENN, etc. (1879), page 12. First published on Long Island in 1664. Possibly Negro slaves were explicitly excepted. Cf. MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN HISTORY, XI. 411, and N.Y. HIST. SOC. COLL., I. 322. 53. ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, pages 97, 125, 134; DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 178, 185, 293. 54. The Assembly attempted to raise the slave duty in 1711, but the Council objected (DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 292 ff.), although, as it seems, not on account of the slave duty in particular. Another act was passed between 1711 and 1716, but its contents are not known (cf. title of the Act of 1716). For the Act of 1716, see ACTS OF ASSEMBLY, 1691-1718, page 224. 55. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 37, 38. 56. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 32-4. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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slaves payable by the importer were to be laid. Later, in 1753, the 40s. duty was restored, but under the increased trade of those days was not felt.57 No further restrictions seem to have been attempted until 1785, when the sale of slaves in the State was forbidden.58 The chief element of restriction in this colony appears to have been the shrewd business sense of the traders, who never flooded the slave market, but kept a supply sufficient for the slowly growing demand. Between 1701 and 1726 only about 2,375 slaves were imported, and in 1774 the total slave population amounted to 21,149.59 No restriction was ever put by New York on participation in the trade outside the colony, and in spite of national laws New York merchants continued to be engaged in this traffic even down to the Civil War.60 Vermont, who withdrew from New York in 1777, in her first Constitution61 declared slavery illegal, and in 1786 stopped by law the sale and transportation of slaves within her boundaries.62
57. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VII. 907. This act was annually renewed. The slave duty remained a chief source of revenue down to 1774. Cf. REPORT OF GOVERNOR TRYON, in DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VIII. 452. 58. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), ch. 68, page 121. Substantially the same act reappears in the revision of the laws of 1788: LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), ch. 40, page 676. 59. The slave population of New York has been estimated as follows: — In 1698, 2,170. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, IV. 420. In 1703, 2,258. N.Y. COL. MSS., XLVIII.; cited in Hough, N.Y. CENSUS, 1855, Introd. In 1712, 2,425. N.Y. CENSUS, 1855, LVII., LIX. (a partial census). In 1723, 6,171. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 702. In 1731, 7,743. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, V. 929. In 1737, 8,941. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 133. In 1746, 9,107. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 392. In 1749, 10,692. DOC. REL. COL. HIST. NEW YORK, VI. 550. In 1756, 13,548. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 123; cited in Hough, as above. In 1771, 19,863. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 144; cited in Hough, as above. In 1774, 21,149. LONDON DOC., XLIV. 144; cited in Hough, as above. In 1786, 18,889. DEEDS IN OFFICE SEC. OF STATE, XXII. 35. Total number of Africans imported from 1701 to 1726, 2,375, of whom 802 were from Africa: O’Callaghan, DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF NEW YORK, I. 482. 60. Cf. below, Chapter XI.
61. VERMONT STATE PAPERS, 1779-86, page 244. The return of sixteen slaves in Vermont, by the first census, was an error: NEW ENGLAND RECORD, XXIX. 249. 62. VERMONT STATE PAPERS, page 505. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1786
In approximately this year the followers of disowned “Universal Friend” Jemimah Wilkinson hired Abraham Dayton, Thomas Hathaway, and Richard Smith to scout a site for their “New Jerusalem” refuge. Passing through the valley known as Wyoming in upstate New York, the trio encountered a backwoodsman named Spalding who directed them to the Yates County region around Seneca Lake. Heading upriver until they fell upon the track left by General John Sullivan’s genocidal army, they arrived at the foot of Seneca Lake, and on Cashong Creek found a pair of French traders, De Bartzch and Poudry, who assured them of the attractiveness of the area. QUAKER DISOWNMENT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1787
The 1st Shaker community was established, at New Lebanon, New York.
At a conference in Hartford, Connecticut, the western boundary of Indian lands was set one mile east of the Niagara River, between lakes Ontario and Erie. Rights to this “Mile Strip” were reserved for New York.
Idle British soldiers sent a damaged boat over the Niagara Falls. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1788
378 members of disowned Jemimah Wilkinson’s Society of Universal Friends, but not as yet she herself, arrived at the middle of the west shore of Seneca Lake in upstate New York to found a settlement which they would name New Jerusalem.
QUAKER DISOWNMENT In upstate New York, the Onondaga accepted a reservation of a few square miles.
The Reverend Mr. Howe, a Baptist, conducted the 1st religious services at Binghamton.
Jeremiah Wadsworth of Hartford inspected the valley of the Genesee River. New Hampshire farmer William Markham III and his brother-in-law Ransom Smith walked from Ackworth to help survey the Avon/Rush area. They chose a lot on the east bank of the Genesee River and returned to Ackworth. There they collect William Markham III’s wife Phoebe Markham and infant son, and Ransom Smith’s wife Lettice Markham Smith and younger brothers David Smith and John Smith. The party set out for the Genesee — but was stopped by a lost horse on the Susquehanna River and forced to wait for the following spring.
Elmira was settled.
The Town of Cortlandt was founded.
The Aurelius settlement at Cayuga was initiated by John Harris from Harrisburgh, Pennsylvania.
The town of Whitestown was transferred from Albany County to Montgomery County.
A tavern keeper named Middaugh moved to the Lewiston area.
Oliver Phelps arrived from his home in Granville, Massachusetts, to explore his New York lands.
Washington County got its first newspaper, the Salem Times. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John Barber began publishing the Albany Register.
Pennsylvanians Elijah Breck and Captain Daniel McDowell, along with William Wynkoop from Ulster County, founded the Chemung County village of Breckville.
The first settlement in the Greene County town of Lexington was initiated.
The law passed in 1774 to settle Ulster County’s debt to Albany County was repealed.
The salesmen John Jacob Astor and Peter Smith begin making trading trips to Fort Schuyler (in New-York, Sarah Astor gave birth to a daughter, Magdalen).
February 22: Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland. He would become so famous that, one day, he would serve as a refrigerator magnet:
New York prohibited all trade in slaves. “An Act concerning slaves.” “Whereas in consequence of the act directing a revision of the laws of this State, it is expedient that the several existing laws relative to slaves, should be revised, and comprized in one. Therefore, Be it enacted,” etc. “And to prevent the further importation of slaves into this State, Be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any person shall sell as a slave within this State any negro, or other person, who has been imported or brought into this State, after” June 1, 1785, “such seller, or his or her factor or agent, making such sale, shall be deemed guilty of a public offence, and shall for every such offence, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds.... And further, That every person so imported ... shall be free.” The purchase of slaves for removal to another State is prohibited under penalty of £100. LAWS OF NEW HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
YORK, 1785-88 (ed. 1886), pages 675-6. THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Of the twenty years from 1787 to 1807 it can only be said that they were, on the whole, a period of disappointment so far as the suppression of the slave-trade was concerned. Fear, interest, and philanthropy united for a time in an effort which bade fair to suppress the trade; then the real weakness of the constitutional compromise appeared, and the interests of the few overcame the fears and the humanity of the many.
June 21, Saturday: By a hotly contested 57-over-47 vote the US Constitution came into force as New Hampshire became the 9th and decisive state to ratify. READ THE FULL TEXT
RATIFICATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: 9, 10, AND 11
June 21, 1788 New Hampshire YES= 57 NO= 47 June 26, 1788 Virginia YES= 89 NO= 79 July 26, 1788 New York YES= 30 NO= 27
HTTP://WWW.YALE.EDU/LAWWEB/AVALON/CONST/RATNH.HTM
James Flatt Melvin was born in Concord to Amos Melvin (2) and Anna Flatt Melvin. (He would remove to Virginia.) THE MELVINS OF CONCORD
July 26, Saturday: New York, upon learning of Virginia’s ratification, over the objections of Governor George Clinton, became the 11th state to ratify the Constitution. READ THE FULL TEXT
RATIFICATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: 9, 10, AND 11
June 21, 1788 New Hampshire YES= 57 NO= 47 June 26, 1788 Virginia YES= 89 NO= 79 July 26, 1788 New York YES= 30 NO= 27
HTTP://WWW.YALE.EDU/LAWWEB/AVALON/CONST/RATNY.HTM HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1789
On the trail between the Genesee Valley and Fort Niagara in upstate New York, Gilbert R. Berry opened an inn at what was then called Hartford and is now called Avon.
By this point the Nicholites near Deep River, North Carolina had erected a meetinghouse of their own and no longer needed to utilize the local meetinghouse of the Quakers.
Closing out his affairs in North Carolina (presumably this would have meant, in part, the selling off of his slaves), Elkanah Watson relocated to Albany, New York. There he would become a successful businessman, found the Bank of Albany, and become the chief promoter for an Erie Canal.
John Greene, from Rhode Island, settled Waterloo, New York.
George Washington visited the Friends meetinghouse in Flushing on Paumanok Long Island. During this year he hired the surveyor Andrew Ellicott to help fix the southwestern boundary of New York, to settle ownership of the city of Erie. He would be helped by his brothers Joseph and Benjamin.
John Jacob Astor bought his first real estate. It was on the Bowery Road of New-York.
New York State attorney general Richard Varick would be appointed mayor of the city of New-York for each of the next two years.
The Federal government took over revenues from the Port of New-York from the state of New York.
In upstate New York, Corning and Ithaca were founded.
Gideon Putnam settled Saratoga Springs, New York.
The approximate date the first structure in Rensselaerville, New York was erected. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
The Seneca became aware that the New York pound was worth only half as much as the Canadian pound. In consequence, when they received the final payment for the previous year’s sale of their land, as a protest they refused to sign an endorsement (which of course didn’t make a rats-ass worth of difference). Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham took possession of the land that had been purchased. Land agent William Walker and General Israel Chapin began surveying the area. Arthur Erwin bought land that would become the sites of Erwin and Corning. In Canandaigua, Phelps opened the first US land office, and sales to the white people began.
In upstate New York, the Connecticut-born surveyor Judah Colt comes down with Genesee Fever.
New York State put aside 50,000 acres of land to be allotted to those who would open new roads.
In upstate New York, Ebenezer Curtis, Amos Hall, Nathan Marvin and Robert Taft settled West Bloomfield.
In upstate New York, Benjamin Patterson scouted for the surveyors Saxton and Porter. He also took the first raft of lumber out of Bradford, down the Conhocton, Chemung, and Susquehanna rivers.
In upstate New York, Richard Smith began construction of a grist mill on the Keuka Lake outlet.
Andrew Dunlap arrived in what would become Seneca County, New York by way of the Chemung River, settling at Ovid.
Nathaniel Loomis came to Salt Point on Lake Onondaga in upstate New York, in the fall, and began producing salt. He would turn out between 500 and 600 bushels over the following winter, which he would then be able to sell for a dollar a bushel. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1790
14-year-old Amos Eaton of Chatham, New York went to live with a relative, the blacksmith Russell Beebe, at Duanesburg. There he would learn surveying, in the process fashioning his own surveying instruments.
Wearying of persecution, the followers of “Universal Friend” (Jemimah Wilkinson) founded a colony they named “New Jerusalem” on a gorgeous stretch of land at the head of a finger lake in northwestern New York State, near the present Penn Yan. There she would attempt without any success to convert local native Americans.
Palmyra miller Noah Foster traveled as far as New Jerusalem to have his grain processed at Richard Smith’s mill.
Dissension would eventually develop in the Jerusalem sanctuary because “Universal Friend” as she aged would become rather demanding of gifts and special treatment, and would institute various punishments for the breaking of her bossy rules. Finally the community would solve its little problem by building a home for her at a considerable distance from the other homes. She would spend her last years in isolation and after her death on some day in 1819 she would be interred in an unmarked grave and the Jerusalem community would disperse.
Refer to D. Hudson, MEMOIR OF JEMIMA WILKINSON (1824, reprinted 1972) and to H.A. Wisbey, PIONEER PROPHETESS (1964). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
The Viscount de Chateaubriand visited the Niagara River area of upstate New York.
The situation of Fort Niagara changed drastically as US soldiers took possession. The fort’s original purpose had been to dominate the mouth of the river and control the portage, and suddenly it had become a border fortification but 600 yards away from a potential enemy. The fortifications had been designed to guard against a land attack and now faced in the wrong direction. The former British garrison had withdrawn, but only just across the river, while the nearest supporting American position was 150 miles to the east at Oswego. The portage around the Niagara Falls was nevertheless as significant to the Americans as it had been for the French and the British. The fort was still positioned to protect the beginning of the carrying place. The old portage route on the east bank was taken over by the Americans. Anticipating the arrival of United States soldiers, the British had at this point established a new road on the west side of the river. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century the two portages would operate opposite each other.
Abel Bowen was born in Greenbush, New York.
Canal engineer Canvass White was born in Whitestown, New York. CANALS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
The “Treaty of New York” was made with the Creek nation of the American South, in order to create a red/
black split by getting the native Americans to capture and turn over the African Americans as “escaped slaves.” (Anyone with noticeable black ancestry was presumed to be an escaped slave. We understand from other sources that at this point the total Seminole population of Florida, which included many persons of noticeably dusky complexion, stood at approximately 2,000 souls.) READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
When Phelps and Gorham’s land sales lagged, they sold the land west of the Genesee River in New York back to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
William Wickham and his family left Orange County in New York in the fall, heading for the Finger Lakes. They wintered over in Tioga Point (Athens).
John Lusk and Oran Stone settled the Brighton area of the future Monroe County in upstate New York.
The approximate date the area around the future Cayuga County Town of Fleming in upstate New York was first settled.
The Markahms and the Smiths, settling in on the Genesee River of New York near Rush and Avon, planted a crop of wheat.
Farmington, Connecticut physician Timothy Hosmer arrived in the Genesee Valley of New York. Along with 3 others he purchased the future site of Avon for 18¢ an acre.
New York’s Land Board divided the Old Military Tract into townships, which it named, often with classical allusion.
March 22, Monday: According to the ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 1st Congress, 1st session, pages 82-83, the federal House of Representatives issued on this date a “Declaration of Powers.” REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE. That, from the nature of the matters contained in these memorials, they were induced to examine the powers vested in Congress, under the present Constitution, relating to the Abolition of Slavery, and are clearly of opinion, First. That the General Government is expressly restrained from prohibiting the importation of such persons ‘as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, until the year one thousand eight hundred and eight.’ Secondly. That Congress, by a fair construction of the Constitution, are equally restrained from interfering in the emancipation of slaves, who already are, or who may, within the period mentioned, be imported into, or born within, any of the said States. Thirdly. That Congress have no authority to interfere in the internal regulations of particular States, relative to the instructions of slaves in the principles of morality and religion; to their comfortable clothing, accommodations, and subsistence; to the regulation of their marriages, and the HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
prevention of the violation of the rights thereof, or to the separation of children from their parents; to a comfortable provision in cases of sickness, age, or infirmity; or to the seizure, transportation, or sale of free negroes; but have the fullest confidence in the wisdom and humanity of the Legislatures of the several States, that they will revise their laws from time to time, when necessary, and promote the objects mentioned in the memorials, and every other measure that may tend to the happiness of slaves. Fourthly. That, nevertheless, Congress have authority, if they shall think it necessary, to lay at any time a tax or duty, not exceeding ten dollars for each person of any description, the importation of whom shall be by any of the States admitted as aforesaid. Fifthly. That Congress have authority to regulate, or (so far as it is or may be carried on by citizens of the United States, for supplying foreigners), to interdict the African trade, and to make provision for the humane treatment of slaves, in all cases while on their passage to the United States, or to foreign ports, so far as respects the citizens of the United States. Sixthly. That Congress have also authority to prohibit foreigners from fitting out vessels in any port of the United States, for transporting persons from Africa to any foreign port. Seventhly. That the memorialists be informed, that in all cases to which the authority of Congress extends, they will exercise it for the humane objects of the memorialists, so far as they can be promoted on the principles of justice, humanity, and good policy. * * * * * REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE. First. That the migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, cannot be prohibited by Congress, prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight. Secondly. That Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of the States; it remaining with the several States alone to provide any regulation therein, which humanity and true policy may require. Thirdly. That Congress have authority to restrain the citizens of the United States from carrying on the African trade, for the purpose of supplying foreigners with slaves, and of providing, by proper regulations, for the humane treatment, during their passage, of slaves imported by the said citizens into the States admitting such importation. Fourthly. That Congress have authority to prohibit foreigners HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
from fitting out vessels in any port of the United States for transporting persons from Africa to any foreign port.
Meanwhile New York was amending its 1788 “Act concerning slaves” to allow the “selling South” of any slave who had committed any sort of criminal offense. “Whereas many inconveniences have arisen from the prohibiting the exporting of slaves from this State. Therefore Be it enacted ..., That where any slave shall hereafter be convicted of a crime under the degree of a capital offence, in the supreme court, or the court of oyer and terminer, and general gaol delivery, or a court of general sessions of the peace within this State, it shall and may be lawful to and for the master or mistress to cause such slave to be transported out of this State,” etc. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1789-96 (edition of 1886), page 151. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
August 1, Sunday: The 1st US census was completed, showing nearly 4,000,000 people lived in the 13 states. The New York population reached 340,120 (that was the fifth largest of the states of the USA in terms of population). The state had the sixth largest US slave population. The Federal Census showed, however, only 1,075 white settlers in western New York, with these pioneers mostly at the outlets of Canandaigua and Seneca lakes. Canandaigua County’s population was under 100 people. General Israel Chapin and Dr. Moses Atwater built homes in Canandaigua. Burlington, New Jersey judge William Cooper moved his family to his new settlement of Otsego. The Pittsford area had 28 people in eight families, making it the first permanent settlement in the future Monroe County. Ontario County’s population was at 205 families made up of 1,081 people. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1791
In and around Duanesburg in upstate New York, young Amos Eaton began a practice of private study of the classics.
March 4, Friday: Vermont became the 14th state to agree to abide by the United States Constitution. It included land on the western side of Lake Champlain, formerly part of New York’s Clinton County. RATIFICATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
December 8, 1787 Delaware YES= 30 NO= 0 December 12, 1787 Pennsylvania YES= 46 NO= 23 December 18, 1787 New Jersey YES= 38 NO= 0 January 2, 1788 Georgia YES= 26 NO= 0 January 8, 1788 Connecticut YES=128 NO= 40 February 6, 1788 Massachusetts YES=187 NO=168 April 28, 1788 Maryland YES= 63 NO= 11 May 23, 1788 South Carolina YES=149 NO= 73 June 21, 1788 New Hampshire YES= 57 NO= 47 June 25, 1788 Virginia YES= 89 NO= 79 July 26, 1788 New York YES= 30 NO= 27
JOINING LATER IN ADHERENCE TO THE US CONSTITUTION: 12, 13, & 14
November 21, 1789 North Carolina YES=194 NO= 77 May 29, 1790 Rhode Island YES= 34 NO= 32 March 4, 1791 Vermont HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
March 17, Thursday: Colonel William S. Smith, US Secretary to John Adams’ legation, brokered a deal with Pulteney and Hornby to purchase 1,000,000 acres of New York State lands from Robert Morris, at 26¢ an acre. Smith and US maritime claims agent in London J.B. Cutting acted as witnesses. Cutting wrote home that interesting news would soon break and that he’d send it by Smith or bring it himself.
March 18, Friday: The town of Troy, New York was formed from the Rensselaerwyck Patent.
May 27, Friday: Captain Charles Williamson met with his employers, the association formed by William Johnstone Pulteney MP, former governor of Bombay William Hornby, and English promoter Patrick Colquhoun, to advise that he’s cut a deal to sell 300,000 acres of New York land to Archibald Boyd of Baltimore, pending their approval of course (for close to £75,000 they would of course authorize the deal).
In Providence, Rhode Island at 3PM, David Cumstock the young murderer was hanged before a crowd estimated at 10,000, to all appearances unrepentant, with the Reverend Snow offering the prayer at the gallows.
December: Elkanah Watson proposed to the state legislature that natural waterways could be used to create a shipping canal across upstate New York. ERIE CANAL HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1792
The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company was formed by General Philip Schuyler, to dig a 3-mile Little Falls, New York canal, and another linking the Mohawk River with Wood Creek. Elkanah Watson was named to the commission. ELKANAH WATSON
The small canal that had been being dug in the Bath area of the district of Maine was in this year completed.
A Unitarian congregation was formed at Portland in the district of Maine by an Episcopalian minister and friend of the Reverend James Freeman, Thomas Oxnard, to whom the reverend had given books by the Reverends Lindsey and Priestley.
The Reverend Freeman began to serve on the Boston School Committee (he would serve for many years).
Moravian missionaries transported a small band of Delaware Indians, originally from New York, from Michigan to Ontario’s Thames River.
George Heriot was posted to Québec, as a clerk in the ordnance office.
Joseph Bouchette was send to Upper Canada, where he would help survey Toronto Harbour and produce maps that included the Toronto Islands. CARTOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1793
The Markham family rented a farm in East Bloomfield, New York and began raising potatoes.
Austin Steward was born enslaved in Virginia. He would be taken to Canandaigua, New York by his slaveowner, who would there get into financial difficulties. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141
May 17, Friday: The commissioners to the native Americans, Colonel Timothy Pickering and Beverly Randolph, had been journeying west across upstate New York on Williamson’s road to treat with the tribes at the Niagara River. They had been joined en route by General Israel Chapin and his interpreters from Canandaigua. General Benjamin Lincoln was conveying presents for the tribes across the state by water. On this day Pickering and Randolph arrived at the Niagara River so as to observe British negotiations with the Indian tribes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1794
In New York, John Stevens demonstrated a steamboat.
David Wilkinson, a son of Oziel Wilkinson, in company with Elijah Ormsbee, also built a steamboat, in which they made a trip of three and a half miles, from Winsor’s Cove to Providence, Rhode Island. They did not seem impressed with the idea that the scheme could be made of practical value and after their “frolic” (as Wilkinson called it) was over, they dismantled the boat. In the course of his reminiscences, sent, in after years, to the society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry, Wilkinson says that while they were engaged in the construction of this steamboat a young man from Connecticut, who gave the name of Daniel French, came to his shop in Pawtucket, and asked and obtained leave to look over the steamboat. He examined everything carefully, and seemed greatly interested. Many years afterward, while riding by rail from Utica to Albany, Mr. Wilkinson says, he fell into a conversation with a gentleman regarding Fulton’s steamboat, and the gentleman declared that Fulton never would have succeeded had he not kept an ingenious Connecticut Yankee locked in for several weeks to draw plans for him. On inquiring the name of the Connecticut Yankee, Mr. Wilkinson was told it was “Daniel French.” READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
A free black salt miner, Asa Dunbar, established a settlement in a clearing on Irondequoit Bay which would later become the northeast corner of Rochester, New York, on the east side of the Genesee River. This would one day become Rochester’s oldest residential neighborhood, “Corn Hill.” This Dunbar family would later relocate to Canada. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November: “Universal Friend,” Jemimah Wilkinson, preaching on the topic “Have We Not All One Father?,” attended the Council of the 6 Nations at Canandaigua, in the vicinity of Seneca Lake in upstate New York. In this year her Society of Universal Friends had had Bailey print in Philadelphia a doctrinal pamphlet consisting largely of BIBLE quotations, THE UNIVERSAL FRIEND’S ADVICE TO THOSE OF THE SAME RELIGIOUS SOCIETY. Having migrated from Rhode Island to near Torrey, at this point they had become involved in a dispute over land titles that had split the movement, and Universal Friend was relocating with those still loyal to her to what is now Jerusalem, at the head of Crooked Lake (also in the “Finger Lake” district, now called Keuka Lake). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November 4, Tuesday: Russian forces demolished all Polish resistance in the “Massacre at Praga” in which somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 Polish civilians were slaughtered. Maastricht surrendered to the French.
Giovanni Paisiello’s dramma per musica Didone abbandonata to words of Metastasio was performed for the initial time, in the Teatro San Carlo of Naples.
Upon the fall of Robespierre, in response to a belated appeal by American minister to France James Monroe, Thomas Paine was released from French prison — but he would go back to America harboring an enormous grudge against President George Washington for having previously neglected to intercede in France at a diplomatic level on his behalf, when he had the status of an American citizen being endangered by a foreign government.63
The understanding of Colonel Timothy Pickering, commissioner to the Native Americans, was that he had succeeded in soothed Indian feelings over the issues of Presque Isle and land along the Niagara River in upstate New York.
63. Because he would go public with his complaint about the unfaithful conduct of the “father of our country,” who was because the ceremonial head of the nation was immune to all possibility of censure, Paine would be roundly excoriated and contemned by the American news media, for the remainder of his life, as a “dirty little atheist” –he was not, nor had he ever been, an atheist– and in fact he would be shot at in his own home in the countryside, from which danger and exposure he would need to flee to the anonymity of a city-flat hideout in New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1795
December 14, Monday: Engineer John Bloomfield Jervis was born in Huntington, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1796
June: In upstate New York, the English left Fort Niagara and Fort Oswego. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1797
Efforts were made to revive Philip Schuyler’s plans for a Stillwater Canal from that New York village to the Hudson River (but nothing would come of this).
Schenectady, New York trustees place an order with a London firm for two hand fire engines.
While recovering from the wound he had received at the siege of Thionville, François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand had spent most of his English exile living in extreme poverty in London. During this period he was struggling to create his initial major publication, ESSAI SUR LES RÉVOLUTIONS. The best he could do was scrape by, offering French lessons and doing translations. Things looked up for him during a stay in Suffolk, where Charlotte Ives, daughter of a local vicar, was studying the French tongue.
It came to pass that he was obliged to divulge an unsavory fact to this 15-year-old’s mama: “Stop, madam,” I cried. “One moment, I beg of you. I am a married man.” She fell in a fainting-fit upon the floor.64
64. Charlotte would fully recover from her indiscretion! Eventually, as Mrs. Charlotte Ives Sutton, wife of Admiral Samuel Sutton –obese at 44 years of age– she would solicit an audience with French Ambassador Chateaubriand in London, remind him of their youthful misadventure, and obtain preferment in the East India Company for her sons William Sutton and John Sutton. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1798
Native Americans in the Mile Strip along the Niagara River granted Horatio Jones and Jasper Parrish two square miles of land north of Scajaquada Creek, near the northern city limit of today’s Buffalo, New York.
A Niagara Canal Company was incorporated to dig a canal between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Construction began on the German Flats Canal.
2d report of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company. ERIE CANAL
April 6, Friday: The New York Legislature called for the surveying of a mile-long reservation along the Niagara River, to be set aside for the Alleghany Indians.
James Pierson Beckwourth was born in Frederick County, Virginia either on this day or more likely on April 6, 1800 (as an adult he would sport a silver dollar coined in 1800 on a string around his neck), sired by Sir Jennings Beckwith upon a mulatto woman known to us only as “Miss Kill.” (Please note that this was not a short-term or casual relationship but a caring one, and it seems there would eventually be some 13 biracial children of this couple’s enduring union.)
Some things need to be said about the white preponderance of this lad’s ancestry. He might not exactly be what this American society regards as lily-white and worthy, but Elizabeth Jennings Beckwith, grand-daughter of Peter Jennings, had been the sister of Edmund Jennings, who was Attorney General of the Virginia colony in 1684, Secretary of State in 1701, and President of the Council and Acting Governor in 1710.
The Beckwiths of Virginia allege that their ancestor was Sir Hugh de Malebisse, a knight serving Duke William at the Battle of Hastings. In the Year of Our Lord 1226 a descendant of this knight, Sir Hercules de HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Malebisse, acquired the name “Beckworth” by marriage to Lady Beckwith Bruce, heiress to the Beckwith estate. Elizabeth Jennings Beckwith’s son Sir Marmaduke Beckwith would establish his home “Belvoin” a few miles north of Warsaw, Virginia, and would beget as his 2d son Sir Jonathan Beckwith, and then Sir Jonathan would beget Sir Jennings Beckwith, and then Sir Jennings of Richmond County, Virginia would beget, upon a mulatto or quadroon known to us only as “Miss Kill” (such a name might have originated as a misreading of a handwritten record), James Pierson Beckwith, AKA James P. Beckwourth. This “Miss Kill,” if that was indeed her monicker, had presumably the status of a slave, since her son’s father would need to appear repeatedly in court to assert that indeed there existed papers in his boy’s manumission. One might suppose that on some planet other than our own, this fine lady Elizabeth Jennings Beckwith pictured above would have been considered to be, therefore, Jim Beckwourth’s great-great-grandma.
November 5, day: The chief surveyor for the Holland Land Company project, Joseph Ellicott, instructed Seth Pease on surveying the Niagara River of upstate New York.
November 6, day: The chief surveyor for the Holland Land Company project, Joseph Ellicott, instructed Seth Pease on laying out New York’s reserved lands along the Niagara River and making a map of the lands, and calculating the contents of the water in Chautauqua Lake for Robert Morris. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1799
The American soldiers consolidated their hold on the New York side of the Niagara River the British soldiers across the river from Fort Niagara constructed a wooden fortress which they called Fort George, just south of today’s village of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Of course they positioned their new fort on higher ground where its guns could dominate the older position. Relations between the two garrisons were for the time being cordial, with the officers eager to socialize among one another. Personnel of the American garrison for instance were known to attend divine services on the British side of the river. Also, during the absence of the American surgeon British doctors filled in, caring for the soldiers of Fort Niagara. Unfortunately, this situation would not endure as the British refused to acknowledge that America had won its Revolutionary War and disregarded American neutrality and disregarded American maritime rights — and as Americans developed plans for the future of Canada.
A “slow freedom” policy was adopted in the state of New York: slavery was to be ended at the convenience of all concerned, by stages which were to be complete by the 4th of July of the year 1827. Children of slaves, as a first step, were to be born as indentured servants rather than as slaves. In the Swartekill neighborhood of the town of Hurley, New York in this year, learning Dutch rather than English, under this “freedom like molasses” policy the already-born-enslaved baby Bell (Sojourner Truth) was hopelessly a slave rather than an indentured servant. Supposedly it became more or less against the letter of the law, for the white people to sell their slaves south just before they were to become free. When Johannes Hardenbergh died between May 15th and October 26th, his ownership of the two-year-old girl with the single name passed to another white man, his son Charles Hardenbergh.
In Kentucky, Henry Clay began to argue that in his consideration, although slavery was indeed an evil, it was for the time being a necessary one, and less demanding than any available alternative (by the way, lest I forget to mention: Clay was a white man who owned slaves): HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
PUBLISHED BY [email protected] (SEPTEMBER, 2005)
REVIEWED FOR H-SOUTH BY PHILLIP HAMILTON, DEPARTMENT OF
HISTORY, CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT U
Harold D. Tallant. EVIL NECESSITY: SLAVERY AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM KENTUCKY. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2003 Stuck in the Middle with Slavery Harold D. Tallant has written a well-researched and nuanced study about Kentucky politics and slavery during the antebellum age. He focuses on the attempt by its political leaders to deal with human bondage at a time when the institution nationwide had become a powerful and divisive issue. Tallant asserts that not only did white Kentuckians see themselves as occupying the nation’s “moderate” middle ground long before the Civil War, but also that their moderate beliefs actually strengthened and perpetuated slavery inside the state. Tallant’s study gets to the heart of the Kentucky paradox--many prominent whites genuinely and publicly proclaimed slavery to be an “evil,” but then thwarted effective actions against it. Indeed, issues of property rights, labor needs, and racism always rendered emancipation schemes unfeasible, thus rendering bondage itself a necessary evil that could not yet be ended. Although some issues and ideas need to be developed, this is a valuable book that will help scholars understand the political and economic complexities of American slavery in the decades prior to the Civil War. Tallant begins EVIL NECESSITY with Kentucky’s most famous antebellum son, Henry Clay, who initially articulated the necessary evil philosophy during the debates of 1799 over the drafting of the state’s first constitution. A half century later in 1849, although Kentucky and the nation had profoundly changed, Henry Clay’s position “was remarkably similar”: slavery remained “an evil” which unfortunately still had “to be tolerated until individual states could devise gradual, cautious plans of emancipation” (pp. 2-3). The static views of “Harry of the West” were shared by many white Kentuckians during the first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike fellow slaveholders in the Deep South, Kentuckians refused to embrace the fantasy of the positive good theory; rather, most of them understood that HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the institution harmed the state, the South, and the nation. Bondage was, moreover, grossly unfair to African Americans in a land of liberty. On the other hand, Clay and other Kentuckians refused to embrace northern abolitionists who stridently demanded slavery’s immediate end. State leaders and owners instead called for emancipation to be gradual and, above all, orderly. Problems concerning property, the labor supply, and the creation of a free black population all had to be confronted and solved before bondage could start down the path toward extinction. In the 1820s and 1830s, many antislavery Kentuckians believed that African colonization would solve these multiple problems. After fully compensated owners voluntarily freed their slaves, all blacks in the state (both ex-slaves and free African Americans) would be shipped across the Atlantic to return to their ancestral homeland. In 1829, political leaders established the Kentucky Colonization Society (KCS) as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society to make this plan a reality. Although a failure by any standard (Tallant notes that the KCS sent only 661 blacks to Africa before the Civil War), colonization efforts reveal the complexities of antislavery. As in most southern states, many Kentucky owners saw colonization merely as a way to rid themselves of supposedly troublesome free blacks. However, unlike masters in the Deep South, a number of white Kentuckians insisted that colonization also be a tool to genuinely (albeit slowly) eliminate slavery. They argued, furthermore, that the colony of Liberia could prove the competency of African Americans to survive independently. Indeed, Liberia could even lead to the “redemption of Africa” itself (p. 56), as ex-slaves would establish key elements of American civilization, especially Christianity, which they had learned during their time in bondage. In the book’s third chapter, “The Dilemma of Conservative Reform,” Tallant provides a fine discussion of the numerous issues antislavery advocates had to keep in mind in their ongoing search for solutions. Although they eventually grasped the impracticalities of colonization, Kentucky emancipationists clearly realized and wrote how bondage socially and economically hurt the state as a whole. Generations inside the system of slavery had certainly debased African Americans morally and intellectually, and created racial enmities that imperiled all residents. Emancipationists insisted, though, that principles of liberty and equality must apply to all, even slaves. Indeed, blacks were “fully human” and definitely not “a different and lower species than the Caucasian[s]” (p. 74). Like whites, they possessed “the gift of reason” (p. 75). Furthermore, reformers argued that bondage crippled the dignity of labor and undermined the desire of lower-class whites to “advance themselves through hard work” (p. 82). Because hard work and progress were whiggishly linked in Kentucky’s emancipationist mind, slavery’s presence in the state ultimately meant a long-term economic decline in which both races would suffer. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Despite their efforts, antislavery leaders realized by the early 1840s that resistance to even modest legislative plans was insurmountable. In addition to ongoing questions about labor and property, emancipationists had to confront the social reality that slave ownership provided Kentucky masters with “a mark of exalted status” (p. 101)--a mark to which many whites still aspired. The only hope for change, therefore, was to convince the General Assembly to call a constitutional convention. Perhaps such an extralegal body could develop a strategy for gradual emancipation and then write it into the new plan for state government. Throughout the decade, antislavery conservatives like Cassius Clay became leading and vocal supporters of what was known as “the convention movement” (p. 113). Deriving political support from the state’s growing urban population as well as from the eastern mountain counties, emancipationists helped push a convention bill through the General Assembly during the 1845-46 legislative session. Although Tallant explains that the demand for constitutional change stemmed from “a variety of forces,” “the issue of slavery quickly overshadowed most other issues as the state prepared to select [convention] delegates” (p. 137). Indeed, the possibility of constitutional change with regard to slavery brought out both antislavery advocates as well as proslavery supporters, who furiously “denounce[d] the emancipationists” (p. 137). Thus, by the late-1840s, Kentuckians witnessed and participated in the kinds of emotional debates over the future of slavery that were then occurring throughout the nation. Violence also visited Kentucky. During the election campaign for delegates, for instance, Cassius Clay was stabbed by a supporter of bondage. In another incident, a proslavery candidate from Paducah pulled out a revolver in the middle of a debate and shot his emancipationist opponent dead. The convention held in the fall of 1849 proved a disaster for the emancipation cause. Only 9.7 percent of the state’s voters selected antislavery delegates. By contrast, “[a]t least a third of the delegates elected to the convention had run as proslavery candidates” (p. 151). This ensured that nothing would be done to advance an emancipation agenda. On the contrary, proslavery delegates insisted that additional protections for bondage be written into the new plan for government. In particular, slave owners’ property rights were to be scrupulously secured in the possible event that Kentuckians later passed a post nati emancipation plan. In the final summary of the convention’s work, moreover, proslavery delegates successfully inserted a passage declaring the institution to be not an evil, but a positive good for all; it was, they wrote, a source of “great ... wealth, and social and political power” (p. 158). In essence, the delegates had drafted, according to Tallant, “the most strongly proslavery state constitution yet written in the United States” (p. 158), leaving the antislavery forces defeated and demoralized. Despite this unmistakable drift toward proslavery sentiments, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Tallant argues that Kentuckians did not entirely abandon their toleration for emancipation supporters. He illustrates this fact in the book’s final two chapters, which examine the Kentucky abolitionist John G. Fee and his activities in the 1850s as leader of the American Missionary Association (AMA). In some respects, these are the book’s best chapters, in part because Fee is such a compelling and heroic figure. In terms of Tallant’s overall argument, however, the chapters add little to our understanding of either Kentucky slavery or the politics of bondage during the most crucial antebellum decade. Tallant asserts that Fee’s abolitionist efforts “tested the limits of his state’s toleration” (p. 217). Fee was indeed very active and he did avoid death despite his work. However, while proslavery supporters in Kentucky were not like their counterparts from the Deep South, they hardly “paid ... little attention” to the AMA’s efforts (p. 216). As the author discusses in great detail, Fee and his fellow AMA members met repeated threats and violence. And Fee himself was expelled from the state sixteen months prior to the Civil War. Moreover, by focusing on a single individual at the book’s end, we lose sight of the bigger picture Tallant had so carefully drawn in the previous chapters. I am curious about what was going on politically throughout the state and also how leaders reacted to the escalating sectional crisis across the nation. Still, EVIL NECESSITY remains an impressive book. It joins a growing number of deeply researched state studies that illuminate the complex political and economic world that antebellum Americans occupied.65 Several things, though, could be developed or provided in order to make the book even stronger. First, Tallant needs to elaborate more fully on geographic regionalism within Kentucky. He does mention the eastern mountain counties, the Bluegrass region, and the growing urban cities of Lexington and Louisville in some of his analysis. But, as a historian of Virginia myself, I know how crucial regionalism can be in terms of understanding the contours and evolution of hot-button issues such as slavery. Therefore, a sustained discussion toward the book’s beginning about how regional differences shaped slavery and other questions (along with a map of the state) would provide context and insight, especially for the generalist reader. Kentucky’s economic development also requires more discussion. Tallant mentions that the state possessed a diversified economy, producing hemp, grain crops, and livestock. But what about Kentucky’s overall role within the national economy throughout the antebellum age? Furthermore, given that the economic and political trends of the period were so tightly linked, how did the economics of slavery play out? Tallant does discuss how slave imports were blocked by the General Assembly in 1833 (later repealed in 1849), but nothing is said about how actively Kentucky owners participated in the export of their bondspeople. Indeed, the export of surplus slaves and the national slave 65. See, for instance, William D. Shade, DEMOCRATIZING THE OLD DOMINION: VIRGINIA AND THE SECOND PARTY SYSTEM, 1824- 1861 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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trade are not mentioned throughout the book. Discussion of this issue is especially important because, as in Virginia, this commerce boosted slave prices and further curbed what little enthusiasm there was for emancipation in the Upper South. Nevertheless, EVIL NECESSITY is a solid and intelligent book that clearly makes the point that Kentucky’s “moderation” in reality did little to help the nation move beyond this tragic institution. Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1800
James Wadsworth sold land in the Genesee Valley of New York to the painter Benjamin West.
Republicans carried New York. The State Legislature selected Republican electors for the national presidential election. (Note: this has nothing whatever to do with the party of Abraham Lincoln.)
By this point the 5-acre pic nic area and skating pond north of the city of New-York that had affectionately been known as “The Collect” — had become nothing but a reeking cesspool.
It had probably been during the Middle Ages that the Ländlers, a peasant dance, had originated in Austria. Upon the destruction or distraction of the French aristocracy during the French Revolution the focal point of the remaining European musical and literary culture had shifted to the court society of Austria. Austria’s native 3 dance was taken into the drawing rooms and its /4 time became the ballroom waltz. To signify the sliding or gliding motion of this dance, its name was in this timeframe being changed from Ländlers to Walzer. At this point this dance of the lower classes with its scandalous reputation was making its way from Vienna into polite British society. Most ballrooms in England and some on the continent tried to ban the valse because it allowed the male to touch a forbidden zone, the female’s waist, and because, although Victorian ladies and gentlemen could touch hands while dancing side by side, facing one another, and in the closed position, was to them all too reminiscent of copulatory activity. Eventually the popularity of the waltz would overcome these qualms, and closed position would become standard for many of the evolving ballroom dances.
It was in approximately this year that Benjamin Seixas, Isaac Gomez, Alexander Zuntz, and Ephraim Hart founded a Stockbrokers Guild — later to become the New York Stock Exchange. JUDAISM
In this year Stephen Myers was enslaved in America — which is to say, in this year he was born in Rensselaer county of New York State.66
66. Isn’t that a kick in the groin? –For some of us Americans becoming born was the same as becoming enslaved! Ugh. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1801
January 28, Wednesday: Moses Ely Ring was born in New-York. As a young man he would live with his father’s family in Rhinebeck, New York. He would marry Anna Maria Shook at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Rhinebeck on September 16, 1824, and in 1827 they would have their first son, Eugene Ring. Between 1835 and 1843 Moses Ring would run a leather business in New-York, but the business would be dissolved when his partner objected to his reckless speculation in hides. In 1843 he would open a general store in Rhinebeck. In 1845 he would be elected Town Supervisor of Rhinebeck. When in the winter of 1848/1849 news of the gold discoveries began to arrive, Moses would join other local men in an overland expedition to California. During Spring 1850 Moses would be reunited in California with his son Eugene Ring and they would begin to work together in the gold mines. In 1851 Moses would return to Rhinebeck, and he would die there on January 12, 1860.
April 8, Wednesday: Eugène Burnouf was born in Paris. His father Professor Jean Louis Burnouf (1775-1844) was a classical scholar.
In “An Act concerning slaves and servants,” New York prohibited slavetrading except when it amounted to transportation for crime (this would be re-enacted with amendments on March 31, 1817). “... And be it further enacted, That no slave shall hereafter be imported or brought into this State, unless the person importing or bringing such slave shall be coming into this State with intent to reside permanently therein and shall have resided without this State, and also have owned such slave at least during one year next preceding the importing or bringing in of such slave,” etc. A certificate, sworn to, must be obtained; any violation of this act or neglect to take out such certificate will result in freedom to the slave. Any sale or limited transfer of any person hereafter imported to be a public offence, under penalty of $250, and freedom to the slave transferred. The export of slaves or of any person freed by this act is forbidden, under penalty of $250 and freedom to the slave. Transportation for crime is permitted. LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1801 (edition of 1887), pages 547-52; LAWS OF NEW YORK, 1817 (edition of 1817), page 136. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: Of the twenty years from 1787 to 1807 it can only be said that they were, on the whole, a period of disappointment so far as the suppression of the slave-trade was concerned. Fear, interest, and philanthropy united for a time in an effort which bade fair to suppress the trade; then the real weakness of the constitutional compromise appeared, and the interests of the few overcame the fears and the humanity of the many. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1802
The Catskill Turnpike of the state of New York was completed.
February: DeWitte Clinton was elected to represent New York in the US Senate. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1803
The American garrison of Fort Niagara did not remain isolated for long. In the early 19th Century the lands on the New York side of the Niagara River were surveyed and rapidly began to fill with settlers. By the end of the 1st decade of the century thriving villages would be being established along the frontier at Youngstown, Lewiston, Manchester, Schlosser (both Manchester and Schlosser now being within the city of Niagara Falls), Black Rock (now within Buffalo), and Buffalo, which the garrison of Fort Niagara was of course expected to protect. Work details out of the fort hacked out a military road from the top of the escarpment of the Niagara River at Lewiston to Black Rock (this road still exists as New York Route 265). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1804
The Irish poet Thomas Moore traveled through upstate New York to the Buffalo area, stopping overnight in Batavia. His poem “Lines Written at the Cohos, or Falls of the Mohawk River” would be inspired by his trip.
In upstate New York, Joseph and Andrew Ellicott completed their survey for New Amsterdam (Buffalo), their plan being influenced largely by their work with Pierre L’Enfant on the Washington DC survey.
Lewis Morgan was elected governor of New York.
In upstate New York, the town of Chautauqua was founded.
The New York legislature did away with the freehold suffrage requirement for male voters.
Twice weekly mail service began between Utica and Canandaigua in upstate New York.
A stone jail was erected at Catskill in upstate New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The New York State legislature declared Mead Creek and Mud Creeks to be public highways, over the veto of Governor Clinton.
Vermonters Josiah Jackman and Gideon and John Walker arrived in the Canadice Lake area of upstate New York, began farms, and returned home for the winter.
Whitingham, Vermont, farmer John Young and his family, including four-year-old Brigham and eight siblings, moved to Chenango County in upstate New York.
William McKinstry opened a distillery on Penfield’s Irondequoit Creek in upstate New York.
The Reverend David Higgins established the first church at Aurelius in upstate New York.
Federalists in New York and New England proposed setting up a northern confederacy.
Eleanor Brisbane, sister of Batavia, New York postmaster James Brisbane, arrived there along with her friend Mary Lucy Stevens to settle. Mary would paint the post office’s first sign. She would marry James Brisbane.
In New York, Adam Hoops chose the name Olean for his new settlement, corrupting oleum, the Latin word for oil.
In Steuben County, New York, the first list of citizens eligible for jury duty was created, and compensation was fixed at $1.50 for a full day; 75¢ for a half day. The Board of Supervisors fixed compensation rates for elections inspectors at $1.50 per day. The inspector who would deliver the ballots to the sheriff for certification would receive $4.00.
John Vanderlyn’s painting “The Death of Jane McCrea” fulsomely recorded an unfortunate-for-her-but- interesting-for-everybody-else event that once upon a time had taken place in upstate New York.
In Albany, New York the charter of the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures expired, and the organization was reincorporated as the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts.
John Stevens crossed the Hudson River from Hoboken, New Jersey to New-York in a boat fitted with a steam engine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1805
Frederic Tudor shipped a cargo of ice from New-York to Martinique.
Farmer and cattle merchant Hachaliah Bailey purchased the Indian elephant Old Bet, one of the 1st to be brought to this continent. He had planned to use her for heavy-duty work on his farm, but such throngs came to his farm near Somers, New York to see Old Bet that he began exhibiting her throughout the northeast. His success attracted neighbors to join in the business of importing and exhibiting exotic animals. A thriving menagerie business paralleled the development of the circus in America and by the 1830s these forms of popular entertainment would merge. In fact, so many of the early 19th-Century circus proprietors came from Somers and neighboring New York towns that Somers is now referred to as the “Cradle of the American Circus.”
John Lovett opened the City Hotel, on Broadway in New-York.
New-York’s tax valuation was $25,645,867, and tax revenues were $127,095.
For $75,000, Aaron Burr sold half of Greenwich Village north of the city of New-York to John Jacob Astor.
Scottish highlanders began moving into the Phelps and Gorham Tract of upstate New York.
In upstate New York, the Caledonia Presbyterian Kirk was founded.
Charles Carroll, William Fitzhugh, and Nathaniel Rochester purchased Ebenezer Allan’s One Hundred Acre Tract — the nucleus of the future Rochester, New York.
Vermonters Josiah Jackman and Gideon and John Walker returned to the Canadice Lake area of upstate New York with their families to settle on the farms they prepared in the autumn.
In upstate New York, the turnpike from Albany to Canandaigua was completed.
New York State militia forces totaled 77,982.
Oliver Loud moved from Weymouth, Massachusetts to western New York, where he would become a tavern keeper. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In about this year, Stephen and Clarissa Prentiss built the 1st frame house in Prattsburg, New York.
In Philadelphia, the lawyer and former Army captain Philip Church got married with Anna Stewart. The couple will soon leave for New York’s southern tier.
The election officials of New Rochelle, New York challenged the citizenship credentials of the despised
1806
Thomas Paine, and refused to count his ballot. Having recently been shot at and, fortunately, missed, Paine relocated to the anonymity of a Greenwich Village apartment on the island of Manhattan.
A turnpike was built on Paumanok Long Island, reaching from Jamaica to Rockaway.
Tolls were allowed on the James River and Kanawha Canal.
German-born US canal engineer John Christian Senf died.
General Henry Knox died and his Georges River Canal was abandoned.
US canal engineer Edward Hall Gill was born in Wexford, Ireland.
John Jacob Astor has since 1803 invested some $300,000 in Manhattan real estate. At this point he began a record of lease payments to him — he would receive $10,000 this year. During this year, this amount of income was small relative to his income of $180,000 from outright profits on resales, and yet he would decide, correctly, that the leasing of various New-York properties might be for him the most profitable option in the long run.
In upstate New York, Philip Church’s parents traveled by wagon to Angelica for the summer to see their new granddaughter, bringing maids, a formal dinner service, and a French chef. They started construction of a summer home in Angelica.
In upstate New York, part of the mortgage taken out with US Indian agent Israel Chapin by land speculator Oliver Phelps in 1796, as security for the regular payment of the land rentals due the Seneca Indians, was released in return for $1,000 paid to Chapin’s successor.
In upstate New York, Robert Miles built a large log canoe on Chautauqua Lake, and started a freighting business. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In upstate New York, Lake Ontario shipments from the Genesee River totaled $30,000.
In upstate New York, a flour mill (the future Phoenix Mill) was built at the High Falls of the Genesee River.
In upstate New York, Pennsylvania-born pioneer Nicholas Hetchler builds a log cabin near Scottsville.
In upstate New York, construction began on Albany’s first Capitol building with the laying of a cornerstone by the local big shot, Mayor Philip Schuyler Van Rensselaer.
In upstate New York, the Onondaga Salt Springs produced a whopping 154,760 bushels of salt.
June 16, Monday: There is one reliably datable event, in Austin Steward’s later account of his life as a teenage slave in upstate New York, and that date is the great eclipse that occurred on this day. We will therefore need to insert here –for lack of a better position at which to place this material in the general chronology– his autobiographical reminiscences of this period of his life: Capt. Helm finally concluded to sell his plantation and stock, except the slaves, and remove to the Genesee Country, where he designed to locate his future residence. The plantation and stock (retaining the slaves) were advertised for sale, and on a certain day named, all would be disposed of at a public sale, or to the highest bidder. When the day of sale arrived, there flocked from all parts of the surrounding country the largest assemblage of people I ever saw in that place. A large number of wealthy and respectable planters were present, whose gentlemanly behavior should have been an example to others. The majority of that vast crowd, however, were a rough, quarrelsome, fighting set, just such as might be expected from slave-holding districts. There were several regularly fought battles during the first day of the sale. One Thomas Ford, a large, muscular, ferocious-looking fellow, a good specimen of a southern bully and woman-whipper, had been victorious through the day in numerous fights and brawls; but he had to pay dear for it when night came. Some one or more of the vanquished party, took advantage of the dark night to stab him in both sides. The knife of the assassin had been thrust into his thigh, tearing the flesh upward, leaving a frightful and dangerous wound; but what is most singular, both sides were wounded in nearly the same manner, and at the same time, for so quickly was the deed committed that the offenders made their escape, before an alarm could be raised for their detection; nor have I ever heard of any one being arrested for the crime. Ford’s groans and cries were painful to hear, but his brother acted like a madman; rushing hither and thither, with a heavy HDT WHAT? INDEX
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bludgeon in his hand, with which he indiscriminately beat the fences and whatever came in his way, crying “Oh my brother, my poor brother! Who has murdered my poor brother?” Physicians came to the aid of the wounded man who at first thought he might recover, but in a climate like that of Virginia it was impossible. His friends did all they could to save him, but the poor wretch lingered a few days and died. Thus ended the life of a bad man and a hard master. ... The sale continued for several days, during which there was no such thing as rest or sleep or one quiet moment on the premises. As was customary in that State, Capt. Helm provided the food and drink for all who came, and of course a great many came to drink and revel and not to buy; and that class generally took the night time for their hideous outbreaks, when the more respectable class had retired to their beds or to their homes. And many foul deeds and cruel outrages were committed; nor could the perpetrators be detected or brought to justice. Nothing could be done but to submit quietly to their depredations. One peaceable old slave was killed by having his head split open with an ax. He was found in the morning lying in the yard, with the bloody instrument of death by his side. This occasioned some excitement among the slaves, but as the white people paid but little attention to it, it soon passed off, and the sorrowful slaves put the old man’s remains in a rough box, and conveyed them to their last resting-place. After the sale was over, the slaves were allowed a holiday, with permission to go and visit their friends and relatives previous to their departure for their new home in a strange land. The slaves generally on Capt. Helm’s plantation looked upon this removal as the greatest hardship they had ever met; the severest trial they had ever endured; and the separation from our old home and fellow-slaves, from our relatives and the old State of Virginia, was to us a contemplation of sorrowful interest. Those who remained, thought us the most unfortunate of human beings to be taken away off into the State of New York, and, as they believed, beyond the bounds of civilization, where we should in all probability be destroyed by wild beasts, devoured by cannibals, or scalped by the Indians. We never expected to meet again in this life, hence our parting interviews were as solemn as though we were committing our friends to the grave. But He whose tender mercies are over all his creatures, knew best what was for our good. Little did Capt. Helm think when bringing his slaves to New York that in a few short years, they would be singing the song of deliverance from Slavery’s thralldom; and as little thought he of the great and painful change, to be brought about in his own circumstances. Could any one have looked into futurity and traced the difficult path, my master was to tread, — could any one have foreseen the end to which he must soon come, and related it to him in the days of his greatness and prosperity, he would, I am certain, have turned from such a narrator of misfortune in a greater rage than did Namaan when the man of God told him “to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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go and dip seven times in the Jordan.” He could not have believed, nor could I, that in a few years the powerful, wealthy slaveholder, living in luxury and extravagance, would be so reduced that the necessaries of life even, were beyond his means, and that he must be supported by the town! But I anticipate. Let us return to the old plantation which seems dearer than ever, now that we are about to leave it forever. We thought Capt. Helm’s prospects pretty fair, and yet we shuddered when we realized our condition as slaves. This change in our circumstances was calculated to awaken all our fears that had been slumbering, and bring all the perilous changes to which we might be subjected most vividly to mind. We were about to leave the land of our birth, the home of our childhood, and we felt that untried scenes were before us. We were slaves, it is true, but we had heart-felt emotions to suppress, when we thought of leaving all that was so familiar to us, and chose rather to “bear the ills we had, than to fly to those we knew not of.” And oh, the terrible uncertainty of the future, that ever rests on the slave, even the most favored, was now felt with a crushing weight. To-day, they are in the old familiar cabin surrounded by their family, relatives and friends; to-morrow, they may be scattered, parted forever. The master’s circumstances, not their own, may have assigned one to the dreadful slave-pen, and another to the distant rice-swamp; and it is this continual dread of some perilous future that holds in check every joyous emotion, every lofty aspiration, of the most favored slave at the South. They know that their owners indulge in high living, and they are well aware also that their continual indulgences engender disease, which make them very liable to sudden death; or their master may be killed in a duel, or at a horse-race, or in a drunken brawl; then his creditors are active in looking after the estate; and next, the blow of the auctioneer’s hammer separates them perhaps for life. ... After the sale of the plantation, Capt. Helm was in possession of quite a large sum of money, and having never paid much attention to his pecuniary interests, he acted as if there could be no end of it. He realized about forty thousand dollars from the sale of his estate in Virginia, which would have been a pretty sum in the hands of a man who had been accustomed to look after his own interests; but under the management of one who had all his life lived and prospered on the unrequited toil of slaves, it was of little account. He bought largely of every thing he thought necessary for himself or the comfort of his family, for which he always paid the most extravagant prices. The Captain was not as well qualified to take care of himself and family as some of his slaves were; but he thought differently, and so the preparations for leaving the old plantation for a home in the wilds of New York, went on under his direction, and at last we bade a final adieu to our friends and all we held dear in the State of Virginia. All things having been prepared for our departure, our last HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“Good-bye” spoken, and our last look taken of the old plantation, we started, amid the sobs and prolonged cries of separating families, in company with our master, the overseer and another white man named Davis, who went with us to take back the five-horse “Pennsylvania team,” which was provided for the conveyance of the food for the slaves, and what little baggage they might have, and also that of the overseer. Capt. Helm had determined to leave his family until he could get his slaves settled in their future quarters, and a home provided for himself, when they were expected to join him. We traveled northward, through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and a portion of New York, to Sodus Bay, where we halted for some time. We made about twenty miles per day, camping out every night, and reached that place after a march of twenty days. Every morning the overseer called the roll, when every slave must answer to his or her name, felling to the ground with his cowhide, any delinquent who failed to speak out in quick time. After the roll had been called, and our scanty breakfast eaten, we marched on again, our company presenting the appearance of some numerous caravan crossing the desert of Sahara. When we pitched our tents for the night, the slaves must immediately set about cooking not their supper only, but their breakfast, so as to be ready to start early the next morning, when the tents were struck; and we proceeded on our journey in this way to the end. At Sodus Bay there was then one small tavern, kept by a man named Sill. The bay is ten miles in length and from a half to two miles in breadth, and makes an excellent harbor. The surrounding country then was almost an unbroken wilderness. After Capt. Helm had rested a few days at Sodus, he went six miles up the bay and purchased a large tract of land lying on both sides of that beautiful sheet of water, and put his slaves on to clear and cultivate it. Then came the “tug of war.” Neither the overseer nor the slaves had the least knowledge of clearing land, and that was the first thing to be done. It was useless to consult the Captain, for he knew still less about matters of that kind. To obviate this difficulty, our master bought out a Mr. Cummings, who had some cleared land on the west side of the bay. On this he put the overseer and a part of the slaves, and then hired a Mr. Herrington to take charge of the remainder. Herrington and his gang of slaves was sent to the east side to chop down the heavy timber and clear the land for cultivation, all of which had first to be learned, for we knew nothing of felling trees, and the poor slaves had rather a hard time of it. Provisions were scarce and could not be procured for cash in that section. There was no corn to be had, and we had but little left. We had no neighbors to assist us in this trying time, and we came near starvation. True, the wild, romantic region in which we were located abounded in game, — elk, deer, bear, panther, and wolves, roamed abroad through the dense forest, in great abundance, but the business of the slaves was not hunting or fishing, but clearing the land, preparatory to raising crops HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of grain the coming season. At last Capt. Helm chartered a boat, and manned it to go to the mouth of the Genesee River to buy corn. They embarked under favorable auspices, but soon there came on such a tremendous storm, that the boat could no longer be managed, and the crew in despair threw themselves on the bottom of the boat to await their inevitable destruction, when one of their number, a colored man named Dunbar, sprang to the helm, and with great difficulty succeeded in running her safely into a Canadian port, where they were obliged to part with every thing in their possession to obtain the means to return to their families in Sodus, who had given them up as lost. But, to the great joy of all, they came back at last with their lives, but with nothing for the famishing slaves. Before another boat could be sent for our relief, we were reduced to the last extremity. We became so weak we could not work, and it was difficult to drag ourselves about, as we were now obliged to do, to gather up all the old bones we could find, break them up fine and then boil them; which made a sort of broth sufficient barely to sustain life. This we drank, and merely existed, until at last, the long looked for boat returned, loaded with provision, which saved us from starvation and gave us strength to pursue our labor. About this time two slaves who were laboring in the forest, instead of returning to their cabin as was expected, got lost, and wandered eight days in the dense forest without provision, except what they could procure from roots and the bark of trees. Great exertion was made to find them; guns were fired, horns blown, and shouts raised, but all to no purpose. Finally, we gave them up, supposing they had starved to death or had been killed by wild beasts. One of them was an elderly man, named Benjamin Bristol, and the other, Edmund Watkins, a lad of about eighteen years of age. They wandered in an easterly direction, a distance of some sixty or seventy miles, through an unbroken wilderness, vainly trying to find their way home. On the eighth day, to their inexpressible joy, they came out on the shore of Lake Ontario, near Oswego; but young Watkins was so completely exhausted that he declared himself incapable of further exertion, and begged to be left to his fate. Bristol, however, who chewed tobacco, which it was supposed kept him from sinking so low as his companion, took him on his back, and carried him home, which they reached in a famished state and reduced to skeletons. All were thankful for the preservation of their lives, and, with the best we could do for them, they soon recruited and became strong as ever. One day, two others and myself thought we saw some animal swimming across the bay. We got a boat and went out to see what it was. After rowing for some time we came near enough to perceive it was a large bear. Those who watched us from the shore expected to see our boat upset, and all on board drowned, but it was not so to be; the, bear was struck on the nose with a blow that killed him instantly, and he was hauled ashore in great triumph. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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While these things were transpiring on the east side of the bay, the overseer on the west side determined to punish one of the slaves who worked on the east side. The name of the slave was Williams; a strong, athletic man, and generally a good workman, but he had unfortunately offended the overseer, for which nothing could appease his wrath but the privilege of flogging him. The slave, however, thought as he was no longer in Virginia, he would not submit to such chastisement, and the overseer was obliged to content himself with threatening what he would do if he caught him on the west side of the bay. A short time after, the overseer called at the cabin of one of the slaves, and was not a little surprised to find there the refractory slave, Williams, in company with three other men. He immediately walked up to him and asked him some question, to which Williams made no reply. Attended, as he always was, by his ferocious bull-dog, he flourished his cowhide in great wrath and demanded an instant reply, but he received none, whereupon he struck the slave a blow with the cowhide. Instantly Williams sprang and caught him by the throat and held him writhing in his vise-like grasp, until he succeeded in getting possession of the cowhide, with which he gave the overseer such a flogging as slaves seldom get. Williams was seized at once by the dog who endeavored to defend his brutal master, but the other slaves came to the rescue, and threw the dog into a huge fire which was near by, from which, after a singeing, he ran off, howling worse than his master when in the hands of Williams. He foamed and swore and still the blows descended; then he commanded the slaves to assist him, but as none obeyed, he commenced begging in the most humble manner, and at last entreated them as “gentlemen” to spare him; but all to no purpose. When Williams thought he had thrashed him sufficiently, he let him go and hurried to his boat and rowed down the bay, instead of crossing it. The overseer no sooner found himself at liberty than he ran out, calling to a servant girl to bring his rifle, which was loaded. The rifle was brought, but before he could get to the bay, Williams had gone beyond his reach; but unfortunately another boat was at this moment crossing the bay, which he, mad with rage, fired into. The men in the boat immediately cried out to him not to repeat the shot, but he was so angry that he swore he would shoot somebody, and sent another bullet after them. No one was hurt, however, but the brave overseer was vanquished. Crest-fallen and unrevenged, he shortly after called on Capt. Helm for a settlement, which was granted, and bidding a final adieu to the “Genesee Country,” he departed for Virginia, where he could beat slaves without himself receiving a cow-hiding. No one regretted his absence, nor do I think any but the most heartless would cordially welcome his return to the land of Slavery. Capt. Helm went to Virginia for his family, and returning with them, concluded to locate his future residence in the village of Bath, Steuben County. He purchased a large tract of land near the village, a large grist mill, and two saw mills; also, two HDT WHAT? INDEX
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farms; one called the “Maringo,” east of the village; and the other, called “Epsam,” north of it; and a fine house and lot in the village. He also kept a distillery, which in those days was well patronized, for nearly every body drank whisky; and with Capt. Helm it was a favorite beverage. The slaves were removed to Bath, where our master was well suited, and was everywhere noted for his hospitality. He had a great deal of land to cultivate, and carried on a multiplicity of business. Soon after we were settled at Bath, Capt. Helm’s eldest daughter, Jenny, was married to Mr. John Fitzhugh, her cousin, who had come from Virginia to claim his bride. The wedding was a splendid affair. No pains were spared to make it more imposing than any thing that had ever happened in that country. Never before had the quiet village of Bath seen such splendor. All that wealth, power and ambition could do, was done to make the event one of great brilliancy. Europe contributed her full proportion; Turkey, the Indias, East and West, were heavily taxed to produce their finest fabrics to adorn the bride and bridal guests; and contribute delicacies to add elegance to the festal scene. Two days previous to the wedding, the invited guests began to arrive with their retinue of servants, and on the evening of the marriage the large mansion was thrown open, and there was the most magnificent assemblage I ever beheld. In the drawing-room, where the ceremony took place, every thing was surpassingly elegant. Costly chandeliers shed their light on the rich tapestry, and beautiful dresses glittering with diamonds, and the large mirrors everywhere reflecting the gay concourse. While the servants were preparing supper it was announced that the hour had arrived for the ceremony to commence. The bridal pair took their place in the center of the apartment. Pearls, diamonds, and jewelry glittered on the bride with such luster, that it was almost painful to the eye to look upon her. The minister, after asking God to bless the assembled guests, and those he was about to unite in the holy bonds of wedlock, proceeded in a very solemn and impressive manner with the marriage service. The ceremony concluded, and good wishes having been expressed over the sparkling wine, the man of God took his leave, two hundred dollars richer than when he came. The company were all very happy, or appeared so; mirth reigned supreme, and every countenance wore a smile. They were seated at tables loaded with luxuries of every description, and while partaking, a band of music enlivened the scene. All business was suspended for several days, the wedding party making a tour of ten days to Niagara Falls. After a while, however, affairs assumed their usual aspect, and business took its regular routine. The grist mill belonging to the Captain was the only one for many miles around, and was a source of great profit to him; the saw mills also, were turning out a large quantity of lumber, which was in good demand; and the distillery kept up a steaming business. It yielded, however, a handsome income to Capt. Helm, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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who was now, for the first time since I knew him, overseeing his affairs himself, dispensing altogether with the service of a regularly installed overseer. The oldest son of our master had been absent from home for sometime, nor did he return to attend his sister’s grand wedding. He had sought and obtained a commission in the United States service as a Lieutenant. This had been his own choice; he had preferred the service and hardships of a soldier, to a plantation well stocked with slaves, and the quietude of domestic life. He had cheerfully given up his friends and prospects as a planter, and entered the service of his country. Frank Helm, the second son, soon followed the example of his older brother, Lina. He obtained a like commission, but he did not, like his brother, get along quietly. His prospects as an officer were soon blighted, and all hope of being serviceable to his country vanished forever. Lina Helm was an easy, good-natured, clever fellow; but his brother Frank was his opposite in nearly every thing; proud, fractious and unyielding. As might be expected, Frank, soon after entering the army, got into an “affair of honor,” according to the duelist’s code of laws. He was not, however, the principal in the difficulty. One of his friends and a brother officer, had a quarrel with a gentleman whom he challenged to mortal combat. Frank was the bearer of his friend’s challenge, and on presenting it, the gentleman refused to accept it, saying that the challenger “was no gentleman.” Then, according to the rules of dueling, no alternative was left for Frank, but to take his brother officer’s place, and fight. This he did and came from the bloody field disabled for life. In consequence of his lameness, he was under the necessity of resigning his commission in the army, which he did, and came home a cripple, and nearly unfitted for any kind of business whatever.... After the return of the wedding party, Mr. Fitzhugh purchased a tract of land near that of Capt. Helm, on which the newly-married couple commenced keeping house. They, however, became dissatisfied with their location, and soon after sold their possessions and returned to the South. Capt. Helm still continued to take the oversight of his slaves, and was out every day, superintending his business, just as his overseer used to do. About this time a man named Henry Tower came to Bath to hire “slave boys,” as we were called. The Captain hired to him Simon and myself, and a Mr. Baker also hired to him one slave named Vol. McKenzie. We three started for Dresden, Ontario County, where we arrived in due time. Mr. Tower had just bought a tract of land, three miles this side of the village of Lyons, on the Canandaigua outlet. Here Mr. Tower contemplated making great improvements, building mills, opening stores &c. This tract of land was comparatively wild, there being but a small frame house for a dwelling, one for a store, and another for a blacksmith shop. Mr. Tower had two brothers; James, the eldest, who took charge of the store, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John, the younger, who took charge of the hands who worked on the farm; Henry himself superintending the building of the mills. This firm had a great number of men in their employ that year. I was kept busy helping the women about the cooking and house-work. And here, for the first time in my life, I had a comfortable bed to sleep on, and plenty of wholesome food to eat; which was something both new and strange to me. The Towers were thorough-going business-men; they built a large grist mill, with four run of stone, and also a distillery. In those days it was customary for nearly all classes to drink spirituous liquors; hence, the distilleries were sources of great pecuniary interest to those who owned them. But having lived to see the dreadful evils which the drinking of alcoholic beverages have produced on community, I can hardly speak of distilleries in the favorable light in which they were then regarded. The Towers, with commendable enterprise, cleared a great number of acres of land during the first year I lived with them, besides doing a heavy business in the mill, store and distillery. It was customary then for men to assemble at some public place for the purpose of drinking whisky and racing horses. One Saturday afternoon there was to be a race, and all was excitement. Being young, I wished to go with the rest. I hurried through my work as fast as possible, and then, with a trembling heart, set off in search of my master, fearing lest he would refuse me the simple request. But he happened to be in uncommon good humor, and readily gave his consent; and away I went, “as happy as a lark.” When I reached the race-ground, they were just preparing to run the horses. Seeing me, they knew me to be a poor friendless little slave boy, helpless and unprotected, and they could therefore do with me as they pleased, and have some fine sport at my expense. When I was asked to ride one of the fast horses, I felt proud of the honor conferred, and was assisted to mount, feeling highly elated with the lofty position I had gained. The word “go,” was shouted, and the horse whirled off, and it seemed to me as if he flew with the speed of lightning. My hat fell off the first thing; and there I was, clinging with might and main to the neck of the fiery animal, my head bare, my feet bootless, and my old stripped shirt blown from my back, and streaming out behind, and fluttering like a banner in the breeze; my ragged pants off at the knees, and my long legs dangling down some length below; and at the same time crying “Whoa! whoa!” as loud as I could. Nor was this all; frightened as I was, nearly to death, I cast a despairing look behind me, and the loud, derisive laugh of the bystanders rung in my ears. Ludicrous as I must have appeared, this was too much, — I felt a giddiness coming over me, my brain reeled, my hold relaxed, and the next instant I had fallen to the ground, where all consciousness left me. When I came to my senses I was lying in bed, surrounded by all the appurtenances of a dying person. The first thing I heard was Mr. Tower scolding the men who put HDT WHAT? INDEX
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me on the horse, and threatening them with a law-suit for presuming to do such a thing without his permission. Mr. Tower considered himself holden to Capt. Helm for my safe return, and was therefore justly indignant at their placing my life in such peril. It was indeed a narrow escape, for the horse was running with all his speed when I fell. My bones were unbroken, however, and I suppose it must have been the tremendous jar I got when I fell that rendered me unconscious; nor do I think it impossible that the fright may not have contributed somewhat to the catastrophe. ... I continued to live with the Towers; and in the fall of that year, I had the misfortune to cut my foot badly. While chopping fire wood at the door, I accidentally struck my ax against a post, which glanced the blow in such a manner that it came down with sufficient force to nearly sever my great toe from my left foot, gashing upward completely through the large joint, which made a terrible wound. Dr. Taylor was immediately called, and sewed the flesh together, taking two stitches on the upper, and one on the under, side of the foot, before it began to swell; but when the swelling came on, the stitches on the upper side gave way, which occasioned the toe to fall over so much, that I have been slightly lame from that day to this. For several weeks I was unable to be moved, and was regularly attended by Dr. Taylor, but as soon as it could be done without danger, I was taken back to Capt. Helm’s, where I found things in much the same condition as when I left them over a year before. ... I managed to purchase a spelling book, and set about teaching myself to read, as best I could. Every spare moment I could find was devoted to that employment, and when about my work I could catch now and then a stolen glance at my book, just to refresh my memory with the simple lesson I was trying to learn. But here Slavery showed its cloven foot in all its hideous deformity. It finally reached the ears of my master that I was learning to read; and then, if he saw me with a book or a paper in my hand, oh, how he would swear at me, sending me off in a hurry, about some employment. Still I persevered, but was more careful about being seen making any attempt to learn to read. At last, however, I was discovered, and had to pay the penalty of my determination. I had been set to work in the sugar bush, and I took my spelling book with me. When a spare moment occurred I sat down to study, and so absorbed was I in the attempt to blunder through my lesson, that I did not hear the Captain’s son-in-law coming until he was fairly upon me. He sprang forward, caught my poor old spelling book, and threw it into the fire, where it was burned to ashes; and then came my turn. He gave me first a severe flogging, and then swore if he ever caught me with another book, he would “whip every inch of skin off my back,” &c. ... About this time Capt. Helm began to sell off his slaves to different persons, as he could find opportunity, and sometimes at a great sacrifice. It became apparent that the Captain, instead of prospering in business, was getting poorer every day. ... I was one afternoon at a neighbor’s house in the village, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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when I was suddenly taken so violently ill with pain in my head and side, that I had to be carried home. When we arrived there, I was allowed a pallet of straw to lie on, which was better than nothing. Day after day, my disease increased in violence, and my master employed a physician to attend me through my illness, which brought me very low indeed. I was constantly burning with fever, and so thirsty that I knew not what I would have given for a draught of cold water, which was denied me by the physician’s direction. I daily grew weaker until I was reduced to helplessness, and was little else than “skin and bones.” I really thought my time had come to die; and when I had strength to talk, I tried to arrange the few little business affairs I had, and give my father direction concerning them. And then I began to examine my own condition before God, and to determine how the case stood between Him and my poor soul. And “there was the rub.” I had often excused myself, for frequent derelictions in duty, and often wild and passionate outbreaks, on account of the hardness of my lot, and the injustice with which I was treated, even in my best endeavors to do as well as I knew how. But now, with death staring me in the face, I could see that though I was a friendless “slave-boy,” I had not always done as well as I knew how; that I had not served God as I knew I ought, nor had I always set a good example before my fellow-slaves, nor warned them as well as I might, “to flee the wrath to come.” Then I prayed my Heavenly Father to spare me a little longer, that I might serve Him better; and in His mercy and gracious goodness, He did so; though when the fever was turning they gave me up; and I could hear them say, when they came to feel my pulse, “he is almost gone,” “it will soon be over,” &c., and then inquire if I knew them. I did, but was too weak to say so. I recollect with gratitude, the kindness of Mrs. H.A. Townsend, who sent me many delicacies and cooling drinks to soften the rigor of my disease; and though I suppose she has long since “passed away” and gone to her reward, may the blessing of those who are ready to perish, rest upon the descendants of that excellent woman. Capt. Helm was driving on in his milling, distillery and farming business. He now began to see the necessity of treating his slaves better by far than he had ever done before, and granted them greater privileges than he would have dared to do at the South. Many of the slaves he had sold, were getting their liberty and doing well. While I was staying with my master at Bath, he having little necessity for my services, hired me out to a man by the name of Joseph Robinson, for the purpose of learning me to drive a team. Robinson lived about three miles from the village of Bath, on a small farm, and was not only a poor man but a very mean one. He was cross and heartless in his family, as well as tyrannical and cruel to those in his employ; and having hired me as a “slave boy,” he appeared to feel at full liberty to wreak his brutal passion on me at any time, whether I deserved rebuke or not; nor did his terrible outbreaks of anger vent themselves in oaths, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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curses and threatenings only, but he would frequently draw from the cart-tongue a heavy iron pin, and beat me over the head with it, so unmercifully that he frequently sent the blood flowing over my scanty apparel, and from that to the ground, before he could feel satisfied. These kind of beatings were not only excessively painful, but they always reminded me of the blows I had so often received from the key, in the hand of Mrs. Helm, when I was but a little waiter lad; and in truth I must say that the effect of these heavy blows on the head, have followed me thus far through life; subjecting me to frequent and violent head-aches, from which I never expect to be entirely free. Even to this day I shudder at the thought, when I think how Robinson used to fly at me, swearing, foaming, and seeming to think there was no weapon too large or too heavy to strike me with. He and I were at one time logging with a yoke of oxen, which it was my business to drive. At that time rattle-snakes were numerous, and a great terror to the inhabitants. To be bitten by one of these poisonous reptiles was certain and almost instant death; hence, the greatest caution and constant vigilance was necessary to avoid them while at work. I had been sent with the oxen to draw a log to the pile, and when I came up to it, I observed that it appeared to be hollow; but stepping forward, with the chain in my hand, ready to attach it to the log, when, oh, horror! the warning rattle of a snake sounded like a death knell in my ears, proceeding from the log I was about to lay hold of. I was so much frightened by the sound, that I dropped the chain as though it were red hot, left my team, and ran with all the speed in my power, screaming “murder, murder!” as loud as I could. This proceeding, which was the fearful impulse of the moment, offended Robinson, and gave him another opportunity to beat me most cruelly. He was himself as much afraid of rattle-snakes as I; but he was the master and I the “slave boy,” which made a vast difference. He caught hold of me, and, with horrid oaths, beat me with his fist again and again; threatening me with awful punishment if I did not instantly return and bring the log to the desired spot. I never can forget the mortal agony I was in, while compelled by his kicks and blows to return and fasten the chain around the log containing the deadly serpent. I, however, succeeded with trembling hands, and drove the oxen, but keeping myself at the fartherest possible distance from them and the log. When I finally arrived at the pile, Mr. Robinson and some other men, cut a hole with an ax in the log, and killed the large, venomous rattle-snake that had occasioned me so much alarm and such a cruel beating. Nor was the uncontrollable and brutal passion of Robinson his only deficiency; he was mean as he was brutal. He had, at one time, borrowed a wagon of a neighbor living two miles distant, through a dense forest. On the day of the total eclipse of the sun, it entered his head that it would be fine sport, knowing my ignorance and superstition, to send me, just HDT WHAT? INDEX
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as the darkness was coming on, to return the borrowed wagon. I accordingly hitched the ox-team to it and started. As I proceeded through the wood, I saw, with astonishment and some alarm, that it was growing very dark, and thought it singular at that hour of the day. When I reached the place of my destination it was almost total darkness, and some persons, ignorant as myself, were running about, wringing their hands, and declaring that they believed the Day of Judgment had come, and such like expressions. The effect of all this was, however, very different from what my master had expected. I thought, of course, if the judgment day had come, I should be no longer a slave in the power of a heartless tyrant. I recollect well of thinking, that if indeed all things earthly were coming to an end, I should be free from Robinson’s brutal force, and as to meeting my Creator, I felt far less dread of that than of meeting my cross, unmerciful master. I felt that, sinful as I had been, and unworthy as I was, I should be far better off than I then was; driven to labor all day, without compensation; half starved and poorly clad, and above all, subjected to the whims and caprices of any heartless tyrant to whom my master might give the power to rule over me. But I had not much time for reflection, I hurried home; my mind filled with the calm anticipation that the end of all things was at hand; which greatly disappointed my expectant master, who was looking for me to return in a great fright, making some very ludicrous demonstration of fear and alarm. But after a few months more of hardship I was permitted to return to Capt. Helm’s, where I was treated much better than at Robinson’s, and much, better than the Captain used to treat his slaves. Capt. Helm, not having demand for slave labor as much as formerly, was in the practice of hiring out his slaves to different persons, both in and out of the village; and among others, my only sister was hired out to a professed gentleman living in Bath. She had become the mother of two or three children, and was considered a good servant. One pleasant Sabbath morning, as I was passing the house where she lived, on my way to the Presbyterian church, where I was sent to ring the bell as usual, I heard the most piteous cries and earnest pleadings issuing from the dwelling. To my horror and the astonishment of those with me, my poor sister made her appearance, weeping bitterly, and followed by her inhuman master, who was polluting the air of that clear Sabbath morning, with the most horrid imprecations and threatenings, and at the same time flourishing a large raw-hide. Very soon his bottled wrath burst forth, and the blows, aimed with all his strength, descended upon the unprotected head, shoulders and back of the helpless woman, until she was literally cut to pieces. She writhed in his powerful grasp, while shriek after shriek died away in heart-rending moanings; and yet the inhuman demon continued to beat her, though her pleading cries had ceased, until obliged to desist from the exhaustion of his own strength. What a spectacle was that, for the sight of a brother? The God HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of heaven only knows the conflict of feeling I then endured; He alone witnessed the tumult of my heart, at this outrage of manhood and kindred affection. God knows that my will was good enough to have wrung his neck; or to have drained from his heartless system its last drop of blood! And yet I was obliged to turn a deaf ear to her cries for assistance, which to this day ring in my ears. Strong and athletic as I was, no hand of mine could be raised in her defence, but at the peril of both our lives; — nor could her husband, had he been a witness of the scene, be allowed any thing more than unresisting submission to any cruelty, any indignity which the master saw fit to inflict on his wife, but the other’s slave. Does any indignant reader feel that I was wanting in courage or brotherly affection, and say that he would have interfered, and, at all hazards, rescued his sister from the power of her master; let him remember that he is a freeman; that he has not from his infancy been taught to cower beneath the white man’s frown, and bow at his bidding, or suffer all the rigor of the slave laws. Had the gentlemanly woman-whipper been seen beating his horse, or his ox, in the manner he beat my poor sister, and that too for no fault which the law could recognize as an offence, he would have been complained of most likely; but as it was, she was but a “slave girl,” — with whom the slave law allowed her master to do what he pleased. ... The Captain sold my aunt Betsy Bristol to a distinguished lawyer in the village, retaining her husband, Aaron Bristol, in his own employ; and two of her children he sold to another legal gentleman named Cruger. One day Captain Helm came out where the slaves were at work, and finding Aaron was not there, he fell into a great rage and swore terribly. He finally started off to a beach tree, from which he cut a stout limb, and trimmed it so as to leave a knot on the but end of the stick, or bludgeon rather, which was about two and a half feet in length. With this formidable weapon he started for Aaron’s lonely cabin. When the solitary husband saw him coming he suspected that he was angry, and went forth to meet him in the street. They had no sooner met than my master seized Aaron by the collar, and taking the limb he had prepared by the smaller end, commenced beating him with it, over the head and face, and struck him some thirty or more terrible blows in quick succession; after which Aaron begged to know for what he was so unmercifully flogged. “Because you deserve it,” was the angry reply. Aaron said that he had ever endeavored to discharge his duty, and had done so to the best of his ability; and that he thought it very hard to be treated in that manner for no offence at all. Capt. Helm was astonished at his audacity; but the reader will perceive that the slaves were not blind to the political condition of the country, and were beginning to feel that they had some rights, and meant to claim them. Poor Aaron’s face and head, however, was left in a pitiable condition after such a pummeling with a knotty stick. His face, covered with blood, was so swollen that he could hardly see for HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
some time; but what of that? Did he not belong to Capt. Helm, soul and body; and if his brutal owner chose to destroy his own property, certainly had he not a right to do so, without let or hindrance? Of course; such is the power that Slavery gives one human being over another. And yet it must be confessed that among the poor, degraded and ignorant slaves there exists a foolish pride, which loves to boast of their master’s wealth and influence. A white person, too poor to own slaves, is as often looked upon with as much disdain by the miserable slave as by his wealthy owner. This disposition seems to be instilled into the mind of every slave at the South, and indeed, I have heard slaves object to being sent in very small companies to labor in the field, lest that some passer-by should think that they belonged to a poor man, who was unable to keep a large gang. Nor is this ridiculous sentiment maintained by the slaves only; the rich planter feels such a contempt for all white persons without slaves, that he does not want them for his neighbors. I know of many instances where such persons have been under the necessity of buying or hiring slaves, just to preserve their reputation and keep up appearances; and even among a class of people who profess to be opposed to Slavery, have I known instances of the same kind, and have heard them apologize for their conduct by saying that “when in Rome, we must do as the Romans do.” Uncle Aaron Bristol was one of Capt. Helm’s slaves who had a large amount of this miserable pride; and for him to be associated with a white man in the same humble occupation, seemed to give him ideas of great superiority, and full liberty to treat him with all the scorn and sarcasm he was capable of, in which my uncle was by no means deficient. At this time the Captain owned a fine and valuable horse, by the name of Speculator. This horse, groomed by uncle Aaron, stood sometimes at Bath and sometimes at Geneva; and at the latter village another horse was kept, groomed by a white man. The white groom was not very well pleased with Aaron’s continual disparagement of the clumsy animal which my uncle called “a great, awkward plow-horse;” and then he would fling out some of his proud nonsense about “poor white people who were obliged to groom their own old dumpy horses,” &c. Well, things went on in this unpleasant manner for several weeks, when at last the white groom and Aaron met at Geneva, and the horse belonging to the former, designedly or accidentally, escaped from his keeper, and came with full speed, with his mouth wide open, after Speculator. When the fiery fellow had overtaken uncle Aaron he attempted to grasp the wethers of Speculator with his teeth, instead of which he caught Aaron on the inside of his thigh, near the groin, from whence he bit a large piece of flesh, laying the bone entirely bare; at the same moment flinging Aaron to the ground, some rods off; and the next instant he kicked Speculator down a steep embankment Aaron was taken up for dead, and Dr. Henry sent for, who dressed his wounds; and after several months’ confinement he finally recovered. It is probable that HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the biting and overthrow of Aaron saved his life, as he must have otherwise been killed in the encounter of the two horses. A while after his recovery, uncle Aaron succeeded in procuring a team and some kind of vehicle, in which he put his wife and children, and between two days, took “French leave” of his master as well as of the lawyer to whom his wife belonged. The lawyer, however, was far from being pleased when he missed his property, and immediately set his wits to work to reclaim her. All was kept secret as possible, but it was whispered about that it was to be done by a State’s warrant, for removing the clothing and furniture they had taken, and so, being thus arrested, “Madam Bristol” would be glad to return to her work in the lawyer’s kitchen. But Aaron was a smart, shrewd man, and kept out of their reach, where he soon found friends and employment, and could go where he pleased, without having an infuriated master to beat and disfigure him with a knotted stick, until his clothes were bespattered with blood. They appreciated their liberty, and lived and died in peace and freedom. Capt. Helm continued his old manner of treating slaves, dealing out their weekly allowance of corn or meal; but living as we now did, so much more intimately with white inhabitants, our condition was materially improved. The slaves became more refined in manners and in possession of far greater opportunities to provide for themselves, than they had ever before enjoyed, and yet it was Slavery. Any reverse in the fortunes of our master would be disadvantageous to us. Oh, how this fearful uncertainty weighed upon us as we saw that our master was not prospering and increasing in wealth; but we had not the dismal fears of the loathsome slave-pen, rice swamps, and many other things we should have to fear in Virginia. We were still slaves, and yet we had so much greater chance to learn from the kind, intelligent people about us, so many things which we never knew before, that I think a slave-trader would have found it a difficult task to take any one of us to a Southern slave market, if our master had so ordered it. The village of Bath is rather an out-of-the-way place, hemmed in on all sides by mountains of considerable height, leaving an opening on the north, through a pleasant valley, to the head of Crooked Lake. Produce of every kind, when once there, met a ready sale for the New York market. In the first settlement of the country this was the only outlet for the country produce, which was transported in rude boats or vessels called arks, built during the winter season to await the spring freshet; then they loaded them with wheat or other produce, and sent them to Baltimore or elsewhere. They used also to obtain great quantities of fine lumber, and floated it through the same rivers every spring; but it was attended with great loss of life and property. Bath assumed a warlike appearance during the last war with Great Britain; the public square was dotted all over with officers, marquees, and soldiers’ tents. Some of these soldiers were HDT WHAT? INDEX
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unprincipled and reckless men, who seemed to care very little what they did. One evening I was walking around the encampment in company with a Mr. James Morrison, a clerk in the land office, looking at the soldiers, until we came near a sentinel on duty. He kept his gun to his shoulder until we came near enough, and then he attempted to run me through with his bayonet. Young Morrison sprang forward, and seizing the musket, told me to run; I did so, which probably saved my life.
November 2, Sunday: New Jersey appoints a commission consisting of Lewis Condict, Alexander C. McWhorter, Aaron Ogden, James Parker and William S. Pennington, to settle the state’s border with New York. The dispute would nevertheless remain unsettled at this time.
SERMON PREACHED AT Dorchester ON THE FORENOON OF THE LORD’S DAY, NOVEMBER 2D, 1806 TO THOSE WHO ASSEMBLE IN THE SOUTH MEETING HOUSE IN DORCHESTER. BY THADDEUS MASON HARRIS, MINISTER OF DORCHESTER (Boston: Belcher & Armstrong, 1806).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1 day 2 of 11 M 1806 / In the forenoon a poor roving meeting, in the Afternoon more composed & more life O Williams was concernd in in a short tho’ livly testimony as follows “John preached unto the people the Baptism of repentance & remission of sins, he was declared unto them to be a bright & shining light to teach them the way of the Lord & to make his paths streight, this we must be brought into before we can know the Kingdom of the Son” Took tea at Saml Thurstons in company with Clarke Rodman from there we came home & I took a very affecting leave of my most endeared friend Isaac Austin who expects to leave us tomorrow morning for Easton NYork where his parents now reside. I love him beyond the power of my tongue or pen to describe. May he be preserved from evil, may the Lord be with him & bless him even to the end of his days. — I spent the remainder of the evening at D Rodmans our minds were so affected in parting with Isaac that we found but little to converse upon & set mostly silent. My mind was engaged in in secret fervant prayer for our preservation & that my dear Isaac might witness the protecting arm of divine Power thro’ every allotment in passing along this vale of tears ——————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1807
Judge William Potter sold the remainder of his interest in his mansion and estate “Little Rest” (later to be known as Kingston), Rhode Island to his relative Elisha R. Potter, and relocated to Genesee in upstate New York.
In the state of New York, some 300 people were in this year imprisoned for debt.
In the state of New York, Marinus Willett was appointed to a one-year term to replace De Witt Clinton.
The city of New-York was granted a northward extension of its underwater land rights along the Hudson and East rivers, 400 feet out from shore.
In upstate New York, Elias Williams started The Intelligencer, the 1st newspaper of Genesee County.
Jesse Hawley, while imprisoned for debt at Canandaigua, wrote thirteen essays under the name Hercules, proposing a canal across New York State. ERIE CANAL
The keel of the Lake Champlain steamboat Vermont was laid.
Charles Harford built a grist mill at the high falls of the Genesee at Frankfort (later Rochester, New York).
Daniel D. Tompkins was elected governor of New York (he would hold the office until 1817).
67 turnpike companies had by this point been chartered to build 3,000 miles of road through the state of New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Lansingburgh’s Farmer’s Register moved to Troy, New York.
Holt and Robbins’s Herkimer Farmer’s Monitor ceased publication. NEW YORK
The approximate date Benjamin Corey began publishing the Herkimer Pelican. NEW YORK
Christian Schultz traveled up the Mohawk River (he would later write about this). NEW YORK
Schenectady County, New York’s The Western Spectator ceased publication.
At Albany, New York, the State House was completed, at a cost exceeding the original $120,000 estimate. (Edifice has its complexes.)
When a ferry sank in New-York harbor, 30 passengers drowned. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS
“The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history.” — A.J.P. Taylor
January 27, Tuesday: The First Presbyterian Church of Marcellus, New York was organized.
The Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was occupied by French troops. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 7, Friday: In New-York, Robert Fulton launched his new steamboat, which he was calling Steam Boat at the moment and which he would name North River (this is the riverboat that is frequently referred to now as the Clermont).
August 9, Sunday: Robert Fulton had carefully negotiated a partnership with Chancellor Robert R. Livingston. This man Livingston seemed to be a mere judge of the court of chancery of the State of New York, and yet in fact his deep background political influence was such that he was known among the knowing there as the 2d most powerful person, after the governor, in the State. Livingston arranged that, if he and Fulton could merely drive their steamboat four miles along the Hudson River in one hour, the government would grant them an enormous privilege: a 20-year monopoly of steamboat service. No patent application would be necessary and yet no competition would be permitted. For twenty years they would be allowed to charge whatever they could induce their passengers and customers to pay. So on this day there came about the initial trials of Fulton’s unpatented boat, described at the time as “an ungainly craft looking precisely like a backwoods sawmill mounted on a scow and set on fire.” It made a successful 1-mile run on Manhattan Island’s East River. (Soon it would steam up the river from New York Harbor to Albany in 32 hours, and back down HDT WHAT? INDEX
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with the current in 30.) Fulton would christen it, inventively, Steam Boat, although later it would be known as the North River and we know it now as the Clermont. Because of the events of this day, you have probably been led to suppose that Fulton invented the steamboat, as a way to harness heat and force it to produce forward motion. No, what this inventor invented was a government-sponsored monopoly, a way for rich people to get richer by putting their own steamboats on the Hudson River while forestalling anyone else from doing so. Which is to say that, instead of inventing ways to translate steam power into mechanical power, Fulton was into inventing ways to translate the political power of office and lobbying into the economic power of money.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1 day 9 of 8 M 1807 / I’m just going to meeting, not in so humble a frame of mind as at some times, but hope to get right before night — I can truly say I am agreeably disappointed for when I took my seat in meeting as a precious mantle was spread over my mind, & instead of having to wrestle with my own spirit, the necessity was measurably taken away - the silent part of the meeting continued till nearly the usual time of its breaking - when Elizabeth Coggeshall rose & delivered a testimony as near Gospel as any I have heard for some time, on the subjects of Affliction, love & the necessity of Subduing our own carnal, wills I know not when I have more witnessed the Baptizing effect of any testimony — Our Afternoon meeting was a very uncommonly favord time -Richard Mott stood full two hours declaring the truth with much life & power - I think his testimony this afternoon of much more use than any he has delivered here in his visit - when he sat down there was a very remarkable Solemnity over the Meeting which continued for some time when E Coggeshall closed in solemn supplication - Took tea at C Rodmans in company with my dear H who came to town this morning & took meetings with us today, & went directly out after tea so that I have had but little oppertunity with her. She was preciously near my heart, & should have been glad to have enjoyed more of her company - In the evening sat a little while with D R & wife with my mind sweetly ruminating & sometimes speaking on the favors of the day - It has been a precious day to me for which I desire to be very thankful RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 10, Monday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2 day 10 of 8 M / Favor’d with the renewal of life thro’ the day - in the forepart of the evening Set a while in the shop of WC where I experienced a degree of exercise which was peerhaps priffitable to myself, in the latter part called at J Earls where was R Mott & wife R was sociable & some of his conversation was instructing, but he spoke on one subject in which I differed with him, I took the liberty to advance my opinion in opposition HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
to his but did not defend it much [which gave him a chance to harp{?} largely upon his, all scratched out] as the company was large. I felt embarrassed at entering into much argument which gave him a good opportunity to expatiate largely in favor of his own sentiment, & I was willing to be accounted a fool before them -the evening did not close so sweetly as I could wish — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 11, Tuesday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3 day 11 of 8 N / Feeling considerable exercise from last evenings conversation, thought I should not feel easy to let R Mott go out of town without further labor on the subject - & thinking it probable he might be in Obadiah Williams shop took a walk up & found him there. we pretty soon resumed the Subject, & after a lengthy debate it evidently appear’d that meither of us was likly to relinquish our opinions, but we parted in love towards each other —-Setting in company with a friend this evening, he said “Well Stephen what doest thou think of the signs of the times among us “(alluding to some circumstances now operating in our Moy [Monthly] Meeting), I reply’d, “The times are low what shall be done about it, weep between the poarch & the Alter”, he reply’d “No that will not do, every man must build the wall over against his own door -working with one hand, holding the sword in the other against the enemys” which reply seemed so peertinent that it made an impresssion of some usefulness on my mind RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 12, Wednesday: France made the demand of July 19th an ultimatum — Portugal must also declare war on Great Britain, arrest all British subjects in the country, and confiscate all British assets.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 12 of 8 M 1807 / The precious life has been felt sweetly to arise in my mind, at seasons, thro’ the day, it would have risen much higher but was prevented for the want of entering into the closet - Jeremiah Austin Junr & wife came to town this forenoon. I was glad to see them, for I love them much RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 16: Robert Fulton accomplished a steamboat run around the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
British troops landed near Copenhagen to prevent Napoléon from taking the Danish fleet. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 17, Monday: Robert Fulton’s North River (which we now know as the Clermont) began chugging up the Hudson River from New-York, averaging 5 mph. By nightfall it reached Haverstraw Bay. It would accomplish a successful round trip to Albany.
Carl Maria von Weber was appointed “Geheimer Sekretär” to Duke Ludwig Friedrich Alexander in Württemberg. He was responsible to administer the Duke’s affairs and instruct his children in music.
Robert Fulton left New-York aboard his steamboat Clermont. He would arrive in Albany in 32 hours. The journey would prove the practicality of motorized water transport.
Nè l’un, nè l’altro, a dramma giocoso by Simon Mayr to words of Anelli, was performed for the initial time, at Teatro alla Scala, Milan.
Augusta Byron married Lieutenant-Colonel George Leigh. GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
August 18, Tuesday: Jérôme Bonaparte became King of Westphalia.
Robert Fulton reached Governor Livingston’s home, Clermont, at 1PM. His average speed had been 4½ miles an hour.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3 day 18 of 8 M 1807 / As I was standing near the Market Cart of our friend H.A. there came up a poor old black Man formerly the property of a member of our society & very rich as to wordly possessions - As he came & looked into the cart H asked him if he wanted meat, he said a little peace which lay there - H asked how much money he had & whether he thought what he had would purchase it, he said he feared not & wanted it weighed & found it would not, the meat was cut, which come to two cents less than the money he had, as he took the meat he held it in one hand, & the remaining two cents in the other, & said “here is all the Money poor old negro got, & I am eighty years old” - My mind was affected before but when the poor old man uttered those words in such plaintive accents, my Soul was moved or touched to the quick with tenderness toward him I know not when I have experienced so humbling sensations - when I ate my own dinner I ate it with an humble thankful heart, to the God & father of mercies that I was so bountifully provided for I was lead to consider the many favors I enjoy, & to feel a sense of the sufferings of others - It is remarkable that the estate of this poor old black mans master is now all gone & out of the family & his children come to be as poor as this old black man. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 19, Wednesday: Robert Fulton steamed north out of Clermont, and reached Albany, New York in slightly more than 8 hours. The entire journey thus had required 28 hours and 45 minutes.
Jane C. Webb was born at Ritwell House near Birmingham, England. Her father Thomas Webb, Esq. was wealthy and her early years would be spent in luxury — luxury that would not endure.67 JANE WEBB LOUDON
The Emperor Napoléon suppressed the Tribunate, making his control of policy more effective.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4 day 19 of 8 M 1807 / Arose & occupied my time before breakfast in transcribing Mary Mitchells Epistles the Quarterly meetings constituting this Yearly Meeting — Most of the day & evening an insensibility of mind to religious impressions, but I trust the good spirit was several times felt to be near - A little prayer now rises in my heart alike this “Oh Lord keep me near, bring me near the fountain of life” RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 21, Friday: Robert Fulton completed his first round trip to Albany by arriving in New-York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6 day 21 of 8 M 1807 / There is scarce anything will affect me more than a relation or sight of human sufferings, & just before dinner my mind was deeply penetrated at hearing the Sufferings of a poor black woman last Winter My mind has been favord to feel a Sweet flow of life for which my desire is to be thankful Spent the evening at R Taylors except a short clall towards the close at C R’s — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 22, Saturday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7 day 22 of 8 M / Had conferences with two friends on a difficult subject in society, one discovered a painful disposition the other accorded with me in sentiment — I am thankful & can say humbly thankful that my mind is preserved from the mixture & feel love in my heart to flow toward all - It has been an highly favord day to me - Oh saith my soul may due returns be made to the bountiful giver of every blessing & favor, my heart hath felt the humbling influence to arise this evening with renewed fervant desires for preservation from every hurtful thing — This evening made agreeable calls at C R; D R & J Es RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 67. Information about Jane Webb Loudon has been extrapolated from Jack Kramer’s WOMEN OF FLOWERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 23, Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1 day 23 of 8 M 1807 / Our Meeting this morng was a good composed time to me & I thought generally favord - Our dear old friend Mary Mitchell Said “While her eyes had surveyed her young friends she had felt her mind disposed to call to them in the language of the royal prophet “let the young men & mainds, Old men & children praise the Lord” She feelingly exhorted us to “attend to that inspeaking word which if attended to would work deliverance from Sin & an enlargement in the truth, she sweetly illustrated a religious life, & desired we might so live as to insure a reward of peace in the Solemn moment hastning on all — In the Afternoon the meeting was without preaching, but not without speaking for a drunken Indian woman came who disturbed us very much - I thought the disturbance was no disadvantage to me, as it drove me more to the center than perhaps I Should otherwise have got - After meeting C R - O W & myself took tea & spent the evening at D Buffums very agreeably & I hope to a degree of proffit - while setting there my thoughts were often turnd towards my precious H with desires she could partake with us - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1808
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft matriculated at Union College in Schenectady, New York.68
William Learned Marcy graduated from Brown University and began practicing law in Troy, New York.
In New-York, the American Academy of Fine Arts was incorporated.
In New York, 1,300 people were in this year imprisoned for debt, up from 300 the year before.
In New York, Printer John Wiley was born.
In New York, pork, potash, wheat, whiskey, etc. worth $100,000 were being shipped from the Genesee River. 15 schooners were plying the ports along the shore of Lake Ontario.
In New York, Daniel P. Tompkins, the “farmer’s son,” was elected governor.
Martin Van Buren moved to Hudson, New York.
In New York, stagecoach service was inaugurated between Batavia and Canandaigua.
68. The name “Union” had been chosen for this new college in expression of a desire that the college never affiliate itself with any particular Protestant religious denomination, such as the Presbyterians or the Congregationalists; they would have named themselves after a major benefactor, as for instance Brown recently had done — except that as luck would have it no such major benefactor ever appeared. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
In New York, daily mail service began between Utica and Canandaigua.
Former New York land agent Charles Williamson died at sea.
In New York, New Town was renamed Elmira.
April 4, Monday: A “Report on Public Roads and Canals” by Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin was made in pursuance of a resolution of the US Senate on March 2, 1807. ERIE CANAL
Jesse Hawley’s treatise “Observations on Canals” predicted that a canal across New York would greatly increase the state’s trade and importance (this consisted of his series of 13 pseudonymous articles composed while he had been imprisoned for debt in Canandaigua). The New York legislature introduced a bill to fund a feasibility study for a New York State canal, retaining Judge James Geddes to make surveys of routes across the state, to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. He completed his study and reported that the project could work despite the 500-foot change in elevation from west to east.
A pamphlet was published proposing a wooden flume linking New-York with Philadelphia.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd 4th of 4th M / The day has passed as many, yea very many others have with a retrograde motion as respects devotion of heart - In the eveng called at Saml Gibbs on buisness & then a few minutes at CR’s RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
January 5, Tuesday: Robert Fulton left New-York to go upstate.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 5 of 1 M / It has been a day of feeling, but I fear I have not obeyed my feelings, so as to insure peace — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
January 6, Wednesday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4 day 6 of 1 M / Busily occupied at Trade. I dont find yet, that the general obstruction of buinsess occasioned by the embargo, effects mine. I desire to be thankful for all my favors.— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
January 7, Thursday: Robert Fulton got married with Harriet Livingston in Teviotdale, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 7th of 1st M 1808 / Favor’d with a good quiet meeting, had a Short visit this afternoon at the shop from R J our conversation occasioned some proffitable feelings — Set the evening at C Rs, rather pensively, but with nothing particularly depressive on my mind RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
March: In New York, Saratoga County physician Dr. Billy J. Clark read Dr. Benjamin Rush’s AN INQUIRY INTO THE EFFECT OF SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS ON THE HUMAN BODY AND MIND. ALCOHOLISM
March 20, Sunday: Martin Van Buren was appointed surrogate of Columbia County, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 20th of 3rd M 1808 / Owing to its being a very rainy day our meetings were very small, but six women this afternoon they were silent & to me very Scattered Seasons - took tea at Aunt M Goulds — Spent the eveng as usual on this day of the week with my very endearing H — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 6, Wednesday: The New York State legislature approved the incorporation of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 6 of 4 M 1808 / It has been a favor’d day, & my mind was particularly refreshed while setting at D W’s this evening RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 30, Saturday: In New York, Saratoga County physician Dr. Billy J. Clark formed the Union Temperance Society of Moreau and Northumberland. ALCOHOLISM
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 30th of 4 M / Nothing material; time has passed & no Note taken but from its loss — On reflecting on the time that I am spending & little proffit arising, I often feel Sorrowful. Oh that I had resolution to have things littlr [?] RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
July: New York’s US Senator Samuel Latham Mitchell requested that Thomas Jefferson grant permission for stranded Chinese businessman Punqua Wingchong to slip through the embargo to return to Asia aboard John Jacob Astor’s ship Beaver. Local merchants suspected, however, that this was a ruse, so Astor could ship goods to China. Permission was not obtained, for this businessman’s servant Quak Te to travel back home with him, and eventually this stranded Chinese servant, in despair in a rented room in Nantucket, would hang himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1809
Thomas Jefferson was asked for a pledge of federal aid to build a canal along the Mohawk River valley, from Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean:
It is a splendid project and may be executed a century hence, but it is little short of madness to think of it at this day.
Later
New York engineer James Geddes surveyed a possible route for a state canal. (This would eventually be adopted.) ERIE CANAL
Solomon Chadwick settled on the shore of Lake Erie, founding a community of Chadwick’s Bay, New York. (This would become Dunkirk.)
Temperance author Timothy Shay Arthur (TEN NIGHTS IN A BAR ROOM AND WHAT I SAW THERE) was born in Newburgh, New York.
Albert Brisbane was born to Batavia, New York postmaster James Brisbane and his wife Mary.
Silas Newell arrived from the Hudson Valley and built a house and planted apple and pear trees in a place that for awhile would be known as Newell’s Settlement (later Wyoming, New York). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Philip Hooker’s new Capitol building at Albany, New York was occupied by the state government as well as the Mayor’s office, City Council and Board of Supervisors.
The first Christian religious services were held in Canadice, New York.
Allegany County, New York court judge Philip Church purchased two male slaves, paying $100 each.
Lenox, Massachusetts, native Enos Stone acquired a farm at the Falls of the Genesee River, part of the future Rochester, New York.
The ballot boxes in front of Willard’s Tavern in Schenectady, New York were found to have been tampered with, Federal votes having been substituted for Republican ones.
January: Colonel John C. Stevens of Hoboken visited Chancellor Robert R. Livingston at Clermont, New York and they built an iceboat.
January 20, Friday: James Geddes recommended to the New York State legislature that they dig a canal along the Hudson-Erie route. ERIE CANAL
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 20th of 1 M / Nothing material to insert the times are dull & streightening as to the outward, the inward is no better but with respect to the outward I believe it is my duty to confess that I am wonderfully helped from day to day being favord with a little incoming tho’ small but sufficient to answer our present needs due thanks be given to him who helpeth RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
February 24, Friday: Asa Fitch, America’s first fulltime entomologist, was born in Salem, New York, to doctor and judge Asa Fitch and Abigail Martin Fitch. (The Fitches were descended from the Brewsters of Plymouth — which is neither here nor there.) First and second report on the noxious, beneficial and other insects of the State of New York: made to the state agricultural society, pursuant to an appropriation for this purpose from the legislature of the state (C. Van Benthuysen)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan sat with a glass at a nearby London coffee house as his new Drury Lane Theatre burned to the ground: “A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
6 day 24 of 2 M / A friend (R M) called to see me to converse on some occurences that took place at meeting yesterday our views were correspondent & I hope the matter well be helped, love & unity is a very desirable object but there are two friends among us that are wide from it - Set the eveng at home & read The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by T Clarkson, he is a wonderful man & worthy of praise for his able & zealous activity in promoting the object RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
March 8, Wednesday: Samuel H. Hammond was born in Bath, New York, a son of Lazarus Hammond, founder of the nearby village of Hammondport. He would be educated at Franklin Academy in Plattsburgh, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4 day 8 of 3 M / My dear frd P Dunham was over & took dinner with us — Sam Vinson & wife spent the Afternoonn & eveng I was obliged to leave them in the eveng to meet at B Hadwens with the Directors of the African Society
March 10, Friday: The ice went out of the Hudson River for the year. At some point during this month Fulton’s Steamboat would be able to go back into Hudson River service. NEW YORK
Samuel Wesley began a series of lectures on a variety of musical subjects at the Royal Institution, London.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6 day 10 of 3 M Nothing worth inseerting the mind in a lean poor State — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
December 1, Friday: Economic competition being decidedly mean-spirited and un-American, Robert Fulton, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, and Colonel John C. Stevens of Hoboken agreed to a compromise. Fulton and Livingston were to be assigned a steamboat monopoly on all New York State waters, the run to New Brunswick, New Jersey, plus all steam navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers while Colonel Stevens was to be assigned a monopoly on Chesapeake Bay, all steam navigation of the Connecticut, Delaware, Santee, and Savannah Rivers, plus the run along Paumanok Long Island Sound between New-York and Providence, Rhode Island. The division being arranged, they could proceed to soak their customers to the maximum extent feasible.
In Newport, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 1st of 12th Mo 1809// Perhaps I have a little more Life than yesterday - Sister E spent the eveng with us & staid all night HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
December 6, Wednesday: KNICKERBOCKER’S HISTORY OF NEW YORK by “Diedrich Knickerbocker” (the 26- year-old Washington Irving) was published by Inskeep and Bradford of Philadelphia.
READ THE FULL TEXT
This would go through many editions, translations, revisions, and reprintings during the author’s lifetime. In 1812 Irving would negotiate with the Philadelphia publisher for a revised edition correcting some misprints, altering spelling and punctuation throughout, eliminating various allusions to chivalry and the classics, condensing the comic preamble on world history, and deleting various references to Knickerbocker’s problems as an historian. About 1/10th of the material would be replaced, leaving the book still at 130,000 words. Among the additions would be a “Further Account of the Author,” Chapters 4 and 5 of Book II which narrate the exploration for the New Amsterdam settlement and Oloffe’s dream, and the history of the Long Pipes and Short Pipes in Chapter 6 of Book IV (a satire of American political parties which replaced the quarrel of the Squareheads and Platterbreeches). In 1815 Irving would desire a 3d edition of A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, illustrated by the drawings of Washington Allston and C.R. Leslie. Irving would continue to revise A HISTORY OF NEW YORK periodically over the next 30 years, until the Author’s Revised Edition, G.P. Putnam’s collected edition of his writings, in 1848. Although a subsequent edition in 1854 would contain a number of minor corrections and revisions supplied by Irving, and a Grolier Club edition in 1886, after Irving’s death, would reprint A HISTORY OF NEW YORK with additional small changes based on Irving’s 1848 manuscript, for all practical purposes the last major form of the text would be per the 1848 Author’s Revised Edition. For it, Irving would revise Books V, VI, and VII, rework the Peter Stuyvesant section, add material on Van Rensselaer, delete the allusions to Jefferson’s policies, delete passages regarded as “coarse,” soften the satire of the Dutch, polish the style, and add “The Author’s Apology,” making this 1848 text some 7,000 words longer overall than previous editions. In 1848 he was 65, a revered American man of letters, a diplomat, and an international celebrity. The edition of A HISTORY OF NEW YORK issued 1848 would be a vastly different book from the version he had written as a young unknown.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 6 of 12 Mo // Pretty much today as Yesterday — Sister R R is quite ill today with a Severe cold — HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1810
In upstate New York, Buffalo was incorporated.
In upstate New York, Jamestown was founded.
The approximate date a windmill was built at Orient, New York, on Paumanok Long Island.
There were more than 200 sloops on the Hudson. Alvin Bronson hired a gang of carpenters, placed them under a Mr. Bassett, took them to Oswego Falls, New York to cut the frame for a vessel, built her at Oswego — and launched her in the autumn as the Charles and Ann, placing her under the command of John Hall.
92,677 men were currently enrolled in the New York State militia.
Francis Brown, driven ashore by a storm at the mouth of the Genesee River while traveling by canoe from Detroit, Michigan, to Rome, New York, ambled up the river and discovered the high falls of the Genesee. Returning later in the year from Rome, he moved to the west bank of the Genesee (Rochesterville).
The Frankfort Tract, on the future site of Rochester, was bought from grist mill owner Charles Harford by Francis Brown, his brother Matthew, and Thomas Mumford and John McKay.
Work commenced on a wooden bridge across the Genesee at Main Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
In upstate New York, Amos Eaton began lecturing in botany at the Catskill Botanical School, publishing a small textbook on the subject.
Between this year and 1813, three volumes of HISTOIRE DES ARBRES FORESTIERS DE L’AMERIQUE SEPTENTRIONALE would be being published by the younger François André Michaux.
An aristocratic New York politician, DeWitte Clinton, became a booster of the proposal for a humongous Erie Canal engineering project. (How do you know when you’ve won? –When some almighty dude like DeWitte Clinton takes your idea away from you.)
At Pittsfield, Massachusetts, one of the farsighted guys who had been an early daddy of the idea of a humongous Erie Canal engineering project in upstate New York, Elkanah Watson, organized the initial county fair in these United States of America (he’s now credited as “The Father of America’s County and State Fairs”).
Daddy HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
February 8, Thursday: Articles of agreement were signed at New Haven, Connecticut, creating the firm of Townsend, Bronson & Co., comprised of Jacob Townsend, Alvin Bronson, and ship’s master Sheldon Thompson, to engage in maritime commerce in New York State.
Napoléon places Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, and the Basque country under military rule.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 8 of 2 Mo// At meeting my tooth Ached so that I was not in a situation to be very much edifyed but doubtless more might have been experienced if I had been more Watchful — Hannah Dennis & Abigail Sherman Dined with us & spent the Afternoon with the Addition of M Williams & Sister E & also Joseph — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
February 16, Friday: John Richardson was appointed Superintendent of New York’s Onondaga Salt Springs.
The Grand Duchy of Frankfurt (Main) was created, under French control. Prince-Archbishop Karl Theodor Anton Maria, Baron von Dalberg of Regensburg became Grand Duke of Frankfurt.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 16 of 2 M // Nothing material, but the usual rounds ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
March 13, Tuesday: George Gordon, Lord Byron and Hobhouse left Smyrna and slept at Han, near the river Halesus.
The New York State Senate passes a resolution calling for Governeur Morris, Stephen Van Rensselaer, DeWitte Clinton, Simeon De Witt, William North, Thomas Eddy, and Peter B. Porter to be appointed commissioners to explore routes for a canal across the state, and to recommend improvements to Onondaga Lake. ERIE CANAL
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 13 of 3 Mo// Again the usual rounds & but little else, my cold seems better for which I desire to be thankful with all the rest of my favors. — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
March 15, Thursday: David Ruggles was born in a free black family of Lyme, Connecticut, David Ruggles, Senior and Nancy Ruggles.
The New York State House of Representatives concurred with the Senate’s resolution calling for Governeur Morris, Stephen Van Rensselaer, DeWitte Clinton, Simeon De Witt, William North, Thomas Eddy, and Peter B. Porter to be appointed commissioners to explore routes for a canal across the state, and to recommend improvements to Onondaga Lake. ERIE CANAL
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 15th of 3 M 1810// I had a poor dull meeting, but the fault was my own. Oh when shall I experience more of the fullness. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
July: Robert Fulton left New-York for Teviotdale, New York.
DeWitte Clinton visited the future Rochesterville, New York area while scouting a canal route. ERIE CANAL
July 1, Sunday: DeWitte Clinton’s boat arrived at Albany, New York before daylight. He and the Eddys put up at Gregory’s tavern. A meeting of the canal commissioners was held at the Surveyor-General’s office. All of the commissioners were present except Porter, who would arrive that evening. Morris and Van Rensselaer was making the journey by land; the others by water. General North was to meet the boat at Utica. ERIE CANAL
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 1st of 7th Mo// At Meeting this forenoon Our Dear H Dennis was concerned in a Sweet testimony alsso D Buffum in a few Words. to me it was a good Meeting — In the Afternoon We (ie) my self & Wife went down to my fathers intending to go from there to meeting but his Clock being much to slow we got deceived in the time of day & when we got into the meeting house Yard the Meeting was gatherd & still. I took out my Watch & found it was half an hour past the time of gathering, unwilling to disturb the meeting we turn’d & came to my fathers again & spent the Afternoon — In the eveng I called at D Ws D Rs & J Es ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Our national birthday, Wednesday the 4th of July:69 Steele White of Georgia marveled at the skill with which Thomas Jefferson’s “illumined mind could pen a ‘Declaration of Independence’.”70 DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
An entertainment headlined as “Columbias Independence” was presented at the Washington Theatre in Washington City.
After a delay in Albany, New York for the proper celebration of our Independence Day, DeWitte Clinton’s party departed at 4 PM, getting precisely as far as Willard’s Tavern in the city’s 3rd ward.
In Connecticut, New Haven’s citizens had a “plowing match.” CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
Reviewing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony no.5 for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote that Beethoven’s instrumental music “opens up to us the kingdom of the gigantic and the immeasurable. Glowing beams shoot through this kingdom’s deep night, and we become aware of gigantic shadows that surge up and down, enclosing us more and more narrowly and annihilating everything within us, leaving only the pain of that interminable longing, in which every pleasure that had quickly arisen with sounds of rejoicing sinks away and founders, and we live on, rapturously beholding the spirits themselves, only in this pain, which, consuming love, hope, and joy within itself, seeks to burst our breast asunder with a full voiced consonance of all the passions.” He sure had enjoyed the heck out of the performance! Don’t you wish you could have been there?
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 4th of 7th Mo// It has been a day of much noise & parade about streets, being what is called Independance but no accident has happened that I have heard off from any of the Military exercises - A little boy fell from a Chamber Window (Gilbert Chases Son) but was not very much hurt - My H spent the day out at Jonathon Dennis’s with Sister Joanna, I took tea with them. - ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
69. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, or Hathorne’s, 6th birthday. 70. AN ORATION, COMMEMORATIVE OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, DELIVERED ON THIS FOURTH OF JULY, 1810 (Savannah GA) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
July 5, Thursday: Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in a manger in Bethel, Connecticut.
We don’t know because photography hadn’t been invented yet — but this may have been more or less what he looked like as an infant:
There had been rain during the night. While waiting for their captain to return from a trip into Schenectady, New York the DeWitte Clinton party climbed a high hill to view the city and the river valley. They got under way at 9 o’clock, pass the mansion built by Sir William Johnson and then past a decades-old native American pictograph on an elevated rock. They tied up at Cook’s tavern for the night.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5th of 7 Mo// This is the first time that I recollect of ever staying from meeting on a week day, on any temporal buisness. It seem’d as if it was best not to go, being out of town Yesterday Afternoon put me behindhand, but I was glad to find that I did not feel indifferent when the hour came. I found a reluctance at staying at home & hardly knew how to forego my usual practice —- This Afternoon met as one with a committee to consider of selling a lot about Sixty feet on Tanner’s Street & 70 deep, to O Williams to build a Tanery on, & tho’ I am not convinced of the good policy of disposing of the land, consented to it for various reasons. — Saw Gideon Wilbour an old apprentice of my fathers who low lives in NYork State. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
July 18, Wednesday: DeWitte Clinton’s party arrived at the outlet of Onondaga Lake in New York.
George Gordon, Lord Byron returned to Athens.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 18 of 7 Mo// My mind was quickened this morning with a little of true spirit of life, which I love to feel, & has lasted in good & comfortable degree thro’ the [day], may I be thankful for every revival & renewal of every tendering Season that occurs. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
July 19, Thursday: DeWitte Clinton’s party reached the home of Dr. Jonas C. Baldwin, the site of the village of Baldwinsville, New York, at 11 PM and spent the night.
The 34-year-old Queen Louise of Prussia died at her father’s estate near Strelitz, attended by her husband King Friedrich Wilhelm III.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 19 of 7 Mo// We had a good precious meeting, at least it was such to me, for the quickening spirit was very sweetly vouchsafed to my mind —- A Robinsons was concerned in humble reverend supplication — I wrote a few lines to Sarah Fish & directed it to Philadelphia We spent the day at my fathers ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
July 29, Sunday: In upstate New York, DeWitte Clinton’s party left the Genesee River and headed west on Ridge Road.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 29 of 7 Mo// Our meeting this Morning Was silent - In the Afternoon D Buffum in a very lively manner repeated the first Psalm with little or no remarks upon it — Both mettings were poor roving seasons to me — After meeting D Rodman & I went to the Work & Alms houses. Sister Elzabeth took tea & spent the evening with us - ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
September 28, Friday: At New-York’s Corlear’s Hook, Robert Fulton was unable to demonstrate that his underwater cable-cutter could set loose moored enemy shipping.
October 30, Tuesday: Robert Fulton demonstrated a model of his torpedo ship.
The Prussian government nationalized both Catholic and Protestant lands and assumed control over them.
Mexican revolutionaries overwhelmed Spanish troops at Monte de las Cruces.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 30th 10 M 1810// My dear father & mother have this day made a visit to our dear cousins Zacheius Chase & family & while setting with them this evening my mind was affected with the HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
consideration that they are all old folk & before many revolving suns will be numbered with the dead. they expressed much Satisfaction which amounted to joy that they had made them one more visit —- I had an opportunity of performing what I thought was a religious duty toward W——C—— he seemd much affected & deeply sensible of his situation. I encouraged him to Close in with the present visitation for he knew not how soon the thread of life would be cut, to seek retirement & be faithful — My H spent the Afternoon with Aunt A Carpenter - ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
October 31, Wednesday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 31st of 10 Mo// Here endeth the day & the Month, & that is the principal that I can say about it - The time has passed & is gone & fear to but little purpose. — Oh how lean & poor I am in every sense — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
November 1, Thursday: At New-York’s Corlear’s Hook, Robert Fulton successfully demonstrated his underwater cable-cutting knife.
As of this date Napoléon’s Berlin and Milan decrees were revoked in regard to the United States of America. Normal commerce between the two nations was resumed.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 1 of 11 M 1810// Our number at meeting was Small & several of our heads absent, attending the Quarterly Meeting this day held at Somersett It was to me a dull season as to life tho’ I had some proffitable reflections — I forgot to mention in yesterdays insertion that I spent the eveng at C J Tenny’s our conversation was on various religious Subjects & our African School - I believe it was a Satisfactory opportunity to him & it was to me as I had an opportunity of explaining some of our customs & doctrines which he was not acquainted with. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1811
James Cooper left off being a midshipman in the US Navy in order to get married with Susan Augusta DeLancey, a descendant of one of the early governors of the New York colony. For several years he would occupy himself in managing his bride’s estates in Winchester County, New York.
In the state of New York, the city of Albany began to get its drinking water from the Maezlandt Kill, a creek, bringing this into a receiving reservoir through an iron main and then distributing it through wooden mains. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
May 3, Friday: British and Portuguese forces threw back the French at Fuentes de Oñoro, just inside Spain southwest of Salamanca.
French forces laid siege to Tarragona in Catalonia.
Henry Stephens Randall was born to General Roswell Randall and Harriet Stephens Randall of Shelburne, Vermont. He would relocate as a young boy from Madison County, New York to Cortland, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 3rd of 5th Mo// It is now 1// 2 past 2 O C P M & time to expect our friends from Greenwich. I have been on the house top with a Spy glass several times since dinner & saw three sloops coming down the river & thought one of them was the bearer of them but as they came nigher I was mistaken A quarter before 4 OClock the packet arrived after a passage of seven hours down the river, they were all well & been so since their absence. I was very glad to see them & particularly my dear H who never left me for so long before, Since we were married — Sister Joanna being much unwell with the ear Ach my H went there in the evening. — ————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 26, Monday: British forces took Batavia (Djakarta) while the Dutch defenders retreated to Semarang.
A Catskill jury convicted Amos Eaton of forgery in connection with a foreclosed property and packed him off to a life sentence at New York’s Newgate Prison, in Greenwich Village. The prisoner would continually maintain his utter innocence and, during the following four years, would be teaching botany to the prison agent’s son John Torrey (who would afterward become a botanist). This prisoner would also, from prison, be publishing a manuscript on mineralogy. BOTANIZING
Upon his release, Eaton would be spending a year at Yale College, studying botany, chemistry, and mineralogy under Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr. and Eli Ives.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2 day 26 of 8 Mo// The day has passed much as usual. In the evening we called to see Elizabeth Coggeshall a little while ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1812
A new edition of Washington Irving’s A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, by “Diedrich Knickerbocker.”
READ THE FULL TEXT
John Walker built the 1st frame house in Canadice, New York.
Canal engineer James Geddes surveyed a route for a possible Chemung Canal, reporting to the New York canal commissioners.
The New York State canal commission was denied funds.
The British navy stored its prize vessels and captured US warships in the harbor of Skenesborough (Whitehall), New York for the coming winter.
A stone arsenal was built near Batavia, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Hamilton College was founded in Clinton, New York and Gerrit Smith enrolled.
In Albany, New York, a Female Academy was established. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
In the US presidential election, with President James Madison bidding for a second term in office, DeWitte Clinton of New York received 89 electoral votes, the incumbent received 128, and the incumbent of course won the election and became the President-Elect.71 The only ringer in this was that 21 of Madison’s votes had 3 come from the owners of black slaves, who were of course themselves voting the /5ths constitutional vote of their slaves (read your Constitution, fellow) in the pursuit of the interests of this property of theirs. This made the voters of the North very angry, and there was talk about how much they were at the mercy of something they were learning to term “niggerocracy.” It made them realize that, even if their Northern white male candidate had had more electoral votes than that Southern white male one, that Southern white male candidate would still have won over their Northern white male one. There was something about this which seemed, in retrospect, somehow unfair. “All we’re asking for is a level playing field!” “Freedom and justice for all!” The groundwork was being laid for the New York City draft riots of 1863, during which free Northern black citizens would be hanged and burned on the street lamp-poles because angry white citizens believed it was the fault of these free Northern black citizens that white men were being forced to go off and fight the Southern white owners of Southern black slaves.
American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a
Presidential Political Electoral Candidate Party Votes
1789 GEORGE WASHINGTON No formally organized party 692
JOHN ADAMS No formally organized party 34
JOHN JAY No formally organized party 9
R. H. HARRISON No formally organized party 6
JOHN RUTLEDGE No formally organized party 6
JOHN HANCOCK No formally organized party 4
GEORGE CLINTON No formally organized party 3
SAMUEL HUNTINGTON No formally organized party 2
JOHN MILTON No formally organized party 2
JAMES ARMSTRONG No formally organized party 1 71. At 5'4'', James Madison had been the first American president regularly to wear trousers (trousers not here depicted): HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a
Presidential Political Electoral Candidate Party Votes
BENJAMIN LINCOLN No formally organized party 1
EDWARD TELFAIR No formally organized party 1
(NOT VOTED) No formally organized party 44
1792 GEORGE WASHINGTON Federalist 132
JOHN ADAMS Federalist 77
GEORGE CLINTON Democratic-Republican 50
THOMAS JEFFERSON 4
AARON BURR 1
1796 JOHN ADAMS Federalist 71
THOMAS JEFFERSON Democratic-Republican 68
THOMAS PINCKNEY Federalist 59
AARON BURR Antifederalist 30
SAMUEL ADAMS Democratic-Republican 5
OLIVER ELLSWORTH Federalist 11
GEORGE CLINTON Democratic-Republican 7
JOHN JAY Independent-Federalist 5
JAMES IREDELL Federalist 3
GEORGE WASHINGTON Federalist 2
JOHN HENRY Independent 2
S. JOHNSTON Independent-Federalist 2
C. C. PINCKNEY Independent-Federalist 1
1800 THOMAS JEFFERSON Democratic-Republican 733
AARON BURR Democratic-Republican 73
JOHN ADAMS Federalist 65
C. C. PINCKNEY Federalist 64
JOHN JAY Federalist 1 HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
American Presidential Elections 1789-1864a
Presidential Political Electoral Candidate Party Votes
1804 THOMAS JEFFERSON Democratic-Republican 162
C. C. PINCKNEY Federalist 14
1808 JAMES MADISON Democratic-Republican 122
C. C. PINCKNEY Federalist 47
GEORGE CLINTON Independent-Republican 6
(NOT VOTED) 1
1812 JAMES MADISON Democratic-Republican 128
DE WITT CLINTON Fusion 89
(NOT VOTED) 1 a. Minor candidates polling less than 10,000 popular votes and receiving no electoral votes are excluded. Until 1804, each elector voted for two men without indicating which was to be president and which vice president. Because the two houses of the New York legislature could not agree on electors, the state did not cast its electoral vote. It was some time before North Carolina and Rhode Island ratified the Constitution. When Jefferson and Aaron Burr received equal numbers of electoral votes, the decision was referred to the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment (1804) provided that electors cast separate ballots for president and vice president. In cases in which no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, the decision was made by the House of Representatives. This is all based upon data from the HISTORICAL STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES, COLONIAL TIMES TO 1957 (1960), STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969, 90th ed. (1969), and CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY’S GUIDE TO U.S. ELECTIONS, 3rd ed. (1994).
From this year until 1820, Martin Van Buren would be a State senator, would be a state attorney general, would be the leader of the Jeffersonian Republicans of New York, and would establish the first state-wide political machine in the country — known as the Albany Regency.
In upstate New York, the banks of the Genesee Falls were wilderness. With the tapering off of hostilities between England and the United States, and the prospect of the Erie Canal that was to cross above the Genesee River, the area east of the Genesee River, on the future site of Rochester, was purchased for mill sites by Samuel J. Andrews and Caleb Atwater, and the village to be named Rochesterville was laid out below the falls. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
March 3, Tuesday: Cuffee, a Paumanok Long Island Shinnecock Indian minister, died near Montauk, New York at the age of 55.
The US Congress passed the 1st foreign aid bill.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 3 of 3 M Each day produces so little, that is worthy of nore & my mind so barrab of Life that, I sometimes doubt the propriety of my waisting paper, but do not deel quite easy to omit it ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 20, Monday: US vice-president and former New York state governor George Clinton died in Washington DC at the age of 72.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 20th of 4 M // The day has passed with the usual rounds, & the mind occupied on usual subjects. — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 26, Tuesday: Albany, New York’s Lancasterian School Society (which is to say, its board of education) was incorporated.
Luigi Cherubini resigned as a member of the Jury of the Académie imperiale de musique.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 26 of 5 Mo// Pretty buisy at trade. Thoughts & reflections much turned towards the Aspect of the Affairs at Washington. some hopes were entertained a few days ago that an accommodation would take place with England, but now things look more discouraging — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 29, Friday: A New York State caucus nominated DeWitte Clinton for the presidency.
Robert Fulton’s wife Harriet Fulton offered an entertainment aboard his Paragon.
The Emperor Napoléon took leave of Empress Marie Louise in Dresden and headed toward the front.
On this day and the following one Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th & 7th days 29th & 30th 5th M 1812// Occupied as usual. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
The mind taken up on various subjects of an outward nature ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
June 18, Thursday: Franz Schubert begins instruction in counterpoint with Antonio Salieri in Vienna.
Unaware of course that Great Britain had already rescinded its offending actions two days before, President James Madison signed the joint congressional Declaration of War. This 2d war of the United States of America upon Great Britain, which would take place over a number of years, is now denominated in our history books the “War of 1812” (evidently we spare ourselves embarrassment when we do not give this war an accurate name).72 –Not that any of this makes any difference (only a fool would suppose that nations go to war for the reasons they proffer)!
Upstate New York was woefully unprepared. Fort Niagara had deteriorated during the decade after 1800 as its garrison had become increasingly smaller. Many of the old buildings, some of them dating to the French occupation, had disappeared. The walls on the land side remained in place, but there was never a large enough workforce to keep them in good condition. At the outbreak of hostilities the Americans could muster only 150 soldiers to man this strongpoint. However, the British preparedness was not much better. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe had been sucking up all of England’s attention, with Canada on the back burner at best, so there were in this year only a couple of thousand of British regular soldiers in all of what is today the province of Ontario. The United States Army although far larger was composed mostly newly organized units consisting of untrained recruits. The Americans were confident, but without justification. Some of the bloodiest fighting would occur along the Niagara River. Captain Nathaniel Leonard would do what he could to improve his defensive readiness, while the corresponding enemy commander likewise concentrated on organizing a defense. Much of the summer would be spent in preparation as units of the state militia were activated and moved toward the Niagara Frontier. In order to keep the regular army and the militia well separate and diminish friction, the militia camp was established at Lewiston, six miles away upriver.
At some point during this period of intermittent scattered hostilities, John Thoreau would become the commissary for73 Fort Independence on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. Thoreau would make a note of this in his journal in 1850:
After October 31, 1850: ... My father was commissary at Fort Independence in the last war. He says that the baker whom he engaged returned 18 ounces of bread for 16 of flour, and was glad of the job on those terms. ...
HENRY’S RELATIVES
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 18 of 6th M 1812// Our Meeting was very large. Anne
72. Interestingly, the federal government of the USA stated that one of the reasons why it was declaring war on Britain was the British embargo on hemp. After the Brits had lost this one, the analysis made by the Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington would be that their forces had suffered from a lack of command discipline: “They wanted this iron fist to command them.” CANNABIS 73. This is what we would consider similar to “running the PX” at a smallish current military base. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Greene was concern’d in supplication, then Micajah Collins in an acceptable testimony, then David Sands in a very extensive & powerful testimony In the last (Preparative) David had a few close remarks on the subject of Rainess [?] At 5 OClock a meeting was appointed for the people of colour, many attended but not all of them by a very considerable - D Sands was by far the greatet laborer amongst them, Anne Willis Hannah Dennis & James Hazard had small testimnies to bear. — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, or Hathorne’s, 8th birthday. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
In the area to the west of the Genesee River that eventually would become Rochester, New York, the family of Hamlet Scrantom moved into a cabin that had been built for them by Henry Skinner.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 7M 4th / This day (being Independence Day) has as usual been very noisy, many guns fired &c — Such seasons of tumult are very unpleasant, but no accident has happened RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
October 4, Sunday: In London a spendthrift 19-year-old heir to a baronetcy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was just getting his bride Harriet Westbrook Shelley pregnant, met William Godwin, a liberally oriented man whose defenseless daughter Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft had just turned 15. Hot damn!
WILLIAM GODWIN’S LIFE
US forces defeated British forces at Ogdensburgh, New York after a British raid out of Prescott, Ontario had failed and their two gunboats had been forced to return.
The French garrison of the Spanish city of Burgos was besieged by British and Portuguese troops under Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington. The siege would fail when French forces would be relieved, but Wellington would capture the city during June 1813 shortly before the battle of Vitoria.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 3 [sic] of 10 M / C R was concern’d in testimony in the forenoon & Afternoon Meetings — Visited the Work & Alms houses — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
October 22,Thursday: US militia out of Fort Covington, New York attacked a British outpost at St. Regis. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November 21, Saturday: Alterations to Fort Niagara, New York had been made just in time. The US forces there and the British at Fort George on the far side of the Niagara River found themselves engaged in an artillery duel. The action produced a heroine: when, at the height of the battle, a cannon mounted on the roof of the French Castle lost one of its crewmen, a soldier’s wife, Betsy Doyle, stepped in to help keep the cannon in operation.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 21 of 11 M / The day has passed with the usual rounds. - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1813
James McCune Smith was born enslaved in New York.
December 18, Saturday: Moses Prichard and Jane Tompson Hallet Prichard of Boston filed in the town of Concord a notice of intention of Marriage.
Most of the New York Militia, since their contracted terms of service had expired, had returned to their homes. British forces from Canada drove away the New York militiamen under General George McClure and recaptured the terrain of their Fort George, with anything still of value on that site being destroyed by the retreating Americans. For good measure General McClure ordered that the adjacent town of Newark (or Niagara-on-the-Lake) also be destroyed. The Canadian civilians of that district were to be left entirely without winter shelter. The militia regrouped on the New York side of the Niagara River, at Fort Niagara and Buffalo.
December 18, Saturday night: The new Teatro Re in Milan opened with a performance of Tancredi by Gioachino Rossini.
A British assault force of 562 crossed to the New York shore, invading the United States at a place called Five Mile Meadows. After a silent march down the River Road, at the village of Youngstown, they found the American pickets for the garrison inside local homes, sheltering from the cold. The British were able to make them all prisoners without the firing of a shot. Fort Niagara was only one more mile. There, the fort’s commander, Captain Nathaniel Leonard, was away with his family in Lewiston, New York, and most of the garrison was asleep. The British, silently approaching the gate of the fort, saw it opening to allow a sentry detail to pass through. A British sergeant was able to leap forward and wedge the gate open with his body, and in a few moments the attackers were in possession of the gate. The attack was so sudden and so unannounced that only a few Americans of the “Red Barracks,” and the 65-man guard detail manning the South Redoubt, were able to mount an organized resistance. First the Red Barracks was cleared at the point of the bayonet, then the British soldiers broke down the door of the South Redoubt and fought their way up two flights of stairs to finish the job. Out of Fort Niagara’s garrison of 433 soldiers, 65 had been killed and 15 wounded.
December 19, Sunday morning: Captain Nathaniel Leonard arrived at the gate of Fort Niagara only to be surprised to encounter there British sentries rather than American ones (only his being a prisoner of war in Canada would prevent a courts martial). The British sallied out of the fort, torched the village of Youngstown, New York, and continued up the River Road to drive away an American detachment at Lewiston, New York and torch that village as well (by the end of the year the British troops would have also put Manchester, Schlosser, Black Rock, and Buffalo to the torch).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 19 of 12 M / I staid from meeting this forenoon to give my H an opportunity of going - In the Afternoon I went but had a rather a dry meeting - however It has been a day of no small favor - life has been near & my mind has been expanded in a manner a little uncommon on the subject of War as being HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
inconsistent with the pure spirit of Christianity RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1814
The 1st flour was being exported from Rochester, New York, and the 3d mill was built there.
Regular public stage service was beginning between New-York and Boston.
Winter: Austin Steward began to suspect that actually, under the laws of New York State, he was free, black, and 22 — even if his white “owner” might beg to disagree!
After living sometime in Bath, and having the privilege of more enlightened society, I began to think that it was possible for me to become a free man in some way besides going into the army or running away, as I had often thought of doing. I had listened to the conversation of others, and determined to ask legal counsel on the subject the first opportunity I could find. Very soon after, as I was drawing wood, I met on the river bridge, Mr. D. Cruger, the eminent lawyer before mentioned, and I asked him to tell me if I was not free, by the laws of New York. He started, and looked around him as if afraid to answer my question, but after a while told me I was not free. I passed on, but the answer to my question by no means satisfied me, especially when I remembered the hesitancy with which it was given. I sought another opportunity to speak with Mr. Cruger, and at last found him in his office alone; then he conversed freely on the subject of Slavery, telling me that Capt. Helm could not hold me as a slave in that State, if I chose to leave him, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
then directed me to D. Comstock and J. Moore; the first being at the head of a manumission society, and the last named gentleman one of its directors. Our condition, as I have said before, was greatly improved; and yet the more we knew of freedom the more we desired it, and the less willing were we to remain in bondage. The slaves that Capt. Helm had sold or hired out, were continually leaving him and the country, for a place of freedom; and I determined to become my own possessor. There is no one, I care not how favorable his condition, who desires to be a slave, to labor for nothing all his life for the benefit of others. I have often heard fugitive slaves say, that it was not so much the cruel beatings and floggings that they received which induced them to leave the South, as the idea of dragging out a whole life of unrequited toil to enrich their masters. Everywhere that Slavery exists, it is nothing but slavery. I found it just as hard to be beaten over the head with a piece of iron in New York as it was in Virginia. Whips and chains are everywhere necessary to degrade and brutalize the slave, in order to reduce him to that abject and humble state which Slavery requires. Nor is the effect much less disastrous on the man who holds supreme control over the soul and body of his fellow beings. Such unlimited power, in almost every instance transforms the man into a tyrant; the brother into a demon. When the first of our persecuted race were brought to this country it was to teach them to reverence the only true and living God; or such was the answer of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England, when her subjects desired the liberty to bring from their native land the poor, ignorant African. “Let them,” said the Queen, “be brought away only by their own consent, otherwise the act will be detestable, and bring down the vengeance of heaven upon us.” A very different position truly, from the one assumed at the present day by apologists for the traffic in human flesh. But, to return to myself. I had determined to make an effort to own myself, and as a preliminary step, I obtained permission of Capt. Helm to visit some friends living in Canandaigua and Geneva. This was in the winter of 1814. I went first to Geneva; from there to Canandaigua. Between the two villages I met a company of United States’ troops, returning from Buffalo, where they had been to repel an invasion of the British. The two villages above named, were small but very pretty, having been laid out with taste and great care. Some wealthy and enterprising gentlemen had come from the East into this great Western country, who were making every improvement in their power. The dense forest had long since fallen under the stroke of the woodman’s ax, and in that section, flourishing villages were springing up as if by magic, where so lately roamed wild beasts and rude savages, both having fallen back before the march of civilization. I called on James Moore, as directed by Mr. Cruger, and found HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
he was one of the directors of the “Manumission Society,” as it was then called. This was an association of humane and intelligent gentlemen whose object it was to aid any one who was illegally held in bondage. The funds of the society were ample; and able counsel was employed to assist those who needed it. The late lamented John C. Spencer, one of the most eminent lawyers in Western New York, was then counsel for that society. I soon got an interview with Mr. Moore, to whom I related the history of my life, — the story of my wrongs and hardships. I told him about my having been hired out by Capt. Helm, which he said was sufficient to insure my freedom! Oh! how my heart leaped at the thought! The tears started, my breast heaved with a mighty throb of gratitude, and I could hardly refrain from grasping his hand or falling down at his feet; and perhaps should have made some ludicrous demonstration of my feelings, had not the kind gentleman continued his conversation in another direction. He said that indispensable business called him to Albany, where he must go immediately, but assured me that he would return in March following; then I must come to him and he would see that I had what justly belonged to me — my freedom from Slavery. He advised me to return to Bath and go on with my work as usual until March, but to say nothing of my intentions and prospects. I returned according to his directions, with a heart so light, that I could not realize that my bonds were not yet broken, nor the yoke removed from off my neck. I was already free in spirit, and I silently exulted in the bright prospect of liberty. Could my master have felt what it was to be relieved of such a crushing weight, as the one which was but partially lifted from my mind, he would have been a happier man than he had been for a long time. I went cheerfully back to my labor, and worked with alacrity, impatient only for March to come; and as the time drew near I began to consider what kind of an excuse I could make to get away. I could think of none, but I determined to go without one, rather than to remain. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1815
In upstate New York, three old gunboats were sent over the Niagara Falls with a British officer offering a reward for the largest piece recovered. The winner offered something about a foot long (it just shows t’go ya’).
A new edition of Washington Irving’s A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, by “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” illustrated by the drawings of Washington Allston and C.R. Leslie.
READ THE FULL TEXT
September: Ship owner Jacob Townsend and his son Sheldon C. Townsend sail from Oswego, New York, late in the month, to Fort Niagara, aboard the schooner Genesee Packet, commanded by Captain Obed Mayo.
October 6, Friday: Great Britain annexed Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.
The Genesee Packet arrived at Fort Niagara, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 6 of 10 M ? / This forenoon went over to Avis Knowles to carry Lydia Tucker a few things sent by Aunt A Carptneter for her comfort - found Lydia low & wearing out fast. — as I was returning in Washington street I met with Our old neighbor Saml Vinson who asked me to walk with him further up as he had a mind to view the ravages of the late Storm & visit the place where he served his time which is now The Goddards shop, in walking round it, he related many Anecdotes of his youth with his usual pleasantry - we then took a turn as far up as the North Battery & home thro’ the street that lead by the Alms house & parted on the parade. Some of his conversation was edifying. he spoke particularly as we passed our Meeting house of his feelings in it when he was a lad & once of latter years on hearing John Casey HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
preach - he said when he reflected now far John had deviated from morality in his Youth & how firmly established & fervent he was now in the Cause of Truth, the consideration was humbling & affecting to his mind RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1816
The 1st steamboat built at Cincinnati was launched. She was named the Vesta. The 1st steam-packet was seen on the Thames River. A steamboat began service between Paris and Rouen. Henry Shreve designed the 1st shallow draft, sidewheel steamboat, that would become the standard for most subsequent riverboat traffic in the US. The Ontario, the 1st steamboat on the Great Lakes, was launched at Sackets Harbor, New York. The Chancellor Livingston, the last steamboat built to Robert Fulton’s specifications, went into service on the Hudson River.
A ten-year boundary survey between the Canada and the United States began. General Peter Porter was appointed to the American commission that would study the boundary issue. He built a house in Black Rock, New York.
Five shipments of upstate New York ice were made to the American South, to Asia, and to South America.
Ilion, New York gunsmith Eliphalet Remington began producing rifles.
The original Auburn Academy of Auburn, New York was destroyed by fire.
The New York Sunday School Union was founded.
The capital earmarked for the Seneca, New York Lock Navigation Company project was increased to $60,000. CANAL HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
The family of 10-year-old Joseph Smith, Jr. relocated from Lebanon, New Hampshire to the vicinity of Palmyra east of Rochester, New York.
Mary Ann Day (Brown) was born in Whitehall, New York.
The Reverend Abner Kneeland was readmitted to the fellowship of the New England Universalist General Convention and relocated to Whitestown, New York. He would, however, be reading the sceptical writings of the Reverend Joseph Priestley.
74 Publication, in France, of the BIOGRAPHIE UNIVERSELLE, was something that had been going on at the rate of at least a volume per year since 1811, and in this year what was being published was the 18th volume of that series. From this volume, in a later timeframe, Henry Thoreau (who, needless to say, hadn’t been born yet) eventually would recover a remark about the initial discovery of the New England coast in 1525 by a captain sent out by King Charles V of Spain, a Portuguese captain by the name of Estêvão Gomes (in Spanish, Estéban Gomés or Gómez, in French, Etienne or Étienne Gomez) sailing his ship La Anunciada — a report which had resulted in 1529 in the first ever think-big name assigned by Europeans to the seaboard of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, to wit: “Terre d’Etienne Gomez.”
74. BIOGRAPHIE UNIVERSELLE, ANCIENNE ET MODERNE, OU, HISTOIRE, PAR ORDRE ALPHABÉTIQUE, DE LA VIE PUBLIQUE ET PRIVÉE DE TOUS LES HOMMES, QUI SUNT FAIT REMARQUER PAR LEURS ÉCRITS, LEURS ACTIONS, LEURS TALENTS, LEURS VERTUS OU LEURS CRIMES. 52 vols. plus supplements. Paris: Michaud frères [etc.], 1811-62. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
CAPE COD: The “Biographie Universelle” informs us that “An ancient manuscript chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has preserved the memory of the voyage of Gomez [a Portuguese sent out by Charles the Fifth]. One reads in it under (au dessous) the place occupied by the States of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Terre d’Etienne Gomez, qu’il découvrit en 1525 (Land of Etienne Gomez, which he discovered in 1525).” This chart, with a memoir, was published at Weimar in the last century.
Captain Gomes had explored from Cape Charles to Cape Cod and the Hudson River, Delaware River, and Connecticut River. Along the coast he captured enough natives that at least 58 would survive, although the Spanish would criticize these slaves as too thin to be of much use to anyone. He had sailed up the Hudson just far enough to be certain that it did not lead to China (well, yeah). The manuscript diary of his voyage would be published in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, with a map in which the present seaboard of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island is marked “Land of Esteban Gomez, discovered by him in 1525, by order of His Majesty; abundance of trees, game, salmon, turbot, and soles, but no gold is found.”
Here now in its entirety, from the library of George Bancroft, is Volume 18 of that BIOGRAPHIE UNIVERSELLE, for your careful comparison of the source document with the extract made above by Thoreau (see in particular the highlighting on pages 44/45): BIOGRAPHIE UNIVERSELLE
When you consider that we don’t actually know for certain sure that Amerigo Vespucci ever came all the way across the pond — doesn’t “United States of Estêvão” have a nice resonance to it?
March 8, Friday: On the basis of surveys done by Benjamin Wright, the New York State Canal Commission submitted its final report to the legislature.
April: Martin Van Buren was reelected to the New York State Senate. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
April 17, Wednesday: The New York General Assembly passed a canal law. ERIE CANAL
Myron Holley had been elected to the New York General Assembly and had helped Senator DeWitt Clinton get this Erie Canal project underway. He, Stephen Van Rensselaer, De Witt Clinton, Joseph Ellicott, and Samuel Young were designated as commissioners in parallel with their service respectively in the Assembly and in the Senate. Nathan Roberts would assist Benjamin Wright on the portion of the canal between Rome and Montezuma. Canvass White was hired to assist on the final survey. Holley and Young were to be acting commissioners, with actual duties, on salary. Holley would be appointed Treasurer of the canal commission and would purchase a home in Lyons, New York in order to be near the canal. For eight years he would be traveling by horse from place to place, using his saddle bags as his office, sleeping in shacks and in backwoods inns and working on his accounts by candlelight. In handling $2,500,000 in public funds, at the end he would be discovered with a $30,000 deficit at least half of which was in notes he had put his signature to in order to keep the canal project moving forward. For this, he would need to make over his Lyons property to the state. CANALS
Josef von Spaun wrote to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, enclosing manuscript copies of settings of his poems by “a 19-year-old composer by the name of Franz Schubert.” He asked whether Schubert might dedicate an edition of his German songs to the poet (these manuscripts would arrive back at the sender without comment).
June: Killing frosts over the following three months would wipe out all major crops in the Genesee Valley of upstate New York — this would come to be known as “The Year Without a Summer.”
June 7, Friday: Light snow fell over the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Summer: Moses Greenleaf, Esq.’s A STATISTICAL VIEW OF THE DISTRICT OF MAINE; MORE ESPECIALLY WITH REFERENCE TO THE VALUE AND IMPORTANCE OF ITS INTERIOR. ADDRESSED TO THE CONSIDERATION OF THE LEGISLATORS OF MASSACHUSETTS (Boston: Published by Cummings and Hilliard, at the Boston Bookstore, No. 1, Cornhill). STATISTICAL VIEW OF MAINE
Big Bett was about 22 years of age and was being shown in Alfred, Maine when her keeper “Uncle Nate” Howes made the mistake of walking her one Sunday across the farm of one of those people who believe it to be an unholy act to make any journey on the Sabbath, except to worship — besides, infuriatingly, money was being spent to see this elephant, that might be better offered to the poor!
Have you seen the elephant? HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Never undermisestimate a religious man — of course this religious man instantly offed her.
Hackaliah Bailey would be commissioning a gilded wooden statue in honor of his murdered pachyderm, in his home town of Somers, New York about fifteen miles east of Peekskill (said wooden effigy, no longer gilt, is today positioned atop a shaft of dressed granite on the green in front of an establishment that for one reason or another is being referred to as “Elephant Hotel”). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1818
On New York waters, the steamboat Ontario began regular visits out of Carthage for Ogdensburg and Lewiston.
Peter Buell Porter and Augustus S. Porter, managers of a general store in the town of Niagara in upstate New York offering food and clothing, liquors, grain, candles, hardware, lumber and leather goods, working with Parkhurst Whitney, owner of a hotel near Niagara Falls, had a stairway erected to take guests over the rocks to the base of the falls where they could pretend to their companions that they had gone, or persuade themselves that they had gone, “behind the cataract.” Above the falls, meanwhile, they constructed a bridge to Goat Island, on which, evidently, buried in the woods, there was a tiny log cabin that had been abandoned by a previous pioneer family.
Charles Lewis Reason was born free in New York State.
There was another slave in the Dumont household in upstate New York, an older man named “Thomas” whose wife had died. The Dumonts married him to their 21-year-old “Isabella” (Sojourner Truth) with her little “bastard” child “Diana.” Although this man would father a number of children by “Isabella,” four of which would live past infancy, he would never acknowledge that he had married her.
In this year there would be an earthquake on St. Helena, lasting some 30 seconds.
Following an incident when a St. Helena white man was fined a statutory £2 for whipping his young slave girl, Hudson Lowe convened a meeting of the inhabitants, urging the abolition of slavery on the island; and so, as a 1st measure, all children born of a slave woman after Christmas Day were to be free (but considered as apprentices until the age of 18). Masters were also to enforce attendance of these free-born children at church and Sunday schools. ST. HELENA RECORDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Stephen Myers was freed. He would become a leader in the movement for equal black suffrage in New York State, and an anti-slavery and temperance lecturer, and an operative in the Albany branch of the Underground Railroad.
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
June 10, Wednesday: The newly rebuilt opera house in Pesaro was opened with a performance of La gazza ladra by Gioachino Rossini in his birthplace.
Construction began on the Champlain Canal, to the Erie Canal near Cohoes, New York with Lake Champlain.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 10th of 6 M / Saw in the Boston Papers this evening, the notice of the Death of “Wm Brown of Salem an estimable member & minister of the Society of Friends aged 30” he was an acquaintance of mine & a hopeful man, he has gone, he has passed into the Valley of the Shadow of death in scarcely the meridian [of] life - may this be to all a solemn Warning to be prepared to meet the final change - I feel it so to me & hope the impressons may be lasting — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
June 14, Sunday: The first loaded boat passed through the newly completed locks of the Seneca and Cayuga Canal at Seneca Falls, New York (paying a toll of 50 cents).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 14th of 6 M 1818 / Our Morning meeting was not quite as large as usual owing to the Rain. Daniel Howland was concerned in a solemnizing testimony followed by James Greene in a corresponding sound & pertinent communication - Then Jerard T Hopkins in a most benevolent & charratable testimony embracing among all the religious denominations of the true Church & thro’ him the standard of truth was exalted. I have seldom been in a meeting to more general satisfaction The people were quiet & solid in their deportment— In the Afternoon the Meeting was very large - Elizabeth Coggeshall was concerned in testimony - Then Jerard T Hopkins much favord & truth again reigned among us which kept the multitude much more quiet than usual in the Afternoon of the Yearly Meeting — In addition to our former lodgers we had Olive Cobb daughter of Edwd. — a number took tea with us. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1819
From this year until 1823, at the New York State prison in Auburn, the “congregate” system of penitentiary organization would be being developed.
As part of a general depression, the aggregate value of real estate and personal property in the state of New York dropped from $315,000,000 in the previous year to $256,000,000.
Jethro Wood patented a metal plow that could be manufactured in pieces so individual parts might be replaced as they wore out. Many farmers would refuse to abandon their wooden plows, suspecting that cast-iron poisons the soil.
In Steuben County, Erastus Shepard began publishing the Western Republican.
At the urging of Albany merchant Elkanah Watson, the Steuben County Agricultural Society was founded.
January 4, Monday: Martin Van Buren had William Thompson nominated as speaker of the New York State Senate.
First day of school. The first boarding student to arrive at the newly constructed Yearly Meeting School, several days before, had been Friend Maria Augusta Fuller from Lynn, Massachusetts, twelve years of age, who had arrived under the care of Friends Matthew Purinton and Betsy Purinton of Salem, Massachusetts, hired to superintend the business and home-life of the institution, but by this first day of instruction, a total of eleven scholars were present, Friends Daniel Bicknell, age 11, having arrived from North Providence, Dorcas Hadwin, age 11, from Providence, Charles Congdon, age 11, from Providence, and Charles Metcalf, age 15, from Cumberland. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1819-1824. Purinton, Matthew and Betsy. 1824-1835. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1829-1835. Gould, Stephen Wanton and Gould, Han- nah, Asst. Supts. 1835-1836. Davis, Seth and Mary. 1837. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1838-1839. Rathbun, Rowland and Alice. 1840-1844. Wing, Allen and Olive. 1845-1846. Thompson, Olney and Lydia. 1847. Congdon, Jarvia and Lydia. 1847-1852. Cornell, Silas and Sarah M.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 4th of 1st M / My mind often depressed with the state of things in our Society, but notwithstanding all our failings I am comforted in a renewed confirmation that we are yet the first religious society, in that we believe in the Truth as it is in Jesus & that many of our members have attained to a higher state of religious experience than any other - we find most of professing christendom very outward in their views. while they profess a belief in spiritual things, they know but little more of the Spiritual work than if they were strangers to the Scriptures or the name of Christ, for the plain reason, that they overlook, the thing in the first setting out.- having no Idea that, the intimations which they feel early in life, as for instance condemnation for doing wrong, & justification for doing right, is nothing short than the divinity of Christ moving in our hearts, could they rightly see this, I believe, there would be less controversy on points of Doctrine - & were but the members of our Society more fully to live up to that which they believe in, - our Zion would Shine as in the days of her Ancient splendor, the Tents of Cushan would not be in affliction, neither would the Curtains of Middian tremble. — HDT WHAT? INDEX
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February 13, Saturday: A bill enabling Missouri to draft a constitution and prepare for statehood was introduced in the United States House of Representatives. New York’s James Tallmadge proposed an amendment to limit slavery there.
February 25, Thursday: Margaret Helen Begbie offered a poem, signed “Helen” and titled “The Joys of Meeting,” in The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences. Oh, I have seen the pitiless snow Descend, and lay the young flow’ret low; And yet that tender and shrinking flower Shall bloom again in the sunny hour. So have I seen some susceptible heart Wither’d and torn when compell’d to part. Cold is that heart which was warm before, Yet there is a smile which could peace restore, And when that smile shall cheer it once more, It shall boast the power of the sunny ray Which melted the chilling snow away— And the Mourner who droop’d in the hour of pain, Shall venture to lift his [her] head again!
A Quaker monthly meeting was established in Rochesterville, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 25th of 2 M / Did not attend our Moy [Monthly] Meeting this day held at Portsmouth, with which I am not fully satisfied. I have been thro’ the day very destitute of life. — Those who attended Said it was a season of some favor but not as flowing as at sometimes the buisness was conducted with decorum & some long & tedious cases brought to a close. — Set part of the evening with my H at Sally Eastons — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 7, Wednesday: The New York legislature established a Board of Agriculture, to oversee appropriations for agriculture, and appropriated $10,000 for each of the next two years.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 7 of 4 M / Mother seems better today having sleept more last night, but the opression continues RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 16, Friday: The publication of Muzio Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum Volume II was entered at Stationer’s Hall, London.
At Sugar Loaf near Goshen, New York, five persons had been found guilty of the murder of Richard Jennings, aged 70 years, as the outcome of an inheritance property dispute. His honor Judge Van Ness, after passing the sentence of the law, advised them as friends to prepare to meet their God! admonished them not to let a false hope of pardon divert their attention from the paramount duties which ensure a safety of their souls — to meet their fate as christians! On this day, the others having received lesser or commuted sentences, two were to be hanged. Before the hanging of James Teed and David Dunning, however, the sheriff delivered the following discourse before the audience of some 20,000 or more: “It is more than thirty years since any person in the county has suffered the last pain of the law for the crime of murder. I am now, however, called to the performance of a necessary, but painful duty, appertaining to my office: I hope I shall discharge it with the feelings that become me. Let me request your attention for a few moments, before the commencement of that awful spectacle which will engross every power and bind up every faculty in terror and commisseration. The cause which stirred up the vindictive passions of the unfortunate men you now behold, was in itself trifling — in its consequences how tremendous! An aged and infirm man, in an unsuspecting moment, was the first victim of violence, and they, the authors and contrivers of his death, are now about to become the necessary sacrifice offered by the law, for the example and the safety of all. Doomed to death in the midst of health, in the prime of life — taken in a moment from the most endearing connexions; from wives and children — in agony and in shame they go to those dark and mysterious abodes, where penitence is unavailing, reformation impossible, and their punishment eternal. By your serious and orderly conduct, let the lesson of their punishment have its full effect — give to them your pity — let them have your prayers: By the inexorable decree of that law they have dreadfully violated, it is all they can ask — it is all you can grant. And may God have mercy on their souls!” Before the hanging, also, the Reverend Mr. Fisk delivered a discourse from Numbers, xxxii. 23. After this James Teed offered a prayer that went on for 15 minutes. At half past two Sheriff Burnet dropped the trap.
Since no local cemetery would receive the remains, Mr. James Hallock and his wife allowed the burial to take place on their property outside the fence of the old cemetery. In the night, however, persons unknown would pound long, sharpened locust posts down through the centers of these burials, and the pair of posts would stand in the pasture for more than fifty years.
July 1, Thursday: John Keats wrote from Shanklin on the Isle of Wight to Fanny Brawne: My dearest Lady — I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you on Tuesday night — ’twas too much like one out of Rousseau’s Heloise. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning is the only proper time for me to write HDT WHAT? INDEX
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to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should [think me] either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad. I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window, looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering as free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me I have never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always spoilt my hours — and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it — make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me — write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. But however selfish I may feel, I am sure I could never act selfishly: as I told you a day or two before I left Hampstead, I will never return to London if my Fate does not turn up Pam or at least a Court-card. Though I could centre my Happiness in you, I cannot expect to engross your heart so entirely — indeed if I thought you felt as much for me as I do for you at this moment I do not think I could restrain myself from seeing you again tomorrow for the delight of one embrace. But no — I must live upon hope and Chance. In case of the worst that can happen, I shall still love you — but what hatred shall I have for another! Some lines I read the other day are continually ringing a peal in my ears:
To see those eyes I prize above mine own Dart favors on another— And those sweet lips (yielding immortal nectar) Be gently press’d by any but myself— Think, think Francesca, what a cursed thing It were beyond expression! J.
Do write immediately. There is no Post from this Place, so you HDT WHAT? INDEX
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must address Post Office, Newport, Isle of Wight. I know before night I shall curse myself for having sent you so cold a Letter; yet it is better to do it as much in my senses as possible. Be as kind as the distance will permit to your John Keats Present my Compliments to your mother, my love to Margaret and best remembrances to your Brother — if you please so. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(The letter would be posted on the 3d.)
Dissension had developed in the Jerusalem, New York sanctuary of the followers of “Universal Friend,” Jemimah Wilkinson, as she had become rather demanding of gifts and special treatment, and had come to institute various punishments for infractions of the rules of the Society of Universal Friends. Finally the community resolved its problem by erecting this two and a half story Federal-style mansion for its inspirational leader at some considerable distance from the other homes. It is now referred to as “Friend House” and is not open to the public:
After spending her last years in isolation, at the age of 67 the religious leader died (or “left time” as her followers described it), and would be interred in a temporary vault in the building’s cellar while her followers faithfully waited for her to come back into animation, and watched as signs of decay accumulated. As her will attests, she had never swerved from the pronouncement she had originally made under the oak tree in Cumberland, Rhode Island after recovering from typhoid fever, that she had died and her spirit had been replaced with “Divine Spirit.” (Her Jerusalem community would, within the following two decades, entirely disperse. At some later date the decomposing body has been removed from its temporary vault for burial at an HDT WHAT? INDEX
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unmarked location on the property.)
Last Will and Testament: The last Will and Testament of the person called the Universal Friend of Jerusalem, in the County of Ontario, State of New York, who in the year 1777, was called Jemima Wilkinson, and ever since that time, the Friend, a new name which the mouth of the Lord hath named. My will is that all my just debts be paid by my executors, hereafter named. I give, bequeath and devise unto Rachel Malin and Margaret Malin, now of said Jerusalem, all my earthly property both real and personal; and that is to say all my land lying in said Jerusalem and in Benton, or elsewhere in the County of Ontario, together with all the buildings thereon, to them the said Rachel and Margaret, and their heirs and assigns forever, to be equally and amicably be shared between them, the said Rachel and Margaret — and I do also give and bequeath to the said Rachel and Margaret, all my wearing apparel, all my household furniture, and my horses, cattle, sheep and swine, of every kind, together with all my farming utensils, and all my movable property of every nature and description whatever. My will is, that all the present members of my family and each of them, be employed if they please, and if employed, supported during their natural life, by the said Rachel and Margaret, and whenever any of them become unable to help themselves, they are according to such inability, kindly to be taken care of by the said Rachel and Margaret. And my will also is, that all poor persons belonging to the society of the Universal Friend, shall receive from the said Rachel and Margaret such assistance, comfort and support during their natural life as they may need; and in case any or either of my family, or others elsewhere in the society shall turn away, such shall forfeit the provisions herein made for them. I hereby ordain and appoint the above-named Rachel Malin and Margaret Malin, Executors of this my last will and testament. In Witness whereof, I, the person called Jemina Wilkinson, but in, and ever since the year 1777, known as the Public Universal HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Friend, have hereunto affixed my name and Seal, this 25th day of the 2d Month, in the year of our Lord 1819. The Public Universal Friend [L.S.] In the presence of, &c. Be it Remembered — That in order to remove all doubt of the due execution of the foregoing will and testament of the person who before the year 1777, was known and called by the name of Jemima Wilkinson, but since that time, as the Universal Friend, do make, publish and declare the within instrument to be my Last Will and Testament, as witness my hand and seal, this 17th day of the 7th month, 1819. Jemima Wilkinson X Her Cross or mark, Or, Universal Friend. [“Witness,” &c.]
That evening after sunset the comet that had passed unnoticed between the earth and the sun on or about June 26th, with its tail brushing over the earth also unnoticed, became visible low in the west. (So much for comets exerting a vast influence!)75 SKY EVENT
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 1st of 7th M 1819 / Our Meeting looked small in a great room, but I believe nearly all the members were present that are in ability to attend, & several that are not members. — I believe it was a comfortable season to some present, it was in good measure so to me. — Father Rodman delivered a short testimony RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
Our national birthday, Sunday the 4th of July: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, or Hathorne’s, 15th birthday.
Future governor of the state of New York Reuben Eaton Fenton was born to George W. Fenton and Elsie Owen Fenton in Carroll, New York.
At Fort Adams near Newport, Rhode Island, an extra gill of rum was dispensed to each soldier in honor of Independence Day. Then Private William G. Cornell went on guard duty at 8PM and was relieved at 10PM. While he was returning as part of the relieved guard to his quarters under the direction of a corporal, carrying his musket bearing a standard load of a ball and three buckshots, Private William Kane was standing in the doorway of the quarters laughing, and after the detail had passed, stepped out and stooped down and picked up a handful of gravel, advancing forward, and pitched it without much violence at the backs of the guard detail. Private Cornell turned and fired, hitting Private Kane just above the hip and severing an artery, causing 75. “GREAT COMET, (C/1819 N1=1819 II. Period of naked eye visibility spanned the month of Jul., T=1819 June 28. Also known as Comet Tralles. Spotted on July 1st in the evening sky a little to the north of the Sun, the head being of about zero magnitude. Comet crossed eastern Auriga and was visible at both dusk and dawn for several weeks. At the end of the first week of July, 1st magnitude with a 7-8 degree tail. Comet faded rapidly as it moved toward the northeast, almost pacing the Sun. At mid-month situated in Lynx, an object of 3rd magnitude with a short tail. In the last few days of July the comet’s brightness rapidly approached the naked eye threshold.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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his death in only a few minutes. A jury of inquest would be summoned on Monday and the accusation made that this was a wilful murder. After a confinement in the Newport County Jail on Marlborough Street, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story would find Cornell guilty on November 18, 1819 (at that time there were no federal judges other than the nine who sat on the Supreme Court). Justice Story would hear an appeal for a new trial on June 15, 1820 and deny the appeal. Eventually Cornell would be pardoned by President James Monroe.
At Mossy Spring in Kentucky, something very unusual and strange, for the United States of America, happened: a woman (a “Mrs. Mead”) was able to deliver an Independence Day oration. –This oration was, it goes without saying, delivered to a group of women. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 4th of 7th M / Our Morning Meeting was large, nearly all the usual attendants were there & a number, who are there but seldom & some strangers, which preety much filled the middle part of the house below stairs. David Buffum was engaged in a lively testimony & Susanna Bateman from Greenwich bore a short testimony. In the Afternoon the Meeting was as large as usual & silent. - Abigail Robinsons was at meeting this fournoon, the first time in more than a Year, her infirmities of body being so great as to prevent her attendance I was glad to see heer seat again filled. -2nd day [Monday] 5 of 7 M / Independence has been celebrated in town today & yesterday on the Fort. — What excesses of drunkeness gluttony & vices of various Kinds does such cellebrations occasion — I have seen it perhaps today as conspicuosly as at any time within my recollection — I have observed many drunken men & some of them quite young - & yesterday a man was shot by a sentinel on the Fort in consequence of some affront. - This day a jury of inquest set & brought in the verdict of Willful Murder, — I feel strong desires that the observance of these days may go out of fashion or in some way surpressed, that the people may be preserved in Innocency. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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October 22, Friday: The Erie Canal opened between Rome and Utica, New York, when the canal boat The Chief Engineer arrived at Rome after a 4-hour trip.
Helen Louisa Thoreau’s 7th birthday.
December: Van Buren and William L. Marcy wrote a recommendation of Rufus King’s reelection to the New York State Senate, and launched an attack against Governor Clinton. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1820
The artist John Lee Douglas Mathies or Mathews, who signed his paintings J.L.D. Mathies, painted a portrait of the Seneca headman Sagoyewatha “Red Jacket” in Canandiagua76 and hung it on the wall in the entryway of his Clinton House hotel in Rochester, New York.
January 26, Wednesday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley moved to Pisa.
New York’s J.W. Taylor proposed a amendment to the Maine statehood bill, prohibiting slavery in Missouri.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 26th of 1 M / Have been much engaged this week in taking the Inventory of Gilbert Chases personal effects, & in consequence of the illness of Benjamin Hadwen I am under the necessity of receiving the Town & State Tax for him which occupies my time & my mind - but I hope to receive no hurt. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August: Martin Van Buren became a major investor in the Albany, New York Argus.
76. In addition this leader would be drawn from life by Henry Inman (1801-1846), painted several times by John Mix Stanley (1814- 1872), and painted several times by Charles Bird King (1785-1862), and would sit for a primitive portrait by Robert Weir (1803- 1889). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 20, Wednesday: Red-haired but nearly bald Colonel Josiah “The Prairie Chicken” Snelling laid the cornerstone of a massive new fort, to be called “Fort St. Anthony,” at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the St. Peter’s River overlooking Pike Island in what eventually would become Minnesota. Construction would require six years.
Rochesterville, New York’s Methodist Episcopal Church opened and Abelard Reynolds was named 1st trustee.
Two hundred and forty-one additional deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 21 of 9 M / Our meeting today was small & silent to me a season of some oppression. — John remains very poorly. I hardly know what to think of his HDT WHAT? INDEX
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case. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
October: Franklin Cowdery began publishing the Angelica, New York Republican.
October 2, Monday: Nathan Reed was the 1st child born in the town of Allegany, New York.
November 13, Monday: The Hudson River froze over at Albany, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1821
Disaffected follower David Hudson’s tell-all HISTORY OF JEMIMA WILKINSON, A PREACHERESS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; CONTAINING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF HER LIFE AND CHARACTER, AND OF THE RISE, PROGRESS AND CONCLUSION OF HER MINISTRY. (Geneva, New York: printed by S.P. Hull).
JEMIMAH WILKINSON HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Publication of the first two volumes of the Reverend Timothy Dwight’s TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK: DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, I DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, II
April 10, Friday, 1857: D.R.’s Shanty … The more characteristic books were Bradley’s Husbandry, Drake’s Indians, Barber’s Hist. Coll., Zimmermann on Solitude, Bigelow’s Plants of Boston, &c., Farmer’s Register of the first Settlers of New England, Marshall’s Gardening, Vick’s Gardener, John Woolman, The Modern Horse Doctor, Downing’s Fruits, &c., The Farmer’s Library, Walden, Dymond’s Essays, Jobb Scott’s Journal, Morton’s Memorial, Bailey’s Dictionary, Downing’s Landscape Gardening, etc., The Task, Nuttall’s Ornithology, Morse’s Gazetteer, The Domestic Practice of Hydropathy, John Buncle, Dwight’s Travels, Virgil, Young’s Night Thoughts, History of Plymouth, and other Shanty books. … FRIEND DANIEL RICKETSON
The final two volumes would appear in following years. According to Walter Harding,77 Thoreau was very familiar with this series TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK, written before the Reverend Wright’s death in 1817 in description of various trips he had taken between 1795 and 1815. DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, III DWIGHT’S TRAVELS, IV
The Reverend Dwight visited Rhode Island.
REV. TIMOTHY DWIGHT
77. Per an April 1958 article by Walter Harding in the Boston Public Library Quarterly. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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CAPE COD: The Harbor of Provincetown —which, as well as the greater PEOPLE OF part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from CAPE COD our perch— is deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms which prevail on the American DWIGHT coast generally come from the east; and there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.” J.D. Graham, who GRAHAM has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast.” It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of JOHN SMITH Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said, Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”
REVEREND COTTON MATHER CHARLES I
CAPE COD: Early the next morning I walked into a fish-house near PEOPLE OF our hotel, where three or four men were engaged in trundling out CAPE COD the pickled fish on barrows, and spreading them to dry. They told me that a vessel had lately come in from the Banks with forty- four thousand codfish. Timothy Dwight says that, just before he arrived at Provincetown, “a schooner came in from the Great Bank with fifty-six thousand fish, about one thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather.” The cod in this fish-house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded me of the figs of Smyrna. “How long does it take to cure these fish?” I asked. “Two good drying days, sir,” was the answer.
REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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CAPE COD: In Dwight’s Travels in New England it is stated that the PEOPLE OF inhabitants of Truro were formerly regularly warned under the CAPE COD authority of law in the month of April yearly, to plant beach- grass, as elsewhere they are warned to repair the highways. They dug up the grass in bunches, which were afterward divided into several smaller ones, and set about three feet apart, in rows, so arranged as to break joints and obstruct the passage of the wind. It spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds when ripe bending the heads of the grass, and so dropping directly by its side and vegetating there. In this way, for instance, they built up again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the sea broke over in the last century. They have now a public road near there, made by laying sods, which were full of roots, bottom upward and close together on the sand, double in the middle of the track, then spreading brush evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen feet, planting beach-grass on the banks in regular rows, as above described, and sticking a fence of brush against the hollows.
REVEREND TIMOTHY DWIGHT
A new edition of Washington Irving’s A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, by “Diedrich Knickerbocker.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Seneca Canal was completed.
The Champlain Canal excavation out of Schuylerville, New York came within ten miles of Waterford.
Auburn’s Theological Seminary opened.
Cooperstown’s Otsego Herald and Western Advertiser, founded in 1795, ceased publication.
A new New York State constitution banned lotteries.
New York contracted with Melancthon Wheeler to build a 900-foot long dam, 27 feet high, at Fort Edward, creating a feeder to the Champlain Canal.
DeWitt Clinton was re-elected governor of New York State.
Construction began on Pennsylvania’s Union Canal.
The Maine legislature granted a charter to the Cumberland-Oxford Canal Company.
Construction began on Canada’s Lachine Canal, to connect Montréal and Ottawa, bypassing rapids on the St. Lawrence.
Industrialist William Hamilton Merritt formed Canada’s Welland Canal Company.
A lighthouse was built on Lake Ontario at Oswego.
March 31, Saturday: “Erlkonig,” a song by Franz Schubert to words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was published by Cappi and Diabelli to great success.
The New York legislature incorporated the Ontario Canal Company.
April 21, Saturday: Lion of the West departed from Rochester, New York, as the initial boat from there to Utica along the Erie Canal.
Benderli Ali Pasha replaced Seyyid Ali Pasha as Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.
In a duel between Viscount Petersham and Mr. Wedderburne, there were no injuries. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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November 10, Saturday: The constitutional convention of the State of New York abolished nearly all property qualifications for voting. The remaining restrictions were upon voting by non-adult citizens, by non-male citizens, and it goes without saying, by non-white citizens (but hey, progress is progress).
In Providence, Rhode Island, William J. Brown was seven years old — and so, as a black boy, it was time for him to get out there in the big world and make his own way: PAGE 26: The colored people called a meeting in 1819 to take measures, to build a meetinghouse, with a basement for a school room. After appointing their Committee to carry out their wishes, they sent a special committee to Mr. Moses Brown, to inform him of their intentions and see what he would do toward aiding them, knowing he belonged to the Society of Friends and was a very benevolent man, besides some of the members of the committee had been in his service. Mr. Brown, after hearing their statements, highly commended their movement, and said, “I always had it in my heart to help the colored people, whenever I saw they were ready to receive. Now go and select you out a lot, suitable for your purpose, and I will pay for it.” PAGE 25: Preparations were being made to open a school in the vestry of our new meeting house, which was just finished. This building was commenced in 1819, but for the want of funds it was not finished until 1821, two years after its commencement. Prior to this time, the people had no place of worship of their own, and were obliged to attend the white people’s churches. Some attended the Congregational church, Rev. James Wilson, pastor; some attended the Methodist church; some attended the Episcopal church, Dr. Crocker, pastor; a few attended the Unitarian church, Rev. Mr. Cady, pastor; and a large number attended the First Baptist church, Dr. Gano, pastor. Some were members of each of the above named churches; the largest number, however, were Baptists, and belonged to the First Baptist Church, but many attended no church at all, because they said they were opposed to going to churches and sitting in pigeon holes, as all the churches at that time had some obscure place for the colored people to sit in.78 PAGES 86-88: After we had taken the lower tenement of the house, mother said to me one day, that it was my birthday; “that I was born on the 10th of November, and was seven years old, and it was commonly stated that the boy at seven years is old enough to earn his own living, but, I think seven years is too young, but I want you to remember when your birthday comes.” And from that day forth I have never forgotten it.... In the Fall I waited anxiously for my birthday to come. I kept run of the months and days until the time came, and had the pleasure of telling mother that that was my birthday. I was eight 78. Note well what Brown indicates clearly, that although “a few attended the Unitarian church,” at this point there were zero persons of color who were willing to seat themselves in the “pigeon hole” loft that the Quakers of Providence had provided for the colored in their meetinghouse on Main Street at the foot of Meeting Street. This explains why in 1822 in a renovation of the Quaker meetinghouse, Friend Moses Brown would report that “what was called the Negros Gallery” had been removed. (The Negros Gallery or pigeon loft remains in existence in the meetinghouse in Saylesville, Rhode Island: go and look.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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years old. That was the time mother said a boy was capable of earning his own living, in her opinion. I tired to make myself useful by running errands and doing work around the house that mother wanted done. I frequently went out with brother Joseph, who was four years older than myself. He was a stout, thick-set boy, and often got into trouble with other boys.... Mother had a task to keep brother in his place, as he was twelve years old, and father was away to sea. Soon Mr. Eaton, a gentleman from Framingham, a relative of Judge Staples’s wife, wanted a boy, and hearing of brother Joseph, came to see mother about him. He made an agreement to take him a year on trial, for his victuals, clothes and schooling, and he went home with Mr. Eaton on trial for a year. After he left home my services were required doing chores around the house, cutting wood, etc. This was before hard coal was brought in use in Providence, and every one burned wood, which cost four or five dollars a cord.... About this time some ladies opened a free school for colored youth ...I was large enough to go into the lowest class. A semi- circle was painted in front of the teacher’s desk. When the class was called each scholar had to toe the circle. It extended across the room and would accommodate some twelve children, who stood front of the teacher to read and spell, the teacher remaining at her desk.... After speaking my piece and making a low bow, I descended from the stand, as I had been instructed to do by Miss Latham. I spoke it to her satisfaction, and the praise and admiration of all present, who declared that I was to be a great man, and if the necessary measures were taken, there was no doubt but that I would be of great use to my people; but that was the winding up of this school. Preparations were being made to open a school in the vestry of our new meeting house, which was just finished.... The house was finished in 1821. The committee lost some time in trying to find a teacher, to instruct the school under the Lancasterian plan. After searching in vain they procured a white gentleman by the name of Mr. Ormsbee, to teach them. The school was opened in the vestry, but not a free school, the price of tuition being $1.50 per quarter. The colored people sent their children and they soon had the number of 125 scholars... Colored teachers were very rarely to be found, and it was difficult to procure a white teacher, as it was considered a disgraceful employment to be a teacher of colored children and still more disgraceful to have colored children in white schools.... At that time the colored people had little or no protection. It was thought a disgrace to plead a colored man’s cause, or aid in getting his rights as a citizen, or to teach their children in schools. The teachers themselves were ashamed to have it known that they taught colored schools.... The feeling against the colored people was very bitter. The colored people themselves were ignorant of the cause, unless it could be attributed to our condition, not having the means to raise themselves in the scale of wealth and affluence, consequently those who were evil disposed would offer abuse whenever they saw HDT WHAT? INDEX
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fit, and there was no chance for resentment or redress.... But it was considered such a disgrace for white men to teach colored schools that they would be greatly offended if the colored children bowed or spoke to them on the street. Mr. Anthony, who was at one time teaching the colored school, became very angry because Zebedee Howland met him on the street, spoke to him, raised his hat and bowed. He took no notice of his dark complexioned scholar, but the next Monday morning took poor Zebedee and the whole school to task, saying, “When you meet me on the street, don’t look towards me, or speak to me; if you do, I will flog you the first chance I get.”.... It was the custom for children on seeing their parish teacher or minister to raise their hats and speak to them, and the girls to make a courtesy. This instruction was taught to them by their parents when small. It was often stated by elderly people that children were to be seen and not heard. When company were in the house they were not to make much noise, and when they came into their own house they must take off their hats and sit down. If they did not know enough to take of[f] their hats they would soon teach them that their heads must be uncovered while in the house. They did not allow their children to be the first at the table; and when called they did not suffer them to help themselves, but to wait until they were helped; when they wanted anything always to ask for it, and when they had finished eating to rise from the table and thank their parents. My parents were so strict that they did not allow us to come to the table until they had finished eating; then they would put victuals on our plates and call us. When we came to the table we had to stand up to eat, not to sit down in chairs. We had to eat just what they put on our plate, and to have our plates cleared before we could have them replenished. When in the street to be respectful to every one, and be very careful not to run against any elderly person. If we did we were liable to feel the weight of their cane; also, to be particular when sent on an errand to a person’s house, to knock at the door, and when we enter take off our hats and make a low bow, holding our hats in hand until we went out.
(We can see in the above the reality that lay behind Frederick Douglass’s observation that in certain respects people of color in the antebellum northern society had moved from being the slaves of individuals to becoming “slaves of the community.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1822
Joseph Smith, Jr. found a seer stone (a stone with a hole in it, of the proper size for peeking through) while digging a well for a neighbor in upstate New York. He would employ this stone for a number of years in search for buried treasure. Later he would use it to translate the BOOK OF MORMON and to receive his early revelations.
Many Narragansett had in 1778 joined the “Brothertown Indians” on the Oneida reservation in upstate New York. The Brothertown band at this point began to relocate with the Oneida and Stockbridge (Mahican) to northern Wisconsin. This move would be complete by 1834. During 1856, the Stockbridge and the Brothertown who wished to retain tribal ownership of their land would merge and relocate to a separate reservation west of Green Bay. The other Brothertown Indians would at that time accept citizenship and allotment, and many of their descendants still live on the east side of Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin.
Construction began on New York’s Glens Falls Feeder Canal.
The Champlain Canal was completed as far as the village of Waterford.
Connecticut chartered the Farmington Canal Company.
The Maryland General Assembly authorized a Canal from Baltimore to the Conewago Falls of the Susquehanna River.
Benjamin Wright surveyed a route for a Blackstone Canal, between Worcester and Providence.
Geneva businessmen dissatisfied with the Seneca Lock Navigation Company’s plans issued a report advocating a Susquehanna and St. Lawrence Canal (but nothing would come of this). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1823
Benjamin Wade left off teaching school and went to study medicine in Albany, New York.
Amos Eaton made a study of the gorge of the Genesee River above Rochester, New York.
Thomas James (1804-1891), an escaped slave, came to Rochester and found employment on the Erie Canal. (He would in 1827 help found an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Society, and with the Reverend James active in the anti-slavery movement, this AME Zion church on Favor Street would become a waystation of what would eventually come to be termed the “Underground Railroad.”)
Rochester celebrated the opening of the Erie Canal. The first pier of its new aqueduct was carried away by spring floods.
The Erie Canal reached Albany. Brockport became the temporary western terminus of the waterway.
William Avery of Pompey, New York, tested his steam-powered canal boat on the Erie Canal.
John Jervis became construction superintendent on a 50-mile stretch of the Erie Canal.
A triple lock was built on the Champlain Canal at Whitehall, New York. The canal opened. It connected with the Erie Canal by crossing the Mohawk River on a slackwater navigation below Waterford. The canal boat Gleaner arrived via the Champlain Canal and the Hudson River.
Genesee Valley business interests petitioned the state legislature for a valley canal to connect the Erie Canal with the Allegheny River near Olean.
Samuel Wilkeson and Dr. Ebenezer Johnson of Buffalo supervised the construction of a dam and a lock at the mouth of Tonawanda Creek in North Tonawanda, the first work done on the western end of the Erie Canal. The dam deepened the creek’s level to four and a half feet.
A culvert was built at Medina to carry the Erie Canal over a road. Abutments and piers for the aqueduct at Rexford were transported to the site. The Cohoes flight was built. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Fall: Horatio Wood matriculated at Harvard College.
Looking for a good location in which to set up their winter camp, fur trappers Jedediah Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick led their crew south from the Yellowstone River to the Sweetwater River (they were guessing that this eastward-flowing river would in the following spring convey them to the Missouri River).
A pair of slave-catchers attired in Kentucky’s characteristic green leggings arrived in Lockport, New York. At that time Darius Comstock, a Quaker, was employing a large crew of Irish laborers to dig a section of the Erie Canal he had under contract, and they were making their way slowly though a local rocky ridge. Friend Darius and his brother Joseph were known to be sympathizers with the fugitive slave. Under a warrant issued by Hiram Gardner, Justice of the Peace, the Kentuckians seized Joseph Pickard, a local black barber. Friend Darius rushed to the office of the Justice, which was on the 2d floor of a wooden building near Brown’s hat store and was entered by a flight of stairs on the outside. A large crowd of his canal workmen packed the street in front of the office. With the examination in progress, the barber sprang though an open window and landed in the street below, but the slave-catchers rushed down the stairs with drawn pistols and again collared him. G.W. Rogers and others surrounded the Kentuckians, defying them to shoot, and an agreement was reached to take the barber back upstairs to allow Justice of the Peace Gardner to hear the case. When the Justice discharged Pickard for want of proof that he was the property of the persons claiming him, this pair of Kentuckian slave-catchers departed the area. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1824
The Marquis de Lafayette returned to Albany, New York to pay a visit to his former revolutionary headquarters on North Pearl Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Amos Eaton’s A GEOLOGICAL AND AGRICULTURAL SURVEY OF THE DISTRICT ADJOINING THE ERIE CANAL IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. TAKEN UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE HON. STEPHEN VAN RENSSELAER (Albany: Packard & Van Benthuysen).
The first pier of the new Genesee River aqueduct was carried away by spring floods.
Erie Canal construction served as Utica’s water supply aqueduct.
Professor Eaton’s report on the rock formations along the route of the future Erie Canal, commissioned by Stephen Van Rennselaer, is published.
The aqueducts at Crescent and at Rexford were completed, as was the entire Erie Canal distance between Schenectady and Albany.
The river and guard locks of the Erie Canal at Tonawanda were completed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In about this year, Alexander Heimup constructed his house at 200 Main Street in Penn Yan in upstate New York.
Publication of H.G. Spofford’s GAZETTEER OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
In this year the first wine was being produced in the Chautauqua region of upstate New York.
The drummer known as “King Charley” or “Carolus Africanus Rex” or “Charley of the Pinkster Hill,” who once presided over Pinkster Day in New York, died at a reputed age of 125 years.
Negro Election Day would, until 1841, be an annual event in Rhode Island. In the document below, we see that the Rhode Island politician Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior of Little Rest (now Kingston), who in 1818 had made an unsuccessful bid for state governor and was at this point serving in the state House of Representatives, involved himself to a degree in this celebration.
This reminisce by Jonathan P. Helme is from the Providence Journal for October 31, 1874 and is headlined “Recollections of Little Rest (Now Kingston) Hill, and its Surroundings Some Fifty Years Ago”: Among the servants of the late E.R. Potter, was one by the name of John Potter. In those days it was the custom of the colored population of the State to elect each year a governor, and on one occasion John was the elect. The governor was installed in June and the headquarters were at Fulling Mills, as it was then called, now Apponaug. On the occasion of his installation, Mr. Potter told his servant John to take the best horse in his stable, as he had a number, among them a fine span of large bays, for his journey to Apponaug, about twenty miles. He selected one of the span, a noble large horse, and with the assistance of Mr. John T. Nichols [sadler in Little Rest], his horse was beautifully caparisoned. Early on the morning of the day, the governor elect, mounted on his splendid steed, dressed in fine style, viz., blue coat, short waist, swallow tail, with a profusion of guilt [sic] buttons, red sash, black pants, put inside of a pair of boots, with white tops, and a handsome pair of silver-mounted spurs, together with a white hat, a large black plume with a red top, completed his regimentals. There were quite a number of our citizens assembled to see the governor elect start for the capital. He was met by a very large delegation of his colored fellow citizens about half way between Greenwich and Apponaug, with a band of music, consisting of three drums and two fifes (in those days the French horns, key bugles, etc..., were not known.) As soon as his appearance was noted, the band struck up “Hail to the Chief;” both sides of the road were lined with spectators, the ladies waving their ’kerchiefs, and the gentlemen their hats, while the governor HDT WHAT? INDEX
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with hat in hand bowed to the populace, his head nearly touching his horse’s head. On his entrance to the village, the band played “Washington’s March.” If any one had told the governor on this occasion, as a slave once told a heroic Roman general, that with all this pomp and show he “was nothing but a man,” he would have spurned him from his sight. ...About this time Mr. E.R. Potter was urgently solicited to accept the nomination for Governor of this State. He declined, stating as one of his reasons, that one Governor in a family was sufficient. We remember this Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior of Little Rest, don’t we? He was the guy who, some four years earlier, back in about 1820, had made the serious error of having his employee Cato Pearce, a black Rhode Islander, thrown in the local jail merely for going off on a Sunday to preach — an error for which he needed to apologize, and for which he did in fact attempt to apologize. So, what do we have here, in about 1824, when we see this guy helping another of his black employees, John Potter, prepare for the important local Pinkster event?
Was this brass-balled, bull-necked politico still, in 1824, trying to make amends? Was he trying to make himself more racially sensitive? Was he learning to “go along and get along”? (It does warm one’s heart, to hear of this sort of thing.)
John Beardslee, founder of Beardslee City, New York, died.
Martin Van Buren declined to back Andrew Jackson, causing a split in the Democratic Republican Party.
Evangelist Charles G. Finney began his career, in western New York.
The steamboat Martha Ogden was built at Sackets Harbor, financed in part by Rochester, New York merchants.
Richard McDaniels settled in Connewango, New York.
Ebenezer Mack, publisher of Ithaca, New York’s Seneca Republican, took on William Andrus as a partner.
The late land agent Paolo Busti was replaced by John J. Vander Kemp.
The approximate date Alexander Heimup built a house at 200 Main Street in Penn Yan, New York.
H. G. Spofford’s Gazetteer of the State of New York was published.
When Troy, New York hardware merchant John Spencer died, his partner Erastus Corning bought out Spencer’s heirs to make himself full owner.
Syracuse, New York was incorporated as a city.
This was approximately the year editor Benjamin Smead turned Bath’s Farmers’ Advocate and Steuben Advertiser over to his sons. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The 7th Regiment of the New York State Militia took the title National Guards.
Evangelist Charles G. Finney began his career, in western New York.
Richard McDaniels settled in Connewango, New York.
Ebenezer Mack, publisher of Ithaca, New York’s Seneca Republican, takes on William Andrus as a partner.
The late land agent Paolo Busti was replaced by John J. Vander Kemp.
Auburn, New York: The Auburn system of prison management was implemented, ending universal solitary confinement.
William Henry Seward got married with Frances Miller, daughter of his senior law partner Judge Elijah Miller. Miller gives them a house.
Canandaigua, New York: The 2d County Court House (later City Hall) was completed.
A.N. Phelps began publishing the Canandaigua Republican. He would soon sell the paper to Thomas B. Barnum who would run it for a short time.
The home of Dr. E. Carr at 50 Gibson Street was completed.
Boston architect Francis Allen’s home for Alexander McKechnie was completed.
David E. Evans became a director of the Ontario Bank and the Western Insurance Company.
Chautauqua Lake, New York: A bursting dam destroyed Robert Miles’s log canoe, used for freighting on the lake since 1806.
Elisha Allen built a horse-boat scow for the Chautauqua to Maysville passenger run. Powered by two pair of horses alternating hourly, the run required ten hours.
Rochester, New York: The village got its first theater.
A visitor was robbed of $1,800 at a gambling shop.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church was built.
The wooden Main Street bridge across the Genesee River was replaced by a new wooden one on stone piers, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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at half the cost of the previous, 1812, one.
The aqueduct was completed.
Colonel Nathaniel Rochester’s Washington Street home was completed. He was named a subscription manager for the new Bank of Rochester.
Thurlow Reed became editor of the Telegraph.
The First Presbyterian Church was built.
April 3, Saturday: Morning and Evening Service for chorus and organ by Samuel Wesley was performed completely for the initial time, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
Samuel Young was nominated by a state caucus for governor of New York.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 3 of 4 M / About 2 OC this afternoon a messenger stoped & gave information that Aunt Mary Gould was worse & I was requested to go up there - which I quickly did, & found her very low, but did not appear to me immediately Dieing [sic]. When I went into the Chamber, I went to the bed & inquired how she did. she told me very poorly, & asked me to sit down, which I did) at the head of her bed - she soon put out her hand for me to take, which I did, & took her pulse & found them Stronger than I expected. — She asked me if I did not think her dieing. I told her not immediately - but considered her very weak & low. — While sitting by her bed side, my mind was cover’d with quiet, & I evidently felt a solemn quiet to preside over her, which was a consolation to my feelings on her account — Aunt Stanton came in, to whom she was able to speak with much composure. — it was necessary for me to leave & come home, being under several pressing engagements - but a few minutes before 5 OC a message came that she was very near the close - I went up & found she had expired just as I entered the room Aged 81 Years 4 Months & 1 day, being born the 2nd of the 10th M called December “old stile” 1743 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 11, Tuesday: British forces captured Rangoon (Yangon).
The cornerstone of Rochester, New York’s St. Luke’s Church was laid. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 11, Friday: John Josias Conybeare died.
Maria Agata Szymanowska gave a performance in the Hanover Square rooms, London in the presence of members of the British royal family.
Gioachino Rossini’s canzone Il pianto delle muse in morte di Lord Byron was performed for the initial time, in Almack’s Assembly Rooms, London.
In New York a black seaman, Thomas Jones, was hanged for murder.
July 12, Saturday: On the 8th day after our national celebration, according to the journal of Hezikiah Prince
Jr., news of the simultaneous deaths of two Founding Fathers and ex-Presidents during that anniversary came to the small port town of Thomaston in Maine: Papers brought the news that Presidents Old Adams and Jefferson both died on the 4th of July past. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
George Gordon, Lord Byron’s funeral.
Horatio Gates Spafford registered his A POCKET GUIDE FOR THE TOURIST AND TRAVELLER ALONG THE LINE OF THE CANALS AND THE INTERIOR COMMERCE OF THE STATE OF NEW-YORK and subsequently would publish this.
December 29, Wednesday: In upstate New York, the trustees of the Rensselaer School held their initial meeting and set tuition at $25 a term. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1825
When Massachusetts radical Daniel Shays died on a farm in Sparta, New York, he had been all but forgotten.
Canada’s Lachine Canal was completed.
Construction began on Canada’s Carillon Canal and Grenville Canal, on the Ottawa River.
Cadwallader Colden’s MEMOIR, PREPARED AT THE REQUEST OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMON COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK AND PRESENTED TO THE MAYOR OF THE CITY, AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE COMPLETION OF THE NEW YORK CANALS.
The Seneca Lock Navigation Company petitioned the New York State legislature to purchase the canal (this would happen).
After citizens of Oswego lobbied to have an Oswego River branch built New York authorized $160,000 to construct the Oswego Canal.
De Witt Clinton was re-elected governor for a 2d, non consecutive, term. Seventeen canal surveys, authorized by the omnibus canal bill, were performed throughout New York. The state’s canals brought in $566,279 in revenue.
A canal settlement sprang up at Knowlesville, New York, east of Medina.
Elisha Johnson, Josiah Bissell and others founded the Rochester Canal and Railway Company.
Citizens of the Troy, New York, area proposed a canal through the Berkshire Mountains to Boston.
John Jervis accompanied Benjamin Wright as Principal Assistant Engineer on the Delaware and Hudson Canal. Horatio Allen became a resident engineer.
The US Congress subscribed to the stock of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. E.H. Gill became an assistant engineer on the canal, under Wright.
The route of the Cumberland-Oxford Canal was surveyed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Blackstone Canal Company corporation was formed, in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The Canal d’Aire opened, connecting the River Lys and the Canal de Neuffossé with the River Scarpe.
The Schuylkill Navigation was completed. The first tunnel in the US was constructed on the Navigation at Auburn, Pennsylvania, primarily for promotional purposes.
William Roberts joined Sylvester Welch’s engineering staff on the Union Canal. Canvass White replaced Loammi Baldwin II as Chief Engineer.
May 11, Wednesday: In Rochester, New York, Austin Steward, a man of substance and property, was able to marry: As time passed on I found myself progressing in a profitable business. I had paid for my house and lot, and purchased another adjoining, on which I had erected a valuable brick building. The Lord prospered all my undertakings and I felt grateful for my good fortune. I kept all kinds of groceries and grain, which met a ready sale; and now I began to look about me for a partner in life, to share my joys and sorrows, and to assist me on through the tempestuous scenes of a life-long voyage. Such a companion I found in the intelligent and amiable Miss B-----, to whom I was married on the eleventh of May, 1825. She was the youngest daughter of a particular friend, who had traveled extensively and was noted for his honesty and intelligence. About this time, too, “Sam Patch” made his last and fatal leap from a scaffold twenty five feet above the falls of Genesee, which are ninety-six feet in height. From thence he plunged into the foaming river to rise no more in life. The following spring the body of the foolish man was found and buried, after having lain several months in the turbulent waters of the Genesee. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This year was also rendered memorable by the efficient labors of Professor Finney, through whose faithful preaching of the gospel, many were brought to a saving knowledge of the truth.
June 7, Tuesday: The Marquis de Lafayette, touring America, arrived in Rochester, New York, on the Governor Clinton via the Erie Canal.
June 9, Thursday: The Marquis de Lafayette, touring America, arrived in Rome, New York, on the Governor Clinton via the Erie Canal.
Suleika II D.717, a song by Franz Schubert to words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was performed for the initial time, in the Jagor’schersaal, Berlin. Other Schubert songs also were performed to great success.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 9th of 6 M / Our Meeting tho’ small was a season of favour a time in which celestial dew fell on some minds to their Strengthening & comfort. — James Hazard David Buffum & Father Rodman were engaged in lively seasonable & pertinent testimonys & James Hazard appeard in the conclusion in humble supplication RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 10, Friday: Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin played at a charity concert in Warsaw where he engages in lengthy improvisations. A critic for the Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung was present. His review marks the 1st time that Chopin’s fame travels outside of Poland.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel was given honorary membership in the Societe de Musique, Geneva.
Pharamond, an opera by Adrien Boieldieu, Berton and Rodolphe Kreutzer to words of Ancelot, Guiraud, and Soumet, was performed for the initial time, in the Academie Royale de Musique, Paris. The work was presented for the coronation of Charles X.
The Marquis de Lafayette, touring America, arrived in Whitesboro, New York, on the Governor Clinton via the Erie Canal.
June 13, Monday: At our nation’s puzzle palace, President John Quincy Adams was out for his usual after- breakfast skinny-dip in the Potomac. At the middle of the river, in a sudden gust of wind, the canoe capsized and, the record states, the life of our President, although he was an expert swimmer who swam for one to two hours daily, was endangered. Some of the President’s clothing was lost and he was forced to hike back to the White House in only one shoe.79
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day - Our Meeting was remarkably favourd with quiet -The buisness conducted in harmony & good feeling - which is a favour we ought to be & I have no doubt many are humbly thankful for — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
October 15: New York Governor De Witt Clinton’s party left Albany, New York on the Erie Canal.
Ludwig van Beethoven moved into his last residence, the Schwarzspanierhaus in Vienna.
October 26, Wednesday: Governor DeWitt Clinton officially opened the Erie Canal and departed from Buffalo, New York aboard the Seneca Chief, eastward past Lockport, Rochester, and Rome to the canal’s junction with the Hudson River at Albany.80 Then the canal boat was towed down the river behind one of Clinton’s new steamboats (truncating several days’ journey into one account, as in fact the fastest of the canal boats traveled at but 3mph) into the harbor, where the US fleet, guns roaring, fell in line behind this barge. A series of 32-pounder cannon captured at Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie had been distantly spaced along the entire canal, and as each one heard the detonation of the cannon to its north, it fired in relay. That signal required an hour and twenty minutes to pass from Buffalo to New-York — and then the process was repeated in reverse.
The Great Lakes had been connected to the Atlantic Ocean.
79. The record is silent as to whether the life of the President’s slave, paddling said canoe, was also endangered when it overturned, and is also silent as to how Antoine might have been punished for having sent the Presidential attire down the river. 80. 363 miles in length, 40 feet wide, 4 feet deep, maximum displacement 75 tons; 77 locks, 90 feet by 15 feet; total lockage 655 feet. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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October 27, Thursday: New York Governor De Witt Clinton’s flotilla was welcomed at Rochester. Local dignitaries joined the flotilla aboard the Erie Canal boat The Young Lion of the West. That evening the city threw a grand ball. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1826
418 boats arrived in Buffalo harbor during this year, and 1,100 craft locked through the Erie Canal. The locks south of Juncta were doubled.
Ebenezer Emmons graduated from Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer Institute (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy with its 1st class. In the year of his graduation, Emmons authored a MANUAL OF MINERALOGY AND GEOLOGY: DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS; AND FOR PERSONS ATTENDING LECTURES ON THESE SUBJECTS, AS ALSO A CONVENIENT POCKET COMPANION FOR TRAVELLERS, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Albany: Websters and Skinners), a textbook that was the 2d treatise of its kind written by an American for American students of geology.
PIONEER OF SCIENCE
Professor Amos Eaton planned a Rensselaer geological expedition through the western part of New York, aboard the canal boat LaFayette, accompanied by Governor De Witt Clinton’s son George W. Clinton, future state entomologist Asa Fitch, and physicist Joseph Henry (among others). Professor Eaton delivered a lecture HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in Rochester, sponsored by that city’s Chemical Class (which had been formed to create a lending library on mechanical subjects and would become the basis for the city’s Franklin Society).81
Friend Elias Hicks and his cousin Friend Edward Hicks the painter visited the Friends meetings of New York, preaching:82
It is a dreadful crisis, the spiritual Jerusalem seems to be invested from every side.... If there were less tattling and scribbling, and more praying, there would be happiness among us.
In this year occurred the first recorded public use of the sarcastic phrase “get religion” in America. –And the chasm within Quakerism which would lead to the Great Split was widening as more and more people “just weren’t getting it” (to employ an idiom new to the 1990s).
Here is an example of the “tattling and scribbling” that was being preached against by Friend Elias. In this year an anonymous 16-page pamphlet was being issued in Philadelphia, entitled AN EXPOSE OF SOME OF THE MISREPRESENTATIONS CONTAINED IN A PAMPHLET, ENTITLED A LETTER FROM A FRIEND IN AMERICA TO LUKE HOWARD, OF TOTTENHAM, NEAR LONDON. This pamphlet is attributed to “a Friend in America” and describes itself as a response to the pamphlet by “Luke Howard, of Tottenham, near London,” LETTER TO A FRIEND IN AMERICA ... UPON A TREATISE WRITTEN BY JOB SCOTT, ENTITLED “SALVATION BY CHRIST.” (In this year Friend Luke Howard was preparing for publication in London by W. Phillips a volume entitled GLEANINGS, MORAL AND RELIGIOUS, FROM VARIOUS AUTHORS / BY JOHN KENDALL [1726-1815], by selecting and arranging passages from that author’s manuscript collections.) HOWARD PUBLICATIONS
81. George W. Clinton’s JOURNAL OF A TOUR FROM ALBANY TO LAKE ERIE, BY THE ERIE CANAL, IN 1826. GEORGE W. CLINTON 82. SERMON DELIVERED BY ELIAS HICKS AND EDWARD HICKS IN FRIENDS MEETINGS IN NEW YORK. New York, 1825, pages 50-51. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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418 boats arrived in Buffalo harbor during this year, and 1,100 craft locked through the Erie Canal. The locks south of Juncta were doubled.
Ebenezer Emmons graduated from Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer Institute (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy with its 1st class. In the year of his graduation, Emmons authored a MANUAL OF MINERALOGY AND GEOLOGY: DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS; AND FOR PERSONS ATTENDING LECTURES ON THESE SUBJECTS, AS ALSO A CONVENIENT POCKET COMPANION FOR TRAVELLERS, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Albany: Websters and Skinners), a textbook that was the 2d treatise of its kind written by an American for American students of geology.
PIONEER OF SCIENCE
Professor Amos Eaton planned a Rensselaer geological expedition through the western part of New York, aboard the canal boat LaFayette, accompanied by Governor De Witt Clinton’s son George W. Clinton, future state entomologist Asa Fitch, and physicist Joseph Henry (among others). Professor Eaton delivered a lecture in Rochester, sponsored by that city’s Chemical Class (which had been formed to create a lending library on HDT WHAT? INDEX
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mechanical subjects and would become the basis for the city’s Franklin Society).83
February 5, Sunday: Buffalo, New York attorney Millard Fillmore got married with Abigail Powers.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 5 of 2 M 1826 / Meetings pretty well attended solid & silent David Buffum & Father Rodman yet confined - their presence we miss on our Meetings. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 17, Monday: New York granted a charter for its first railway, the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad Company, to run between Albany and Schenectady, capitalized at $300,000 with an option to raise an additional $500,000.
The village of Saratoga Springs, New York was incorporated.
Whitesboro, New York’s Scientific and Military Academy of Western District was incorporated by the state legislature.
83. George W. Clinton’s JOURNAL OF A TOUR FROM ALBANY TO LAKE ERIE, BY THE ERIE CANAL, IN 1826. GEORGE W. CLINTON HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 27, Thursday: Rensselaer professor Amos Eaton went to Albany, New York to arrange for the canal boat for his upcoming student field trip on the Erie Canal, the LaFayette.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27th of 4th M 1826 / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting was this day held at Portsmouth, to attend which I went out over night & lodged at Uncle Stantons — aunt Patty being very sick did not go, so I walked to Meeting & on my way stoped at Richd Sissons to see him — In the first Meeting Ruth Freeborn preached excellently —In the last Meeting we got through with some buisness which had been long on hand, particularly on application for Membership from our Preparative Meeting - which was not a very clear or satisfactory case at last — Dined at Richd Mitchells & rode Home with David Buffum in his carriage. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 29, Saturday: Asa Fitch, a member of the Rensselaer field expedition group, studied the types of rock they would be encountering as they passed across New York.
King Pedro IV signed the constitutional charter and announced his intention to abdicate in favor of his infant daughter Maria da Gloria, if she was betrothed to his brother Miguel and Miguel accepted the new constitution.
A seriously ill Carl Maria von Weber attended the premiere of Bishop’s Alladin at Drury Lane. As he entered, the house rose. During the “Huntsmen’s Chorus” the audience whistled Weber’s chorus of the same name.
A farewell concert was given at Boylston Hall in Boston for Anton Philipp Heinrich.
April 30, Sunday: The Erie Canal boat LaFayette, hired in Albany, New York for Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition, was towed to Troy. Asa Fitch helped maneuver the craft through the sloop lock. GEORGE W. CLINTON
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 31[?] 4 M / Our Monthly Meeting was well attended & solid - Father Rodman concerned in a short testimony— Having something to attend too at Uncle Stantons before 27 Meeting & to make the way more clear to leave home I rode out in his waggon which was in town & got there by 3 OClock — after taking a dish of tea there I set out for home on foot & walked home RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 1, Monday: At the Round Hill School in Northampton, George Bancroft and George Henry Bode signed the preface to the 2d edition of Edward Everett’s English translation of Professor Philip Karl Buttmann’s BUTTMANN’S GREEK GRAMMAR.
STRAßE PHILIPP BUTTMANN IN BERLIN IS NOT NAMED AFTER THIS PHILOLOGIST.
The Rensselaer field expedition on the Erie Canal needed to stand by for a day due to the large quantity of baggage and bedding that was being loaded onto their canal boat, the LaFayette.
Jonas Wheeler of Concord died at the age of 37.
JONAS WHEELER, son of Jotham Wheeler, was born February 9, 1789, and graduated [at Harvard College] in 1810. He read law with Erastus Root, Esq., of Camden, Maine, and settled in the profession in that town. He was justice of the peace, Colonel in the militia, delegate to form the constitution, a representative and a member of the Senate of Maine, of which he was President the two last years of his life. He died May 1, 1826, aged 37.84 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 2, Tuesday: Emperor Pedro I of Brazil waived his right to the Portuguese throne in favor of his daughter Maria de Gloria.
The United States recognized the Peruvian Republic.
After waiting for the loading of stove, utensils, crockery, the Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition got under way along the Erie Canal. The LaFayette made its way through the sloop lock at 11 AM, stopping in Troy, New York to onload Hezekiah Hulbert Eaton’s chemical apparatus. Timothy Dwight Eaton joined the party. Dinner was held at the foot of the nine-lock Waterford flight. Asa Fitch and others walked as far as Cohoes and then waited two hours for the boat to catch up. At tea Professor Eaton read out the rules of conduct and the schedule — wake at sunrise, breakfast at eight, dinner at 2, tea after boat stopping for the night. There were 24 members of this all-male (it goes without saying) expedition. The sleeping would be crowded so they created a tent on the afterdeck that could sleep 4. Taps not being in their curriculum, they would not get to bed until after midnight. Governor DeWitt Clinton’s son George W. Clinton was one of the participants. GEORGE W. CLINTON
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 2nd of 5th M 1826 / This Morning with my wife & others making a company of 21 in number - went on board the Packet for Greenwich to attend Quarterly Meeting we arrived before One OClock at Daniel Howlands - & After Dinner Uncle Peter Lawton & I took a Chaise & rode about four Miles to see John Casey who is now I thnk turned 87 Years of Age — he retained his looks remarakbly, his countenance fresh & not materially changed from what it was when I saw him last, 5 or 6 Years ago but his limbs quite debilitated, so that it was with difficulty he could walk about — In his mind there was the marks of former greatness, but, much reduced & even fallen. — he seemed glad to see us, & me in particular - he remains a Monument of warning to others, to take heed least they fall - my mind was humbled & grieved to see his situation, but I concluded it was best to go to see him. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 3, Wednesday: The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition crossed the Niskayuna River on Alexander’s aqueduct. An unfastened window shutter on the boat was torn off on the side of the aqueduct. The captain was told he was responsible to the owner for any expenses due to accidents. They continued on to Schenectady, New York and stopped for dinner and the night. Four or five of the party slept in a nearby tavern.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 84. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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4th day Close attendance of Meetings from 9 OC in the Morng till after 7 OC in the eveng. - Dined at Abigail Prouds & Lodged At Thos Howlands — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 4, Thursday: The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition had a one-day layover. Classes were being given along the way. Dinner was at Auriesville, New York.
Confitebor tibi, Domine for solo voices, chorus and orchestra by Samuel Wesley was performed for the initial time, in the Argyll Rooms, London.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day Our public Meeting was favourd, & the buisness conducted in an orderly becoming manner - Dined at Saml Browns & then In company with Caleb Wheaton rode to Providence & got to the School House a little after Dark - found John well & glad to see me - Hannah staid in Greenwich to return home with friends tomorrow - I lodged at the School House & 6th day was much engaged at the School committee, we had a favourd opportunity in the Girls School, in which my mind was uncommonly enlarged, tho’ I said nothing — Again lodged at the School - 7th day met with the Trustees of O B Fund, which occupied the Forenoon, then rode to Providence town & Dined at Wm Jenkins’s & again in the Afternoon engaged at his house on a committee from the Meeting for Sufferings till near night & finding myself disappointed of returning home, went to Dorcas Browns to tea, & while there was informed that the Steam Boat Babcock had come up landed her Passengers & returned immediately. Benjamin Hadwin & Abigail Robinson came passengers - Abigail having a prospect of Smithfield Quarterly Meeting next week — lodged at Wm Jenkins & 1st day [Sunday] attended Meetings in Providence all Day - Dined at Wm Jenkins’s - & took tea & spent the eveng at Jos Anthonys lodged again at Wm Jenkins’s — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 5, Friday: The Rensselaer field expedition stopped at Fort Plain, New York and explored the creeks. They arrived at Little Falls on the Erie Canal at dark. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 6, Saturday: A building for the Senate of Brazil opened in Rio de Janeiro in the presence of Emperor Dom Pedro. It would be used for the following 98 years.
The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition passed Herkimer, New York and German Flats, mooring for the night at Frankfort. GEORGE W. CLINTON
May 7, Sunday: The Rensselaer field expedition arrived at Utica, New York too late for morning services. Some of the party would attend afternoon services at the Episcopal church. Frances, a black woman, was engaged to cater for them all at $16 a day (this contract would cover all their food expenses).
In the Reverend Ezra Ripley’s handwriting in the Concord church’s records, there appears the following curious notation: The church tarried by the desire of the pastor, after the communion service, and heard the request, in writing, of our brothers and sisters, —John Voss and his wife, —David Hubbard, —Phebe Wheeler, —Martha Whiting, —(and others) — to be dismissed from this church and recommended to a Council which may be convened for the purpose of organizing them, with others, into a Church of Christ.... This request being sudden and unexpected to members of the church, it was thought best not to reply to the request without further consideration. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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What had happened? Deacon John White was leading a dissident group of religious reactionaries out of the church, to form one more to their own liking, to be known as the Trinitarian Congregationalist congregation. THE DEACONS OF CONCORD
May 8, Monday: The Rensselaer field expedition toured the American Revolution battlefield at Oriskany, New York. They stopped for the night at Lenox. GEORGE W. CLINTON
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day came home in Capt Waldrons Packet - This is a much longer time than I am usually from home at Q Meeting time. - but so it is I have something to do with most of Societys concerns, & I cannot get along as others can. — I feel the pressure of the various engagements I am under on account of Society - they fall on one who is weak & entirely unable to bear much, but I desire to do the best I can & leave the Issue to him who does not forsake in the needful time. — tho’ I may acknowledge my Faith & my patience are often brought to very close test RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 9, Tuesday: Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition had breakfast at New Boston, New York, then continued along the Erie Canal to Chittenengo, where they toured the polytechnical school run by Mr. Yates. After dinner with the teachers in the dining hall they traveled to a nearby hill to examine samples of petrified wood. They spent the night in “Fuddletown” (Manlius).
May 10, Wednesday: The Rensselaer field expedition arrived at Salina (north Syracuse), New York, formed in the previous year. Asa Fitch visited the salt works. They continued on to Nine Mile Creek (Otisco). A bed- making committee was chosen.
May 11, Thursday: The Rensselaer field expedition had breakfast at Jordan, New York. Asa Fitch begins feeling unwell. Dinner was eaten at Byron. The LaFayette continued on to Montezuma. Erie Canal mile- boards now begin appearing, and this would continue all the way to Buffalo.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 11th of 5 M / Our Meeting was well attended & a solid & pretty comfortable time — The committee in care of Jamestown Meeting met & agreed to encourage a Meeting’s being held there in the middle of the week, which the members agreed too & is to be opened the 1st 5th day after Moy [Monthly] Meeting RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 12, Friday: The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition had breakfast at Clyde. Asa Fitch was feeling better. They stopped at Lyons for dinner. Professors Addison Hulbert and Bennet F. Root left the party to give lectures on botany and chemistry to local audiences. The party met Erie Canal commissioner Myron Holley. Supper was at Newark. They stopped at Palmyra, New York for the night.
May 13, Saturday: Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition proceeded aboard the LaFayette along the Erie Canal in the direction of Rochester, New York.
May 14, Sunday: Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition reached Rochester, New York. Professor Eaton predicted the town would fail to survive. GEORGE W. CLINTON
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 14th of 5th M 1826 / John Wilbour & Andrew Nichols attended our Morning Meeting which was large & favourd Andrew began the service in a short but well connected plain & pretty forcible testimony - then John commenced with the Scriptue “How much owest thou my Lord” which he improved well & I believe to the edification of the Meeting at large. — & concluded in humble earnest suplication. — they attended an appointed Meeting at Portsmouth, at the 4th Hour — Our Meeting in the Afternoon was pretty well attended & Silent — With my Wife & Sister Ruth sat the evening at Abigail Robinsons. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 15, Monday: Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition visited the falls of the Genesee River, New York. The professor was lecturing on the rock strata when he was stricken with a fainting spell and began hallucinating. Receiving medical attention, he soon pulled himself back together.
May 16, Tuesday: The Rensselaer field expedition passed through the towns of Gates, Clarkson, and the unincorporated Brockport, spending the night at Holleysville (Holley), New York. Asa Fitch read the 12th and 13th cantos of Byron’s DON JUAN.
Maria Szymanowska gave her final concert in London. She would return to Warsaw.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
3rd day 16th of 5th M / Much affected about Noon with the News from Providence of the very sudden death of Our frd Dorcas Brown widow of Obadiah Brown - she was taken about 4 OC yesterday Afternoon in a Fit & lived till about 11 OC in the evening. —We have not heard the particulars, but that they are sudden & Awful is certain, an express having arrived in town this forenoon for Her Brother Benj Hadwen It has seemed very remarkable to me that early this Morning she was much on my mind, a subject of conversation between my wife & me at Breakfast table, & all along thro’ the forenoon she was occasionally in my thoughts & particularly about 10 minutes before I heard the news of her death I was thinking what a change her removal would make, & was casting in my mind the probability of her having prepared for it by making a Will, & some consequences of her having done or not done it, was very forcibly brought to view. — It also seems to me a little remarkable, that while I was in Providence last, My mind was specially drawn to make her a visit & a very pleasant one it was. I took tea & set the evening with her, & it did not seem an easy thing to come away in consequence of which my stay was prolonged, longer than common. - it seemed as if my love for her was renew’d in a manner, that seemed remarkable to me at the time — “In the midst of life we are in Death” We know not the Day or hour we may be called hence to be seen of men no more. — Her precious Father John Hadwen died equally sudden - the Day I well remember & his funeral — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
May 17, Wednesday: Sigismund Thalberg gave his 1st public performance in London.
In Concord, the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company sold its 1st policy.
Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition passed through Newport (Albion), crossed over the highway arch, and spent the night at Middleport, New York. They were told of a 2-year-old who had recently drowned in the Erie Canal. Asa Fitch read cantos 14 and 15 of DON JUAN. Fitch described the countryside as “fertile and productive, yielding abundant crops, to repay the labors of the husbandman.”
The American people learned that in the previous year their government had entered into an agreement at Council Grove, Kansas with a group of people to the west, the Osage, called the “Kansas Tribe of Indians,” which would provide them with right-of-way for their new trail to Santa Fe:
“BLEEDING KANSAS” WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
May 18, Thursday: The Rensselaer field expedition passed evidence of the newly-begun fruit industry. They examined flammable gas seeping out of the ground and named the local community Gasport. As they passed through Lockport, New York, they encountered local entrepreneurs marketing excavated stone from the Erie Canal. GEORGE W. CLINTON
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 18th of 5th M 1826 / Our Meeting was well attended, & several not members came in, supposing J Wilbour & A Nichols was to be there. — In the Preparative Meeting T Carr our new Member sat with us. — some little buisness occurd but none transacted on any consequence - A proposition was made & left for consideration, To either discontinue the public Meeting in the Middle of the week or hold it in six day, which occurs in the Yearly Meeting time RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 19, Friday: Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition arrived at Manchester, New York, encountering 200 US troops en route from Sackets Harbor to Green Bay, Michigan. Several were under guard for desertion and disobedience. A prisoner count revealed one missing. He was soon spotted and recaptured. The Rensselaer party pressed on along the Erie Canal to view Niagara Falls. Asa Fitch’s expectations had been too great, and at the actual thingie he found himself underimpressed — some rocks above the falls were needed, in order to frame the scene more artistically. They descended the steps to the base of the cataract, and toured Goat Island.
May 20, Saturday: In the evening the group from Rensselaer walked along the shore of Lake Erie in upstate New York. Professor Amos Eaton offered a recapitulation of the expedition. GEORGE W. CLINTON
May 23, Tuesday: Franz Liszt gave the 1st of three concerts in the Salle de Bourse, Lyon.
Professor Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition reached Sturgeon Point, the farthest extent of their journey. They encamped at 18 Mile Creek outside of Buffalo, New York. GEORGE W. CLINTON
May 24, Wednesday: The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition was invited to dine with General Peter Porter and his wife in Buffalo, New York. They crossed into Canada and toured the Fort Erie battlefield. GEORGE W. CLINTON HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
May 25, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 25th of 5 M / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting this day held in Town was Silent & to me a low time. — The buisness conducted in the last was pretty well resulted, but great want of life on my part. — — we had several of our friend to dine with us Vizt B Freeborn, Z Chase G Dennis Asa Sherman - & Eleanor & Ann Lawton.— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
The Reverend Waldo Emerson’s 23d birthday.
The widower Philip Leidy remarried with Christiana Taliana, a cousin of his deceased wife Catherine Mellick Leidy.
The Rensselaer school’s Erie Canal expedition left Troy aboard the LaFayette left Buffalo for the return trip. Professor Amos Eaton and the expedition crossed the mouth of “Tonnewanta” (Tonawanda) Creek, and spent the night at Lockport, New York.
Giacomo Meyerbeer got married with his cousin Minna Mosson in Berlin. They immediately departed for Paris, where he would work on a new opera.
Cospaia was divided between Tuscany and the Papal States.
Per the journal of Albert Gallatin’s son James as recorded in THE DIARY OF JAMES GALLATIN: I am torn both ways. I know I could be of the greatest use to father. It is impossible to take our child at his age across the ocean, as the discomforts, particularly where food is concerned, are so great. Josephine is quite willing for me to go, in fact urges me to do so. I will leave the matter entirely in father’s hands. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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After her 2d appearance in Chepachet, Rhode Island Little Bett, The Learned Elephant was being walked out of town when she was executed by a broadside of gunfire from shooters concealed in a grist mill on the Chepachet River. Her keeper had made the mistake of bragging to the yokels that her tough hide was impenetrable to bullets. Her hide would be shipped to the Boston Museum and would wind up being exhibited by Phineas Taylor Barnum at the American Museum in New-York. Four years later, seven of the local residents would be found responsible for this incident at the bridge and be required to pay $1,500 in damages to Hackaliah Bailey, an ancestor of the Bailey of Barnum & Bailey Circus — and two of them would get expelled from the local chapter of the Masonic Order. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 26, Friday: Carl Maria von Weber’s song From Chindara’s Warbling Fount I Come J.308 to words of Moore was performed for the initial time, in London. This was his final composition. The composer was too ill to finish the accompaniment so he improvised it as it was performed. Ignaz Moscheles would later write down what he remembers of Weber’s interpolation. After the concert, Weber collapsed on a sofa. A mustard plaster would be applied to his chest.
Professor Amos Eaton set a goal for the remainder of the Rensselaer field expedition journey of 30 miles a day along the Erie Canal. They reached Gasport to find that their name for the settlement was already appearing on signboards. Moving on to Middleport, New York they notice an abundant harvest along the way. GEORGE W. CLINTON
May 27, Saturday: The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition spent the night at Newport (Albion), New York. Asa Fitch described the citizens as “about as sassy, indecent, vulgar and dirty set of inhabitants as we have yet met with.”
May 28, Sunday: Arriving in Rochester, New York the Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition attended Presbyterian services. The naturalist Samuel Constantine Rafinesque joined the party. Some of the group spent the evening at the Canal Hotel.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 28th of 5 M / In the Morning Father Rodman delivered a solid good testimony, attended with life - Silent in the Afternoon - Set the evening with Abigail Robinson RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 29, Monday: The Amos Eaton Rensselaer field expedition visited the Lower Falls, New York with Professor Constantine Rafinesque. They viewed a perfect rainbow, and noted that the river was lower than before. A number of them collected wild geraniums, which in this eastern part of the state are rare. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
May 30, Tuesday: Professor Amos Eaton and the Rensselaer field expedition passed through Pittsford, New York. Asa Fitch left the group briefly to visit friends. The party collected plants in a marsh at Palmyra. George Clinton walked in his sleep, wakening the party in middle of the night.
Bianca e Gernando, a melodramma by Vincenzo Bellini to words of Gilardoni after Roti, was performed for the initial time, in Teatro San Carlo, Naples before the royal family on the nameday of King Ferdinando. This would receive 25 performances during the season and would later be staged as Bianca e Fernando.
Carl Maria von Weber made his final public appearance, at a benefit for Mary Anne Paton, in London.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 30th of 5 M / My feelings this morning a little after 9 OC were shocked with the occurrence of a daughter of Christian Ellery Jumping out of a garret window from the house occupied by Wm Tilley & owned by George Mason. She killed herself almost instantly, - her name was Cornelia Harding wife of Albert Harding of Providence here on a visit to her Sister RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 31, Wednesday: Breakfast was eaten at Newark, New York. A mosquito swarm attacked along the Erie Canal. The students built fires on board the boat to ward them off. GEORGE W. CLINTON
June 1, Thursday: Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer field expedition reached Otisco, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 1st of 6th M 1826 / Our Meeting was small, but solid & silent- I am thoughtful & concerned about our approaching Yearly Meeting it always is a weight & burden on my mind, but I have also always or nearly always found strength sufficient to the day — it however now seems more like giving out than common. —What a day it is in our Society, the burden bearers have fallen on strange times, defection in principle seems to be spreading far & wide, & great pains taken among the disaffected to discriminate their doctrine which is tantamount with Deism. — It is said some of these are expected here. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
June 2, Friday: Le timide, ou Le nouveau seducteur, an opera comique by Daniel Francois Esprit Auber to words of Scribe and Saintine, was performed for the initial time, in Theatre Feydeau, Paris.
The Rensselaer field expedition reached Salina, New York. Professor Amos Eaton gave public lectures on chemistry and natural history. GEORGE W. CLINTON
June 3, Saturday: The Rensselaer field expedition reached Manlius, New York. Asa Fitch reported that allegedly it had once been named Fuddletown, from the first inhabitants, who were a drunken, carousing set of people. The present inhabitants seemed not all that drunken or carousing, and were zealous to obliterate the former name. The group moved on to Green Lake, where they encountered downpours. To entertain the students, Professor Samuel Constantine Rafinesque sang French, Scottish and Italian airs.
June 4, Sunday: The Rensselaer field expedition reached Rome, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 4th of 6th M / Our Meeting was well attended & in the Morning the London Epistel was [read] by Brother D Rodman - Silent in the Afternoon. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
June 5, Monday: One day before his planned return home to Dresden, servants in the house of Sir George Smart, London, called to wake their guest, Carl Maria von Weber. When they were unable to rouse him, they broke open the door and found the composer dead in his bed, at the age of 39 years, the victim of the effects of tuberculosis.
The Rensselaer field expedition spent the night in Utica, New York. GEORGE W. CLINTON
The Trinitarian Congregationalist Church of Concord was authorized by an ecclesiastical council. Initially, this church would have 16 members.
June 6, Tuesday: A cold storm struck out of the east. Most of the students of the Rensselaer field expedition remained within the cabin of their Erie Canal boat. Breakfast was eaten at Frankfort, New York. They reached German Flats by nightfall.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 8th of 6 M / Our Meeting today was small as it usually is the fifth day previous to Yearly Meeting — It was low as to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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life - Oh for a quickning & renewal of life - how feeble do I feel at the Approach of Yearly Meeting — oppressed with many discouragements RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
June 7, Wednesday: The Rensselaer field expedition reached Fort Plain, New York. There was a thunderstorm.
Per the journal of Albert Gallatin’s son James as recorded in THE DIARY OF JAMES GALLATIN: It is finally decided I am to accompany father, but only for six months should I be wanted at home. For many reasons this is thought to be for the best. As now arranged we sail on July 1. I am doing all I can to provide for more comfort for the voyage. I often wonder how father has stood so many of these disagreeable crossings of the Atlantic. The horrible cramped feeling. The misery of a gale when we can barely crawl about, and the absolute horrors of a fog. We are to take a very southerly course this time. Both father and mother are very much annoyed. At the last moment an application was made to father asking him to take a Miss Bates to England. It seems she is to marry a Monsieur Van der Weyer, a Belgian avocat. The latter made himself very useful to Prince Leopold, the husband of Princess Charlotte. None of us know or ever heard of the Bates family; they are very rich and extremely vulgar. Father could not refuse.
June 8, Thursday: At noon the Rensselaer field expedition passed the mouth of Schoharie Creek, New York. The Erie Canal boats were pulled across by cable. GEORGE W. CLINTON
June 9, Friday: The Rensselaer field expedition arrived at Niskayuna, New York.
June 10, Saturday: The Rensselaer field expedition passed through the Waterford Locks of the Erie Canal, arriving at Troy, New York, the completion of their adventure. GEORGE W. CLINTON HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 19, Saturday: Manuel Gonzalez Salmon y Gomez de Torres replaced Pedro Alcantara Alvarez de Toledo y Salm-Salm, Duque de Infantado as prime minister of Spain.
The Canada Company was chartered, to colonize Upper Canada (Ontario).
Joseph Ellicott, former Resident-Agent for western New York’s Holland Land Office, ill and despondent, committed suicide at Bellevue Hospital in New-York at the age of 65.
September 10, Sunday: In Batavia, New York, William Morgan was taken into custody by the police in order to protect him from a mob of Freemasons who were accusing him of having revealed their Masonic secrets.
In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 10th of 9 M 1826 / Our morning meeting was rather small on acct of Rain, but it was a good solid & in good degree a favourd Meeting. Our frd David Buffum was favourd in public testimony. - two other friends said a little & I believe the Meeting closed will - In the Afternoon we were silent & solid— Spent the evening with my H at Abigail Robinsons in company with Mary Morton who is not yet well enough to go to Meeting RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 12: William Morgan of Batavia, New York, becoming disillusioned with Freemasonry, had published the secrets of the order in a booklet. He was in the protective custody of the police in Canandaigua when he was abducted by a gang of his fellow Masons and taken to Fort Niagara near Niagara Falls, which had recently been abandoned by the US Army and where the caretaker and its only other resident, a ferryman, were both active Masons. The renegade was locked in an empty powder magazine while they debated whether they needed to kill him. While this discussion was going on, Morgan disappeared from the magazine — and would not be again heard from. Anti-Masons suspected that the Masons had indeed murdered him. According to Jasper Ridley, “They took him out on to the River Niagara in a boat, fastened metal weights to his feet and threw him into the river, where he drowned.” The Masons countered that the renegade may well have been bribed to leave the country. (This incident would lead to greatly focused paranoid fears of a general conspiracy, and to the formation of an Antimasonic Party. One is, however, instantly reminded of the initiation accident that occurred in March 2004 on Long Island, where the script called for the person being initiated into the Masons to be shot at with blanks at close range in the lodge basement, in order to impress him with the seriousness of the event, and the gun contained live rounds and William James was shot in the face by Albert Eid and killed. Sometimes these strange things happen, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone contemplated beforehand that anything strange like that would happen.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1827
In Rochester, New York, the population neared 10,000. A platform was built over the Genesee River to provide space for a farmer’s market. Alexander Street and Pennsylvania Street (South Union Street) were completed between the Erie Canal and East Avenue. The city had eight boat basins on that canal: Warehouse, Washington, Fisher’s Screw Dock, Fitzhugh’s, Ely’s, Child’s, Hill’s (Johnson’s), and Gilbert’s. The house of hardware merchant Ebenezer Watts was completed. An African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church was being erected at Ford and Spring streets.
April 2, Monday: Eugene Ring was born in Kingston, New York, the first son of Moses Ring and Anna Maria Shook. He would spend the first years of childhood at Rhinebeck, New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 4, Wednesday: This 4th of July was quite a celebration of American freedom — this was the final full day of slavery in the state of New York!
The steamboat Chautauqua went into service, with John T. Wills as captain.
On South Mountain near Boonsboro, Maryland there is a monument believed to be the 1st erected to the memory of George Washington — and believed also to have been dedicated on this day.
George Washington Parke Custis’s “The Indian Prophecy: A National Drama in Two Acts” had its Philadelphia premiere at the Chestnut Street Theater.
The Ohio and Erie Canal opened in Cleveland as Governor Allen Trimble arrived there on the lead boat, State of Ohio.
July 5, Thursday, New York Emancipation Day: Slavery had been “abolished” at midnight, in the state of New York. Austin Steward gave Rochester’s New York Emancipation Day Speech.
Actually, only those born before 1799 were manumitted — those born between 1799 and 1827 would be required to continue with their slave labor for a few more years. However, since James McCune Smith had at this point attained the age of 14, his lot fell among those freed rather than among those forced to continue under the category of indentured servant. But the Emancipation Bill had been passed, and the colored people felt it to be a time fit for rejoicing. They met in different places and determined to evince their gratitude by a general celebration. In Rochester they convened in large numbers, and resolved to celebrate the glorious day of freedom at Johnson’s Square, on the fifth day of July. This arrangement was made so as not to interfere with the white population who HDT WHAT? INDEX
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were everywhere celebrating the day of their independence — “the Glorious Fourth,” — for amid the general and joyous shout of liberty, prejudice had sneeringly raised the finger of scorn at the poor African, whose iron bands were loosed, not only from English oppression, but the more cruel and oppressive power of Slavery. They met according to previous appointment, Mr. A.H----, having been chosen president, Mr. H.E----, marshal, and Mr. H.D----, reader of the “Act of Emancipation,” and “The Declaration of Independence.” A large audience of both white and colored people assembled, and the day which had been ushered in by the booming cannon, passed by in the joyous realization that we were indeed free men. To the music of the band the large procession marched from the square to the hotel, where ample provision was made for dinner, after listening to the following oration, which I had been requested to deliver. I must not omit to mention that on the morning of that happy day, a committee of colored men waited upon the Hon. Matthew Brown, and in behalf of the citizens of Monroe County, presented their thanks for his noble exertions in the Legislature, in favor of the Act by which thousands were made free men.
Here is how the events of the day would be presented by the Rochester Daily Advertiser: ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. The extinction of that curse by the laws of our State, was marked with appropriate rejoicings on the part of the African race in this neighborhood. A procession of considerable length and respectable appearance, preceded by a band of music, moved from Brown’s Island through the principal streets to the public square, yesterday forenoon, where a stage and seats were erected, for the speakers and audience. The throne of Grace was addressed by the Rev. Mr. Allen, a colored clergyman. The act declaring all slaves free in this State, on the fourth day of July, 1827, was read, which was succeeded by the reading of the Declaration of Independence and delivery of an oration by Mr. Steward. We have heard but one opinion from several gentlemen who were present, and that was highly complimentary to the composition and delivery of the same. The exercises were concluded by a short discourse from the Rev. Mr. Allen, and the procession moved off to partake of an entertainment prepared for the occasion. The thing was got up in good order, and passed off remarkably well. The conduct of the emancipated race was exemplary throughout, and if their future enjoyment of freedom be tinctured with the prudence that characterised their celebration of its attainment, the country will have no reason to mourn the philanthropy that set them free. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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— And here, then, is Austin Steward’s New York Emancipation Day Speech in Rochester, at least as he later remembered and chose to make record of it: The age in which we live is characterised in no ordinary degree, by a certain boldness and rapidity in the march of intellectual and political improvements. Inventions the most surprising; revolutions the most extraordinary, are springing forth, and passing in quick succession before us, — all tending most clearly to the advancement of mankind towards that state of earthly perfection and happiness, from which they are yet so far distant, but of which their nature and that of the world they inhabit, are most certainly capable. It is at all times pleasing and instructive to look backward by the light of history, and forward by the light of analogical reasoning, to behold the gradual advancement of man from barbarism to civilization, from civilization toward the higher perfections of his nature; and to hope — nay, confidently believe, that the time is not far distant when liberty and equal rights being everywhere established, morality and the religion of the gospel everywhere diffused, — man shall no longer lift his hand for the oppression of his fellow man; but all, mutually assisting and assisted, shall move onward throughout the journey of human life, like the peaceful caravan across the burning sands of Arabia. And never, on this glorious anniversary, so often and so deservedly celebrated by millions of free men, but which we are to-day for the first time called to celebrate — never before, has the eye been able to survey the past with so much satisfaction, or the future with hopes and expectations so brilliant and so flattering; it is to us a day of two-fold joy. We are men, though the strong hand of prejudice and oppression is upon us; we can, and we will rejoice in the advancement of the rapidly increasing happiness of mankind, and especially of our own race. We can, and we will rejoice in the growing power and glory of the country we inhabit. Although Almighty God has not permitted us to remain in the land of our forefathers and our own, the glories of national independence, and the sweets of civil and religious liberty, to their full extent; but the strong hand of the spoiler has borne us into a strange land, yet has He of His great goodness given us to behold those best and noblest of his gifts to man, in their fairest and loveliest forms; and not only have we beheld them, but we have already felt much of their benignant influence. Most of us have hitherto enjoyed many, very many of the dearest rights of freemen. Our lives and personal liberties have been held as sacred and inviolable; the rights of property have been extended to us, in this land of freedom; our industry has been, and still is, liberally rewarded; and so long as we live under a free and happy government which denies us not the protection of its laws, why should we fret and vex ourselves because we have had no part in framing them, nor anything to do with their administration. When the fruits of the earth are fully afforded us, we do not wantonly refuse them, nor ungratefully repine because we have done nothing towards the cultivation of the tree which produces them. No, we accept them HDT WHAT? INDEX
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with lively gratitude; and their sweetness is not embittered by reflecting upon the manner in which they were obtained. It is the dictate of sound wisdom, then, to enjoy without repining, the freedom, privileges, and immunities which wise and equal laws have awarded us — nay, proudly to rejoice and glory in their production, and stand ready at all times to defend them at the hazard of our lives, and of all that is most dear to us. But are we alone shut out and excluded from any share in the administration of government? Are not the clergy, a class of men equally ineligible to office? A class of men almost idolized by their countrymen, ineligible to office! And are we alone excluded from what the world chooses to denominate polite society? And are not a vast majority of the polar race excluded? I know not why, but mankind of every age, nation, and complexion have had lower classes; and, as a distinction, they have chosen to arrange themselves in the grand spectacle of human life, like seats in a theater — rank above rank, with intervals between them. But if any suppose that happiness or contentment is confined to any single class, or that the high or more splendid order possesses any substantial advantage in those respects over their more lowly brethren, they must be wholly ignorant of all rational enjoyment. For what though the more humble orders cannot mingle with the higher on terms of equality. This, if rightly considered, is not a curse but a blessing. Look around you, my friends: what rational enjoyment is not within your reach? Your homes are in the noblest country in the world, and all of that country which your real happiness requires, may at any time be yours. Your industry can purchase it; and its righteous laws will secure you in its possession. But, to what, my friends, do you owe all these blessings? Let not the truth be concealed. You owe them to that curse, that bitter scourge of Africa, whose partial abolishment you are this day convened to celebrate. Slavery has been your curse, but it shall become your rejoicing. Like the people of God in Egypt, you have been afflicted; but like them too, you have been redeemed. You are henceforth free as the mountain winds. Why should we, on this day of congratulation and joy, turn our view upon the origin of African Slavery? Why should we harrow up our minds by dwelling on the deceit, the forcible fraud and treachery that have been so long practised on your hospitable and unsuspecting countrymen? Why speak of fathers torn from the bosom of their families, wives from the embraces of their husbands, children from the protection of their parents; in fine, of all the tender and endearing relations of life dissolved and trampled under foot, by the accursed traffic in human flesh? Why should we remember, in joy and exultation, the thousands of our countrymen who are to-day, in this land of gospel light, this boasted land of civil and religious liberty, writhing under the lash and groaning beneath the grinding weight of Slavery’s chain? I ask, Almighty God, are they who do such things thy chosen and favorite people? But, away with such thoughts as these; we will rejoice, though sobs interrupt the songs of our rejoicing, and tears HDT WHAT? INDEX
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mingle in the cup we pledge to Freedom; our harps though they have long hung neglected upon the willows, shall this day be strung full high to the notes of gladness. On this day, in one member at least of this mighty Republic, the Slavery of our race has ceased forever! No more shall the insolent voice of a master be the main-spring of our actions, the sole guide of our conduct; no more shall their hands labor in degrading and profitless servitude. Their toils will henceforth be voluntary, and be crowned with the never failing reward of industry. Honors and dignities may perhaps never be ours; but wealth, virtue, and happiness are all within the compass of our moderate exertions. And how shall we employ a few moments better than in reflecting upon the means by which these are to be obtained. For what can be more proper and more profitable to one who has just gained an invaluable treasure, than to consider how he may use it to the best possible advantage? And here I need not tell you that a strict observance to all the precepts of the gospel ought to be your first and highest aim; for small will be the value of all that the present world can bestow, if the interests of the world to come are neglected and despised. None of you can be ignorant of what the gospel teaches. Bibles may easily be obtained; nor can there be a greater disgrace, or a more shameful neglect of duty than for a person of mature age, and much more, for any father of a family to be without that most precious of all books — the BIBLE. If, therefore, any of you are destitute of a BIBLE, hasten to procure one. Will any of you say that it can be of no use to you, or that you cannot read it? Look then to that noblest of all remedies for this evil, the Sunday School — that most useful of all institutions. There you may learn without loss of time or money, that of which none should be ignorant — to read. Let me exhort you with earnestness to give your most sincere attention to this matter. It is of the utmost importance to every one of you. Let your next object be to obtain as soon as may be, a competency of the good things of this world; immense wealth is not necessary for you, and would but diminish your real happiness. Abject poverty is and ought to be regarded as the greatest, most terrible of all possible evils. It should be shunned as a most deadly and damning sin. What then are the means by which so dreadful a calamity may be avoided? I will tell you, my friends, in these simple words — hear and ponder on them; write them upon the tablets of your memory; they are worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold upon every door-post — “industry, prudence, and economy.” Oh! they are words of power to guide you to respectability and happiness. Attend, then, to some of the laws which industry impose, while you have health and strength. Let not the rising sun behold you sleeping or indolently lying upon your beds. Rise ever with the morning light; and, till sun-set, give not an hour to idleness. Say not human nature cannot endure it. It can — it almost requires it. Sober, diligent, and moderate labor does not diminish it, but on the contrary, greatly adds to the health, vigor, and duration HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of the human frame. Thousands of the human race have died prematurely of disease engendered by indolence and inactivity. Few, very few indeed, have suffered by the too long continuance of bodily exertion. As you give the day to labor, so devote the night to rest; for who that has drunk and reveled all night at a tippling shop, or wandered about in search of impious and stolen pleasures, has not by so doing not only committed a most heinous and damning sin in the sight of Heaven, but rendered himself wholly unfit for the proper discharge of the duties of the coming day. Nor think that industry or true happiness do not go hand in hand; and to him who is engaged in some useful avocation, time flies delightfully and rapidly away. He does not, like the idle and indolent man, number the slow hours with sighs — cursing both himself and them for the tardiness of their flight. Ah, my friends, it is utterly impossible for him who wastes time in idleness, ever to know anything of true happiness. Indolence, poverty, wretchedness, are inseparable companions, — fly them, shun idleness, as from eminent and inevitable destruction. In vain will you labor unless prudence and economy preside over and direct all your exertions. Remember at all times that money even in your own hands, is power; with it you may direct as you will the actions of your pale, proud brethren. Seek after and amass it then, by just and honorable means; and once in your hand never part with it but for a full and fair equivalent; nor let that equivalent be something which you do not want, and for which you cannot obtain more than it cost you. Be watchful and diligent and let your mind be fruitful in devises for the honest advancement of your worldly interest. So shall you continually rise in respectability, in rank and standing in this so late and so long the land of your captivity. Above all things refrain from the excessive use of ardent spirits. There is no evil whose progress is so imperceptible; and at the same time so sure and deadly, as that of intemperance; and by slow degrees it undermines health, wealth, and happiness, till all at length tumble into one dreadful mass of ruin. If God has given you children, he has in so doing imposed upon you a most fearful responsibility; believe me, friends, you will answer to God for every misfortune suffered, and every crime committed by them which right education and example could have taught them to avoid. Teach them reverence and obedience to the laws both of God and man. Teach them sobriety, temperance, justice, and truth. Let their minds be rightly instructed — imbued with kindness and brotherly love, charity, and benevolence. Let them possess at least so much learning as is to be acquired in the common schools of the country. In short, let their welfare be dearer to you than any earthly enjoyment; so shall they be the richest of earthly blessings. My countrymen, let us henceforth remember that we are men. Let us as one man, on this day resolve that henceforth, by continual endeavors to do good to all mankind, we will claim for ourselves the attention and respect which as men we should possess. So shall every good that can be the portion of man, be ours — this HDT WHAT? INDEX
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life shall be happy, and the life to come, glorious.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5th of 7 M 1827 / Our Meeting small & hevy to me, & I am quite inclined to believe there was but very little life among us. — Yet as Wm Flanner on[c]e said in our Meeting “My not being able to feel the life doses [does] not prove that none of the rest are favoured with it. — Had a comfortable letter from John this Morning. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
September 8, Saturday: Egyptian ships landed troops at Navarino to help put down the rebellion in Greece.
A big charity concert in honor of Franz Schubert took place in the Landstandisches-Theater, Graz, organized by the Styrian Musical Society, of which he was an honorary member (the proceeds go to help recent flood victims).
William Forsyth of the Pavilion Hotel, John Brown of the Ontario House, and General Parkhurst Whitney of the Eagle Hotel in Niagara Falls, New York had reconfigured an old lake schooner, the Michigan, to the appearance of a pirate ship, sorta. Aboard it they had placed an effigy of Blue Beard, along with effigies of other buccaneers and politicians. They had loaded the ship with live animals such as a buffalo, a small bear from the US and one also from Canada, two raccoons, a dog and a goose (some reports had two foxes, fifteen geese, and a tethered eagle). The event had been advertised in the papers as the “Michigan Descent” and as “INFERNAL NAVIGATION, OR A TOUCH OF THE SUBLIME!” The pirate Michigan with a cargo of ferocious wild animals will pass the great rapids and falls of Niagara — 8th September 1827 at 6 o’clock The Michigan has long braved the bellows of Erie, with success, as a merchant vessel: but having been condemned by her owners unfit to sail long proudly “above”; her present proprietors, together with several public spirited friends, have appointed her to carry a cargo of Living Animals of the Forest, which surround the upper lakes, through the white tossing and deep rolling rapids of Niagara and down its great precipice, into the basin “below.” The greatest exertions are being made to procure animals of the most ferocious kind, such as Panthers, Wild Cats and Wolves; but in lieu of these, which it may be impossible to obtain, a few vicious or worthless dogs, such as may possess strength and activity, and perhaps a few of the toughest of the lesser animals will be added to, and compose the cargo.... Should the vessel take her course through the deepest of the rapids, it is confidently believed that she will reach the Horse Shoe unbroken;85 if so she will perform her voyage to the water of the Gulf beneath which is of great depth and buoyancy, entire, but what her fate will be the trial will decide. Should the animals be young and hardy and possessed of great muscular power and joining their fate with that of the vessel, remain on board until she reaches the water below, there 85. Although the water that goes over the Horseshoe Falls nowadays is only about three to five feet thick at the lip, this is due to diversion of water through hydroelectric tunnels, and back then the lip of the falls in this season was nearly twenty feet thick. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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is a great possibility that many of them will have performed the terrible jaunt, unhurt! Most of the spectators were locals, and there was a reason for that. These fall festivals that attracted the local yokels and farmers to Niagara were planned by the hotelkeepers and saloonkeepers in such a manner as to extend their operating season beyond the touristy summer rush. Captain James Rough of the paddle steamer Chippawa towed the Michigan from Black Rock to Navy Island and pointed it toward the Falls. At approximately 6PM he released this hulk into the rapids. Its hull tore and the two bears made it to Goat Island, there to be shot for somebody’s supper. At the base of the falls the goose, still living, would be recovered by a Mr. Duggan and, undoubtedly, would also do service as somebody’s supper. 10,000 to 50,000 people were watching as this stunt ship went over the Horseshoe Falls. A good time was had by all (except perhaps the animals), and we must imagine that the local prostitutes did a handsome business that night. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1828
The New York legislature called for a registry of canal boats.
Kingston, New York’s Rondout district was created by the directors of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, as their canal’s eastern terminus.
“The Arcade” was built on Westminster and Weybossett Streets in Providence, Rhode Island at a cost of about $140,000. The huge 21-foot tall solid granite columns were cut by Joseph Olney from the quarry at Bear Ledges, Graniteville (along the present Route 44 just east of the present Interstate 295) and hauled to Providence not on barges but by oxcart. One of these massive stone columns fractured in transit, and was used instead in the town cemetery (you can still view a repurposed section of that split column as you drive along Branch Avenue past the local cemetery). Such arcades had existed in London, by the way, since 1818, and the Reynolds Arcade would go into operation in Rochester, New York in the following year. The glass-covered central court of this granite edifice serves as a pleasant and convenient passageway from Westminster to Weybosset St. At either end of the building stairways lead to galleries around the upper floors. There are 26 retail stores on each of its three levels:
Also, Cove-street was completed, and a new bridge was built, by the Providence Washington Insurance HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Company, connecting it with Canal-street.
Ezra Cornell moved from the Bronx to Ithaca, New York.
Upstate New York’s initial printing press was set up in Wyoming County.
The Rogers brothers launched their 1st schooner, Jeanette, on the lower Genesee River.
James D. Bemis sold the Western Repository and Genesee Advertiser to Morse and Harocy.
Hamilton College tutor William Kirkland got married with the writer Caroline Stansbury and the couple relocated to Geneva, New York to found the Domestic School.
Great Lakes steamboat operator Josephus Bradner Stuart died.
1,000 gallons of whiskey was purchased at 20¢ per gallon, for resale in Le Roy, New York.
Nathaniel Pitcher, Jr. was elected as the New York State governor.
At about this point, silver was discovered near the town of Lowville, New York.
A brick Steuben County courthouse is built at Bath, New York.
The Ithaca and Owego Railroad Company was incorporated, and was capitalized at $150,000.
Thomas Flynn’s dramatization of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” played at Albany, New York.
In Buffalo, New York, the attorney Millard Fillmore was elected to the state legislature. Beals, Mayhew and Company established the town’s initial foundry and machine shop, at Indiana and Ohio Streets.
The Great Lakes schooner Guerriere delivered 2,500 bushels of wheat from the west. Not finding a ready market, the schooner continued with its cargo to Dunkirk, New York.
In Rochester, New York the merchant Charles J. Hill took on Lewis L. Peet as a partner, and the firm became Hill & Peet.
April 21, Monday: Gerrysville, New-York changed its name to Alabama.
The Auburn and Owasco Canal Company was chartered with a capitalization of $100,000, to connect the village with Owasco Lake.
December 10, Wednesday: The initial shipment of Pennsylvania anthracite from the Delaware and Hudson Canal reached New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1829
Colonel William Leete Stone’s FROM NEW YORK TO NIAGARA—JOURNAL OF A TOUR, IN PART BY CANAL, IN 1829.
David Hosack’s MEMOIR OF DEWITT CLINTON, WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING NUMEROUS DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS OF HIS LIFE AND OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CANALS.
The Pioneer Line, running packet boats on the Erie Canal on every day but the Sabbath, failed.
The Oswego Canal connected the Erie Canal with the east end of Lake Ontario.
The New York State legislature approved funding for a Chemung Canal linking the Chemung River to the Erie Canal.
Rochester packet boatbuilder Seth C. Jones launched the 15/20-ton Superior on the Erie Canal. The boat had a 7-foot-high cabin decorated with scenic paintings by artist Daniel Steele.
January 1, Thursday: According to an almanac of the period, “The General Congress of Mexico assembled, and was opened by a speech from President Victoria.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
As an experiment, a gas streetlamp was placed in Dock Square in Boston.
Martin Van Buren became governor of New York State.
Prince Ibrahima, an Islamic prince who had four decades earlier been sold into slavery, recently manumitted on condition that he return to Africa, was an honored guest of the black citizens of Philadelphia in their New Year’s Day parade up Lombard and Walnut streets, and down Chestnut and Spruce streets.
The overture to the opera Fierabras D.796 by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time, in the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Musikvereinsaal, Vienna.
John Henry Eaton got married with the widowed Peggy O’Neale Timberlake (her husband had during the previous autumn committed suicide aboard the USS Constitution, where he was serving as Purser; she would be accused of promiscuousness and of having had a miscarried pregnancy, by Secretary of War Eaton, prior to their marriage, and would be ostracized by the society women of Washington DC, building toward the fall of President Andrew Jackson’s first cabinet).
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal about attending Friends worship in Providence, Rhode Island, and there seeing Friend Moses Brown in the 91st year of his age: 5th day 1st of 1st M 1829 / In dating the New Year I sensibly feel that I have passed the old one & enterd on another - & where or how situated & circumstanced We may be at the end of this, is wisely hid from us. — On entering our kitchen this morning to go to breakfast Many of the girls came up in a Sprightly manner to wish us a happy new Year innocency & sprightliness of their countenances was striking, & evinced the sincerity of their hearts - I hope it will be a happy Year to us & to them - but ear [ere] it may be passed it may not be presumptuous to apprehend that some of the members of this numerous family may be numbered with the silent dead & wheather living or dead I cordially wish all a happy Year After breakfast I went into town to visit James Mitchell & his sisters - I found James very low & apparantly closing on this world & all the things of it to enter a new scene—— as I entered the room I felt my mind solemnized & on drawing to the bed side he put out his hand to take mine. —— After sitting a little time with him I asked him if he suffered much pain, he told me he had distress at the lungs - on which I took occasion to remark to him that we were but poor creatures without divine help - Oh yes he replied poor miserable creatures indeed - I then observed that it had been a consolation to me in times of disertion & poverty to feel that we have an advocate with the Father, this he signified was his consolation. - a little more was said, in which it was manifest that he had given up the world & the prospects of it, & his sisters told me he had fully expressed that to them & his anxious desire to depart & be at rest - it seemed to me his situation was even a desirable one. & I dont know that I ever visited a person in their last moments where there appeard to be a better hope on genuine christian ground. After this satisfactory, & even consoling visit to James - I attended Meeting in Providence which was silent & rather less Sensibility in my feelings than I had reason to expect from the previous opportunity. —— Our frd Moses Brown was present on the day of the New Year - now in the 91st Year of his Age. ——86 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
86. Stephen Wanton Gould Diary, 1823-1829: The Gould family papers are stored under control number 2033 at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, Box 8 Folder 13: October 2, 1823-March 6, 1829; Box 8 Folder 14: April 1, 1829-December 31, 1832; also on microfilm, see Series 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1819-1824. Purinton, Matthew and Betsy. 1824-1835. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1829-1835. Gould, Stephen Wanton and Gould, Han- nah, Asst. Supts. 1835-1836. Davis, Seth and Mary. 1837. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1838-1839. Rathbun, Rowland and Alice. 1840-1844. Wing, Allen and Olive. 1845-1846. Thompson, Olney and Lydia. 1847. Congdon, Jarvia and Lydia. 1847-1852. Cornell, Silas and Sarah M.
January 9, Friday: According to an almanac of the period, “Discovery and failure of an extensive conspiracy at Lisbon, Portugal, to overthrow the government of Don Miguel,” and “Frederick von Schlegel, the celebrated. German author, died in Germany.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
Whitesboro’s Scientific and Military Academy of Western District was accredited by the New York Board of Regents.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 9th of 1 M / This Morning was sent for into Providence to Rhoda Mitchells & her sisters whose brother James Died about 8 OClock. - After doing the Needful I came home. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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February 27, Friday: According to an almanac of the period, “Battle between the Colombian and Peruvian armies at Tarqui, in the southern part of Colombia, the former consisting of 5000 and the latter of 8000 men. The Peruvians were defeated with considerable loss. Convention signed for the cessation of hostilities on the field of battle, and mutual differences referred to the arbitration of the United States’ government.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
In New York, the Albany Institute was incorporated and merged with the Albany Lyceum of Natural History, to promote science and art.
March 5, Thursday: In the Landhaussaal of Vienna, Franz Schubert’s “Hymnus an den Heiligen Geist D.964” for male chorus, soloists, chorus, and winds to words of Schmidt was performed for the initial time.
Governor of New York State Martin Van Buren resigned to become President Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of State (he would be replaced by Enos Thompson Throop).
According to an almanac of the period, “Battle fought between the Turks and Russians, near the river Natonebi in Asiatic Turkey, in which the former lost 1000 men in killed and wounded, and the latter 200.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 5th of 3 M 1829 / Being in Newport I attended our Meeting which was Small but comfortable to me — I also in the course of the day called on many of my old friends & acquaintances all of whom appeared to be very glad to see me as I really was them. Newport & Newport folks all looking natural tho I have been longer absent from it then I ever was before from the day of my birth. — The object of my returning home to my native Town at this time is to attend to a Law Suit pending at the Supreme Court now sitting in which I am defendant as executor to the Will of old Benjamin Reynolds. — Tho’ in my own person or property I am not interested yet the case has given me considerable anxiety & trouble it having passed the lower court in my favour & the Widow who brought the Action is very inveterate towards me, I know without just cause, as it has ever been my desire & constant effort to deal justly & honourably with her. - but she is a malignant & wicked old woman & makes a great many false representations, thro’ which my mind has ever been preserved in the quiet & favourd remarkably to keep my place. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 17, Friday: The Madison County Rail Road was organized. Capitalized at $70,000, and meant to link Chittenango and Cazenovia, New York, it would be surveyed but never built.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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6th day 17th of 4th M 1829 / We recd today a good satisfactory & comfortable letter from our dear John - & we have also had the company this evening of our dear brother David Rodman from Newport - all which we feel thankful for. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
May 17, Sunday: Former US Supreme Court chief justice and New York State governor John Jay died in his Bedford home at the age of 80.
According to an almanac of the period, “A French minister, M. Bresson, arrives, and is presented to the Colombian government at Bogota,” “A body of Turkish troops, 5000 in number, defeated and driven into Silistria, by the Russian army under General Diebitsch, after a severe action, with heavy losses on both sides. Silistria completely invested by the Russians the same day,” and “Severe battle near Pravadia, between the Russian army under General Roth, and the Turkish army commanded by the Grand Vizier in person. The Turks are said to have lost 2000, and the Russians 1000 men. The Russian army maintained their ground; but no important advantage gained by either party.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
Bronson Alcott, in Boston: “I have perused the New Harmony Gazette for 1827-8 within the last month, and am pleased with many articles which its pages contain.... The objection which I have to it is chiefly in reference to its open attack upon the Christian religion, or rather to the disrespect which its editors pay to religious opinions, or rather to the disrespect which its editors pay to religious opinions generally. I fear they are not fully imbued with the spirit of liberality, that spirit which induces its possessors to treat the opinions of all with respect and to acknowledge frankly the truth contained in all.”
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 17 of 5 M / Our Meetings were both silent & to me Seasons of life & favour for which I desire to be thankful, as death & dullness has been my lot & portion for a long time & particularly in Meeting —After Meeting in the PM We recd a letter from John — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
November 9, Monday: From the log of the lightkeeper on Matinicus Rock: “a bad storm.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1830
Ebenezer Emmons returned to Amos Eaton’s Rensselaer Institute in Troy, New York, as a Junior Professor of Mineralogy and Geology. He would remain there until 1839. During this period, Emmons would also begin work for the New York State Geological Survey.
Samuel Constantine Rafinesque revisited the Albany area while touring the Catskills. He met with scientists Lewis C. Beck, James Eights, and Amos Eaton, and Rensselaer School secretary Moses Hale, and delivered a series of lectures at the college.
British actor Tyrone Power visited America, touring upstate New York.
Subsequent to the Embargo Acts and the War of 1812, and with the coming of the steamboat, many of America’s small harbor villages had been becoming remarkably impoverished. Into such quiet villages were beginning to come middle-class summer boarders, “rusticating” themselves where living was cheap and the locals eager to make themselves of service. Even the descendants of ship captains and merchants, living in large houses full of Chinoiserie, had begun to accept paying “guests.” However, these were merely cheap hideaways: as no coastline aesthetic had as yet been pioneered, such guests were not experiencing these quiet villages as “picturesque.” Tourism would not begin for real until after the US Civil War.
Theodore Dwight’s guidebook THE NORTHERN TRAVELLER identified Franconia Notch in New Hampshire as “where are iron works, and a curious profile on a mountain, called the Old Man of the Mountain.”
The tourist taking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire during this decade was encountering a district for which no accurate maps were as yet in existence, in which the farmers had not yet cleared off the old- growth forest, and along the roads of which there were only rude inns frequented by lumberjacks and peddlers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Soon, however, this tourism would become the dominant economic enterprise of the district, and would attract an extensive railroad system which would allow penetration to the heart of the primitive lands in but nine rail hours from downtown Boston. By the 1850s, a great contrast would have developed in the White Mountains, between local folk having low-paid jobs in the service industries, and the grand hotels in which wave after wave of elegant tourists played cards and drank champagne against a backdrop of majestic scenery. Class divisions were becoming exacerbated: there was a growing minority that could afford travel and leisure, but there was also a growing majority for whom being away from their work for a week would mean unemployment, and a slide into vagabondage or destitution. These rising tourists had, uniformly, familiarized themselves with the attractions of the region before ever they got there, by inspecting paintings or reproductions of paintings or engravings after paintings, by reading guidebooks, or by encountering the region through poetry. Examples of this tourist genre are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face” and Thomas Cole’s “Notch of the White Mountains.” The major payoff offered to these tourists was that by means of their tour, they would be able to stake a claim to a more genteel status. They had demonstrated their good taste and their sensitivity. Standing in front of romantic scenery while quoting someone else’s poetry made one a Romantic. Buying a railroad ticket, and a travel trunk, and taking a hotel room, and taking meals in a hotel ballroom, and purchasing and perusing a guidebook, and purchasing and perhaps using an elegantly bound blank journal, were a commodification of gentility. Just as the sex industry offers sexual acts and fantasies in return for payment, so also this nascent tourist industry began to offer private experiences of the sublime. However, there is a difference between the sex industry and the tourist industry: in the case of tourism, dissimulation is required: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Nineteenth-century tourists (like twentieth-century tourists) liked to think of some things as “private,” apart from the world of buying and selling, and those experiences were precisely what tourism often sold. Some items of the tourist trade could be marketed openly. Stagecoach tickets, bathing machines, hotel rooms: Those things had prices and were appropriate for market transactions. But romantic scenery must not appear to be tainted by buying, selling, and speculating. It had to exist, as Emerson imagined it, in the world of the “poet.” It had to appear untouched by marketplace transactions.... One way or another, tourism lured tourists into a world where all experiences were for sale: culture and gentility for the Unitarian minister in the White Mountains, community and religion for the Methodist grocer on Martha’s Vineyard. Precisely because these products were intangible, because they disguised the commercial relationship, they were well calculated to overcome residual resistance to consumer relations. Tourists were able to see themselves, not as consumers purchasing goods, but as sensitive lovers of scenery or loyal members of a religious community. ...By the mid-nineteenth century, everyone with even a remote hope of achieving middle-class status understood that a vacation was as essential to that status as owning a piano and a carpet.... Tourism offered tourists satisfaction through acquisition (in this case, the acquisition of experiences), emotional fulfillment through spending money.... From its beginning, industrial capitalism has been able to encompass the buying and selling of cultural experiences that seem to be outside it, or even in direct conflict with it. In spite of how scenic tourists saw it, tourism did not protect nature from commercialization; it intensified the commodification of both art and nature. Whatever nostalgic tourists thought, tourism was no more a return to idyllic preindustrial class relations than were the mills of Fall River. That was the ultimate irony of the industry: not that people hid selfish motives behind lofty rhetoric (which is after all not much of a discovery), but that they inevitably bought what they did not want. Nineteenth-century tourists turned away from the allure of the marketplace to travel straight into the arms of the marketplace. And that is a route that has become well-traveled indeed in the past two centuries.
When Ralph Waldo Emerson published his famous essay on “Nature” in 1836 (four years after his own trip to the White Mountains), he used a phrase that articulated the new intangible “product” that was being marketed in scenic regions. Farmers owned the usual sort of property in land: “Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.” But none of these farmers owned “the landscape.” That was “a property in the horizon,” as Emerson called it, “which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.” Emerson was arguing that the “poet’s” sort of property was not for sale. But he was wrong. By the 1830s, any Miller, Locke, or Manning with enough imagination and capital could speculate in such scenic property. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John Chattin purchased for $660, from a speculator, 55 acres of former Iroquois land south of Rochester, New York. When the evangelist Reverend Charles Grandison Finney brought his revival to the city, thousands come to hear him, and the result was that 635 join the city’s three Presbyterian churches, 203 joined the city’s 1st Baptist Church, and the Methodists build a church there that had a seating capacity of 2,000. Edwin Scrantom and his wife joined the Brick Presbyterian Church. Austin Steward closed his grocery store and prepared his family to depart for the new black settlement of Wilberforce in Canada.
In 1830, I closed my business in Rochester, preparatory to leaving for Canada. Some of my friends thought I had better remain in the States and direct emigrants to Wilberforce; while others were certain I could benefit them more by going myself at once, — the latter I had determined to do; but as the time drew near for me to start, an unaccountable gloominess and forebodings of evil took possession of my mind. Doubts of the practicability of the undertaking began to arise, though nothing unfavorable had occurred. To the throne of grace, I often bore the subject and besought my Heavenly Father to enlighten my mind, and direct my steps in duty’s path regarding it; but to confess the truth, I never received any great encouragement from that source, though it occupied my mind constantly. During the hours of slumber I was continually being startled by frightful dreams, — sometimes I thought I saw a monstrous serpent as large as a log stretched across the road between Rochester and the Genesee River; at another I thought myself in the air so high that I could have a full view of the shores of Lake Ontario, and they were alive with snakes; and then I saw a large bird like an eagle, rise up out of the water and fly toward the south. Notwithstanding these omens, I turned my steps toward Wilberforce. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Steamboats out of New-York began to bypass the port at New London, Connecticut and deliver their passengers to the docks of Providence, Rhode Island, where the passengers could take either the stage along the Lower Path to Boston, or the barge up the canal to Worcester. From this year until 1835 the Lady Carrington, an elegant and carefully designed barge, would be floating passengers along in comfort on a 12- hour cruise from Providence to Worcester (steamers plying the sound had by this point quite stripped the Connecticut coast of its timber).
The 1st steamboats on the Danube River in Europe.
A total of $1,066,922 in tolls was collected on New York’s canals.
Subsequent to this year, celebrations of Black Election Day in Rhode Island would fall off, no longer occurring during the planting season of each and every year.
Captain James DeWolf sold the “Linden Place” mansion in downtown Bristol, that he had acquired from the bank for $5,100 two years earlier, to his son William Henry DeWolf for $8,000.
It may have been at approximately this point that Providence citizen William J. Brown was giving over his dreams of self-improvement through travel in order to get married and raise a family: PAGES 152-155: I have previously remarked that the colored people have but very little chance to elevate themselves to a position of influence and wealth, and I determined to travel until I could find a brighter prospect for the future than Providence. I found, however, that there was a very formidable hindrance blocking up my pathway. I had made the acquaintance of a young lady schoolmate while attending school. This acquaintance was not formed for any special purpose, but simply to have some one to spend my leisure hours with. I made it a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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practice to call twice a week, as I was remarkably fond of being in the society of ladies. The reason I did not want to make a wife of her then was, because I was not able to support her, having no permanent business that would warrant me a living, and thought it better for one to be miserable than two. I had been waiting upon her some two years, and thought I would break off the easiest way I could. I commenced by making short visits when I called, saying I could not stay long, as I had some engagement that called me away, at the same time watching to see the effect it would produce. I found it created a worriment of mind, making her very inquisitive. The next step was to omit a visit at the regular time. This brought forth questions I could not answer satisfactorily without telling a falsehood; finally I knew not what to do, for my visits had aroused a passion in my heart and mind I could not smother. I was also satisfied that if I wished to make a companion of her for life I could find no one with more attractions in personal appearances, qualifications or ability, than she possessed in my weak judgement. The question was, however, soon decided with me, for the time was fast approaching when I must settle on the subject of my departure. I was taken suddenly ill, suffering much from pain, which I could not account for. I had eaten nothing to cause it. It continued increasing until I was compelled to shut up my shop and go home. This was before my mother’s death, and she was an excellent nurse.... I had repeated attacks, each one becoming more severe, until I was compelled to give up the idea of going away.... I had said nothing to my intended or any one else about going away, but had merely said that if people could not prosper in one place they had better move to another.... Now the question to be settled was, would she accept me for a husband. I could not boast of any beauty and was near-sighted. Uniting in wedlock was no small thing to consider; its conditions extended through life. In making up her mind these defects might make her change her opinion of me. She might think it for her interest to marry a man blessed with good eyesight; if anything happened after marriage it would be something out of her power to obviate. I prized my good education highly, for it was in my favor; it excelled that of my associates at this time and if anything, present or future, could be accomplished by it, the means were in my possession. I also prized the good character I bore, for I was held in esteem by the elderly people for industry and politeness. The young people had a good opinion of me, because I was well spoken of by the aged; having knowledge of the estimate placed upon my character, I thought my defects would not be noticed. I now felt that the time had come for me to settle this question, for it had long been a source of trouble to me. I had made her frequent visits and enjoyed myself much in her society. Now I desired to know something of her personal appearance during the day, when engaged in her domestic affairs. To accomplish this I would drop something during the evening, which would cause me HDT WHAT? INDEX
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to call after during the next day. I would go at different hours for the things. It was common for ladies to be prepared for company during the evening; then one could find no fault with their appearance; but to my satisfaction I always found her in trim, dressed according to her work. I considered her every way qualified, so far as domestic affairs were concerned, to make a suitable companion for any one, whether in high or low degree, and every one spoke well of her character. Her temper was mild, and there was but few who could equal her in looks, besides she enjoyed the best of health, having a carriage and appearance well calculated to sustain it. Thus having the matter settled in my own mind, I found no just cause to prevent us from getting married. I went and brought matters to a close respecting our union in just three months from that day. The varied incidents which had been thrown in my way had made its impression upon my mind, and my views in regard to the future were entirely changed. Instead of making preparations to go out and see the world, I decided to settle down at home; my business was good and increasing every day, everything seemed to warrant my success in supporting a family if I had one. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 6, Tuesday: Joseph White, an 82-year-old man in Salem, Massachusetts, was murdered.
On this day the Church Christ (which is to say, the Mormon church; the church would change its name two more times) was organized in Fayette, near Lake Cayuga with a handful of people, as God’s one true church on earth. Hyrum Smith, schoolteacher Oliver Cowdery, David and Peter Whitmer, and Samuel H. Smith comprised the founding committee. Back in Palmyra, New York, on this fateful day, THE BOOK OF MORMON was being published; Joseph Smith, Jr. had been able to translate it, he said, by peeking through a hole in a stone, from mysterious inscriptions he could make out on the surface of a set of golden tablets, that he had HDT WHAT? INDEX
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found buried, near Palmyra.87 –Did I mention this prime beachfront property in New Mexico? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Speaking of New Mexico, on this day the government of Mejico was enacting fateful legislation designed to prevent further intrusion of US settlers and their slaves into the northern regions of its nation, and to interfere with their freedom to traffic in these slaves. This act of insolent disregard for American freedom would, eventually, lead to their being invaded by an all-white US army –and the capture of their capital city –and the war loss of all of the northern regions of their nation.
WAR ON MEXICO
Grand Duke Ludwig I of Hesse died and was succeeded by his son, Ludwig II.
June: From the log of the lightkeeper on Matinicus Rock: “The keeper is Beter and he aught to be.”
The backers of the Mohawk and Hudson Rail-Road in New York advertised for contracts.
87. An interesting relationship has been discovered between the BOOK OF MORMON and the Translators’ Preface to the KING JAMES BIBLE, a preface which had, of course, been created as of 1611. This relationship challenges the claim of Joseph Smith, Jr. –if that claim needs to be challenged rather than being in-your-face preposterous– that the writings in question had been produced in ancient times by Nephites rather than being created by him during 1830. The 1611 Translators’ Preface has: ...clouds of darkness would so have overshadowed this Land, that men should have been in doubt which way they were to walk... the appearance of Your Majesty, as of the Sun in his strength, instantly dispelled those supposed and surmised mists...
There are in the BOOK OF MORMON phrases which it would seem could only have been taken from this 1611 Preface: ...the cloud of darkness, which had overshadowed them, did not disperse... (Helaman 5:31) ...the cloud of darkness having been dispelled... (Alma 19:6) This expression “clouds of darkness” or “cloud of darkness” is not anywhere in the text. The word “overshadowed” appears in the NEW TESTAMENT but this cannot be the source as these ancient Nephites imagined by Smith would not have had access to it. The word “dispelled” is not anywhere in the King James Version and Smith did not employ it again in the BOOK OF MORMON. Also, the Translators’ Preface of 1611 has it that the appearance of King James, like “the Sun in his strength, instantly dispelled” dark mists. The verse in Alma 19:6 was also written concerning a king, although his name is given as Lamoni rather than as James, and speaks of “the light which did light up his mind... yea, this light had infused such joy into his soul, the cloud of darkness having been dispelled....”
(A personal note: Although I am very much an advocate of religiosity as a force in our lives, I am in no manner a worshiper of origins and happen to consider the origins of all the “big religions” to be frankly ludicrous. I do not intend here, therefore, to portray the origin of Mormonism as in any manner uniquely ludicrous — I merely mean to portray it as at least as amusing as most.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 13, Tuesday: Recent heavy rains had caused a breach in the Erie Canal in Bushnell’s Basin near Pittsford’s Grand Embankment; a culvert had given way a mile and a half west of Pittsford and damage had been done at Fairport.
July 15, Thursday: The body of George IV was interred with suitable solemnity in St George’s Chapel at Windsor.
Contractors’ proposals for the Mohawk and Hudson Rail-Road in New York were received.
A treaty was signed in Keokuk which ceded 10,530,000 hectares belonging to the Sauk and Fox tribes of Wisconsin and Illinois to the United States. The Americans would be obliged to evacuate across the Mississippi into Iowa.
Hector Berlioz was chosen as one of the six finalists for the Prix de Rome for the 4th time. He vowed that whatever happened, this would be the last.
July 17, Saturday: The six finalists for the Prix de Rome, including Hector Berlioz, entered the loges. The poem was by Jean-Francois Gail on the last night of Sardanapalus.
Barthelemy Thimonnier received a French patent for the 1st practical sewing machine.
Contracts were signed by the Mohawk and Hudson Rail-Road of New York for grading, stone, and timber.
The Pensacola, Florida Gazette added some followup detail to the intriguing story of the negrero Feniz and its cargo of enslaved Africans that had begun on July 3rd: The Feniz (prize to the USS Grampus) sailed for New Orleans Monday last. The departure of this vessel has excited some considerable conversation in the City, and we have heard it attributed altogether to the absence of Judge Brackenridge. We do not pretend to know any thing in relation to the causes which may have induced the captors to take this vessel to New Orleans — but in justice to Judge B. we will remark that his absence from town could not have been the reason, as he had nothing to do with the case until it came before his court for trial. The judge it is true is absent from the city, but he is in the district and it is well known that he has been engaged in holding the courts in Jackson and Walton counties and that by a little trouble he could have been informed that his services were required here, and we have no doubt he would have been in town within a week. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 12, Thursday: Johanna Schumann grudgingly approved a plan of Freidrich Wieck to allow her son Robert to study piano and theory and assess his progress after a 6-month period.
Ground was broken at Schenectady, New York for the Mohawk and Hudson Rail-Road. Backer and lawyer C.C. Cambreleng addressed the crowd.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 12th of 8th M / After waiting on Lydia Breed and my wife to Meeting in Providence which they had a mind to attend - I took the Steam Boat for Newport having buisness there which required my personal attention. — Found Aunt Nancy & all my particular friends well & had time to accomplish some things I went on - in the course of the Afternoon. Took tea at Father Rodmans & lodged at our own hired house RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 10, Friday: The Reverend Charles Grandison Finney began half a year of ministering in Rochester and other parts of western New York.
Robert Schumann received a certificate of study from the University of Heidelberg.
Secretary of War John Eaton, and other officials meet with Choctaw chiefs and headmen to pressure them to sign over their territory and move across the Mississippi River.
The following is a snippet from Charles Haskell’s REMINISCENCES OF NEW YORK BY AN OCTOGENARIAN: John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, died at Auburn NY, and on the 16th occurred his funeral, a very solemn and impressive sight. The procession is said to have contained five thousand persons, and the streets were thronged through which it passed. The funeral service was performed in Trinity Church. Bishop Hobart was a great man and born ruler, and a very eminent citizen of New York. He at one time became engaged in a polemical discussion with Dr. Mason, who was termed the Goliath of Calvinism, and of Hobart’s defence the lines of Sir Walter Scott in his “Lady of the Lake” were aptly quoted: “While less expert, though stronger far / The Gael maintain’d unequal war.” The BOOK OF M ORMON of Joseph Smith, alleged by him to have been found, was first published in this year. It is claimed, however, that the book was written by a clergyman at Mormon Hill in 1819; being essentially a plagiarism of a romance, which was clandestinely taken or copied by a printer, and adopted as the BIBLE of the “Latter Day Saints,” as Smith and his proselytes termed themselves. MORMONISM
September 11, Saturday: The initial convention of the new Antimasonic Party, in Philadelphia. A national paranoia had begun.
English traveler John Fowler arrived in Poughkeepsie, New York and toured the town (his task was to examine agricultural prospects for immigrants). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1831
Having studied law with General S.S. Haight at Angelica, New York, Samuel H. Hammond was admitted to the bar, and would practice for a time at Baldwinsville, New York.
Swiss immigrants John and Peter Delmonico opened a restaurant in lower Manhattan, New-York, New York and introduced the menu to the US.
Cables made of wire were first substituted for ropes made of hemp, in the silver-mines of the Harz Mountains.
In Albany, New York Joseph Henry (1797-1898) was demonstrating the electromagnetic telegraph, by sending signals over a mile of wire. He had discovered a method for producing electromagnetic self-induction (credit has been given to Michael Faraday for being first; Henry would also invent an electric motor, but again, was not the first to do so). Joseph Henry would in 1846 become the first Director of the Smithsonian Institution, and would be one of the founding members of the National Academy of Science.
March 3, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 3 of 3 M / Went to town & having Abby Rodman to see on board the Steam Boat for home I did not attend Meeting in town -perhaps it will be no more than honest to say that I forgot it till it was too late to go — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
Inventor George Mortimer Pullman was born in Brocton, New York.
Representative Mercer moved that the US House of Representatives temporarily suspend its rules so that he could submit a resolution. The House voted 108 over 36 to suspend and Mr. Mercer’s resolution passed by a vote of 118 over 32. “Resolved, That the President of the United States be requested to renew, and to prosecute from time to time, such negotiations with the several maritime powers of Europe and America as he may deem expedient for the effectual abolition of the African slave trade, and its ultimate denunciation as piracy, under the laws of nations, by the consent of the civilized world.” HOUSE JOURNAL, 21st Congress, 2d session, pages 426-8. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
March 19, Saturday: New-York’s City Bank was robbed, the 1st bank robbery in the US. The thieves got away with $245,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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March 30, Wednesday: The Albany, New York Orphan Asylum, in operation for most of the past two years, was incorporated.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 30 of 3 M / Spent this day with my dear Mother & in calling on some of my valuable friends & acquaintances Have had much conversation with Mother in the course of the day - find her resigned & not expecting to stay in this world long. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 18, Monday: Charter of the University of the City of New-York (in 1896 this would be renamed New York University).
Formation of the University of Alabama.
On his furious charge back to Paris to kill his fiancee and her mother, Hector Berlioz reached Nice. He would remain there a month, and would later remember this sojourn as the happiest period of his life.
The following announcement appeared in a Berlin newspaper: In December of last year there was spread about a rumor of the death of John Field which was without foundation. The great piano-forte virtuoso still lives, and if he can overcome his depression and apathy ... the rest of Europe may not be obliged to renounce the happiness of hearing ... this extraordinary pianist.
April 21, Thursday: The Rochester, New York Savings Bank was incorporated.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 21 of 4 M / Preparative & Select Meeting in Town it was a very good Meeting — Wm Almy much favourd in testimony — The Scholars attended — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
April 26, Tuesday: The state of New York declared that as of March 1 of the following year imprisonment for debt would no longer be tolerated.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel performed before the royal family at the Court of St. James.
In Baltimore, the Odd Fellows dedicate a new lodge, on their anniversary, in Gay Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 16, Monday: Alexis de Tocqueville recorded some of his impressions of New-York.
May 17, Tuesday: Rochester pioneer Colonel Nathaniel Rochester died in Genesee County, New York at the age of 80.
June: A fire destroyed William Campbell’s stone mill on the banks of the Genesee River in Rochester, New York. The Aqueduct House also was badly damaged. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Our national birthday, Monday the 4th of July: Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont observed a grand 4th-of-July parade in Albany.
Being in New York rather than Massachusetts or in South Carolina, they quite missed the 1st public singing of the new “My Country ’Tis of Thee” anthem that had just been authored by the Reverend Samuel Francis Smith and arranged by Lowell Mason –which was taking place at Boston’s Park Street Church– and they quite missed being among the nullifiers at the Circular Church in Charleston who were hearing Robert Y. Hayne give “the traditional noon oration, with a denunciation of the tariff, defense of nullification” (though admitting it could lead to disunion) and in the warm southern evening having a “sumptuous feast and ... fire-eating addresses by Pinckney, Hamilton, Turnbull, and Hayne.” CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
They also missed out on the grand opening to the public of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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and the 27th birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne. During this month and perhaps on this very day of celebration,
the York, designed and built by a Quaker watchmaker named Phineas Davis of York PA who had named it for his home town, was winning the $4,000.00 prize in the steam locomotive contest that had been sponsored by the B&O RR. It could be operated for as little as $16.00 a day, cutting the cost for a train pulled by horses by more than half, plus it would negotiate the sharpest curves on the track at a speed of 15 miles per hour and was able to get up to 35 miles per hour on the straightaways, something of which no dray nag could even dream. Friend Phineas, the watchmaker of York, would be appointed Master Mechanic of the B&O and his engine would begin a schedule of one trip per day between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, pulling up to five cars. Somewhat later this would be extended into a journey of some 40 miles between Baltimore and Parr’s Ridge, which was part way to Frederickstown MD.
“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
A fireworks canister was exploded in front of Albany, New York mayor Bloodgood’s door. A $100 reward would be offered for the perpetrator.
In Washington DC, the attorney Francis Scott Key delivered himself of an oration in the Rotunda of the Capitol, and Jacob Gideon, Sr., “who had officiated during the Revolutionary War as trumpeter to the commander-in-chief, and had acted in that capacity at the surrender at York Town” sounded his “revolutionary blast” for the benefit of those attending a dinner of the Association of Mechanics and other Working Men. There were separate partisan political ceremonies: a “National Republican Celebration” was observed by the friends of Henry Clay while an “Administration Celebration” was observed by those favoring the re-election of President Andrew Jackson.
Meanwhile, in Alexandria, Virginia, there was a ground-breaking ceremony for the Alexandria branch of the C&O Canal, with G.W.P. Custis and town mayor John Roberts delivering speeches. South of Alexandria, the Pequoad were celebrating the 4th with a war dance at their wigwam HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Meanwhile, in Georgetown, the George Washington, a “beautiful new packet boat,” was commencing its first run on the C&O Canal.
Meanwhile, in Hartford, Connecticut, Friend Angelina Emily Grimké had taken Catherine Beecher up on her invitation to visit her at the Hartford Seminary, and as a result of this visit she would form a plan to attend that seminary. (Her Philadelphia monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends would, however, refuse to sanction such a plan for theological education outside their group.)
Meanwhile, in Charleston, South Carolina, citizens were carrying parade banners “on which were inscribed the names of battles fought in the Revolution, and in the late War.”
Meanwhile, in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams was delivering a Fourth of July oration. Per Charles Francis Adams, Sr.’s diary (published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1968): As my father was to deliver the Oration, I thought I would hear him for the purpose of forming a Judgment upon the character of his Oratory. To do this, I felt as if I should make sure of a good seat only by going through all the Ceremonies. Isaac Hull and I therefore went up ... and endured all the excruciating head of the sun, ... dust, procession &ca. for three hours, until we reached the Meeting house, thus paying pretty dearly for our privelege. The Oration was and hour and twenty five minutes. The manner was as I expected, perhaps a little better though with a little of the defect I anticipated. [footnote says the main theme was an attack upon the South Carolina doctrine of nullification, which helps explain:]... I fear for him lest in his age it should bring upon him the War of words to which through all his life he has been accustomed. It is the character of my Father vehemently to attack. He does it through all his writings more or less, and attack in every community creates defence; Controversy rises, from which issue anger, and ill blood. All this is not to my taste and therefore I presume I must be set down as preferring insignificance and inglorious ease.” “I attended the Dinner and suffered three hours of excessive heat without any thing to pay me for it, excepting a beautiful tribute to the memory of my Grandfather here in his native town, which affected me even to tears. That is worth having. Removed from all the stormy passions he sleeps in his last mansion, yet the spontaneous effusion of grateful hearts rises up to cheer and invigorate his drooping descendants. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Former president James Monroe died in New-York, where he was living with his daughter and her husband. Allegedly, when the noise of firing began at midnight he opened his eyes inquiringly, and when the occasion was communicated to him, observers noted a look of intelligence come into his eyes. The following is a snippet from Charles Haskell’s REMINISCENCES OF NEW YORK BY AN OCTOGENARIAN: On the Fourth of July Ex-President James Monroe died in the house of his son-in-law, Samuel L. Gouverneur, in this city. Of four ex-Presidents who then had died, Mr. Monroe was the third to depart on the national anniversary, a coincidence heightened in effect by the simultaneous deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826.
When he would hear of this death, President Andrew Jackson would direct that all US military “officers wear crape on their left arm for six months.”
July 31, Sunday: After 28 Menominee held a kind of anniversary celebration of their massacre of Fox the previous year, they fell into a drunken stupor. A large group of Fox were awaiting this stupor, and slaughtered the entire group. Black Hawk either participated in this action or helped plan it.
The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, the 2d in the USA, began operations. Among the passengers on the partially completed route to Schenectady, New York were former governor Joseph C. Yates, former Albany mayor John Townsend, Schenectady mayor John I. De Graff, Albany police chief John Meigs, New-York police representative Jacob Hayes, and politician Thurlow Weed.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould would summarize in his journal, after arriving back home in Rhode Island: 1st day 31 of 7 M Rode with John into Hudson & attended the little gathering of sound friends who meet there. - Tho’ it was small it did seem to me that the Meeting was not in vain, but if the few who assemble would Seek to have Salt in themselves that it would season others & the savour would spread very considerably — I dined with John at Bryans Hotel after which I called on James Nixon & took tea, then went to the Wharf & waited for the Arrival of the Steam Boat & while in waiting for that I had an opportunity of seeing an old acquaintance James Brown & his wife (Irish folks) who once lived in Newport & now in Athens opposite Hudson. — He is one of the Boatmen in the River & went across & brought his wife over to see me. — I parted with my dear son John on the Wharf not far from Sunset & arrived in NYork next morning, (2nd day [Monday] the 1 of 8 M 1831) & was very kindly recd at the house of our frd Saml Wood & sons & in the Afternoon at 5 OC took the Steam Boat Washington for home - & on 3rd day reached home in the forenoon while the subcommittee were sitting & was very glad & I trust thankful to find my dear wife & friends all well. — This journey has been quite an extension of my travels it is the first time I was ever up the North River to Hudson In going up the North River it was [a] matter of some regret to me that both passages up & down the River were mostly performed in the night HDT WHAT? INDEX
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that much of the beautiful scenery was lost to my view.— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
August 1, Monday: The entire capitalization of New York’s Mohawk and Hudson Rail-Road was paid.
Lewis Cass resigned as governor of the Michigan Territory in order to serve as Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson. He would be a central figure of the Jackson administration’s Indian removal policy.
Approximate date of Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in New Salem, Illinois, where he would work as a clerk in Denton Offut’s village store, sleeping in the back.
John Amy Bird Bell, 14 years of age, was hanged at half-past eleven o’clock for having offed Richard F. Taylor, 13 years of age, the son of a poor tallow-chandler, in a wood by the road, for the sake of nine shillings he was carrying (the equivalent of an unskilled laborer’s weekly wage). At his sentencing, when the judge with the black cloth atop his judicial wig directed that his corpse was to be given over to the surgeons of Rochester for practice in dissection, this young culprit had exhibited some dismay. On March 4th, the victim lad had been sent to Aylesford to collect his father’s weekly parish allowance. On May 11th, his body was found in a ditch and a white horn-handled knife led the authorities to a nearby poorhouse and the Bell family, a father with two sons. The younger of the two brothers, James Bell, required by the constable to search through the pockets of the clothes upon the decayed corpse, confessed that his older brother, John Bell, had waylaid the victim in the wood, and that meanwhile he had kept watch. He said he had received a shilling sixpence as his share of the nine shillings. The older brother then pointed out to the constable the pond at which he had washed the blood off his hands on his way home. He also pointed and said: “That’s where I killed the poor boy,” and added “He is better off than I am now: do not you think he is, sir?” (Thoreau would write, in “Civil Disobedience,” “... If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and....” That would not have been a reference to this Newgate case since it is in a context of honest earning rather than in a context of dishonest theft, although it may have been a reference to the “Tolpuddle Martyrs” who had held out in 1834- 1836 for a week’s wage of ten shillings.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 9, Tuesday: John Caldwell Calhoun was nominated for President at a New-York public meeting.
A rebuilt steam locomotive DeWitt Clinton inaugurated the first scheduled steam travel in the sovereign State of New York, with an initial run on the Mohawk & Hudson RR. There was so much slack between the coaches of the train that the jerk of starting this thing off removed the hats, and came close to removing the heads, of the passengers. So much soot rained down that when the passengers raised umbrellas, they caught fire and had to be jettisoned. There was wild abandon on the trip as the passengers forsook all discretion to beat out fires they saw starting in each others’ clothing. The trip had been so well advertised that almost down the entire length of track from Albany to Schenectady there were farming families, waving and hooting. However, at one point about five miles out of town, they were able to stop the train next to an unattended farm fence and, by the male passengers tying fencerails in between the cars of the train, to hold the cars rigidly apart and diminish their head-snaps and jerking. The entire 14 miles between Albany and Schenectady was completed in 46 minutes inclusive of this stop to steal fencerail repair materials. You would think this photograph below to be this exact machinery’s exact appearance at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1892; that is, you would suppose such — if you were unaware that this was a mere replica, which had been carefully constructed on the basis of one surviving wheel, plus a preserved scale drawing that had been made, I believe, out of blue-sky imagination before the construction of the actual engine had begun, plus the inspiration offered by a preserved impressionistic black-paper silhouette:
December 1, Thursday: The 1-track line of the Mohawk and Hudson Rail-road linking Albany and Schenectady, New York was completed.
While on the steamboat from Wheeling to Ohio, Alexis de Tocqueville was musing about the topic of class equality in marriage: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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When one wishes to estimate the equality between different classes, one must always come to the question of how marriages are made. That’s the bottom of the matter. An equality resulting from necessity, courtesy or politics may exist on the surface and deceive the eye. But when one wishes to practise this equality in the intermarriage of families, then one puts one’s finger on the sore. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1832
Washington Irving returned to New York from Spain, taking up residence in North Tarrytown (today’s Sleepy Hollow). During this year his THE ALHAMBRA was being put through the presses.
By this year 137 different European intrusive plants had become naturalized among the New York flora. PLANTS
February: Rochester, New York freethinker “Obediah Dogberry” began publishing the weekly Liberal Advocate.
March 1, Thursday: The Reverend Abiel Holmes, D.D. presented a copy of his biography of his father-in-law, THE LIFE OF EZRA STILES, to the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts (that copy is now the very one that has been electronically preserved by Google Books).
New York’s antipoverty legislation went into effect.
April 24, Tuesday: The Auburn Canal and Rail Road Company, capitalized at $150,000, is organized, to connect Auburn with the Erie Canal (this wouldn’t ever be dug).
Authorization, by the New York legislature, of the New York and Erie Rail Road. De Witt Clinton, Jr. would make the preliminary survey.
The Rochester and Tonawanda Railroad was chartered. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 25, Wednesday: Having not heard from his letter of the previous August 20th, Robert Schumann wrote a 2d letter to Johann Nepomuk Hummel, enclosing his Papillons op.2.
New York’s Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad Company (forerunner of the Paumanok Long Island Railroad), was incorporated.
August: Nathaniel Hawthorne departed from Salem to tour through New England and upstate New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1833
John Gardner Wilkinson returned from Egypt to England for his health.
A (subsequently disregarded) project for a “Suez Canal” across the Suez isthmus by Prosper Enfantin. EGYPT
A second aqueduct over New York’s Genesee River was begun.
English canal engineer William Weston died.
John Jervis became Engineer of the Chenango Canal.
The Carillon Canal was completed.
A Canadian commission was formed to investigate a Trent-Severn Waterway, to connect Lake Ontario with Georgian Bay.
William Gooding surveyed the Erie and Wabash Canal.
The Miami and Dayton Canal Company secured another land grant from the US Government.
The US Congress appropriated $25,000 to create a harbor near Chicago to serve as a terminus for the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
The Rochester Canal & Railway Company blocked a scheme to build a rival rail line between Rochester and Charlotte, along the west side of the Genesee River.
The Chemung Canal was completed.
New York’s Canal Commission passed enabling legislation for building the Chenango Canal and hired John B. Jervis to supervise construction.
Professor Edward Hitchcock’s REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY, MINERALOGY, BOTANY, AND ZOOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS. MADE AND PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THAT STATE ... WITH A DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF THE SPECIMENS OF ROCKS AND MINERALS COLLECTED FOR THE GOVERNMENT... (his wife Orra White Hitchcock had prepared 8 drawings for inclusion in the atlas of this publication) (Amherst: Press of J.S. and C. Adams). GEOLOGY, ... OF MASS.
This study, which Henry Thoreau would have in his personal library, would spur the state of New York to begin its own such geological survey under a 4-person team: Lardner Vanuxem (1792-1848), Ebenezer Emmons, William M. Mather (1804-1859), and Timothy Conrad (1803-1877). Conrad would move on, and would be replaced by James Hall (1811-1898). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Emmons was assigned the northern district of the state, including the largest part of the wild and then almost unknown Adirondack Mountains — indeed Emmons gave them that name and some of the fringe of settled land around them. Emmons did a thorough piece of work, both on the “Primary” rocks of the mountains and on the almost flat-lying “Transition” strata that lie unconformably above and dip gently away in all directions. With his colleagues, especially Vanuxem and Hall, he established the stratigraphic sequence in these “Transition” strata, which quickly became the standard column for the pre- Carboniferous Paleozoic rocks of North America, definitively replacing the crude Wernerian subdivisions that Eaton had proposed in his Erie Canal traverse (1824). At Emmons’ suggestion, the four geologists named this sequence the “New- York System” or the “New-York Transition System,” and truly it is a better stratigraphic standard than the Cambrian to Devonian systems then being erected in the highly deformed rocks of Britain. Emmons was largely responsible for establishing the units in the lower part of the sequence, the Champlain division (now the Upper Cambrian and Ordovician). Like his mentor Eaton, Emmons must have driven many times (by horse and buggy) from Williamstown to Troy and Albany, and he was evidently deeply impressed by the complicated rocks he saw along the route. They were in strong contrast to the nearly horizontal strata of the New York System, but not as massive and lacking in stratification as the “Primary” rocks. He tells us that at first he taught his students that these rocks were simply (greatly disturbed) “extensions eastward of the lower New York rocks”; i.e., of “Transition” rocks, as Eaton had thought, but, as his knowledge of the flat-lying “Transition” strata in northern New York grew, he abandoned this doctrine and concluded that they formed an independent system intermediate in age between the New York System and the “Primary,” and he called in the Taconic System for the Taconic Range of mountains along the border between Massachusetts and New York, just west of Williamstown and southward as far as the northwestern corner of Connecticut. Apparently, Emmons first told his colleagues about his new system in late 1839 or early 1840, probably when the New York State Survey geologists met to compare their results, and possibly also at the meeting of the Association of American Geologists in Philadelphia in April 1840. PIONEER OF SCIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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A stone jail was erected in the rear of the courthouse of Auburn, New York. When a state investigative team toured the women’s quarters of the prison, it was appalled at the conditions it discovered there.
Isabella Van Wagenen (Sojourner Truth) moved, with Elijah Pierson and the Reverend Robert Matthew (the Prophet Matthias), to a utopian commune called Zion Hill in Sing Sing, New York.
However, Pierson would soon be murderized, and in the resultant disruption of the commune she would lose all her personal belongings — at which point she would return to New-York and start over again as a servant, for the next eight or nine years — until her mystical experiences would again draw her into testimony.88
Silvio Pellico’s LE ME PRIGIONI was translated into English, leading us toward Thoreau’s “This is the whole history of ‘My Prisons’.”
RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT
88. The builders of the penitentiary that came to be known as Sing Sing after the town it was near had intended that it be referred to as the Mount Pleasant State Prison — but such an institution would not long support the irony of such a name. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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READ “MY PRISONS”
July 1, Monday: The Connecticut legislature approved a merger of the New York and Stonington Railroad with the New York, Providence and Boston Railroad, which was henceforth to be known by the latter name. (During this month the New York and Erie Railroad was also organized.)
The expedition led by Commander George Back arrived at the Grand Rapid. An opportune change in the weather allowed us to get away; and, having passed the limestone rocks bordering that part of the lake, we shortly arrived at the Grand Rapid, the interesting particulars of which are too well and too minutely described in Sir John Franklin’s NARRATIVES, to require or even justify a repetition here. THE FROZEN NORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1834
Weekly steamboat service between Buffalo, New York and Chicago was inaugurated (during this year 80,000 people would shuffle off from Buffalo heading in a westerly direction).
January 25, Saturday: Fire destroyed business buildings on Rochester, New York’s Main Street Bridge.
February: Rochester, New York’s “Obediah Dogberry” published the final edition of his weekly journal Liberal Advocate.
February 4, Tuesday: The negrero Encomium, carrying a cargo of 45 slaves from Charleston, South Carolina, to New Orleans, was wrecked near Fish Key, Abaco, and the slaves were carried to Nassau, in New Providence, British West Indies and there set free. Naughty, naughty Great Britain would eventually need to pay the American owners an indemnity for having so mishandled their slave properties (SENATE DOCUMENT, 24th Congress, 2d session II, No. 174; 25th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 216). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
Henry Stephens Randall got married in Auburn, New York with Jane Rebecca Polhemus, daughter of the Reverend Henry Polhemus and Mrs. Jane Anderson Polhemus.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3rd day 4th M 2nd 1834 / Sub Committee Meeting. — A pretty pleasant Day - & my mind very quiet. — We hear by those who come from Rhode Island that Sister Ruth is no better - her case pretty decidedly a Cancer in the breast. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
February 17, Monday: Representatives of Spain and the United States signed the Van Ness Convention in Madrid. Spain agreed to pay a lump sum of 12,000,000 reales to settle all US claims against it.
Erastus Shepard and Alvah Strong, having purchased Rochester, New York’s Advertiser, changed its name to Daily Democrat.
March: The Cultivator, the official organ of New York’s State Agricultural Society, sponsored by Stephen Van Rensselaer and James Wadsworth, was published by Jesse Buel.
April 24: The New York State Legislature granted a charter to the Paumanok Long Island Railroad.
The Lockport & Niagara Falls Rail Road was incorporated, capitalized at $175,000. This entity would later merge with the New York Central Rail Road. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 28, Monday: For the 1st time, Robert Schumann mentioned the music of Hector Berlioz in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik.
When, to advance French industry, King Louis-Philippe visited Erard’s in Paris, Franz Liszt performed for the occasion.
Nicolò Paganini made his debut as a solo violist in London (critics advised that he not persist in this effort).
Rochester, New York was incorporated as a city.
May 23, Friday: Benjamin Wright, appointed to survey the route for the New York and Erie Rail Road, set out with assistants James Seymour and Charles Ellet (they would finish by the end of the year).
June: In New-York, the Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour approved a resolution endorsing Prudence Crandall’s school (MINUTES OF THE FOURTH ANNUAL CONVENTION FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOUR IN THE UNITED STATES, HELD BY ADJOURNMENTS IN THE ASBURY CHURCH, NEW-YORK, FROM THE 2ND TO THE 12TH OF JUNE INCLUSIVE, 1834. New York: by order of the Convention).
James Fenimore Cooper’s A LETTER TO HIS COUNTRYMEN was published, urging Americans not to defer to foreign opinion. He revisited Cooperstown, New York after a 17-year absence.
A Spanish negrero, the General Mauso, master Capo, out of an unknown area of Africa on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at its destination port, Matanzas, Cuba. A Portuguese slaver, the Duquesa de Braganca, master J.J. de Barros, out of an unknown area of Africa on one of its three known Middle Passages, was in this month delivering a cargo of 277 enslaved Africans at Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
June 9, Monday: In his 73d year, William Carey died in India. Before the Reverend’s death, 212,000 copies of the Christian Scriptures had been sent out from Serampore in 40 different languages, representing the tongues of 330,000,000 members of the human family. Dr. Southey would write that “These low-born, low- bred mechanics have done more to spread the knowledge of the Scriptures among the heathen than has been accomplished, or even attempted, by all the world beside.”
Giacomo Costantino Beltrami was nominated to be a member of the Société dell’Institut Historique de France (oops, there went his Saturday afternoons).
Jonathan Child was elected by Rochester, New York’s council as the city’s first mayor. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 10, Tuesday: David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, John Marshall (1755-1835)’s A HISTORY OF THE COLONIES PLANTED BY THE ENGLISH ON THE CONTINENT OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM THEIR SETTLEMENT, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THAT WAR WHICH TERMINATED IN THEIR INDEPENDENCE.... (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824).
More than 3,000 gathered at Brown’s Race to celebrate Jonathan Child’s inauguration as Rochester, New York’s first mayor.
HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin sailed up the Pacific coast of the South American continent.
In Leipzig, Richard Wagner’s 1st published essay “Die deutsche Oper” appeared in Zeitung fur die elegante Welt.
In Oxford, England, “Captivity of Judah,” an oratorio by William Crotch to words of Schomberg and Owen, was performed for the initial time, at ceremonies installing the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor of the university (also performed was the premiere of Crotch’s ode “When these are days of old” to words of Keble).
Oxford
Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle moved to 5 Great Cheyne Row (now 24 Cheyne Row) in the Chelsea district of London near the Thames River. He has spent the last quarter of his life in London, writing books; has the fame, as all readers know, of having made England acquainted with Germany, in late years, and done much else that is novel and remarkable in literature. He especially is the literary man of those parts. You may imagine him living in altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a quiet part of London, called Chelsea, a little out of the din of commerce, in “Cheyne Row,” there, not far from the “Chelsea Hospital.” “A little past this, and an old ivy-clad church, with its buried generations lying around it,” writes one traveller, “you come to an antique street running at right angles with the Thames, and, a few steps from the river, you find Carlyle’s name on the door.” With the exception of the soundproofed room which the writer would have constructed at the top of the house during the 1850s, the building now preserved by the Carlyle’s House Memorial Trust and by the National Trust still very much echoes this contemporary description, which is of Carlyle’s penning: The House itself is eminent, antique; wainscotted to the very ceiling, and has been all new-painted and repaired; broadish HDT WHAT? INDEX
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stair, with massive balustrade (in the old style) corniced and as thick as one’s thigh; floors firm as a rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanness, and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor. And then as to room ... Three stories besides the sunk story; in every one of them three apartments in depth (something like 40 feet in all; for it was 13 of my steps!): Thus there is a front dining room (marble chimney-piece &c); then a back dining room (or breakfast-room) a little narrower (by reason of the kitchen stair); then out from this, and narrower still (to allow a back- window, you consider), a china room, or pantry, or I know not what, all shelved, and fit to hold crockery for the whole street. Such is the ground-area, which of course continues to the top, and furnishes every Bedroom with a dressing room, or even with a second bedroom ... a most massive, roomy, sufficient old house; with places, for example, to hang say three dozen hats or cloaks on; and as many crevices, and queer old presses, and shelved closets (all tight and new painted in their way) as would gratify the most covetous Goody. Rent £35!
June 28, Saturday: William Crotch made his final public appearance, playing the organ at the Handel Festival in Westminster Abbey.
Shortly after its 1st run on New-York’s Harlem Railroad, an engine exploded.
Congress approved the new New Jersey/New York state border.
Commander George Back reached the Thlew-ee-choh or Great Fish River. After spending a month descending this river, his expedition would spend three weeks exploring Chantrey Inlet. (Page 306) In the midst of one of these groups was my old acquaintance and Indian belle, who will be remembered by the readers of Sir John Franklin’s narrative under the name of Green Stockings. Though surrounded by a family, with one urchin in her cloak clinging to her back, and sundry other maternal accompaniments, I immediately recognised her, and called her by HDT WHAT? INDEX
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her name; at which she laughed, and said “she was an old woman now,” begging, at the same time, that she might be relieved by the “medicine man, for she was very much out of health.” However, notwithstanding all this, she was still the beauty of her tribe; and, with that consciousness which belongs to all belles, savage or polite, seemed by no means displeased when I sketched her portrait. THE FROZEN NORTH
Our national birthday, Friday the 4th of July: A man who was at both the battle of Lexington and the battle of Bunker Hill attended ceremonies in New Haven, Connecticut — in the original coat he had then worn.
At the Hermitage Inn in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the traditional 4th-of- July address was delivered by David Crockett, and anti-abolitionist Americans destroyed the homes of more than 36 black Americans.
On this day, elsewhere, Richard Henry Dana, Sr. was delivering an oration upon The Law.
In Plymouth, it having been decided that the glacial erratic known as “Forefathers Rock” in the town square was rapidly becoming small, that it needed to be moved to protect it from all the souvenir sellers, it had been relocated. During the move it had rolled off its conveyance in front of the City Hall and broken again — but in this escape attempt it didn’t get far and we had simply cemented it back together. On this date the installation of the rock in its new milieu was suitably celebrated.89 PLYMOUTH ROCK HDT WHAT? INDEX
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New-York’s annual Convention of People of Color set July 4th as a day of prayer and contemplation of the condition of blacks. Meanwhile, a group of white laboring men broke up an amalgamated meeting of the Anti- Slavery Society at the Chatham Street Chapel in New-York to protest blacks and whites sitting in the same audience (they were resentful, of course, of the presence in America of free black Americans to drive down their wages and benefits). Here is a hymn written by Friend John Greenleaf Whittier for the occasion:
O Thou, whose presence went before But oh, for those this day can bring, Our fathers in their weary way, As unto us, no joyful thrill; As with Thy chosen moved of yore, For those who, under Freedom’s wing, The fire by night, the cloud by day! Are bound in Slavery’s fetters still: When from each temple of the free, For those to whom Thy written word A nation’s song ascend to Heaven, Of light and love is never given; Most Holy Father! unto Thee, For those whose ears have never heard May not our humble prayer be given? The promise and the hope of heaven! Thy children still, though hue and form For broken heart, and clouded mind, Are varied in Thine own good will, Whereon no human mercies fall; With Thy own holy breathings warm. Oh, be Thy gracious love inclined, And fashioned in Thine image still. Who, as a Father, pitiest all! We thank Thee, Father! hill land plain And grant, O Father! that the time Around us wave their fruits once more, Of Earth’s deliverance may be near, And clustered vine and blossomed grain When every land and tongue and clime Are bending round each cottage door. The message of Thy love shall hear; And peace is here; and hope and love When, smitten as with fire from heaven, Are round us as a mantle thrown, The captive’s chains shall sink in dust, And unto Thee, supreme above, And to his fettered soul be given The knee of prayer is bowed alone. The glorious freedom of the just!
This protest would break out, again, on the 10th and 11th of the month, with the trashing not only of 60 black homes and 6 black churches but also of homes of white people known to be seeking to abolish human slavery — this was, after all, the year in which the song “Old Zip Coon,” the minstrel song which eventually would
89. On some date unknown to me, Elizabeth Barrett Browning would create a poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” which would implausibly pose a runaway slave before this rock, pouring out to the “pilgrim-souls” the sadness of her own personal pilgrimage to a new land. She had murdered her infant because it had displayed the features of the white master who had raped her. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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evolve into “Turkey in the Straw,” was born! RACISM POPULAR SONGS
Samuel Ringgold Ward was present, as he had been intending to hear an antislavery lecture by David Paul Brown of Philadelphia, but in his account of the rioting he would prefer to point up the fact that this violence had been organized by members of the local merchant class: A lawyer well known to fame, David Paul Brown, Esq., of Philadelphia, was always ready to render his peerless services in defence of any person claimed as a slave. On the fourth day of July, 1834, this gentleman was invited to deliver an anti- slavery oration in Chatham Chapel, and, of course, the coloured people mustered in strong array to hear so well known a champion of freedom; but the meeting was dispersed by a mob, gathered and sustained by the leading commercial and political men and journals of that great city. It was Independence Day — a day, of all days, sacred to freedom. What Mr. Brown came to tell us was, that the principles, enunciated in few words, in the Declaration of Independence — “We hold these truths to be self- evident truths, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — applied as well to black men as to white men. This the aristocracy of New York could not endure; and therefore, just fifty-eight years from the very hour that the Declaration of 1776 was made, the mob of the New York merchants broke up this assembly. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Here is a view of our nation’s capital city during this year, a painting by George Cooke as transformed into an aquatint engraving by W.J. Bennett. This should be available on 13 1/4” x 16 7/8” cover stock paper in a heavy mailing tube from Historic Urban Plans, Inc., Box 276, Ithaca NY 14851 (607 272-MAPS), for roughly $16.50 inclusive of postage.
In Washington DC, the first Trades Union celebration occurred. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
On this day, elsewhere, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who detested American blacks, was having his 30th birthday.
Publication of Die Schule des Legato und Staccato op.335 by Carl Czerny was announced in the Wiener Zeitung. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 11, Friday: Fresh from absolutist defeat in Portugal, Don Carlos Maria Isidro de Bourbon arrived in Elizondo to join partisans who had already proclaimed him King Carlos V of Spain. He was supported by the Roman Catholic Church, conservatives, and Basques while his niece, Queen Isabella II, was supported by Spanish liberals, Great Britain, and France (the conflict would continue for 5 years).
James Abbott (McNeill) Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the initial child of the engineer George Washington Whistler with his new wife Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Ceci n’est pas Whistler’s mere. In a week of race rioting in New-York since Independence Day, 60 homes and 6 churches of the black population had been torn down by white mobs.
Chicago’s harbor being complete, Captain Augustus Pickering’s schooner Illinois, out of Sackets Harbor, New York, was the 1st large ship to enter this new facility.
October: Salma Hale was admitted to the New Hampshire bar.
James Fenimore Cooper purchased a family seat at Otsego, New York.
Frederick Emerson’s THE NORTH AMERICAN ARITHMETIC. PART THIRD, FOR ADVANCED SCHOLARS (Concord, New Hampshire: Marsh, Capen & Lyon; Boston: Lincoln and Edmands). ARITHMETIC, PART THIRD ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1835
Receiving a request for an autograph by England’s Princess Victoria, James Fenimore Cooper sent her a manuscript of “The Minikins.” He and his family spent the summer in Cooperstown, New York.
Frederick C. Mills, newly-elected chief engineer of the Genesee Valley Canal, presented a report based on the previous year’s survey.
$1,548,100 in tolls were collected on New York canals.
July: A fugitive slave family named Stanford was kidnapped from St. Catharines, Ontario and conveyed to Buffalo, New York. After a clash between liberators and a sheriff’s posse at Black Rock, at Hamburg blacks of both cities freed the Stanfords and returned them to Canada. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1836
Samuel H. Hammond took up the practice of law as a partner of Robert Campbell, Jr. in Bath, New York (until 1842).
In this year the white phosphorus friction match, which had been invented by John Walker in 1828, began to be manufactured in a US factory under a patent obtained by Alonzo D. Phillips, a shoemaker of Springfield MA. FIRE
The New-York Loco-Focos, a party named of course in honor of the locofoco match, joined with other labor groups in New York state to form the Equal Rights Party. (This political action would get precisely nowhere because of the general economic collapse of the following year.)
Work began on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, to connect Chicago with the Illinois River. The 1st grain shipment from Chicago reached Buffalo, New York, to be shipped down the Erie Canal.
New Jersey’s Morris Canal was extended to the Hudson River.
An Erie Canal boat arrived in Rochester, New York carrying the 1st locomotive for the Tonawanda Railroad.
36,000 tons of goods were transhipped via the Erie Canal at Buffalo.
When speculators promoting a canal, between the Erie Canal at Lyons and Lake Ontario, took land belonging to the Shakers at Sodus Bay’s Alasa Farms, the 125-member community moved by sled and wagon to the Williamsburgh (Groveland) area and for their new settlement used the native American name for that site — Sonyea.
Thomas S. Woodcock’s NEW YORK TO NIAGARA described his journey on the Erie Canal.
Construction began on a new Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River.
The Chenango Canal joined the Erie Canal. Other improvements on the Erie Canal were begun, for instance to enlarge that canal’s channel to 7'X70' and its locks to 18'X110'.
A company was formed to dig a canal at 106th Street in northern Manhattan for a marble quarry (the project would be abandoned when this marble was found inferior). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Reverend George Washington Hosmer became the minister of the Unitarian Church of Buffalo, New York. He would hold this post until 1866. Under the leadership of the new pastor, the congregation began a school in their church basement (free for all poor white children, this was the 1st such in the city). Impressive in part because of his eloquence and in part because of his massive size, this reverend would have the honor of preaching at three famous national politicians (former president John Quincy Adams visited on October 29, 1843, and president elect Abraham Lincoln visited during February 1861 as the guest of church member and former president Millard Fillmore). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Professor Chester Dewey became the principal of a collegiate institute in Rochester, New York. He would hold this position for 14 years, until this collegiate institution became the University of Rochester, and would then become that university’s professor of chemistry and natural philosophy.
Ebenezer Emmons became the State Geologist (the principal scientist) for the northern New York State Geological District. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1837
The New York politician Philip Hone described the glorious geist of his countrymen: “Go ahead is our maxim and our password. We go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of the consequences and indifferent about the value of human life.”
The Reverend Enoch Pratt resigned his pastorate at the Congregational church in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. The family would relocate to Brewster and he would continue to preach by supplying vacant pulpits, while acting as an agent for Bible societies distributing the Scriptures through the country. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 5, Saturday: Ebenezer Emmons led the 1st recorded ascent of a prominent landmark of the Adirondack region, renaming this peak in honor of Governor William Learned Marcy of the State of New York, as Mt. Marcy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John Hecker, Jr., one of Isaac Hecker’s older brothers, was vice-president of New York’s Equal Rights Party as it attempted to deal with the financial and economic crisis of this period.
The conspiracy of secrecy entered into by the founding fathers, not to discuss the work done at the Constitutional Convention for fifty years, expired. It was revealed that the founding fathers had not intended, in employing vague phrases such as “We the People,” that the protections would gradually be expanded until they included blacks, and Indians, and women.
Interest alone [by which was meant prosperity, was] the governing principle.
It was revealed, by the expiration of this oath of secrecy in regard to the machinations that had produced the federal Constitution, that the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Benjamin Franklin, had betrayed the American slave. During the course of the Constitutional Convention he had not so much as brought the topic up for discussion. The convention had simply capitulated to the American slaveholders — and the freedom of women of course never crossed anyone’s mind. The only consideration given to the fact that some Americans were being held in bondage was to allow those who were chaining them to cast more weighty votes than non-slaveholders –in their behalf– in all the national elections! “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The Constitution of the United States of America was thus revealed to have been a “Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,” to paraphrase ISAIAH 28:15 in the manner favored by abolitionists.90
What to do? —To replace the expired 50-year gag agreement on discussing the proceedings of the 1887 Constitutional Convention, Congress enacted a new gag rule that would effectively suppress any and all congressional debate on anything and everything having to do with the national slavery issue.
As the result of a Connecticut trial, Jackson v. Bullock, any slave brought into Connecticut from a slave state of the federal union would be considered to be immediately free. This followed the 1836 Massachusetts case of Commonwealth v. Aves which in turn followed the 1772 British case, Somerset v. Stewart. New York and Pennsylvania overrode the Somerset decision by statutory enactments, according to which Pennsylvania granted 9 months transit until 1847 and New York granted 9 months transit until 1841.
In this year the Reverend Horace Bushnell was warning America to protect its Anglo-Saxon blood from the
90. In a sense, the correct answer to the standard classroom question “What caused the Civil War?” would be “Uh, Ben Franklin?”
Son of so-and-so and so-and-so, this so-and-so helped us to gain our independence, instructed us in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds.
Repeat after me, class: “Nobody ever does just one thing.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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immigrant tide. RACISM
The Reverend Hosea Easton, a black abolitionist, warned sensibly that doing away with human slavery in itself would not correct America’s wrong, for after that it would still be necessary for the US’s whites to overcome their color prejudice which made dusky skin “a mark of degradation.” One might suppose that the La Amistad slaves would, under such an arrangement, have been free the moment they set foot on Connecticut soil, but no, they had been brought there not from a slave state of our federal union but across the Middle Passage from Africa by way of Cuba, and perhaps they weren’t really slaves in not having been legally enslaved, and therefore there were two significant considerations bearing upon whether this Connecticut law having to do with slaves brought into Connecticut from a slave state of the federal union could be made to stick in court. During this year 11 American negreros would clear from the port of Havana on their way to the coast of Africa to pick up slave cargo (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, page 221). In particular the negrero Washington, named of course in honor of our founding father, was enabled by the American consul at Havana, himself (what are buddies for?), to proceed to the coast of Africa to pick up slave cargo (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 488-90, 715 ff; HOUSE DOCUMENT, 27th Congress, 1st session, No. 34, pages 18-21). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE
Contracts were let for construction of the Genesee Valley Canal.
The Chenango Canal went into operation.
The Chemung Canal connecting Binghamton with the Erie Canal at Utica was completed.
3,955 boats arrived in the lake harbor at Buffalo, New York during this year and 4,755 boats went through the Erie Canal.
At Rochester, New York, a wall was built along the Genesee River through downtown. Construction began on a new Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River. A public market building was erected on Market Street HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(formerly Mason Street), which was then renamed Front Street. Wealthy St. Louis fur trader Henry Shaw built a house for his parents. Mayor Jonathan Child began building a home on South Washington Street. Senator Daniel Webster spoke in the Court House square. The city’s first murder occurred. Louis Seyle’s fire engine manufacturing company at Brown’s Race was destroyed by fire. After his store burned, Austin Steward relocated to Canandaigua, New York to begin, assisted by his daughter, a school for colored children, and there he began work on his TWENTY TWO YEARS A SLAVE AND FORTY YEARS A FREEMAN; EMBRACING A CORRESPONDENCE OF SEVERAL YEARS, WHILE PRESIDENT OF WILBERFORCE COLONY, LONDON, CANADA WEST.
Revival meetings were held. A Rochester resident, Sam Scott, began to attempt a repris of the jumping career of Sam Patch.
(This Rochester man’s show-biz career would come to an abrupt completion in London: while attempting to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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perform a public stunt with a rope he accidentally hanged himself.)
HANGING Crimes Punishable by Death in England:
Year Number
1800 150
1837 10 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 3, Monday: David Henry Thoreau passed the final exams in German and in Italian at Harvard College (he took the Italian exam along with 13 other students who also had been brought forward by Pietro Bachi).
After this slam-dunk he checked out Waldo Emerson’s NATURE from the library of his debating club, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“Institute of 1770” (soon he would purchase a copy for himself).
Thoreau supplemented his borrowings by at the same time checking out from his club’s library the 1st and 2d of the dozen volumes of Edward Gibbon’s THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (London 1807, 1820, 1821),91 GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL I GIBBON, DECLINE & FALL II
and the 1st of the three volumes of Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP (Edinburgh, 1824) (Thoreau would have in his personal library the edition that had been printed in Boston by Wells and Lilly in 1828). WILHELM MEISTER I WILHELM MEISTER II WILHELM MEISTER III
John Burroughs was born near Roxbury, New York.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 3rd of 4 M / This day, I believe this day, I have paid all my debts of a pecuniary nature, which I owe on my own account - it is a comfortable thing to feel clear of the World & I believe I am truly thankful therefor — My God has been very good 91. We have reason to believe that this was as far as Thoreau got into the famous or infamous “Decline & Fall,” before becoming so distressed with Gibbon that he would switch over entirely to other historical sources having to do with the Roman Empire, and this of course brings to mind the Duke of Gloucester’s remark to Edward Gibbon, upon being presented in 1787 with this 2d volume: “Another damned thick square book! Always scribble scribble scribble — eh, Mr. Gibbon?” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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to me all my life long
June 27, Tuesday: New York made its initial payment on Erie Canal Enlarged Lock #18 at Cohoes. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1838
The Reverend William Ingraham Kip became rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Albany, New York.
The Union Theological Seminary conferred its D.D. degree upon Chester Dewey.
In New York, the Scottsville and Le Roy Railroad was built at the cost of $40,0000, using wooden rails. It only reached from Scottsville to Caledonia.
Asa Fitch decided to start studying agriculture and entomology. He began to collect and study insects for New York State.
The formative meeting of the American Association of Geologists took place at the home of Ebenezer Emmons in Albany, New York (this organization was the predecessor of the American Association for the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Advancement of Science). In this year he named the Adirondack region of mountains.
THE SCIENCE OF 1838 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1839
A 650-foot-deep salt well was drilled along the enlarged Erie Canal at Montezuma, New York.
Junius peppermint farmer Peter Hill moved to Lyons, New York, having purchased property at the future site of Erie Canal Lock E-56. Over a dozen local companies had risen up to haul passengers and freight on the Erie Canal.
In upstate New York, the Genesee Valley Canal reached Mount Morris.
Company directors liquidated the Rochester Canal and Railway Company.
The Tidewater and Susquehanna Canal was completed.
US canal engineer David Stanhope Bates died.
E.H. Gill became Principal Assistant Engineer on the James River and Kanawha Canal, in charge of construction above Lynchburg. Charles Ellet, Jr. lost his job as Chief Engineer on account of refusing to compromise with others, and was replaced by Judge Wright. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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By this point the followers of “Universal Friend,” Jemimah Wilkinson, in and around the town of Penn Yan, New York at the head of Crooked Lake (now Keuka Lake), had entirely dispersed. James Brown and George Clark, through marriages to heirs of Rachel Malin, had come into possession of the magnificent Friend House that Universal Friend had bequeathed to Rachel and her sister, and there was no longer that little real-estate embarrassment of there being a dead body in the basement.
Jemimah’s only residue was that doctrinal pamphlet consisting primarily of Scriptural quotations, THE UNIVERSAL FRIEND’S ADVICE TO THOSE OF THE SAME RELIGIOUS SOCIETY, that she had caused to be issued in 1794.
A railroad connected Corning, New York with the Pennsylvania coal fields.
A Stafford, New York silkworm operation contained 6,000 mulberry trees and 72,000 worms.
American Revolution heroine Sybil Ludington died, in her late seventies.
The Albany Exchange Building was erected at Broadway and State Street by a joint stock company. It would host the post office, the New York Central Railroad office, and other offices.
H. and W. Clark’s Cobblestone Hotel (the J.P. Hicks Building) was completed in Liverpool, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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General William Kerley Strong erected a Greek Revival mansion on Geneva, New York’s Rose Hill Farm.
The route for the Oswego and Syracuse Railroad company was surveyed.
Rochester, New York had a permanent 12-man police force, but close to one out of each three children of that city were receiving no education whatever. Of the fortunate two out of three, half were attending private, and half public fee-based schools.
New York Loyalist-in-exile Anthony Allaire died in New Brunswick, Canada, in his mid-eighties.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s THE BUBBLES OF CANADA, and his A REPLY TO THE REPORT OF THE EARL OF DURHAM.
Catherine Fox of the Spiritualist Fox Sisters was probably born in this year near Bath, New Brunswick in Canada.
While on a visit to Syracuse, New York, the slave Harriett Powell was liberated. SLAVERY
July 25, Thursday: In upstate New York, at the Niagara Falls, a carpenter working on a tourist bridge to Goat Island fell into the rapids. Myron Chapin had gone in about 500 feet before the curl of the always-deadly American Falls, and as the current pulled him along he managed to swim so as to collide with a pile of rocks about 90 feet from the curl. After about half an hour of handwaving from the rocks and from the shore of the island, Joel Robinson tipped a light skiff into the waters at the lower end of Bath Island and rowed from an eddy behind one rock to an eddy behind another rock, resting in each eddy while plotting out his next dash across the torrent. After one mishap in which he almost lost control of his skiff, he made it to the eddy downstream of Chapin’s pile. With Chapin aboard, Robinson made his way back from eddy to eddy to the safety of Goat Island. Chapin, clambering out of the skiff safe and sound, embraced his wife and children. Someone began a cash collection among the onlookers in honor of Robinson’s courage and selflessness, and the crowd put Robinson and Chapin back into the skiff and marched to town as a triumphal procession — carrying the skiff with the two men in it on their shoulders.
July 25. There is no remedy for love but to love more.
July 26, Friday: In upstate New York, the Rochester Lyceum (or,Youths Debating Association) argued the question, “Resolved that Henry Clay deserves the office of President of the United States of America more than Gen. Scott.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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October: David Lee Child joined Lydia Maria Child in Boston.
The Seneca River Towing Path of the New York State Barge Canal connected Mud Lock on the Oswego Canal to the outlet of Onondaga Lake.
Ellery Channing departed from Massachusetts on a pilgrimage by canal boat, steamboat, and stagecoach toward the Illinois region, to take up a life behind the plow. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1840
Henry R. Worthington invented a direct-acting steam pump, installing this on his canal boat (after a few seasons, pressure from established boatmen would force his paddlewheeler off the Erie Canal).
Wayne County peppermint farmer Peter Hill began dismantling his private grocery building to move it out of the way of the Erie Canal enlargement.
Also, in this year, Earl Trumbull constructed the first all-iron truss using catenary rod reinforcements in the USA, to carry a road 70 feet over the Erie Canal at Frankford, New York.
January 15, Wednesday: Birth in Albany, New York of William Ingraham Kip, Jr., second child of Maria Elizabeth Lawrence Kip and the Reverend William Ingraham Kip.
Waldo Emerson lectured in East Lexington, Massachusetts as part of the dedication of a new church building. Then he lectured in Boston, delivering the 6th lecture of his current series, on “Reforms.”
September 1, Tuesday: The initial boat to use the completed section of New York State’s Genesee Valley Canal, traveling from Rochester to Mount Morris, stopped at Cuylerville’s National Hotel for a celebration. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1841
Clinton Roosevelt’s SCIENCE OF HUMAN GOVERNMENT envisioned a new basis for human society: a disciplined and tightly structured network of local communities. Charles Sears, a follower of Albert Brisbane, would be attempting to implement the economy-of-scale concepts of Charles Fourier.
With Nathan Starks, he founded a Fourierist group in Albany, New York. The North American Phalanx, a secular Utopian community, was initiated near Red Bank in Monmouth County, New Jersey (and would endure there until 1856) by Brisbane, with Horace Greeley and Park Goodwin. For $14,000, they would purchase 673 acres in Monmouth from Hendrick Longstreet and Daniel Holmes on January 1, 1844. Settlement of the men would begin over 6 months, with women and children following during Spring 1845. NORTHAMPTON ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION ONEIDA COMMUNITY MODERN TIMES UNITARY HOME FRUITLANDS BROOK FARM HOPEDALE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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March 4, Thursday: Myron Holley died in Rochester, New York.
General William Henry “Party Hardy” Harrison arrived in Washington DC on the Baltimore & Ohio train in cold and stormy weather, registered at Gadsby’s hotel, refused the offer of a hat and coat, rode in triumph on a white horse down the avenue to the White House, and on the East Portico of the Capitol was sworn in as President of the United States of America by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney.
This former general of the Indian campaigns, known as “Old Tippecanoe,” then spoke determinedly and purposefully for an hour and forty-five minutes into the snowstorm. His inaugural address set a record for length that is unlikely ever to be exceeded. He thus achieved the dual distinction among our Presidents of talking the longest and serving the shortest term of office, for this 68-year-old after standing outdoors for the entire proceeding went on to greet crowds of well-wishers at the White House, pressing the flesh as he went about his new duties, and that evening made an appearance at not one but several celebrations — and barely one month later would expire of the pneumonia which he was contracting.
On the accession of General Harrison to the Presidency, Daniel Webster was called to the office of Secretary of State, in which, after this President’s untimely death, he would continue under President Tyler for about two years. The relations of America with Great Britain would be in a very critical position. The most important and difficult subject which would engage the attention of the government while Webster would be serving in that capacity would be the negotiation of a treaty with Great Britain, which would be signed at Washington on August 9, 1842. The other members of President Harrison’s Cabinet would resign their places during Fall 1841 and there would be discontent that Webster would be invited to remain. However, President Tyler would continue Mr. Webster’s administration of foreign policy due to the great importance of pursuing a steady line in the nation’s foreign affairs, and in hope of an honorable settlement of the difficulties we were having with England. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Isaac Hecker had been attending the sermons of the Reverend Orville Dewey at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah
in New-York, until the reformer Orestes Augustus Brownson came down from Boston to lecture at the Stuyvesant Institute on “The Democracy of Christ.”
March 4. Ben Jonson says in his epigrams, —
“He makes himself a thorough-fare of Vice.” ON GUT
This is true, for by vice the substance of a man is not changed, but all his pores, and cavities, and avenues are prophaned by being made the thoroughfares of vice. He is the highway of his vice. The searching devil courses through and through him. His flesh and blood and bones are cheapened. He is all trivial, a place where three highways of sin meet. So is another the thoroughfare of virtue, and virtue circulates through all his aisles like a wind, and he is hallowed.
We reprove each other unconsciously by our own behavior. Our very carriage and demeanor in the streets should be a reprimand that will go to the conscience of every beholder. An infusion of love from a great soul gives a color to our faults, which will discover them, as lunar caustic detects impurities in water.
The best will not seem to go contrary to others, but, as if they could afford to travel the same way, they go a parallel but higher course, a sort of upper road. Jonson says, —
“That to the vulgar canst thyself apply, Treading a better path not contrary.” ON GUT HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Their way is a mountain slope, a river valley's course, a tide which mingles a myriad lesser currents.
August 9, Monday: The Lake Erie steamboat Erie departed from Buffalo, New York, heading for Chicago. When it caught on fire off Silver Creek, 215 people perished.
At the Liberty Hall in New Bedford, William C. Coffin heard Frederick Douglass speak briefly at the annual meeting of the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society, and invited him to come along to the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society convention that was to take place the next day on Nantucket Island. (Others at this meeting: George Bradburn, John A. Collins, Parker Pillsbury, Edmund Quincy.)
In his journal Henry Thoreau mused “If I am not I — who will be?” (He would transcribe this in 1842.)
August 9: It is vain to try to write unless you feel strong in the knees. Any book of great authority and genius seems to our imagination to permeate and pervade all space. Its spirit, like a more subtle ether, sweeps along with the prevailing winds of the country. Its influence conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood, and bathes the huckleberries on the hills, as sometimes a new influence in the sky washes in waves over the fields and seems to break on some invisible beach in the air. All things confirm it. It spends the mornings and the evenings.92 Everywhere the speech of Menu demands the widest apprehension and proceeds from the loftiest plateau of the soul. It is spoken unbendingly to its own level, and does not imply any contemporaneous speaker. I read history as little critically as I consider the landscape, and am more interested in the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than in its groundwork and composition. It is the morning now turned evening and seen in the west, - the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. Its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, Hat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving, or free. But, in reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment if it is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures – we want not its then – but its now. We do not complain that the 92. A WEEK, page 157; Riv. 195. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct — they are the more like the heavens… Of what moments are facts that can be lost. — which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale confided to them. The living fact commemorates itself– Why look in the dark for light– look in the light rather. Strictly speaking, the Societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but they themselves are instead of the fact that is lost. The researcher is more memorable than the researched. The crowd stood admiring the mist and the dim outline of the trees seen through it, and when one of their number advanced to explore the phenomenon, with fresh admiration all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure. Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented – we cannot know what we are not– But one veil hangs over past– present– and future– and it is the province of the historian to find out not what was, but what is. When a battle has been fought you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts — where a battle is being fought there are hearts beating.93 We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones? Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the back side of the picture on the wall, as if the author expected the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries –earnestly rebuilding the works behind as they are battered down by the incroachments of time– but while they loiter — they and their works both fall a prey to the enemy. Biography is liable to the same objection — it should by autobiography. Let us not leave ourselves empty that so vexing our bowels — we may go abroad and be somebody else to explain him– If I am not I– who will be?– As if it were to dispense justice to all– But the time has not come for that.94
93.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward a snippet from this day’s entry as:
THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN…
Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau
It is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been 238 History fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.
94. A WEEK, pages 161-63; Riv. 200-04. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1842
During this year, or the following one, the partnership between Eugene Ring’s father Moses Ely Ring and uncle Epaphras Cook Ely in the leather business in New-York ended, with the Rings returned to Rhinebeck, New York. Ring would experience a long and serious illness there, until 1847.
The 1st locomotive for the Auburn and Rochester Railroad was delivered by canal boat.
When New York ran out of money as a result of the 1837 panic, a “Stop and Tax Law” halted all canal construction for the next five years. The Jordan Level of the Erie Canal, between Montezuma and Camillus, had been almost completed when work was halted by this crisis, but the new Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River at Rochester was functional.
It cost a dollar to send a one-ounce letter from New-York to Buffalo, New York. Most postage had to be paid for, at this point, in Spanish coins.
Isaiah Roger’s Merchants’ Exchange was erected on the Wall Street site of the First Merchants’ Exchange, destroyed in the 1834 fire. The New-York Stock and Exchange Board moved there from its Jauncey Court location. The price of a seat on the New-York Stock Exchange rose from $150 to $350.
Town, Davis and Frazee’s Customs House was erected on the site of the old New-York City Hall, on Wall Street.
In New-York, Phineas Taylor Barnum opened the American Museum, featuring Charles S. Stratton as “Tom Thumb.”
Sweets Restaurant opened in lower Manhattan.
A stove fire destroyed the building at 231 Water Street in New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Ebenezer Emmons’s REPORT OF THE SECOND GEOLOGICAL DISTRICT OF NEW YORK. Professor Emmons had been helped by his son Ebenezer Emmons and by James Hall. This 2d district was the Adirondacks:
(In the same year, a report on the 3d district of the state, the central counties, was being made by Lardner Van Uxem, James Eights and S. Can.)
August 9, Tuesday: Lord Ashburton wrote eloquently to Secretary of State Daniel Webster: Lord Ashburton to Mr. Webster. Washington, August 9, 1842. Sir,—The note you did me the honor of addressing me the 8th instant, on the subject of impressment, shall be transmitted without delay to my government, and will, you may be assured, receive from them the deliberate attention which its importance deserves. The object of my mission was mainly the settlement of existing subjects of difference; and no differences have or could have arisen of late years with respect to impressment, because the practice has, since the peace, wholly ceased, and cannot, consistently with existing laws and regulations for manning her Majesty’s navy, be, under the present circumstances, renewed. Desirous, however, of looking far forward into futurity to anticipate even possible causes of disagreement, and sensible of the anxiety of the American people on this grave subject of past irritation, I should be sorry in any way to discourage the attempt at some settlement of it; and, although without authority to enter upon it here during the limited continuance of my mission, I entertain a confident hope that this task may HDT WHAT? INDEX
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be accomplished, when undertaken with the spirit of candor and conciliation which has marked all our late negotiations. It not being our intention to endeavor now to come to any agreement on this subject, I may be permitted to abstain from noticing at length your very ingenious arguments relating to it, and from discussing the graver matters of constitutional and international law growing out of them. These sufficiently show that the question is one requiring calm consideration; though I must, at the same time, admit that they prove a strong necessity of some settlement for the preservation of that good understanding which, I trust, we may flatter ourselves that our joint labors have now succeeded in establishing. I am well aware that the laws of our two countries maintain opposite principles respecting allegiance to the sovereign. America, receiving every year by thousands the emigrants of Europe, maintains the doctrine suitable to her condition, of the right of transferring allegiance at will. The laws of Great Britain have maintained from all time the opposite doctrine. The duties of allegiance are held to be indefeasible; and it is believed that this doctrine, under various modifications, prevails in most, if not in all, the civilized states of Europe. Emigration, the modern mode by which the population of the world peaceably finds its level, is for the benefit of all, and eminently for the benefit of humanity. The fertile deserts of America are gradually advancing to the highest state of cultivation and production, while the emigrant acquires comfort which his own confined home could not afford him. If there were any thing in our laws or our practice on either side tending to impede this march of providential humanity, we could not be too eager to provide a remedy; but as this does not appear to be the case, we may safely leave this part of the subject without indulging in abstract speculations having no material practical application to matters in discussion between us. But it must be admitted that a serious practical question does arise, or, rather, has existed, from practices formerly attending the mode of manning the British navy in times of war. The principle is, that all subjects of the crown are, in case of necessity, bound to serve their country, and the seafaring man is naturally taken for the naval service. This is not, as is sometimes supposed, any arbitrary principle of monarchical government, but one founded on the natural duty of every man to defend the life of his country; and all the analogy of your laws would lead to the conclusion, that the same principle would hold good in the United States if their geographical position did not make its application unnecessary. The very anomalous condition of the two countries with relation to each other here creates a serious difficulty. Our people are not distinguishable; and, owing to the peculiar habits of sailors, our vessels are very generally manned from a common stock. It is difficult, under these circumstances, to execute laws which at times have been thought to be essential for the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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existence of the country, without risk of injury to others. The extent and importance of those injuries, however, are so formidable, that it is admitted that some remedy should, if possible, be applied; at all events, it must be fairly and honestly attempted. It is true, that during the continuance of peace no practical grievance can arise; but it is also true, that it is for that reason the proper season for the calm and deliberate consideration of an important subject. I have much reason to hope that a satisfactory arrangement respecting it may be made, so as to set at rest all apprehension and anxiety; and I will only further repeat the assurance of the sincere disposition of my government favorably to consider all matters having for their object the promoting and maintaining undisturbed kind and friendly feelings with the United States. I beg, Sir, on this occasion of closing the correspondence with you connected with my mission, to express the satisfaction I feel at its successful termination, and to assure you of my high consideration and personal esteem and regard. ASHBURTON. HON. DANIEL WEBSTER, &c., &c., &c.
This treaty with Great Britain negotiated by Secretary of State Daniel Webster with Ashburton was signed at Washington DC. This Webster-Ashburton Treaty settled British/US boundary disputes in regard to the northern extents of Maine, Minnesota, and New York. The 1774 Canada/New York boundary was restored and Albert Smith (U. S.) and J.B B. Estcourt (Britain) were assigned to a new survey. READ THE FULL TEXT
The treaty provided for joint American and British maintenance of squadrons on the west coast of Africa, to interdict the international slave trade. The blockading cruisers had a pecuniary interest in capturing the slavers on the high seas instead of merely interdicting their traffic, for any negreros captured on the high seas could be sold for prize money and this prize money divided among the officers and crew. (The result of this sort of ambivalently motivated blockade would be a 300% increase in slaves shipped, with 2/3ds of these human beings being murdered at sea to evade pursuit and capture by the blockaders, and a deterioration in the conditions of current slaves in America as their workload increased to compensate for the decrease in supplies of new slaves.) Date Right of Search Arrangements Treaty with for Joint Great Britain, Cruising with made by Great Britain, made by 1817 Portugal; Spain 1818 Netherlands 1824 Sweden 1831-33 France HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1833-39 Denmark, Hanse Towns, etc. 1841 Quintuple Treaty (Austria, Russia, Prussia) 1842 United States 1844 Texas 1845 Belgium France 1862 United States
W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The Treaty of Washington, in 1842, made the first effective compromise in the matter and broke the unpleasant dead-lock, by substituting joint cruising by English and American squadrons for the proposed grant of a Right of Search. In submitting this treaty, Tyler said: “The treaty which I now submit to you proposes no alteration, mitigation, or modification of the rules of the law of nations. It provides simply that each of the two Governments shall maintain on the coast of Africa a sufficient squadron to enforce separately and respectively the laws, rights, and obligations of the two countries for the suppression of the slave trade.”95 This provision was a part of the treaty to settle the boundary disputes with England. In the Senate, Benton moved to strike out this article; but the attempt was defeated by a vote of 37 to 12, and the treaty was ratified.96 This stipulation of the treaty of 1842 was never properly carried out by the United States for any length of time.97 Consequently the same difficulties as to search and visit by English vessels continued to recur. Cases like the following were frequent. The “Illinois,” of Gloucester, Massachusetts, while lying at Whydah, Africa, was boarded by a British officer, but having American papers was unmolested. Three days later she hoisted Spanish colors and sailed away with a cargo of slaves. Next morning she fell in with another British vessel and hoisted American colors; the British ship had then no right to molest her; but the captain of the slaver feared that she would, and therefore ran his vessel aground, slaves and all. The senior English officer reported that “had Lieutenant Cumberland brought to and boarded the ‘Illinois,’ notwithstanding the American colors which she hoisted, ... the American master of the ‘Illinois’ ... would have complained to his Government of the detention of his vessel.”98 Again, a vessel which had been boarded by British officers and found with American flag and papers was, a little later, captured under the Spanish flag with four hundred and thirty slaves. She had in the interim 95. SENATE EXECUTIVE JOURNAL, VI. 123. 96. U.S. TREATIES AND CONVENTIONS (ed. 1889), pages 436-7. For the debates in the Senate, see Congressional Globe, 27 Cong. 3 sess. Appendix. Cass resigned on account of the acceptance of this treaty without a distinct denial of the Right of Search, claiming that this compromised his position in France. Cf. SENATE DOCUMENT, 27 Cong. 3 sess. II., IV. Nos. 52, 223; 29th Congress 1st session, VIII. No. 377. 97. Cf. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois. 98. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 28th Congress 2d session, IX. No. 150, page 72. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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complained to the United States government of the boarding.99 Meanwhile, England continued to urge the granting of a Right of Search, claiming that the stand of the United States really amounted to the wholesale protection of pirates under her flag.100 The United States answered by alleging that even the Treaty of 1842 had been misconstrued by England,101 whereupon there was much warm debate in Congress, and several attempts were made to abrogate the slave-trade article of the treaty.102 The pro-slavery party had become more and more suspicious of England’s motives, since they had seen her abolition of the slave-trade blossom into abolition of the system itself, and they seized every opportunity to prevent co-operation with her. At the same time, European interest in the question showed some signs of weakening, and no decided action was taken. In 1845 France changed her Right of Search stipulations of 1833 to one for joint cruising,103 while the Germanic Federation,104 Portugal,105 and Chili106enounced the trade as piracy. In 1844 Texas granted the Right of Search to England,107 and in 1845 Belgium signed the Quintuple Treaty.108 Discussion between England and the United States was revived when Cass held the State portfolio, and, strange to say, the author of “Cass’s Protest” went farther than any of his predecessors in acknowledging the justice of England’s demands. Said he, in 1859: “If The United States maintained that, by carrying their flag at her masthead, any vessel became thereby entitled to the immunity which belongs to American vessels, they might well be reproached with assuming a position which would go far towards shielding crimes upon the ocean from punishment; but they advance no such pretension, while they concede that, if in the honest examination of a vessel sailing under American colours, but accompanied by strongly-marked suspicious circumstances, a mistake is made, and she is found to be entitled to the flag she bears, but no injury is committed, and the conduct of the boarding party is irreproachable, no Government would be likely to make a case thus exceptional in its character a subject of serious reclamation.”109 While admitting this and expressing a desire to co-operate in the suppression of the slave-trade, Cass nevertheless steadily refused all further overtures toward a mutual Right of Search. The increase of the slave-traffic was so great in the decade 1850-1860 that Lord John Russell proposed to the governments of 99. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 28th Congress 2d session, IX. No. 150, page 77. 100. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 27 Cong. 3 sess. V. No. 192, page 4. Cf. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1842-3, page 708 ff. 101. HOUSE JOURNAL, 27 Cong. 3 sess. pages 431, 485-8. Cf. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 27 Cong. 3 sess. V. No. 192. 102. Cf. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois. 103. With a fleet of 26 vessels, reduced to 12 in 1849: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1844-5, page 4 ff.; 1849-50, page 480. 104. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1850-1, page 953. 105. Portugal renewed her Right of Search treaty in 1842: BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1841-2, page 527 ff.; 1842-3, page 450. 106. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1843-4, page 316. 107. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1844-5, page 592. There already existed some such privileges between England and Texas. 108. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1847-8, page 397 ff. 109. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1858-9, pages 1121, 1129. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the United States, France, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, that they instruct their ministers to meet at London in May or June, 1860, to consider measures for the final abolition of the trade. He stated: “It is ascertained, by repeated instances, that the practice is for vessels to sail under the American flag. If the flag is rightly assumed, and the papers correct, no British cruizer can touch them. If no slaves are on board, even though the equipment, the fittings, the water-casks, and other circumstances prove that the ship is on a Slave Trade venture, no American cruizer can touch them.”110 Continued representations of this kind were made to the paralyzed United States government; indeed, the slave-trade of the world seemed now to float securely under her flag. Nevertheless, Cass refused even to participate in the proposed conference, and later refused to accede to a proposal for joint cruising off the coast of Cuba.111 Great Britain offered to relieve the United States of any embarrassment by receiving all captured Africans into the West Indies; but President Buchanan “could not contemplate any such arrangement,” and obstinately refused to increase the suppressing squadron.112 On the outbreak of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration, through Secretary Seward, immediately expressed a willingness to do all in its power to suppress the slave-trade.113 Accordingly, June 7, 1862, a treaty was signed with Great Britain granting a mutual limited Right of Search, and establishing mixed courts for the trial of offenders at the Cape of Good Hope, Sierra Leone, and New York.114 The efforts of a half-century of diplomacy were finally crowned; Seward wrote to Adams, “Had such a treaty been made in 1808, there would now have been no sedition here.”115
110. BRITISH AND FOREIGN STATE PAPERS, 1859-60, pages 902-3. 111. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 36th Congress 2d session, IV. No. 7. 112. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 36th Congress 2d session, IV. No. 7. 113. SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37th Congress 2d session, V. No. 57. 114. SENATE EXECUTIVE JOURNAL, XII. 230-1, 240, 254, 256, 391, 400, 403; DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE, 1862, pages 141, 158; U.S. TREATIES AND CONVENTIONS (ed. 1889), pages 454-9. 115. DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE, 1862, pages 64-5. This treaty was revised in 1863. The mixed court in the West Indies had, by February, 1864, liberated 95,206 Africans: SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 38th Congress 1st session, No. 56, page 24. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1843
Samuel H. Hammond removed to Albany, New York, and would practice law there.
In Rochester, New York, Dr. J.B. Beers began the use of gold teeth in dentistry.
William Thomas Green Morton got married with Elizabeth Whitman of Farmington, Connecticut (a niece of former Congressman Lemuel Whitman), promising her parents that he would undertake the study of medicine rather than remain a dentist. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1845
Our national birthday, Friday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 41st birthday, and the flag was gaining another star as the State of Florida was entering the Union as our 27th state, making the score in this land of the free and home of the brave to amount to 14 states for human slavery versus 13 states agin it:
Ordinance of the Convention of Texas.
In Washington DC, the cornerstone of Jackson Hall was being laid and a good time was being enjoyed by all these American patriots who were equating patriotism with inebriation, but on the grounds south of the Executive Mansion, some drunken celebrant fired off a dozen rockets into the crowd, killing James Knowles and Georgiana Ferguson and injuring several others — collateral damage due to friendly fire.
In Ithaca, New York, a celebration cannon, evidently overcharged with powder, blew apart, killing three. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Ex-president John Tyler delivered an oration at William and Mary College.
In Nashville, Tennessee, the corner-stone of the State House was laid. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
What to the slave is the 4th of July? On this day and the next Frederick Douglass was lecturing in Athol, Massachusetts. Henry Thoreau began to sleep in the open frame of the new shanty “as soon as it was boarded and roofed…” not only on the anniversary of independence, but also on the day on which the US took the Texas territory from Mexico. Had he remained in Concord that day, he would have been subjected not only to offensive parades with flag-waving, but also to much offensive pro-war oratory. TIMELINE OF WALDEN EMERSON’S SHANTY
WALDEN: When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night.The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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We need not presume that he intended the date to have any metaphorical significance, as in the idea that moving to the shanty was his Declaration of Independence from human society. On this day of Thoreau’s removal, an article appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune calling for a return to “the narrow, thorny path where Integrity leads.” This article was authored in full awareness of the course Thoreau was following in Concord, for this sentiment had been penned by Margaret Fuller.
Years later, on May 1, 1850 to be exact, Thoreau recollected an incident of this day, that “The forenoon that I moved to my house –a poor old lame fellow who had formerly frozen his feet –hobbled off the road –came & stood before my door with one hand on each door post looking into the house & asked for a drink of water. I knew that rum or something like it was the only drink he loved but I gave him a dish of warm pond water which was all I had, nevertheless, which to my astonishment he drank, being used to drinking.”
Thoreau lived HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“At Walden, July, 1845, to fall of 1847, then at R.W.E.’s to fall of 1848, or while he was in Europe.”
At about this time, more or less, a number of people’s acquaintance’s lives were changing: for instance, Giles Waldo, whom Thoreau had chummed around with in New-York, was sailing to become vice consul at Lahaina in the Sandwich Islands, and George Partridge Bradford was abandoning the private school he had attempted to set up in Waldo Emerson’s barn to begin a private school in Roxbury MA.
Thoreau wrote the following sometime after he moved to his new shanty at Walden Pond, about the drumming of the ruffed grouse:
After July 4: {one-fifth page blank} When I behold an infant I am impressed with a sense of antiquity, and reminded of the sphinx or Sybil. It seems older than Nestor or Jove himself, and wears the wrinkles of Saturn. Why should the present impose upon us so much! I sit now upon a stump whose rings number centuries of growth– If I look around me I see that the very soil is composed of just such stumps — ancestors to this. I thrust this stick many aeons deep into the surface — and with my heel scratch a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years– If I listen I hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of Egypt — or a distant partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] drumming on a log — as if it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. CURRENT YOUTUBE VIDEO I raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mould. –Why, what we call new is not skin deep — the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the fertile ground we walk upon but the leaves that flutter over our head The newest is but the oldest made visible to our eyes. We dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface and call it new, and the plants which spring from it.
After July 4: Night and day — year on year, / High & low — far and near, / These are our own aspects, / These are our own regrets…. / I hear the sweet evening sounds / From your undecaying grounds / Cheat me no more with time, / Take me to your clime. 1842, 1845, 1848: Night and day, year on year, / High and low, far and near, / These are our own aspects, / These are our own regrets…. / I hear the sweet evening sounds / From your undecaying grounds; / Cheat me no more with time, / Take me to your clime. (WEEK 389) (Johnson 388-9) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 14, Monday: Frederick Douglass lectured at the Baptist Meetinghouse of West Winfield, New York. In Concord, the “gentle rain” fell that would appear in the “Spring” chapter of WALDEN:
WALDEN: Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolean music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to- day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.– “Mourning untimely consumes the sad; Few are their days in the land of the living, Beautiful daughter of Toscar.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 14th What sweet and tender, the most innocent and divinely encouraging society there is in every natural object, and so in universal nature even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no really black melan-choly to him who lives in the midst of nature, and has still his senses. There never was yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to the innocent ear. Nothing can compel to a vulgar sadness a simple & brave man. While I enjoy the sweet friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. This rain which is now watering my beans, and keeping me in the house waters me too. I needed it as much. And what if most are not hoed –those who send the rain whom I chiefly respect will pardon me. Sometimes when I compare myself with other men methinks I am favored by the Gods. They seem to whisper joy to me beyond my deserts and that I do have a solid warrant and surety at their hands, which my fellows do not. I do not flatter myself but if it were possible they flatter me. I am especially guided and guarded. And now I think of it –let me remember– What was seen true once –and sanctioned by the flash of Jove –will always be true, and nothing can hinder it. I have the warrant that no fair dream I have had need fail of its fulfillment. Here I know I am in good company –here is the world its centre and metropolis, and all the palms of Asia –and the laurels of Greece –and the firs of the Arctic Zones incline thither. Here I can read Homer if I would have books, as well as in Ionia, and not wish myself in Boston or New-york or London or Rome or Greece– In such place as this he wrote or sang. Who should come to my lodge Just now –but a true Homeric boor –one of those Paphlagonian men? Alek Therien –he call himself– A Canadian now, a woodchopper –a post maker –makes fifty posts –holes them i.e. in a day, and who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught– And he too has heard of Homer and if it were not for books would not know what to do –rainy days. Some priest once who could read glibly from the Greek itself –taught him reading in a measure his verse at least in his turn –at Nicolet away by the Trois Riviers once. And now I must read to him while he holds the book –Achilles’ reproof of Patrocles on his sad countenance “Why are you in tears, –Patrocles? Like a young child (girl) &c. &c Or have you heard some news from Phthia? They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor And Peleus lives, son of AEacus, among the Myrmidons, Both of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.” He has a neat bundle of white-oak bark under his arm for a sick man –gathered this Sunday morning– “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing today.”? ? The simple man. May the Gods send him many wood chucks. And earlier today came 5 Lestrigones –Railroad men who take care of the road, some of them at least. They still represent the bodies of men –transmitting arms and legs –and bowels downward from those remote days to more remote. They have some got a rude wisdom withal –thanks to their dear experience. And one with them a handsome younger man –a sailor like Greek like man –says “Sir I like your notions– I think I shall live so my self Only I should like a wilder country –where there is more game. I have been among the Indians near Apallachecola I have lived with them, I like your kind of life– Good-day I wish you success and happiness.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Since we may wonder, what is a Paphlagonian man — here was Paphlagonia: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 19, Saturday: In New-York there was a fire in a warehouse in which saltpeter was being stored. When the
building collapsed there were firemen on the roof and some of these men actually rode the roof down and arrived at ground level uninjured. In the center of this period illustration, you can see one of these lucky firemen depicted as if on a surfboard! The general conflagration consumed an area to the north of Bowling Green between Broad Street and Broadway. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS
July 19-20: Frederick Douglass lectured in Waterloo, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1846
In this year and in 1848, Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan would put out the two volumes of HISTORY OF NEW NETHERLANDS; OR, NEW YORK UNDER THE DUTCH (New York). At some point his obvious historical talents led to his appointment as secretary-archivist of the State of New York.
From this year until 1854, successive publication of the volumes of Ebenezer Emmons’s massive illustrated AGRICULTURE OF NEW YORK STATE.
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1847
Boston Associates selected Holyoke as the site for a planned industrial city, and purchased and assumed the name of the Hadley Falls Company and acquired controlling interest in the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals. The 1st map of the planned city was prepared for them by surveyors. Irish laborers began to arrive to work on the dam and canals and began to settle in the Patch, the Flats, and Tigertown.
The Caledonian Canal opened.
Canal construction resumed in New York.
Walter W. Gwynn was hired as Chief Engineer of the James River and Kanawha Canal, with Edward Lorraine as his assistant. E.H. Gill was offered the position of principal assistant engineer but turns down the assignment.
John Roebling built an aqueduct to carry the Delaware and Hudson Canal over the Delaware River at Lackawaxen.
The Georges River Canal was completed.
Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan’s JESUIT RELATIONS OF DISCOVERIES AND OTHER OCCURRENCES IN CANADA AND THE NORTHERN AND WESTERN STATES OF THE UNION, 1632-1672 (New York).
June: Samuel H. Hammond was appointed District Attorney for Albany County, New York (he would fill that office until 1851).
August: Sir George Back returned from his honeymoon in Italy to take an active part in the preparation of expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin. He would serve with a number of other Arctic veterans on the Arctic council which advised the Admiralty about preparing search expeditions. THE FROZEN NORTH
At about this point the sailor William Jackman emigrated from Liverpool to New-York aboard the Queen, Captain McLean, and then, after a trip up the Hudson River and on the Erie Canal (there were 2,725 boats paying a passage along this waterway during this year), remarried with Jennett Nelson Scott whom he had met aboard the Queen, probably in Orleans County, New York (the bride had been born on November 2, 1825 in Scotland, and would die on April 14, 1897 in Kinnic, Wisconsin; this union would produce twelve children). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Late September: Late in this month Frederick Douglass revealed some startling news: rather than turn over to the anti- slavery society the considerable funds that had been entrusted directly to him by British friends (most of the lecture receipts and book sale profits had been handed instead to his white traveling companion, who, acting on explicit instructions from headquarters, had been during this lecture trip sequestering as many of these donations as possible and holding them away from Douglass), he was planning to use these moneys to start up his own newspaper, in Rochester, New York, to be called The North Star. This despite the most bitter
opposition from Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison in particular was objecting that this idea was insane, since 1.) the new Douglass paper would be unnecessary competition for his The Liberator which was having enough financial trouble already, and since 2.) Douglass had no clue what he was getting himself into, had never done any writing or editing and thus had no grasp of how difficult the crafts of writing and editing actually were. No, Douglass’s grandiloquent plan was a recipe for disaster!116
October 6, Wednesday-9, Saturday: William Cooper Nell relocated to Rochester, New York to manage Frederick Douglass’s North Star.
December: The Fox family from Canada relocated to a decrepit house, reputedly haunted, near Hydesville, New York. SPIRITUALISM FOX SISTERS
116. The idea that Frederick Douglass had no clue how difficult writing actually was is a strange one to hear coming from the mouth of Garrison, since Garrison had earlier written a letter asserting that Douglass had himself written his NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (a claim which Douglass himself had never made and would never make), and since this narrative allegedly authored by Douglass had turned out to be an acknowledged literary masterpiece (now, a “classic”) and a runaway 19th-Century moneymaking bestseller. Whoever wrote the NARRATIVE of 1845 already knew how to write and knew how to write exceedingly well — but Douglass did not know and would not be able to learn even the rudiments! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December 3, Friday: At the printing office of the Rochester Democrat, William Cooper Nell, Frederick Douglass and Martin Robison Delany examined the initial issue of the North Star.
For the time being this gazette would be being printed in the basement of the local Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion church.
December 8, Wednesday: William Cooper Nell was given 40 acres of land in upstate New York by Gerrit Smith.117
December 12, Sunday: William Cooper Nell became the recording secretary of the Executive Committee of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York.
December 19, Sunday: At an Anti-Slavery meeting in the Minerva Hall of Rochester, New York, William Cooper Nell and Giles B. Stebens were appointed as secretaries.
While laid up in Mexico City with his thigh wound, 2d Lieutenant Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr. almost engaged in a duel of honor. The encounter was, however, on this day averted by means of a most carefully worded exchange of correspondence: City of Mexico, December 19th, 1847. Sir, Captain McKinstry has received your note of yesterday, and has requested me, as his friend, to inform you that he has not made any remarks reflecting upon you as a gentleman and a man of honour. Very respectfully, Your obedient servant, John B. Grayson, Captain 165 A.
Lieutenant Mayne Reid, N.Y. Volunteers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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117. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith had been scheming to sell parcels of land on a 100,000-acre plot south of Lake Placid to black farmers, but this had come to nothing due not only to lack of capital among free blacks with which to purchase such land, but also to the entire infertility of the land being presented as farmable. (Fast-forward to John Brown at North Elba.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1848
The 2d volume of Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan’s HISTORY OF NEW NETHERLANDS; OR, NEW YORK UNDER THE DUTCH (New York).
William Whiting was president and Mary Merrick Brooks a member of the executive committee of the Middlesex County Antislavery Society.
During the Hopedale years the Reverend Adin Ballou had been traveling around New England lecturing on and debating Practical Christianity, Christian Non-resistance, abolition, temperance, and other social issues, and in 1846 he had made in addition an anti-slavery lecture foray into Pennsylvania. In this year he lectured on anti-slavery in the state of New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The definitive final edition of KNICKERBOCKER’S HISTORY OF NEW YORK by “Diedrich Knickerbocker” (Washington Irving) was published by G.P. Putnam.A revised edition of Irving’s THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY
READ THE FULL TEXT
HOLLOW was published, which included the rendering of Ichabod Crane the ill-fated schoolmaster, by the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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illustrator Felix Octavius Carr Darley, which would become the definitive illustration:
Would Henry Thoreau, or his former pupils, have taken this illustration as a humorous rendition of himself, in his instar as schoolmaster at the Concord Academy? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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John Andrew emigrated from England to New-York.
In New-York, Charles Burton created the baby carriage.
In Brooklyn, the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer, Inc. was formed to begin manufacture and sale of a candy-coated dewormer dose.
Alexander T. Steward founded the initial department store, on Broadway in Manhattan.
City University was founded.
A group of New-York newspapers organize the Associated Press.
High Bridge over the Harlem River was completed.
Edward Sherman Hoar passed the bar exam and became qualified to practice law in the State of New York (although as it would turn out, he would find the confinement in that practice in that state “oppressive” and would begin his practice of law again, in California).
The Oneida Community was formed in upstate New York. (At some point member Sewell Newhouse would donate to the collective his patent for a superior steel trap. This would be the organization’s cash cow for many decades. During the year 1860, for instance, the community would gross $100,000 from nationwide sale of the Newhouse trap. In 1881 it would reorganize as a stock company for the manufacture primarily of quality silverware.)
Frederick Douglass met Julia Griffith, who would become influential at the North Star newspaper office in Rochester, New York.
Though free from his birth, the black man Charles Reed (neé Washington DC in 1827) went with his enslaved brother Webster Reed from Hagerstown, Maryland to Canada, both of them in fear of a murderous overseer. Together with his Mohawk wife, Mary Pickett, and their first two children, Charles Reed first appeared in the 1850 Trumansburg, New York census.
Foundation of the W.D. Wilson Printing Ink Company.
By coating daguerreotype plates with silver chloride, Edward Becquerel was able to more or less capture and portray the various colors. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Ebenezer Emmons’s NATURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK. He proposed a “Taconic System” to describe the formation of the Taconic Mountains and rocks of easternmost New York and western Massachusetts.
According to this theory the event occurred earlier than was being supposed by other geologists. While working with the New York State Geological Survey, Emmons’s disagreement with James Hall and others was well publicized. The mountain building had occurred when a volcanic island arc came together with a proto- North American continent, eliminating a former ocean. This affected the region from Newfoundland to Alabama that we now term the Appalachians. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Hall was insisting that these mountains did not appear until the Ordovician. Whenever it had happened, rocks that had originally been deposited on the floor of a deep ocean were thrust upward together to create the Taconic Mountain range. This was an overthrust, in which older rocks came to lie over younger rocks. It is visible in Troy and in fact runs through the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic.
The fossils in these rocks indicate that it was Emmons who was correct, but this was not known at the time. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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At the time the matter was settled in court, with Emmons suing James Hall for slander and libel, but he would lose the case and be prohibited from practicing geology in the state of New York.
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William A. Reynolds hired Burlington, Vermont architect Henry Searle to design a meeting place for gatherings of the Athenaeum & Mechanics Association, across Works Street from his Reynolds Arcade in Rochester, New York. The columns at the front of the upscale structure would supply it with its name — Corinthian Hall. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The world’s first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19th and 20th. Three hundred people attended. A Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions was debated and ultimately signed by 68 women and 32 men, setting the agenda for the women’s rights movement that followed. Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a leader at the Seneca Falls conference for women’s rights. Susan B. Anthony’s younger sister (Mary) attended the Adjourned Convention in Rochester of the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. At the time she was more interested in pursuing temperance reform. (Temperance is the restraint in the use of alcoholic liquors.) Her commitment to temperance came in part as a result of her Quaker upbringing. She never did officially leave the Quaker meeting, although at this time she also began attending the liberal Unitarian Church.
Susan B. Anthony herself in this year was joining the Daughters of Temperance. A few years later, she would not be allowed to speak at a temperance rally in Albany not on account of her being crosseyed but on account of her being a woman. She would leave the Society upon this insult, and shortly thereafter form the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. Here is her portrait in this year at the age of 28:
March: The Fox family of Canadians had lived during that winter in an old house, reputedly haunted and certainly decrepit, near Hydesville, New York. Pretty soon, young Maggie Fox and Kate Fox were faking rappings on the floor of their bedroom as a trick on their parents John and Margaret Fox.
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The younger Fox girls, of an age to be bored and mischievous, had learned how to make their joints, in particular their knee joints, make a popping noise, and quickly became adept at delivering toe-taps without any noticeable movement. (Initially, they were professing to have raps with a “Mr. Splitfoot.” Luckily for everyone concerned, this was Hydesville, New York rather than Salem, Massachusetts –and the 19th Century rather than the 17th –so the adolescent trickiness would veer this time in the direction of spiritualism rather than again in the direction of demonism, and there would be seances instead of witch trials.) An oldest sister, Ann Leah Fox Fish, had been living in Rochester and supporting herself by giving piano lessons, so after the younger sisters moved in with her, the craze would become known alliteratively as “Rochester Rappings.” The sisters would go on tour and find they could bring in perhaps $100.00 a night among them, although Leah as the oldest and as their manager was able to siphon off most of this. SPIRITUALISM
March 31, Friday: Waldo Emerson visited Oxford.
Past and present members of legislative bodies of all German states met in Frankfurt to organize an all-German parliament.
The young Canadian girls Kate Fox and Maggie Fox again faked rappings, fooling their parents John and Margaret Fox into supposing that they were in communion with spirits. A number of their new neighbors in upstate New York were called over to witness the phenomenon, and a lifetime of lying and publicity seeking began.
Kate Maggie SPIRITUALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 4, Tuesday: Frederick Douglass sailed from Liverpool, again aboard the Cunard steamship Cambria, again consigned to the steerage compartment in its stern, expected by the crew and by the other passengers to take all his meals in solitude — but this time he was bound for a triumphal return to his family in Lynn as the conqueror of the British Isles.
The Rochester Daily American challenged its readers to solve the Fox Sisters mystery of the Hydesville, New York rappings. SPIRITUALISM
(Refer to Professor Janet Oppenheim’s 1985 THE OTHER WORLD: SPIRITUALISM AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH IN ENGLAND, 1850-1914 for an analysis of how the recent creation of the Morse telegraph code enabled the creation of an interpretation system for the table rappings, with one rap for “Yes,” two raps for “No,” and three raps for “Don’t know.” — I’m not convinced, myself, that such an interpretation is not being forced too far, but you may be more impressed by the connection than I am: “Significantly, manifestations during spiritualist séances would follow new innovations in technology, suggesting that contrivances designed for clear and easy communication had been appropriated for the mediated form of communication between this world and the next. For example, when the Morse code was introduced in the mid- to late 1830s, spirits rapped in Morse, and with the invention of the telephone, disembodied voices at séances became the vogue.”)
May: Ann Leah Fox Fish, piano-teaching older sister of Maggie Fox and Kate Fox, learning of the rapping goings- on in Hydesville from a reading of the Rochester, New York Daily American, took the Erie Canal packet boat from Rochester to Newark and went directly to her brother David’s Hydesville home, where she talked to her sisters — and got them to confess their secret, as well as how they were producing the rappings. SPIRITUALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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To make some money and become famous, the sisters of course became co-conspirators. Anything’s better than having to work for a living, right? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June: A Congregational minister, the Reverend Lemuel Clark of Worcester, New York attended a Fox Sisters seance at Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Fish’s home in Rochester. Among the spirits contacted were that of a murdered Hydesville pedlar (they said the apparition referred to himself as “Charles B. Rosna”) and that of Harriet Granger, dead daughter of the hosts Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Granger. SPIRITUALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 17, Saturday: Sam Patch’s legacy evidently was “You don’t need to be from Rhode Island in order to be too stupid to be alive.” It was reported in this day’s newspapers that Hosea Hollenbrook, a lad who did not know how to swim, had attempted to repeat Sam’s leap at the Genesee Falls in Rochester, New York — and of course had not survived.
Gone But Not Forgotten
July: William Cooper Nell orated “On the Elevation of the Colored People” at the Third Baptist Church of Rochester, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 9, Sunday: Elizabeth Cady Stanton met with her friends Martha Wright and Mariane McClintock at the Seneca Falls, New York, home of Jane Hunt, for a tea in honor of Philadelphia Quaker minister Lucretia Mott. They decided to hold a woman’s rights convention in that town.
Costumes of Philadelphia Quakers
July 20, Thursday: In Berlin, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” made a 2d entry in his JOURNAL INTIME: “It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy. When the duration of a man’s life or of a people’s life appears to us as microscopic as that of a fly and inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a celestial body, with all its dust of nations, we feel ourselves at once very small and very great, and we are able, as it were, to survey from the height of the spheres our own existence, and the little whirlwinds which agitate our little Europe. At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.”
Continuation of the world’s 1st convention for Women’s Rights, at Seneca Falls, New York, was organized by HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Friend Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
Resolved, that all men and women are created equal.
Frederick Douglass was present.
At this first convention, even the organizers weren’t sure of the appropriateness of having a female chair a public meeting, so the job fell to a couple of Quaker males, Friend James Mott and Friend Thomas M’Clintock. A Quaker female, Friend Mary Ann M’Clintock, Jr., was allowed to fill the function of Secretary.
This meeting would be satirized in Harper’s Magazine. It has been noted that in this illustration, several of the male figures appear to have horns, one of the female figures is exhibiting her stockinged legs, one of the female figures appears to be reclining, and in the balcony, a male audience is hooting and hollering, but which one of these figures is the solitary black man in attendance — might he be any other than the seated figure in the center front of the illustration, the male who has a slouching female outrageously leaning her elbow on his shoulder? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 26, Wednesday: The new enlarged lock on New York’s Erie Canal at Tonawanda, along the south side of the original lock, was put into service.
July 28, Friday: Eight days after the conclusion of the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, Frederick Douglass provided a favorable glimpse118 in his Rochester The North Star:
One of the most interesting events of the past week, was the holding of what is technically styled a Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The speaking, addresses, and resolutions of this extraordinary meeting was wholly conducted by women; and although they evidently felt themselves in a novel position, it is but simple justice to say that their whole proceedings were characterized by marked ability and dignity. No one present, we think, however much he might be disposed to differ from the views advanced by the leading speakers on that occasion, will fail to give them credit for brilliant talents and excellent dispositions. In this meeting, as in other deliberative assemblies, there were frequent differences of opinion and animated discussion; but in no case was there the slightest absence of good feeling and decorum. Several interesting documents setting forth the rights as well as the grievances of women were read. Among these was a Declaration of Sentiments, to be regarded as the basis of a grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women. We should not do justice to our own convictions, or to the excellent persons connected with this infant movement, if we did not in this connection offer a few remarks on the general subject which the Convention met to consider and the objects they seek to attain. In doing so, we are not insensible that the bare mention of this truly important subject in any other than terms of contemptuous ridicule and scornful disfavor, is likely to excite against us the fury of bigotry and the folly of prejudice. A discussion of the rights of animals would be 118. During the month of August, a followup Women’s Rights Convention would be held in Rochester, New York, passing a resolution to have the word “obey” struck from the marriage vows. A letter from abolitionist Gerrit Smith would there be read, expressing his support. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the “wise” and the “good” of our land, than would a discussion of the rights of women. It is, in their estimation to be guilty of evil thoughts, to think that woman is entitled to equal rights with man. Many who have at last made the discovery that the negroes have some rights as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be convinced that women are entitled to any. Eight years ago a number of persons of this description actually abandoned the anti-slavery cause, lest by giving their influence in that direction they might possibly be giving countenance to the dangerous heresy that woman, in respect to rights, stands on an equal footing with man. In the judgment of such persons the American slave system, with all its concomitant horrors, is less to be deplored than this “wicked” idea. It is perhaps needless to say, that we cherish little sympathy for such sentiments or respect for such prejudices. Standing as we do up on the watch-tower of human freedom, we cannot be deterred from an expression of our approbation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character of any members of the human family. While it is impossible for us to go into this subject at length, and dispose of the various objections which are often urged against such a doctrine as that of female equality, we are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally for woman. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman, and if that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is that “right is of no sex.” We therefore bid the women engaged in this movement our humble Godspeed.
August 2, Wednesday: William Cooper Nell spoke at a Woman’s Rights Convention in the Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York.
August 3, Thursday: At a Women’s Rights convention held at the Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York those participating demanded voting suffrage, and property rights. FEMINISM
Senator Daniel Webster responded to some of his “neighbors” of Marshfield, Massachusetts: Marshfield, Aug. 3, 1848. GENTLEMEN,—I have received your letter. The critical state of things at Washington obliges me to think it my duty to repair thither immediately and take my seat in the Senate, notwithstanding the state of my health and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the heat of the weather render it disagreeable for me to leave home. I cannot, therefore, comply with your wishes at present; but on my return, if such should continue to be your desire, I will meet you and the other Whigs of Marshfield, in an unceremonious manner, that we may confer upon the topics to which your letter relates. I am, Gentlemen, with esteem and friendship, Your obliged fellow-citizen, DANIEL WEBSTER. To Messrs. DANIEL PHILLIPS, GEORGE LEONARD, GEO. H. WETHERBEE, and others.
August 6, Sunday: The 1st suspension bridge over the Niagara River in upstate New York, built by Charles Ellett, opened.
November: Rochester, New York diarist Cyrus Paine and a friend walked out Buffalo Street (today’s West Main Street) to the “Mimger Tract,” one of the proposed sites for Madison University (today’s Colgate University), which was then considering a relocation to Rochester.
November 14, Tuesday: A public display of Spiritualism was organized in Rochester, New York, and prominent clergy, doctors, and scientists, were asked to be in attendance. Unable to detect trickery on this first night, they called for a subsequent performance as and for several private demonstrations in the presence of doctors. Still the source of the rappings would elude them and so yet a third public forum would be scheduled. The crowd would strip Maggie Fox, inspecting both her clothing and her body. When the 15-year-old would burst into tears and cry out for help, Friend Amy Post would come to her assistance. Many members of the Rochester community would nevertheless demand yet a fourth public examination — the stakes were high, as either they were being duped, or these strange noises were Satanic in origin. Several members of the Rochester community announced that if Maggie did not reveal the source of the rapping, they intended to lynch her and anyone else connected with the rappings. The local clergy registered no protests in the face of this threat, but before the final demonstration began, Friend George Willets announced that anyone who attempted to lynch the girl would do so over his dead body. As the demonstration ended, boys began lighting fireworks and several men came on stage to remove Maggie’s dress and check it for hidden weights. The police had to disperse the crowd and escort the girl home. Eliab Capron of Auburn, New York attending one or more of the seances, would claim to have been convinced of the authenticity of the rappings. SPIRITUALISM
November 14, 1848: Jeremiah Mason, a Boston attorney, had died on October 14, 1848. At a meeting of the Bar of the County of Suffolk, Massachusetts on October 17, 1848, Mr. Choate had proposed appropriate sentiments and all had agree that these should be presented to the Supreme Judicial Court at its next term in Boston. On this day, at the opening of that court after the offering of prayer, Daniel Webster therefore rose:119 May it please your Honors,—JEREMIAH MASON, one of the counsellors of this court, departed this life on the 14th of October, at his residence in this city. The death of one of its 119. Edwin P. Whipple’s THE GREAT SPEECHES AND ORATIONS OF DANIEL WEBSTER WITH AN ESSAY ON DANIEL WEBSTER AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE (Boston: Little, Brown, 1879). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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members, so highly respected, so much admired and venerated, could not fail to produce a striking impression upon the members of this bar; and a meeting was immediately called, at which a member of this court, just on the eve of leaving the practice of his profession for a seat on the bench,120 presided; and resolutions expressive of the sense entertained by the bar of the high character of the deceased, and of sincere condolence with those whom his loss touched more nearly, were moved by one of his distinguished brethren, and adopted with entire unanimity. My brethren have appointed me to the honorable duty of presenting these resolutions to this court; and it is in discharge of that duty that I rise to address you, and pray that the resolutions which I hold in my hand may be read by the clerk. The clerk of the court then read the sentiments of the Bar Association: Resolved, That the members of this bar have heard with profound emotion of the decease of the Honorable Jeremiah Mason, one of the most eminent and distinguished of the great men who have ever adorned this profession; and, as well in discharge of a public duty, as in obedience to the dictates of our private feelings, we think it proper to mark this occasion by some attempt to record our estimate of his pre-eminent abilities and high character. Resolved, That the public character and services of Mr. Mason demand prominent commemoration; that, throughout his long life, whether as a private person or in public place, he maintained a wide and various intercourse with public men, and cherished a constant and deep interest in public affairs, and by his vast practical wisdom and sagacity, the fruit of extraordinary intellectual endowments, matured thought, and profound observation, and by the soundness of his opinions and the comprehensiveness and elevated tone of his politics, he exerted at all times a great and most salutary influence upon the sentiments and policy of the community and the country; and that, as a Senator in the Congress of the United States during a period of many years, and in a crisis of affairs which demanded the wisdom of the wisest and the civil virtues of the best, he was distinguished among the most eminent men of his country for ability in debate, for attention to all the duties of his great trust, for moderation, for prudence, for fidelity to the obligations of that party connection to which he was attached, for fidelity still more conspicuous and still more admirable to the higher obligations of a thoughtful and enlarged patriotism. Resolved, That it was the privilege of Mr. Mason to come to the bar when the jurisprudence of New England was yet in its infancy; that he brought to its cultivation great general ability, and a practical sagacity, logical power, and patient research,— constituting altogether a legal genius, rarely if ever surpassed; that it was greatly through his influence that the growing wants of a prosperous State were met and satisfied by a system of common law at once flexible and certain, deduced by 120. Mr. Justice Richard Fletcher. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the highest human wisdom from the actual wants of the community, logically correct, and practically useful; that in the fact that the State of New Hampshire now possesses such a system of law, whose gladsome light has shone on other States, are seen both the product and the monument of his labors, less conspicuous, but not less real, than if embodied in codes and institutes bearing his name; yet that, bred as he was to the common law, his great powers, opened and liberalized by its study and practice, enabled him to grasp readily, and wield with entire ease, those systems of equity, applicable to the transactions of the land or the sea, which, in recent times, have so much meliorated and improved the administration of justice in our country. Resolved, That as respects his practice as a counsellor and advocate at this bar, we would record our sense of his integrity, prudence, fidelity, depth of learning, knowledge of men and affairs, and great powers of persuading kindred minds; and we know well, that, when he died, there was extinguished one of the few great lights of the old common law. Resolved, That Mr. Webster be requested to present these resolutions to the Supreme Judicial Court, at its next term, in Boston; and the District Attorney of the United States be requested to present them to the Circuit Court of the United States now in session. Resolved, That the Secretary communicate to the family of Mr. Mason a copy of these resolutions, together with the respectful sympathy of the bar. Daniel Webster continued: The proprieties of this occasion compel me, with whatever reluctance, to refrain from the indulgence of the personal feelings which arise in my heart, upon the death of one with whom I have cultivated a sincere, affectionate, and unbroken friendship, from the day when I commenced my own professional career, to the closing hour of his life. I will not say, of the advantages which I have derived from his intercourse and conversation, all that Mr. Fox said of Edmund Burke; but I am bound to say, that of my own professional discipline and attainments, whatever they may be, I owe much to that close attention to the discharge of my duties which I was compelled to pay, for nine successive years, from day to day, by Mr. Mason’s efforts and arguments at the same bar. Fas est ab hoste doceri; and I must have been unintelligent, indeed, not to have learned something from the constant displays of that power which I had so much occasion to see and to feel. It is the more appropriate duty of the present moment to give some short notice of his life, character, and the qualities of his mind and heart, so that he may be presented as an example to those who are entering upon or pursuing the same career. Four or five years ago, Mr. Mason drew up a biography of himself, from the earliest period of his recollection to the time of his removal to Portsmouth, in 1797; which is interesting, not only HDT WHAT? INDEX
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for the information it gives of the mode in which the habits of his life were formed, but also for the manner of its composition. He was born on the 27th day of April, 1768, at Lebanon in Connecticut. His remotest ancestor in this country was Captain John Mason (an officer who had served with distinction in the Netherlands, under Sir Thomas Fairfax), who came from England in 1630, and settled at Dorchester in the Colony of Massachusetts. His great-grandfather lived at Haddam. His grandfather, born in 1705, lived at Norwich, and died in the year 1779. Mr. Mason remembered him, and recollected his character, as that of a respectable and deeply religious man. His ancestor on the maternal side was James Fitch, a learned divine, who came from England and settled in Saybrook, but removed to Lebanon, where he died. A Latin epitaph, in the ancient burying-ground of that town, records his merits. One of his descendants held a large tract of land in the parish of Goshen, in the town of Lebanon, by grant from the Indians; one half of which, near a century afterwards, was bequeathed to his daughter, Elizabeth Fitch, the mother of Mr. Mason. To this property Mr. Mason’s father removed soon after his marriage, and there he died, in 1813. The title of this land was obtained from Uncas, an Indian sachem in that neighborhood, by the great- grandfather of Mr. Mason’s mother, and has never been alienated from the family. It is now owned by Mr. Mason’s nephew, Jeremiah Mason, the son of his eldest brother James. The family has been distinguished for longevity; the average ages of Mr. Mason’s six immediate ancestors having exceeded eighty-three years each. Mr. Mason was the sixth of nine children, all of whom are now dead. Mr. Mason’s father was a man of intelligence and activity, of considerable opulence, and highly esteemed by the community. At the commencement of the Revolutionary war, being a zealous Whig, he raised and commanded a company of minute-men, as they were called, and marched to the siege of Boston. Here he rendered important service, being stationed at Dorchester Heights, and engaged in fortifying that position. In the autumn of that year, he was promoted to a colonelcy, and joined the army with his regiment, in the neighborhood of New York. At the end of the campaign, he returned home out of health, but retained the command of his regiment, which he rallied and brought out with celerity and spirit when General Arnold assaulted and burned New London. He became attached to military life, and regretted that he had not at an early day entered the Continental service. Colonel Mason was a good man, affectionate to his family, kind and obliging to his neighbors, and faithful in the observance of all moral and religious duties. Mr. Mason’s mother was distinguished for a good understanding, much discretion, the purity of her heart and affections, and the exemplary kindness and benevolence of her life. It was her great anxiety to give all her children the best education, within the means of the family, which the state of the country would allow; and she was particularly desirous that Jeremiah should be sent to college. “In my recollection of my mother,” says Mr. Mason, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“she was the personification of love, kindness, and benevolence.” Destined for an education and for professional life, Mr. Mason was sent to Yale College, at sixteen years of age; his preparatory studies having been pursued under “Master Tisdale,” who had then been forty years at the head of a school in Lebanon, which had become distinguished, and among the scholars of which were the Wheelocks, afterwards Presidents of Dartmouth College. He was graduated in 1784, and performed a part in the Commencement exercises, which greatly raised the expectation of his friends, and gratified and animated his love for distinction. “In the course of a long and active life,” says he, “I recollect no occasion when I have experienced such elevation of feeling.” This was the effect of that spirit of emulation which incited the whole course of his life of usefulness. There is now prevalent among us a morbid and sickly notion, that emulation, even as honorable rivalry, is a debasing passion, and not to be encouraged. It supposes that the mind should be left without such excitement, in a dreamy and undisturbed state, flowing or not flowing, according to its own impulse, without such aids as are furnished by the rivalry of one with another. For one, I do not believe in this. I hold to the doctrine of the old school, as to this part of education. Quinctilian says: “Sunt quidam, nisi institeris, remissi; quidam imperio indignantur: quosdam continet metus, quosdam debilitat: alios continuatio extundit, in aliis plus impetus facit. Mihi ille detur puer, quem laus excitet, quem gloria juvet, qui victus fleat; hic erit alendus ambitu, hunc mordebit objurgatio, hunc honor excitabit; in hoc desidiam nunquam verebor.” I think this is sound sense and just feeling. Mr. Mason was destined for the law, and commenced the study of that profession with Mr. Baldwin, a gentleman who has lived to perform important public and private duties, has served his country in Congress, and on the bench of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and still lives to hear the account of the peaceful death of his distinguished pupil. After a year, he went to Vermont, in whose recently established tribunals he expected to find a new sphere for the gratification of ambition, and the employment of talents. He studied in the office of Stephen Rowe Bradley, afterwards a Senator in Congress; and was admitted to the bar, in Vermont and New Hampshire, in the year 1791. He began his career in Westmoreland, a few miles below Walpole, at the age of twenty-three; but in 1794, three years afterwards, removed to Walpole, as being a larger village, where there was more society and more business. There was at that time on the Connecticut River a rather unusual number of gentlemen, distinguished for polite accomplishments and correct tastes in literature, and among them some well known to the public as respectable writers and authors. Among these were Mr. Benjamin West, Mr. Dennie, Mr. Royall Tyler, Mr. Jacobs, Mr. Samuel Hunt, Mr. J.W. Blake, Mr. Colman (who established, and for a long time edited, the “New York Evening Post”), and Mr. Olcott. In the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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association with these gentlemen, and those like them, Mr. Mason found an agreeable position, and cultivated tastes and habits of the highest character. About this period, he made a journey to Virginia, on some business connected with land titles, where he had much intercourse with Major-General Henry Lee; and, on his return, he saw President Washington, at Philadelphia, and was greatly struck by the urbanity and dignity of his manner. He heard Fisher Ames make his celebrated speech upon the British treaty. All that the world has said with regard to the extraordinary effect produced by that speech, and its wonderful excellence, is fully confirmed by the opinion of Mr. Mason. He speaks of it as one of the highest exhibitions of popular oratory that he had ever witnessed; popular, not in any low sense, but popular as being addressed to a popular body, and high in all the qualities of sound reasoning and enlightened eloquence. Mr. Mason was inclined to exercise his abilities in a larger sphere. He had at this time made the acquaintance of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. The former advised Mr. Mason to remove himself to New York. His own preference was for Boston; but he thought, that, filled as it then was by distinguished professional ability, it was too crowded to allow him a place. That was a mistake. On the contrary, the bar of this city, with the utmost liberality and generosity of feeling and sentiment, have always been ready to receive, with open arms, every honorable acquisition to the dignity and usefulness of the profession, from other States. Mr. Mason, however, removed to Portsmouth in the autumn of 1797; and, as was to be expected, his practice soon became extensive. He was appointed Attorney- General in 1802. About that time, the late learned and lamented Chief Justice Smith retired from his professional duties, to take his place as a judge; and Mr. Mason became the acknowledged head of his profession. He resigned the office of Attorney- General, three or four years afterwards, to the great regret of the court, the bar, and the country. As a prosecuting officer, he was courteous, inflexible, and just; careful that the guilty should not escape, and that the honest should be protected. He was impartial, almost judicial, in the administration of his great office. He had no morbid eagerness for conviction; and never permitted, as sometimes occurs, an unworthy wrangling between the official power prosecuting, and the zeal of the other party defending. His official course produced exactly the ends it was designed to do. The honest felt safe; but there was a trembling and fear in the evil disposed, that the transgressed law would be vindicated. Very much confined to his profession, he never sought office or political elevation. Yet he held decided opinions upon all political questions, and cultivated acquaintance with all the leading subjects of the day; and no man was more keenly alive than he to whatever occurred, at home or abroad, involving the great interests of the civilized world. His political principles, opinions, judgments, were framed upon HDT WHAT? INDEX
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those of the men of the times of Washington. From these, to the last, he never swerved. The copy was well executed. His conversation on subjects of state was as instructive and interesting as upon professional topics. He had the same reach of thought, and exhibited the same comprehensive mind, and sagacity quick and far seeing, with regard to political things and men, as he did in professional affairs. His influence was, therefore, hardly the less from the fact that he was not actively engaged in political life. There was an additional weight given to his judgment, arising from his being a disinterested beholder only. The looker-on can sometimes form a more independent and impartial opinion of the course and results of the contest, than those who are actually engaged in it. But at length, in June, 1813, he was persuaded to accept the post of a Senator of the United States, and took his seat that month. He was in Congress during the sessions of 1813 and 1814. Those were very exciting times; party spirit ran very high, and each party put forward its most prominent and gifted men. Both houses were filled by the greatest intellects of the country. Mr. Mason found himself by the side of Rufus King, Giles, Goldsborough, Gore, Barbour, Daggett, Hunter, and other distinguished public men. Among men of whatever party, and however much some of them differed from him in opinion or political principle, there was not one of them all but felt pleasure if he spoke, and respected his uncommon ability and probity, and his fair and upright demeanor in his place and station. He took at once his appropriate position. Of his associates and admirers in the other house, there are some eminent persons now living who were occasional listeners to his speeches and much struck with his ability; together with Pickering, Benson, Pitkin, Stockton, Lowndes, Gaston, and Hopkinson, now all deceased, who used to flock to hear him, and always derived deep gratification and instruction from his talents, character, and power. He resigned his seat in the Senate in 1817. His published speeches are not numerous. The reports of that day were far less complete than now, and comparatively few debates were preserved and revised. It was a remarkable truth, that he always thought far too lightly of himself and all his productions. I know that he was with difficulty persuaded to prepare his speeches in Congress for publication; and in this memorial of himself which I have before me he says, with every appearance and feeling of sincerity, that he “has never acted any important part in life, but has felt a deep interest in the conduct of others.” His two main speeches were, first, one of great vigor, in the Senate, in February, 1814, on the Embargo, just before that policy was abandoned. The other was later, in December, 1815, shortly before the peace, on Mr. Giles’s Conscription Bill, in which he discussed the subject of the enlistment of minors; and the clause authorizing such enlistment was struck out upon his motion. He was afterwards for several years a member of the New Hampshire HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Legislature, and assisted in revising the code of that State. He paid much attention to the subject of the judicature, and performed his services fully to the satisfaction of the State; and the result of his labors was warmly commended. In 1824 he was again a candidate for the Senate of the United States. The election was to be made by the concurrent vote of the two branches of the Legislature. In the popular branch he was chosen by a strong vote. The Senate, however, non-concurred; by which means the election was lost,—a loss to the country, not to him,— by force of circumstances and agencies not now or ever fit to be recalled or remembered. He continued to reside for many years in Portsmouth. His residence in that ancient town was a happy one. He was happy in his family and in the society of the town, surrounded by agreeable neighbors, respected by the bar and the court, and standing at the head of his profession. He had a great love of conversation. He took pleasure in hearing others talk, and gave an additional charm by the freshness, agreeableness, and originality of his own observations. His warm hospitality left him never alone, and his usefulness was felt as much within the walls of the homes, as of the tribunals, of Portsmouth. There are yet many in that town who love him and his; many who witnessed, as children, and recollect, the enthusiasm with which he was greeted by their fathers and mothers; and all in New Hampshire old enough to remember him will feel what we feel here on this occasion. Led at last partly by the desire of exerting his abilities in a larger sphere of usefulness, and partly by the fact of the residence here of beloved domestic connections, he came to this city, and entered upon the performance of his professional duties in 1832. Of the manner in which he discharged those duties, this court is the most competent judge. You, Mr. Chief Justice, and the venerable associate who usually occupies a place at your right,121 have been witnesses of the whole. You know the fidelity with which he observed his duty to the court, as well as his duty to his clients. In learning, assiduity, respect for the bench, uprightness, and integrity, he stood as an example to the bar. You know the general probity and talent with which he performed, for so many years, the duty of a counsellor of this court. I should hardly trust myself to make any analysis of Mr. Mason’s mind. I may be a partial judge. But I may speak of what I myself admire and venerate. The characteristics of Mr. Mason’s mind, as I think, were real greatness, strength, and sagacity. He was great through strong sense and sound judgment, great by comprehensive views of things, great by high and elevated purposes. Perhaps sometimes he was too cautious and refined, and his distinctions became too minute; but his discrimination arose from a force of intellect, and quick-seeing, far-reaching sagacity, everywhere discerning his object and pursuing it steadily. Whether it was popular or professional, he grasped a 121. Mr. Justice Wilde. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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point and held it with a strong hand. He was sarcastic sometimes, but not frequently; not frothy or petulant, but cool and vitriolic. Unfortunate for him on whom his sarcasm fell! His conversation was as remarkable as his efforts at the bar. It was original, fresh, and suggestive; never dull or indifferent. He never talked when he had nothing to say. He was particularly agreeable, edifying, and instructive to all about him; and this was the charm of the social intercourse in which he was connected. As a professional man, Mr. Mason’s great ability lay in the department of the common law. In this part of jurisprudence he was profoundly learned. He had drunk copiously from its deepest springs; and he had studied with diligence and success the departures from the English common law which had taken place in this country, either necessarily, from difference of condition, or positively, by force of our own statutes. In his addresses, both to courts and juries, he affected to despise all eloquence, and certainly disdained all ornament; but his efforts, whether addressed to one tribunal or the other, were marked by a degree of clearness, directness, and force not easy to be equalled. There were no courts of equity, as a separate and distinct jurisdiction, in New Hampshire, during his residence in that State. Yet the equity treatises and equity reports were all in his library, not “wisely ranged for show,” but for constant and daily consultation; because he saw that the common law itself was growing every day more and more liberal, that equity principles were constantly forcing themselves into its administration and within its rules; that the subjects of litigation in the courts were constantly becoming, more and more, such as escaped from the technicalities and the trammels of the common law, and offered themselves for discussion and decision on the broader principles of general jurisprudence. Mr. Mason, like other accomplished lawyers, and more than most, admired the searching scrutiny and the high morality of a court of equity; and felt the instruction and edification resulting from the perusal of the judgments of Lord Hardwicke, Lord Eldon, and Sir William Grant, as well as of those of great names in our own country, not now among the living. Among his early associates in New Hampshire, there were many distinguished men. Of those now dead were Mr. West, Mr. Gordon, Edward St. Loe Livermore, Peleg Sprague, William K. Atkinson, George Sullivan, Thomas W. Thompson, and Amos Kent; the last of these having been always a particular personal friend. All of these gentlemen in their day held high and respectable stations, and were eminent as lawyers of probity and character. Another contemporary and friend of Mr. Mason was Mr. Timothy Bigelow, a lawyer of reputation, a man of probity and honor, attractive by his conversation, and highly agreeable in his social intercourse. Mr. Bigelow, we all know, was of this State, in which he filled high offices with great credit; but, as a counsellor and advocate, he was constant in his attendance on the New Hampshire courts. Having known Mr. Bigelow from my early HDT WHAT? INDEX
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youth, I have pleasure in recalling the mutual regard and friendship which I know to have subsisted between him and the subject of these remarks. I ought not to omit Mr. Wilson and Mr. Betton, in mentioning Mr. Mason’s contemporaries at the bar. They were near his own age, and both well known as lawyers and public men. Mr. Mason, while yet in New Hampshire, found himself engaged in causes in which that illustrious man, Samuel Dexter, also appeared. The late Mr. Justice Story was still more frequently at the bar of that State; and, at a period somewhat earlier, your great and distinguished predecessor, Chief Justice Parsons, occasionally presented himself before the courts at Portsmouth or Exeter, and he is known to have entertained a very high regard, personal and professional, as well for Mr. Mason as for the late Chief Justice Smith. Among those still living, with whom Mr. Mason was on terms of intimacy, and with whom he associated at the bar, were Messrs. Plumer, Arthur Livermore, Samuel Bell, and Charles H. Atherton. If these respected men could be here to-day, every one of them would unite with us in our tribute of love and veneration to his memory. But, Sir, political eminence and professional fame fade away and die with all things earthly. Nothing of character is really permanent but virtue and personal worth. These remain. Whatever of excellence is wrought into the soul itself belongs to both worlds. Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life; it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last for ever; but a conscience void of offence before God and man is an inheritance for eternity. Religion, therefore, is a necessary and indispensable element in any great human character. There is no living without it. Religion is the tie that connects man with his Creator, and holds him to his throne. If that tie be all sundered, all broken, he floats away, a worthless atom in the universe; its proper attractions all gone, its destiny thwarted, and its whole future nothing but darkness, desolation, and death. A man with no sense of religious duty is he whom the Scriptures describe, in such terse but terrific language, as living “without God in the world.” Such a man is out of his proper being, out of the circle of all his duties, out of the circle of all his happiness, and away, far, far away, from the purposes of his creation. A mind like Mr. Mason’s, active, thoughtful, penetrating, sedate, could not but meditate deeply on the condition of man below, and feel its responsibilities. He could not look on this mighty system, “This universal frame, thus wondrous fair,” without feeling that it was created and upheld by an Intelligence, to which all other intelligences must be responsible. I am bound to say, that in the course of my life I never met with an individual, in any profession or condition of life, who always spoke, and always thought, with such awful HDT WHAT? INDEX
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reverence of the power and presence of God. No irreverence, no lightness, even no too familiar allusion to God and his attributes, ever escaped his lips. The very notion of a Supreme Being was, with him, made up of awe and solemnity. It filled the whole of his great mind with the strongest emotions. A man like him, with all his proper sentiments and sensibilities alive in him, must, in this state of existence, have something to believe and something to hope for; or else, as life is advancing to its close and parting, all is heart-sinking and oppression. Depend upon it, whatever may be the mind of an old man, old age is only really happy, when, on feeling the enjoyments of this world pass away, it begins to lay a stronger hold on those of another. Mr. Mason’s religious sentiments and feelings were the crowning glories of his character. One, with the strongest motives to love and venerate him, and the best means of knowledge, says:— “So far as my memory extends, he always showed a deep conviction of the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures, of the institutions of Christianity, and of the importance of personal religion. Soon after his residence in Boston, he entered the communion of the Church, and has continued since regularly to receive the Lord’s Supper. From that time, he also habitually maintained domestic worship, morning and evening. The death of two of his sons produced a deep impression upon his mind, and directed it in an increased degree to religious subjects. “Though he was always reserved in the expression of religious feeling, still it has been very apparent, for several years, that his thoughts dwelt much upon his practical religious duties, and especially upon preparation for another world. Within three or four years, he frequently led the conversation to such subjects; and during the year past, immediate preparation for his departure has been obviously the constant subject of his attention. His expressions in regard to it were deeply humble; and, indeed, the very humble manner in which he always spoke of himself was most marked. “I have observed, of late years, an increasing tenderness in his feelings and manner, and a desire to impress his family with the conviction that he would not remain long with them. His allusions of this kind have been repeated, even when apparently in his usual health; and they indicated the current of his thoughts. “He retained his consciousness till within a few hours of his death, and made distinct replies to every question put to him. He was fully aware that his end was near; and in answer to the question, ‘Can you now rest with firm faith upon the merits of your Divine Redeemer?’ he said, ‘I trust I do, upon what else can I rest?’ “At another time, in reply to a similar question, he HDT WHAT? INDEX
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said, ‘Of course, I have no other ground of hope.’ We did not often speak to him during those last three days, but had no doubt that he was entirely conscious of his state, knew that his family were all near, and that his mind was free from anxiety. He could not speak with ease, and we were unwilling to cause him the pain of exertion. His whole life, marked by uniform greatness, wisdom, and integrity, his deep humility, his profound reverence for the Divine Majesty, his habitual preparation for death, his humble trust in his Saviour, left nothing to be desired for the consolation of his family under this great loss. He was gradually prepared for his departure. His last years were passed in calm retirement; and he died as he wished to die, with his faculties unimpaired, without great pain, with his family around his bed, the precious promises of the Gospel before his mind, without lingering disease, and yet not suddenly called away.” Such, Mr. Chief Justice, was the life, and such the death, of JEREMIAH MASON. For one, I could pour out my heart like water, at the recollection of his virtues and his friendship, and in the feeling of his loss. I would embalm his memory in my best affections. His personal regard, so long continued to me, I esteem one of the greatest blessings of my life; and I hope that it may be known hereafter, that, without intermission or coolness through many years, and until he descended to his grave, Mr. Mason and myself were friends. Mr. Mason died in old age; not by a violent stroke from the hand of death, not by a sudden rupture of the ties of nature, but by a gradual wearing out of his constitution. He enjoyed through life, indeed, remarkable health. He took competent exercise, loved the open air, and, avoiding all extreme theories or practice, controlled his conduct and habits of life by the rules of prudence and moderation. His death was therefore not unlike that described by the angel, admonishing Adam:— “I yield it just, said Adam, and submit. But is there yet no other way, besides These painful passages, how we may come To death, and mix with our connatural dust? “There is, said Michael, if thou well observe The rule of ‘Not too much,’ by temperance taught, In what thou eat’st and drink’st; seeking from thence Due nourishment, not gluttonous delight; Till many years over thy head return, So mayst thou live; till, like ripe fruit, thou drop Into thy mother’s lap; or be with ease Gathered, not harshly plucked; for death mature. This is old age.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December 22, Friday: William Cooper Nell was made Recording Secretary at the 5th annual meeting of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society.
With William Jewett Pabodie serving as a witness, Edgar Allan Poe signed a document consenting to the release of Friend Sarah Helen Power Whitman’s property to her mother. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1849
Our 1st female MD, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), graduated from Geneva Medical College in Syracuse, New York. She would go on to found the New York Infirmary in 1853 and, after moving to England in 1869, to found the London School of Medicine for Women.
NOTES ON THE MEDICAL APPLICATION OF ELECTRICITY, a treatise on “electrotherapeutics” by William Francis Channing (Printed in Boston by D. Davis, jr.). MEDICAL ELECTRICITY
The New York and Erie Railroad reached New-York, connecting it with Buffalo and thus transforming it into the 3d largest shipping point in the state of New York. HISTORY OF RR HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In Rochester, New York, St. Paul’s Church was lit by gas and the Corinthian Hall was completed.
Not a nude woman!
Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, close outside Rochester, the 1st US spiritualists, communed with the dearly departed by spirit rapping at seances at Auburn. The Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell, visiting Rochester, went with Fox neighbors Amy and Isaac Post to a Fox Sisters seance there. SPIRITUALISM
Kate Maggie
The former Louis Seyle fire engine manufacturing company at Brown’s Race, which had suffered a fire in 1837, again burned.
The Western House of Refuge, for male juvenile offenders, was incorporated. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
April 11, Wednesday: In the state of New York, Albany City Hospital was incorporated.
Rochester’s Academy of the Sacred Heart was incorporated by the New York State Legislature.
The New York State legislature passed a bill to create a Croton Aqueduct Department, to replace the Water Commission, which had been appointed by the governor and Senate. The new department was to regulate all aspects of the Croton Aqueduct system, that delivered drinking water to New-York.
New York also began requiring railroad companies to report annually to the State Engineer and Surveyor.
November: Lydia Maria Child wrote to Louisa Loring: “Dread... reformers”; Property and sex laws; Dolores.
Henry Stephens Randall ran for Secretary of State for New York on the Democratic ticket, but unsuccessfully. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November 14, Wednesday: Two of the Fox Sisters, Margaret and Ann, gave a demonstration of their spirit rappings at Rochester, New York’s new upscale Corinthian Hall. SPIRITUALISM
Kate Maggie
Not a Fox sister! HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November 15, Thursday: Margaret Fuller reported to the New-York Tribune from Florence on the state of Italy:
[NEED TO SCAN TNIS NEWSPAPER COLUMN]
A committee conducted an investigation of the Fox Sisters at Rochester, New York’s Sons of Temperance Hall, and discovered no evidence of deceit on the part of these Canadian girls. The audience demanded another investigation. SPIRITUALISM
Kate Maggie
November 16, Friday: A second Rochester, New York committee failed to find any evidence of deceit in the Fox Sisters. Citizens hostile to spiritualism demanded a third investigation, this time sitting on the committee themselves. SPIRITUALISM
Kate Maggie HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November 17, Saturday: The third Rochester, New York committee could detect no faking of the Fox Sisters rappings. When they announced their findings a mob rushed the stage but Police Justice S.W.D. Moore was able to keep them off the two Canadian girls. SPIRITUALISM
Kate Maggie
November 22, Thursday: Waldo Emerson began his winter lecture series: 2 lectures in November, 10 in December, 10 in January, 18 in February, 14 in March, 7 in April, in all netting for him nearly $1,200.00. In case you’re wondering, that’s approximately the total annual family income of at least three and perhaps four ordinary American families of that era. Hey, if the boys can make this kind of money by posturing before an American audience with this sort of male- appropriate rationality trip, why can’t the girls also make this sort of money, by posturing before an audience with some sort of female-appropriate spirituality trip? –Don’t girls need money just as much as boys?
The New York Weekly Tribune printed an account of the Rochester, New York Spiritualism committees that had been investigating the Fox Sisters. Other New-York journals would also report on this upstate movement. SPIRITUALISM
Kate Maggie
December: Although rumors of a coming epidemic of the cholera were making the rounds in Rochester, New York, fortunately no such outbreak would develop. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1850
The Fox Sisters held further seances at Auburn, New York. They began holding others in New-York, which were attended by James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, and others. Greeley was taken in by the fraud and defended the sisters.
William Cullen Bryant’s LETTERS OF A TRAVELLER; OR, NOTES OF THINGS SEEN IN EUROPE AND AMERICA (New York: G.P. Putnam).
LETTERS OF A TRAVELLER
(Henry Thoreau would in about 1853 make notes on this in his Indian Notebook #8 and in his Fact Book.)
The city of Rochester, New York created a Home for the Friendless, for prostitutes.
Summer: There was continued doubt as to John Brown of North Elba, New York’s financial solidity: A failed surveyor, farmer, speculator, schoolteacher, tanner, and cattleman, he showed up as a wool dealer in an 1848 credit report: “his condition is questionable.” Winter 1849: “may or may not be good.” Summer 1850: “his means are equally obscure.” Still in his forties, he looked sixty to credit reporters. The agency lost him when he switched lines of work yet again, only to fail yet again. Like many another misfit who pushed a doomed venture too far, he quit when he had no other choice. Having grown whiskers for the first time, his craggy face looked still more ancient. Everyone had an opinion of this broken man. “Served him right.” Overhearing such comments, Thoreau said he felt proud even to know him and questioned why people “talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.” The bankrupt court had restored this loser’s freedom in 1842. Now it was 1859, and no earthly court could save John Brown after his failure at Harpers HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Ferry.
He brought his Devon cattle to the Agricultural Fair of Essex County: The appearance upon the grounds of a number of very choice and beautiful Devons, from the herd of Mr. John Brown, residing in one of our most remote and secluded towns, attracted great attention, and added much to the interest of the Fair. The interest and admiration they excited have attracted public attention to the subject, and has already resulted in the introduction of several choice animals into this region. We have no doubt but that this influence upon the character of the stock of our county will be permanent and decisive. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 21, Thursday/22, Friday: A Fugitive Slave Law Convention was held in the orchard of Grace Wilson’s School, on Sullivan Street in Cazenovia, New York. Attending were Mary Edmondson and Emily Edmondson, who had been among 14 siblings born into slavery in Washington DC because their mother (not their father) was enslaved. In 1848 they, with their brothers Samuel Edmondson and Richard Edmondson and 73 others, had attempted to flee aboard the schooner Pearl. When that ship was intercepted, the girls had been carried by a slavetrader to New Orleans to serve as “fancy girls,” but their father Paul Edmondson had however gone to New-York to petition the New York Anti-Slavery Society, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the congregation of his Plymouth Church had raised a sum of money to purchase his daughters. Harriet Beecher Stowe having undertaken responsibility for their education, Emily Edmondson and Mary Edmondson would in 1852 enroll in Oberlin’s Preparatory Department with the intention of becoming missionaries to American blacks who were escaping to Canada. Mary Edmondson was, however, suffering from phthisis, and would HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
become progressively weaker throughout her first year at Oberlin College and die on May 18, 1853. Emily Edmundson would, until her marriage, assist at Myrtilla Miner’s school for black girls in the District of Columbia. She would, with the sponsorship of Frederick Douglass, armed with her manumission papers, go to the deep South and buy one of her brothers out of slavery. On this Daguerreotype plate exposed by local photographer Ezra Greenleaf Weld, Mary Edmondson is wearing a shawl, at the elbow of Frederick Douglass. Gerrit Smith, whose home was in nearby Peterboro, is gesturing behind Douglass, and the figure at center is presumably Abby Kelley Foster, with Emily Edmundson behind her in a bonnet. The Reverend Samuel Joseph May is standing behind the man who is taking notes. Theodore Dwight Weld, recognizable by his miss-shapen skull, is in front of Douglass. We suspect therefore that the diminutive figure between Emily Edmundson and the Reverend May would be Angelina Emily Grimké Weld. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
September 28, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF SEPTEMBER 28
On this night in Westerlo, New York, Reuben A. Dunbar, a 20-year-old recent newlywed, whose wife had a baby on the way, murdered two of his relatives, Stephen V. Lester age 8 and David L. Lester age 10. The bodies would be found in the woods and interred at the Wickham Farm Burying Ground, Dunbar Hollow, Dormansville, New York. Dunbar would explain that he had been after their inheritance. He would hang.
REUBEN A. DUNBAR HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1851
The Fox family relocated from Rochester, New York to New-York City, to stage further seances. Meanwhile, a pamphlet entitled DISCOVERY AND EXPLANATION OF THE SOURCE OF THE PHENOMENA KNOWN AS THE ROCHESTER KNOCKINGS was produced in Buffalo. This announced that the “knockings” in question were being faked by voluntary partial dislocation of joints of the “spiritualist.” Spiritualism and its professed ability to communicate with the dead was becoming a religious fervor as explosive as many of the other fervors that had been coming out of the “burned-over” upstate revivalist district. Although Horace Greeley was annoyed by the dancing furniture, floating heads, and other trickery many spiritualists were using, he remained ready to credit that the Fox sisters in particular would not make themselves part of any such fraud, and could truly be a source of some great new human discovery. He offered to educate the sisters at his expense, to put their fine minds in touch with the broader ideas of the world. Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Fish agreed to allow Kate to attend school, but Maggie was producing too much income. By this time Mrs. Fish had established herself as a spiritual medium as well, and her plan was to work the big city market while sending Maggie on a tour of Philadelphia and Washington DC. SPIRITUALISM
The Erie Railroad, by this point under the control of Daniel Drew, became the 1st rail line connecting the Great Lakes with New-York and began to compete with the Erie Canal as a transportation route. HISTORY OF RR In New York, the Rochester, Auburn, and Syracuse Railroad received a charter for a line along the Erie Canal.
The West Troy Weighlock of the Erie Canal was completed.
The New York State policy of requiring railroads to pay the equivalent of Erie Canal tolls was abandoned.
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld attended the Woman’s Rights Convention in Rochester, New York.
Machinery was imported that would halve the price of manufacture of horseshoe-shaped drainage tiles. By 1864 there would be enough such tile laid in ditches under the meadows of upstate New York, to encircle the earth.
In Rochester, New York, a 6,230 pound bell was cast, to be hung in the 2d County Courthouse.
Daniel Webster and Jenny Lind visited the city of Rochester, New York. Waldo Emerson, visiting, was given a tour of the University of Rochester.
Rochester, New York’s 20 mills were producing 5,885 barrels of flour a day, 561,818 barrels annually. The Whitney Mills alone was producing 300 barrels a day. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
January 31, Friday: The San Francisco Orphan’s Asylum, 1st in California, was founded.
In upstate New York, Reuben A. Dunbar was hanged.
Samuel H. Hammond had been the prosecutor at his murder trial, and had obtained the conviction on the basis of evidence that was largely circumstantial. Dunbar, age 20, had killed his relatives Stephen V. Lester, age 8, and David L. Lester, age 10, in the town of Westerlo on the night of September 28, 1850. The bodies, found in the woods, had been interred at the Wickham Farm Burying Ground, Dunbar Hollow, Dormansville, New York. After conviction Dunbar had explained that since an uncle had died and he was newly married with a HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
baby expected shortly, he had been after their inheritance.
REUBEN A. DUNBAR
“I look upon Phrenology as the guide of Philosophy, and the handmaid of Christianity; whoever disseminates true Phrenology, is a public benefactor.” — Horace Mann, Sr.
THE MOST FOUL AND UNPARALLELED MURDER IN THE ANNALS OF CRIME LIFE AND CONFESSION OF REUBEN A. DUNBAR, CONVICTED AND EXECUTED FOR THE MURDER OF STEPHEN V. A ND DAVID L. LESTER (AGED 8 AND 10 YEARS,) IN WESTERLY, ALBANY COUNTY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1850. (Published by John D. Parsons. Weed, Parsons & Co., Printers). The pamphlet included illustrations of the murders.
Hammond, S.H. THE CLOSING ARGUMENT IN THE CASE OF THE PEOPLE VS. REUBEN DUNBAR, MURDER; TRIED AT THE LATE NOVEMBER TERM OF THE COURT OF OYER AND TERMINER FOR ALBANY COUNTY (Albany: J. Munsell). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
November: Bronson Alcott, attending a party at which Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and Seth Wells Cheney were present, felt awkward.
A circus elephant named Columbus weighing some five tons, perhaps the largest animal then on exhibit to size-worshiping Americans, fell through a South Adams bridge and severely injure itself. Columbus then died or, presumably, was slaughtered, in Lenox. In the modern era there has arisen a piece of urban folklore, that “an elephant lies buried somewhere in Concord,” but this event when it occurred had nothing whatever to do with the town of Concord. Also, although I have no information as to what happened to Columbus’s body, it is probably not to be found buried in Lenox. There is little likelihood that in antebellum America the owner of such a pile of meat, from the body of a vegetarian animal that had died of an injury rather than of an illness, would have gone to the additional expense of burying it — rather than recovering what could be recovered from the situation by selling it to the Lenox slaughterhouse.
Henry Stephens Randall ran again for Secretary of State for New York on the Democratic ticket, this time successfully. He would serve from 1852 to 1853.
Samuel Ringgold Ward had removed from Cortland to Syracuse, New York, but in consequence of his having participated on October 1st in the “Jerry rescue case,” it was necessary for him to abandon his interest in his newspapers, during this month, and for the Ward family to take refuge in Canada: From Cortland we removed to Syracuse in 1851, whence, on account of my participating in the “Jerry rescue case,” on the first day of October in that year, it became quite expedient to remove in some haste to Canada, in November. During the last few years of my residence in the United States I was editor and proprietor of two newspapers, both of which I survive, and in both of which I sunk every shred of my property. While at this business, it seemed necessary that I should know something of law. For this purpose, I commenced the reading of it....
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn entered Exeter Academy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1852
Following a cholera outbreak that killed 420, the city of Rochester, New York chartered a public water company.
Hey, good move.
This was the year of the last legal importation of slaves into Brazil. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
Capture of the American negreros Advance and Rachel P. Brown, out of the harbor of New-York, was interfered with by the United States consul in the Cape Verdi Islands (SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 34th Congress, 1st session XV, Number 99, pages 41-5; HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 34th Congress, 1st session XII, Number 105, pages 15-19).
Between this year and 1862, 26 ships would be intercepted and bonded for the capital crime of slave-trading in the Southern District of New York (SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37th Congress, 2d session V, Number 53). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1853
Samuel H. Hammond became editor of the Albany, New York State Register (until 1856).
July 21, Thursday: New York State accepted Boston Corner from Massachusetts.
The Wayne County Erie Canal village of Newark (later renamed Arcadia) was incorporated.
Henry Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” was published by William Lloyd Garrison in The Liberator.
Here is an illustration of the period, indicating what sorts of people the illustrator believed read The Liberator:
In this same illustration, note what the illustrator suspected that such a person might have on his wall, besides an illustration from a Shakespearean play: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
I’ve had enough fun, I’ll show you the whole illustration: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1854
Gail Borden borrowed the technology of vacuum pans from the Shakers of New Lebanon, New York in order to produce a condensed milk product. In doing this, he supposed it to be his condensing of the milk, rather than his heating of the milk, which was what was so providentially keeping his product from spoiling.122
A new edition of Washington Irving’s A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, BY “DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER.”
Poughkeepsie was incorporated as a city.
A steam railroad connected Rochester with Charlotte. The New York Central railroad opened from Rochester to Syracuse. A spur ran to Charlotte.
The final volume of the report of the New York State Agricultural Department was published.
Henry Larcom Abbot graduated 2d in his class at West Point and was posted to the Topographical Engineers.
Lewiston’s Dickersonville Cemetery Association was incorporated.
The New York State Inebriate Asylum in Binghamton was incorporated, with a 50-year charter.
The US government placed lifeboats on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Genesee and Niagara rivers, Oswego, Salmon River, Sandy Creek, Sodus, and Tibbetts Point.
122. It would not be until 1860 that Louis Pasteur of France would develop the technique of sterilizing milk by heating, which would be termed “Pasteurization.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
While touring the South as a special correspondent of the New-York Times, Frederick Law Olmsted visited a German community near Neu-Braunfels.
When no hospital in New-York would accept a female physician on its staff, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell opened a clinic and dispensary on East 7th Street (now honored in Beth Israel Medical Center at Stuyvesant Square East and 15th Street) that would provide the poor and sick with the services of “medical practicioners [sic] of either sex.”
The Free Academy of New-York (later City College) at this point had 14 instructors and 600 students. 11,000 students were attending night classes.The municipality had a total of 224 public schools with 133,831 students enrolled, and of these public schools, 25 were for blacks and 199 were for whites.
Word came to several New-York newspapers that Daniel Sickles, first secretary to the US legation in London, had been able to introduce his mistress, New-York madame Fanny White, to Queen Victoria.
In New-York, the opening of the Academy of Music at 14th St. and Irving Place.
Upstate New York richie-rich real estate magnate and rabid abolitionist Gerrit Smith resigned from Congress, writing a final letter to his constituents in which he outlined his political philosophy.
The western end of the State of New York had its hottest summer as yet on record. Severe drought conditions throughout the state would result in poor crop yields. The city of Albany cracked down on the sows running loose in its streets, by rounding up some 15,000 of the mothers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Ebenezer Emmons’s AMERICAN GEOLOGY, CONTAINING A STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES OF THE SCIENCE WITH FULL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE CHARACTERISTIC AMERICAN FOSSILS (Albany: Gray, Sprague & Co.). Also, his A TREATISE UPON AMERICAN GEOLOGY.
PIONEER OF SCIENCE
Also, his INSECTS OF NEW-YORK (C. van Benthuysen, publisher; this was the 5th volume of the author’s AGRICULTURE OF NEW-YORK), which Henry Thoreau would check out of the New Bedford library while visiting Friend Daniel Ricketson in 1857. THE SCIENCE OF 1854 HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Asa Fitch became the first professional entomologist of the New York State Agricultural Society (commissioned by the State of New York).
This made him the very 1st it’s-my-day-job entomologist in the US of A (many of his notebooks are now at the Smithsonian Institution).
Benedict Jaeger, assisted by H.C. Preston, M.D., produced a “valuable ornament for the parlor table” (that’s how he described it) entitled THE LIFE OF NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS ILLUSTRATED BY NUMEROUS COLORED HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
ENGRAVINGS AND NARRATIVES (Published for the Author. Providence: Sayles, Miller and Simons, Printers).
NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS This was initially issued in parts, six in all, each with a colored plate of insect illustrations prepared by Dr. Washington Hoppin, and prefaced with a thumbnail biography of Sir Hans Sloane, M.D., who had founded the British Museum:
Afterward the six parts were offered bound together as a book. What Henry Thoreau had in his personal library may have been this initial printing in six separate parts (and it would seem, out of good judgment or whatever, that he never made notes from this questionable source, in any of his Commonplace books or Indian notebooks, etc.). John D. Sherman’s “Catalog 10 of Books on Insects” has characterized Professor Jaeger’s volume as “famous as the most worthless of all American Insect books,” presumably due to its lack of organization, lack of detailed information, egregious blunders, and “semi-philosophical meanderings.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Now it is a fact that during my twenty-two years’ residence in this country not a single summer has passed without my seeing some of these red-eyed Cicadas in one or other of the States, and hence I must maintain that the name “Seventeen-years Locust” is neither correct nor proper.
At some point Thoreau would check out, from the New Bedford, Massachusetts library, a volume published in this year, Ebenezer Emmons’s INSECTS OF NEW-YORK.
April 15, Saturday: Henceforward in New York all canal engineers would be selected by a Contracting Board made up of the Canal Commission, the State Engineer, and the Auditor of the Canal Department.
April 15: Morning. — Snow and snowing; four inches deep. Yesterday was very cold. Now, I trust, it will come down and out of the air. Many birds must be hard put to it. Some tree sparrows and song sparrows have got close up to the sill of the house on the south side, where there is a line of grass visible, for shelter. When Father came down this morning he found a sparrow squatting in a chair in the kitchen. Does n't know how it came there. I examined it a long time, but could not make it out. It was five or six inches long, with a somewhat finch-like bill (bluish-black above and light below); general aspect above pale brown mottled with buffish and whitish; bay and a little black on the wings; the crown a faint bay, divided by an ashy line, with a broad ashy line over eye and a distincter bay or chestnut line from the angle of the mouth backward; legs pale clear flesh- color, feet black, claws slender; two faint whitish bars on wings (the tips of feathers); the breast ashy-white, with many dart: or black spots edged with bay in chains; no yellow about it; a rounded tail, long and of a pretty HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
uniform pale brown or bay, ashy on the inner vanes, but no white nor black in it; a rather slender bird. It made me think of the bay-wing [Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus] and of the Savannah sparrow.
P.M. — This cold, moist, snowy day it is easier to see the birds and get near them. They are driven to the first bare ground that shows itself in the road, and the weather, etc., makes them more indifferent to your approach. The tree sparrows look much stouter and more chubby than usual, their feathers being puffed up and darker also, perhaps with wet. Also the robins and bluebirds are puffed up. I see the white under sides of many purple finches, busily and silently feeding on the elm blossoms within a few feet of me, and now and then their bloody heads and breasts. They utter a faint, clear chip. Their feathers are much ruffled. The yellow- red-poll hops along the limbs within four or five feet of me. Martins the 13th first. The arrival of the purple finches [Carpodacus purpureus] appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossoms it feeds. Johnson in his “Wonder-working Providence” speaks of “an army of caterpillars” in New England in 1649, so great “that the cart wheels in their passage were painted green with running over the great swarms of them.” EDWARD JOHNSON HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1855
Experiments were made on the Erie Canal with an “expanding” paddlewheel steam driven boat (it reached a speed of 10 mph).
The approximate date the Schenectady, New York dry dock on the Erie Canal was closed.
The Buffalo and Niagara Falls Railroad was taken over by the New York Central Railroad.
The total Indian population of the state of New York was 4,169.
The Seneca tribe of upstate New York leased the right-of-way for the Erie Railway Company and for the Atlantic & Great Western Railway, both crossing their Allegany reservation.
New York State began to incur the expense of maintaining an insane Indian at the state asylum, and investigated the education of Indians.
The Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Children was established on the Cattaraugus reservation, the first New York State institution for Indian children.
New York State reported that over 200,000 paupers have been treated at the public expense during the year.
The Elmira Female College of New York was founded, the first woman’s institution to grant degrees.
Former Ontario County, New York sheriff Myron Holley Clark was elected governor.
The German-language newspaper Free Press began publication in Buffalo, New York.
The Village of Yonkers, New York was incorporated.
Grover Cleveland left Clinton, New York, to study law in Buffalo.
Charlotte, New York import revenue peaked at $1,534,000.
Albany, New York’s State Hall (hall of records, currently a geological hall) was demolished to make way for a Geological and Agricultural Hall.
Prohibition laws were adopted by Delaware, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire, New York, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
the Territory of Nebraska.
Connewango, New York farmer Daniel Newcomb, an early settler, died in town.
The steamboat Joseph Wood was built in Canandaigua, New York by Allen and David Wood. Canandaigua Lake was so low the boat needed to be launched by dragging it across mud.
O.V. Thayer founded the Binghamton, New York Water Cure.
The new Wayne County Court House at Lyons, New York was completed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Samuel H. Hammond’s HUNTING ADVENTURES IN THE NORTHERN WILDS; OR, A TRAMP IN THE CHATEAUGAY WOODS OVER HILLS, LAKES AND FOREST STREAMS.123 HUNTING ADVENTURES
S.H. Hammond’s and L.W. Mansfield’s COUNTRY MARGINS AND RAMBLES OF A JOURNALIST (New York: J.C. Derby, 119 Nassau Street. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co. Cincinnati: H.W. Derby).
COUNTRY MARGINS
“The truth is that it is natural, as well as necessary, for every man to be a vagabond occasionally.”
123. In about the following year, Henry Thoreau would copy from this into his Fact Book. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
Castle Garden, at the foot of Manhattan Island, was leased by the New York State Immigration Commission to deal with the 400,000 immigrants that would arrive this year alone.
At this point more than half the population of the city of New-York had been born in some other nation.
From this year into 1891, Charles Lewis Reason would be serving as a public school teacher and as a principal in New-York.
The publisher P.F. Harris released an anonymous spoof on Phineas Taylor Barnum’s 1854 THE LIFE OF P.T. BARNUM, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, titled THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PETITE BUNKUM....
Common council member Charles Haskell was given a demonstration, by the Philadelphia Fire Department, of a steam fire engine, but when he recommended that New-York acquire them, entrenched interests defeated the suggestion.
The family of George William Benson relocated from Williamsburgh on Long Island to New-York (which of course in this timeframe means Manhattan Island), where the father would work as a commission broker.
At Rochester, New York, the 10 grist mills on Brown’s Race were grinding 2,860 barrels of flour a day.
January 2, Tuesday: Albany’s new New York State Library building was opened to the public.
January 3, Wednesday: Congress confirms the transference of the Boston Corner tract from Massachusetts to New York State. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1856
Niagara University was founded at Niagara Falls, New York.
November: Samuel H. Hammond returned to Bath, New York, to go into partnership with A.P. Ferris. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1857
In Rochester, New York, after Rosetta Douglass, daughter of Frederick Douglass, had been denied entrance to school, the Board of Education reversed its ban. The Rochester public schools at least partly desegregated. A nun from the District of Columbia, Sister Hieronymo O’Brien, and three Sisters of Charity, founded St. Mary’s Hospital, the city’s 1st hospital. The Howe and Rogers carpet manufacturing firm began operations. Spring rains washed away the temporary Main Street bridge. The town replaces its Andrews Street bridge. The Industrial School of Rochester (later the Rochester Children’s Nursery) was established at 133 Exchange Street. The Rochester Savings Bank was completed. Sophia and Hart streets became Plymouth Avenue. The city had 13 commercial boat yards. Henry Knapp replaced Ezra Jones in the Ohio Basin boatyard of Jones and Ambrose Cram, which became Cram and Knapp. Robert Barret began a boatyard at the Ohio Basin. Boatbuilder Zina H. Benjamin relocated his operation from the Ohio Basin to the area around Lock One of the Genesee Valley Canal. At the Genesee Feeder, John Thompson and Co. manufactured canal boats.
Colonel Julius W. Adams, a railroad engineer, prepared a design for the sewerage system of the 20 square miles of the city of Brooklyn, New York that is considered to be the first application of engineering skills and design standards to the design of sewers. (This is the man who would at some point convince the City of Brooklyn that it needed to endorse the construction of a Brooklyn Bridge over the strait to New-York City.)
According to Strickland Kreass, Chief Engineer of the Department of Sewerage for Philadelphia, writing in this year: There should be a culvert on every street, and every house should be obliged to deliver into it, by underground channels, all ordure or refuse that is susceptible of being diluted. The great advantage in the introduction of lateral culverts is not only that underground drainage from adjacent houses should be generally adopted, but that by the construction of frequent inlets, our gutters would cease to be reservoirs of filth and garbage, breeding disease and contagion in our very midst. (This sort of Philadelphia thinking would create the American version of the “building lateral” or “house connection sewer.”)
A sewer was installed in Charleston, South Carolina, with no slope for drainage. It was 2.6 miles long, 3.5 ft. wide, and 4.5 feet high, and had a bottom made of wood planks, with brick sides and top arch. Tide gates at each end provided the only source of water for its flushing.
In South Carolina, a legislative committee reported on local attitudes in regard to the African slave-trade. Some white people were for it on the basis of self-interest and some white people were opposed to it on the basis of self-interest: Special committee of seven on the slave-trade clause in the Governor’s message report: majority report of six members, favoring the reopening of the African slave-trade; minority report of Pettigrew, opposing it. REPORT OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE, etc., published in 1857. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The matter did not rest with mere words. During the session of the Vicksburg Convention, an “African Labor Supply Association” was formed, under the presidency of J.D.B. De Bow, editor of De Bow’s Review, and ex-superintendent of the seventh census. The object of the association was “to promote the supply of African labor.”124 In 1857 the committee of the South Carolina legislature to whom the Governor’s slave- trade message was referred made an elaborate report, which declared in italics: ”The South at large does need a re-opening of the African slave trade.” Pettigrew, the only member who disagreed to this report, failed of re-election. The report contained an extensive argument to prove the kingship of cotton, the perfidy of English philanthropy, and the lack of slaves in the South, which, it was said, would show a deficit of six hundred thousand slaves by 1878.125 In Georgia, about this time, an attempt to expunge the slave-trade prohibition in the State Constitution lacked but one vote of passing.126 From these slower and more legal movements came others less justifiable. The long argument on the “apprentice” system finally brought a request to the collector of the port at Charleston, South Carolina, from E. Lafitte & Co., for a clearance to Africa for the purpose of importing African “emigrants.” The collector appealed to the Secretary of the Treasury, Howell Cobb of Georgia, who flatly refused to take the bait, and replied that if the “emigrants” were brought in as slaves, it would be contrary to United States law; if as freemen, it would be contrary to their own State law.127 In Louisiana a still more radical movement was attempted, and a bill passed the House of Representatives authorizing a company to import two thousand five hundred Africans, “indentured” for fifteen years “at least.” The bill lacked but two votes of passing the Senate.128 It was said that the Georgian, of Savannah, contained a notice of an agricultural society which “unanimously resolved to offer a premium of $25 for the best specimen of a live African imported into the United States within the last twelve months.”129 It would not be true to say that there was in the South in 1860 substantial unanimity on the subject of reopening the slave- trade; nevertheless, there certainly was a large and influential minority, including perhaps a majority of citizens of the Gulf States, who favored the project, and, in defiance of law and morals, aided and abetted its actual realization. Various movements, it must be remembered, gained much of their strength from the fact that their success meant a partial nullification of the slave-trade laws. The admission of Texas added probably seventy-five thousand recently imported slaves to the Southern 124. De Bow’s Review, XXVII. 121, 231-5. 125. REPORT OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE, etc. (1857), pages 24-5. 126. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 40. The vote was 47 to 46. 127. HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 36th Congress, 2d session, IV. No. 7, pages 632-6. For the State law, cf. above, Chapter II. This refusal of Cobb’s was sharply criticized by many Southern papers. Cf. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 39. 128. New York Independent, March 11 and April 1, 1858. 129. 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 41. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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stock; the movement against Cuba, which culminated in the “Ostend Manifesto” of Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé, had its chief impetus in the thousands of slaves whom Americans had poured into the island. Finally, the series of filibustering expeditions against Cuba, Mexico, and Central America were but the wilder and more irresponsible attempts to secure both slave territory and slaves.
Two female seminaries open in Binghamton, New York: the Misses March’s Harmony Retreat, and Miss Barton’s.
John Alsop King was elected governor of New York.
A New York State Senate committee reported that the Alleghany County poorhouse at Angelica was not well kept or managed. Mentally ill patients were being left unattended in unsanitary cells and inmates were often flogged.
The Oswego, New York school system consisted of 23 districts, with 47 teachers and 5,516 pupils, with 3,000 volumes in the libraries.
Dr. Andrew Oliver of Penn Yan, New York died, leaving his Main Street home to his children. His descendants would live in the house until 1942.
In New York, the ward of North Tonawanda separated from the Village of Tonawanda.
In Albany, New York, the expenses of public schools for the year totaled $44,310.10.
In New York, construction began on the Albany Industrial School, for vagrant children.
Fultonville, New York, postmaster and businessman John Starin arrived there to manufacture patent medicines and toiletries, locating at 87 Barclay Street.
New York’s senator Hamilton Fish resigned and Preston King was elected to succeed him. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The grain elevator at Charlotte, New York collapsed.
Oramel, New York’s Republican Era ceased publication.
Le Roy, New York’s Ingham Collegiate Institute was chartered as Ingham University.
The Medina, New York Police Department is founded.
The US and the Seneca Indian tribe signed a treaty at Tonawanda, New York in which the tribe repurchase state reservation lands with funds from the exchange and sale of Seneca reservation lands in Kansas.
In New York, the Hudson River steamer Armenia got the first steam calliope.
The New York Central added improved snowplows to its rolling stock.
The National Association of Base Ball Players was formed, playing at the Fashion Race Course, in Jamaica, New York. The rules were changed from the first-team-to-reach-21 rule to a nine-inning format.
February 8, day: The Genesee River flooded, carrying away buildings on Rochester, New York’s Main Street Bridge.
February 12, day: The Agricultural Rooms of Albany, New York’s State Geological and Agricultural Hall were dedicated.
March 28, day: Alfred University was incorporated in Alfred, New York. This was to be a Seventh-Day Baptist denominational college, run by 33 trustees.
April 19, day: Rochester, New York’s third Carthage bridge collapsed.
May 14, day: New York’s Contracting Board, created in 1854 to appoint state engineers, had its powers enlarged. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June: Railroad brakemen across New York struck for $1 a day, followed a week later by engineers and firemen.
July: The final arch keystone of Rochester, New York’s Main Street bridge was set in place.
July 1, day: Rochester, New York stonecutter Patrick O’Rorke entered the West Point Military Academy.
August 9, day: Lecturer-reformer Harriet May Mills was born in Syracuse, New York.
October 31, day: The Albany, New York water works had taken in $75,550 in receipts for the fiscal year just ending.
November: Unemployment rose in the state of New York.
November 21, day: Rochester, New York’s Eagle Bank Building, also home to the Daily Democrat, was destroyed by fire.
December 5, day: The Rochester, New York Daily Democrat merged with the Rochester American to form the Democrat and American.
April 16, Thursday: Eugene Ring married Sarah Hand of New-York. They would have three children: Eugene, Josephine, and Leslie. Sarah would die in Morrisania on February 7, 1873 and on December 9, 1873, Eugene would remarry, to Emma Hunt, nearly 25 years younger than himself. That marriage would prove long and happy, and would produce two more children, Charles and Ambrose. During the 1880s Eugene would join his son-in-law in the woolens business. After the death of his son Leslie in 1889 he would move to his boyhood home near Rhinebeck, New York, but then he would return quickly to the Bronx. After the turn of the century he would move to White Plains on Long Island for the remainder of his life. During his last two decades, Eugene’s sons would embark on their own mining adventures. In the 1890s, Eugene Ring, Jr. would work in the mines near Basin, Montana. Charles and Ambrose Ring would join their brother at the turn of the century. Charles and Eugene, Jr. eventually would outgrow their youthful interest in mining, but Ambrose would pursued a long career as a mining engineer, at mines in Arizona, Missouri, Idaho, Colorado, Australia, and Guiana. The father Eugene would die at White Plains on October 28, 1912 and would be buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown.
Henry Thoreau replied to Caroline Cushing Andrews, sending along the copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD 130 AND MERRIMACK RIVERS that she had requested. TIMELINE OF A WEEK Concord Ap. 16 ’57 130. Thoreau had been in New Bedford, Massachusetts from April 2d to 15th. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Miss Caroline C. Andrews, I send to you by the same mail with this a copy of my “Week”. I was away from home when your note arrived, and have but just returned; other- wise you would have received the book earlier. Henry D. Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1858
March 26, Friday: Prescott Keyes was born, a son of John Shepard Keyes and Martha Prescott Keyes (he would in 1881 get married with Alice Reynolds, a daughter of Grindall Reynolds).
Waldo Emerson wrote from Concord to Henry Stephens Randall of New York that “Thoreau’s study seems at present to be equally shared between natural and civil history,” adding “he reads both with a keen and original eye.” Emerson was soliciting (and would obtain) a 2d freebie copy of a 4-volume state-published documentary history, one copy of which he already had in his library and that Thoreau had already consulted — either Emerson’s 4-volume set or the 4-volume set thus obtained for the library of Henry Thoreau (I don’t know for sure which) is now safely in the possession of the Concord Free Public Library: Lately, a friend of mine comes occasionally to my library to explore [THE D OCUMENTARY H ISTORY OF THE S TATE OF N EW Y ORK: –ARRANGED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE HON. CHRISTOPHER MORGAN, SECRETARY OF STATE. By Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons, & Co., public printers, 1849/1851, four volumes)], and finds them to contain much valuable matter to his purpose. His estimation is the most valuable, that he under estimated them when he first looked at them, a good while since; & he is a very curious & very instructed scholar in early American History, especially in all that concerns the Indians.... He is Henry D. Thoreau, a land- surveyor in this town, a good scholar, and though far less known than he ought to be, very well-known in this region as the author of a book called “A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers,” and “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”
HISTORY OF NEW YORK, I HISTORY OF NEW YORK, II HISTORY OF NEW YORK, III HISTORY OF NEW YORK, IV HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(Thoreau would copy from this source into his Indian Notebooks #6 and #8, his Fact Book, and his Canadian Notebook for the 1852-1854 period.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 8, Thursday: The schooner Thomas Kingsford sailed out of Oswego, beginning its season of voyages between New York and Chicago.
On this day and the following one Henry Thoreau surveyed the John Kettell farm on Lexington Road for Sam Staples, and charged him $11.50. The farm stretched from Lexington Road across the field to Cambridge
Turnpike and then to the Mill Brook and had belonged to Isaac Watts131 in 1849 when Thoreau divided the woods on the hill behind and northeast of the house into 52 woodlots.
Marcia Moss believes that 1849 survey was the first one Thoreau recorded in his Field Notes book. It shows the location of land belonging to Sexton, George Heywood, C.B. Davis, Cyrus Warren, Shannon, Richard Messer, John B. Moore, and the surroundings. Thoreau’s journal for October 4, 1857 indicates that he seriously injured himself one day while building a woodshed on this land.
131. This was not the Isaac Watts who authored hymns. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm
(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)
View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/74.htm This would presumably be the event described later by Sheriff Sam to Dr. Edward Emerson: Sam Staples told me ... “When I bought that farm next to your father’s, I had him [Thoreau] run the lines for me. I guess ’twas about the last work he did. Well the line against your father’s pear orchard and meadow running down to the brook, I’d always supposed was right, as his hedge ran, and so I dug that ditch between his meadow and mine, right in the line of the hedge. Well, when we come to run the line, the corner of the hedge on the Turnpike was right, but when we got to the other end of the hedge, ’twas several feet over on to what I’d bought. And at the brook, the ditch which I’d dug to it from the hedge-corner, supposing that this was the line, came much as a rod into my meadow by the deed. That tickled Thoreau mightily. ‘We’ll call Emerson down and show it to him,’ says he. ‘Oh, never mind,’ says I, ‘he don’t know about it; let it be as it is.’ ‘No,’ says he, ‘I’ll get Emerson down.’ So he went up to the house and told him we got something to show him down at the meadow, and he put on his hat and came along with Henry. Well, when we got him down there, Thoreau, says he, ‘I didn’t think this of you, Mr. Emerson, stealing so much land of Staples here.’ Well, your father was troubled when he saw where the ditch was over in my land. ‘I’ll pay you for the land,’ says he, ‘what’s it worth?’ ‘Oh, no,’ says I, ‘I dug the ditch there supposing the hedge was the line. ’Twan’t your fault. ’Twas the man you bought of showed you where to put the hedge. Let it be as the ditch now.’ It pleased Thoreau to get the joke on him.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 23, Monday: Waldo Emerson wrote his poem “The Adirondacks” about his visit to the Adirondack Mountains
Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed, Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux, And greet unanimous the joyful change.
of upstate New York with the artist William James Stillman,132 Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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132. Here is a painting which Stillman produced in this year, “The Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks,” now at the Concord Free Public Library, depicting these immortals at their target practice, with Emerson watching in the center of the frame: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar of Concord, Samuel Gray Ward, John
Holmes (brother of Oliver Wendell Holmes), Professor Jeffries Wyman (Comparative Anatomy, Harvard College), and four Boston physicians (see painting), in which he had been so utterly alienated by Nature.133 After spending some time at Stillman’s hunting lodge, the group had taken a boat across Lake Champlain and had ridden in farm carts to Follansbee Lake in upstate New York, where they had camped out.
There is a range of questions which neither Thoreau scholars nor Emerson scholars seem to have considered: 1.) Had Thoreau been invited to participate in this well-organized camping trip? 2.) If he’d been invited to take part — why didn’t he? (The reason commonly given for his failure to participate in the Saturday Club, to wit cigar smoke in the hotel rooms, wouldn’t seem to apply in the great outdoors.) 3.) If he hadn’t been invited — why not? Had he, like Frederick Douglass, somehow been blackballed?
August 23, 1858. Emerson says that he and Agassiz and Company broke some dozens of ale bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! It sounds rather Cockneyish. He says that he shot a peetweet [Spotted Sandpiper Actitis macularia] for Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He carried a double-barrelled gun – rifle and shotgun – which he bought for the purpose, which he says received much commendation – all parties thought it a very pretty piece. Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods! They cut several pounds of lead out of the tree. It is just what Mike Saunders, the merchant’s clerk, did when he was there. The writer needs the suggestion and correction that a correspondent or companion is. I sometimes remember something which I have told another as worth telling to myself, i. e. writing in my Journal. Channing, thinking of walks and life in the country, says, “You don’t want to discover anything new, but to discover something old,” i. e. be reminded that such things still are.
133. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once bailed out of a hunting trip with his sidekick Louis Agassiz upon being told that Waldo Emerson would be along and would be armed. “Somebody will be shot,” he declared. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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READ ALL ABOUT IT
In August, Stillman, their variously fit and attractive captain, led the Adirondack Club, not yet to their Lake Ampersand, the purchase of which was probably not quite completed, but to a lake easier of access from Bill Martin’s, on Lower Saranac, the end of the long wagon drive from Keeseville, New York. Stillman wrote: — The lake where our first encampment was made was known as Follansbee Pond, and it lies in a cul-de-sac of the chain of lakes and streams named after one of the first of the Jesuit explorers of the Northern States, Père Raquette. Being elected captain of the hunt, and chief guide of the Club, it depended on me also, as the oldest woodsman, to select the locality and superintend the construction of the camp, and the choice was determined by the facility of access, the abundance of game, and the fact that the lake was out of any route to regions beyond, giving the maximum of seclusion, as the etiquette of the woods prevented another party camping near us. Follansbee was then a rare and beautiful piece of untouched nature, divided from the highway, the Raquette, by a marsh of several miles of weary navigation, shut in by the hills on all sides but that by which we entered, the forest still unscarred, and the tall white pines standing in files along the lake shores and up over the ridges, not a scar of axe or fire being visible as we searched the shore for a fitting spot to make our vacation lodging-place. Many things are requisite for a good camping-ground, and our camp was one of the best I have ever seen, at the head of the lake, with beach, spring, and maple grove. Two of the hugest maples I ever saw gave us the shelter of their spreading branches and the supports to the camp walls. Here we placed our ridge-pole, laid our roof of bark of firs (stripped from trees far away in the forest, not to disfigure our dwelling-place with stripped and dying trees), cut an open path to the lakeside, and then left our house to the naiads and dryads, and hurried back forty miles to meet our guests. Tradition has long known it as the “Philosophers’ Camp,” though, like Troy, its site is unknown to all the subsequent generations of guides, and I doubt if in all the Adirondack country there is a man except my old guide, Steve Martin, who could point out the place where it stood.” However surely Oblivion was following in the wake of those Argonauts of the forest chain of lakes, the freshness HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of their joy still lingers in the verses of one. “Welcome!” the wood-god murmured through the leaves,- “Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.” Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple boughs, Which o’er-hung, like a cloud, our camping-fire. Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks, Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor. “Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft In well-hung chambers, daintily bestowed, Lie here on hemlock boughs, like Sacs and Sioux, And greet unanimous the joyful change, Sleep on the fragrant brush as on down-beds. Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air That circled freshly in their forest-dress Made them to boys again.”
Stillman painted on the spot an admirable picture of the morning hours’ work or diversions, before the excursions by boat or on foot began, the sun filtering down between the foliage of the vast, columnar trunks of pine, maple, and hemlock. There are two groups; on one side, Agassiz and Dr. Jeffries Wyman dissecting a fish on a stump, with John Holmes, doubtless with humorous comment, and Dr. Estes Howe, as spectators; on the other, Lowell, Judge Hoar, Dr. Amos Binney, and Woodman trying their marksmanship with rifles, under the instruction of the tall Don Quixote-like Stillman; between the groups, interested, but apart, stands Waldo Emerson, pleased with the gifts of all. Prolonging the shooting party towards the edge of the picture two or three guides are gathered, silent critics.134 In recruiting this company the rifle had proved both attractive and repellent. Stillman’s skill whether as marksman or hunter was unusual, and he was an admirable instructor for amateurs. Of his experiences in recruiting the party he wrote: “I had done all I could to induce Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes to join the party, but the latter was too closely identified with the Hub in all its mental operations to care for unhumanized nature, and Longfellow was too strongly attached to the conditions of completely civilized life to enjoy roughing it in flannels and sleeping on fir boughs. The company of his great- brained friends was a temptation at times, I think; but he hated killing animals, had no interest in fishing, and was too settled in his habits to enjoy so great a change. Possibly he was decided in his refusal by Emerson’s purchase of a rifle. “Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun.” he asked me. “Yes,” I replied. “Then I shall not go,” he said; “somebody will be shot.”135 Though Emerson was once paddled noiselessly by night into a remote bay, “jack hunting” (that is, with a torch and reflector in the bow of the skiff), and the guide pointed to the water’s edge, where a deer was gazing at the wondrous light, and whispered “Shoot,” Emerson could only see a “square mist,” and his rifle remains until now guiltless of blood of man or beast. 134. This picture was bought by Judge Hoar, and bequeathed by him to the Concord Public Library. 135. It would be a cheap shot to mention Dick Cheney in this context, so I won’t do it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Each man of the company had a special guide assigned to him by Stillman, but he asked and received the privilege of doing that service in full for Agassiz, rowing him in his own boat on the water journey, and almost daily on his collecting excursions. He wrote: — For I had the feeling which all had who came under the magic of his colossal individuality, — the myriad- minded one to whom nothing came amiss or unfamiliar, and who had a facet for every man he came in contact with. His inexhaustible bonhomie won even the guides to a personal fealty they showed no other of our band; his wide science gave us continual lectures on all the elements of nature — no plant, no insect, no quadruped hiding its secret from him. The lessons he taught us of the leaves of the pine, and of the vicissitudes of the Laurentine Range, in one of whose hollows we lay; the way he drew new facts from the lake, and knew them when he saw them, as though he had set his seal on them before they were known; the daily dissection of the fish, the deer, the mice (for which he had brought his traps), were studies in which we were his assistants and pupils. All this made being with him not only “a liberal education,” but perpetual sunshine and good fortune. When we went out, I at the oars and he at the dredge or insect-net, or examining the plants by the marsh-side, his spirit was a perpetual spring of science. When he and Wyman entered on the discussion of a scientific subject (and they always worked together), science seemed as easy as versification when Lowell was in the mood, and all sat around inhaling wisdom with the mountain air. Nothing could have been, to any man with the scientific bent, more intensely interesting than the academy of two of the greatest scientists of their day. Stillman’s high estimate of the wise, gentle, judicial, and modest Jeffries Wyman will be given in the sketch of him later. At our dinners, the semblance of which life will never offer me again, the gods sent their best accompaniments and influences — health, appetite, wit, and poetry, with good digestion. Our foaming ale we drank from hunters’ pans — Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread. All ate like abbots, and, if any missed Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss With hunter’s appetite and peals of mirth. Lowell was the Magnus Apollo of the camp. His Castalian humour, his unceasing play of wit and erudition — poetry and the best of the poets always on tap at the table — all know them who knew him well, though not many as I did; but when he sat on one side of the table, and Judge Hoar (the most pyrotechnical wit I have HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ever known) and he were matching table-talk, with Emerson and Agassiz to sit as umpires and revive the vein as it menaced to flag, Holmes and Estes Howe not silent in the well-matched contest, the forest echoed with such laughter as no club ever knew, and the owls came in the trees overhead to wonder. These were symposia to which fortune has invited few men, and which no one invited could ever forget.... For Lowell I had a passionate personal attachment to which death and time have only given a twilight glory. Here Stillman’s narrative must be interrupted to put on record a story of Lowell, showing a quality in him that would hardly have been divined in the Cambridge poet. Emerson wrote it in his pocket notebook on the day after the daring venture. On the top of a large white pine in a bay was an osprey’s nest around which the ospreys were screaming, five or six. We thought there were young birds in it, and sent Preston to the top. This looked like an adventure. The tree might be a hundred and fifty feet high, at least; sixty feet clean straight stem, without a single branch, and, as Lowell and I measured it by the tape as high as we could reach, fourteen feet, six inches in girth. Preston took advantage of a hemlock close by it and climbed till he got on the branches, then went to the top of the pine and found the nest empty, though the great birds wheeled and screamed about him. He said he could climb the bare stem of the pine, “though it would be awful hard work.” When he came down, I asked him to go up it a little way, which he did, clinging to the corrugations of the bark. Afterwards Lowell watched long for a chance to shoot the osprey, but he soared magnificently, and would not alight.... Lowell, next morning, was missing at breakfast, and, when he came to camp, told me he had climbed Preston’s pine tree. To resume Stillman’s record: — To Emerson, as to most men who are receptive to Nature’s message, the forest was the overpowering fact. We climb the bank, And in the twilight of the forest noon Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard. The “twilight of the forest noon” is the most concentrated expression of the one dominant sentiment of a poetic mind on first entering this eternal silence and shadow.... We were much together. I rowed him into the innermost recesses of Follansbee Water, and would, at his request, sometimes land him in a solitary part of the lake-shore, and leave him to his emotions or studies. We have no post, and letters neither came nor went, and so, probably, none record the moment’s mood; but well I remember how he marvelled at the completeness of the circle of life in the forest. He examined the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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guides, and me as one of them, with the interest of a discoverer of a new race. Me he had known in another phase of existence — at the Club, in the multitude, one of the atoms of the social whole. To find me axe in hand, ready for the elementary functions of a savage life, — to fell the trees, to kill the deer, or catch the trout, and at need to cook them, — in this to him new phenomenon of a rounded and self-sufficient individuality, waiting for, and waited on, by no one, he received a conception of life which had the same attraction in its completeness and roundness that a larger and fully organized existence would have had. It was a form of independence which he had never realized before, and he paid it the respect of a new discovery.... What seems to me the truth is, that Emerson instinctively divided men into two classes, with one of which he formed personal attachments which, though tranquil and undemonstrative, as was his nature, were lasting; in the other he simply found his objects of study, problems to be solved and their solutions recorded. There was the least conceivable self- assertion in him; he was the best listener a genuine thinker, or one whom he thought to be such, ever had; and always seemed to prefer to listen rather than to talk, to observe and study rather than to discourse. So he did not say much before Nature; he took in her influences as the earth takes the rain. He was minutely interested in seeing how the old guides reversed the tendencies of civilization.... Looking back across the gulf which hides all the details of life, the eternal absence which forgets personal qualities, the calm, platonic serenity of Emerson stands out from all our company as a crystallization of impersonal and universal humanity; no vexation, no mishap, could disturb his philosophy, or rob him of its lesson. The magical quality of the forest is that of oblivion of all that is left in the busy world, of past trouble and coming care. The steeds that brought us in had no place behind for black Care. We lived, as Emerson says,— Lords of this realm, Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day Rounded by hours where each outdid the last In miracles of pomp, we must be proud, As if associates of the sylvan gods. We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac, So pure the Alpine element we breathed, So light, so lofty pictures came and went. Stillman, writing the above happy memories of a golden prime in HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the last years of the century, said: — A generation has gone by since that unique meet, and of those who were at it only John Holmes and I now survive. The voices of that merry assemblage of “wise and polite” vacation-keepers come to us from the land of dreams; the echoes they awakened in the wild wood give place to the tender and tearful evocation of poetic memory; they and their summering have passed into the traditions of the later camp-fires, where the guides tell of the “Philosophers’ Camp,” of the very location of which they have lost the knowledge. Hardly a trace of it now exists as we then knew it. The lumberer, the reckless sportsman with his camp-fires and his more reckless and careless guide, the axe and the fire, have left no large expanse of virgin forest in all the Adirondack region, and every year effaces the original aspect of it more completely. Emerson, on the spot, thus strove to picture Stillman’s heroic figure: — “Gallant artist, head and hand. Adopted of Tahawus grand, In the wild domesticated, Man and Mountain rightly mated, Like forest chief the forest ranged As one who had exchanged After old Indian mode Totem and bow and spear In sign of peace and brotherhood With his Indian peer. Easily chief, who held The key of each occasion In our designed plantation, Can hunt and fish and rule and row. And out-shoot each in his own bow, And paint and plan and execute Till each blossom became fruit; Earning richly for his share The governor’s chair, Bore the day’s duties in his head. And with living method sped. Firm, unperplexed, By no flaws of temper vexed, Inspiring trust. And only dictating because he must. And all he carried in his heart He could publish and define Orderly line by line On canvas by his art. I could wish So worthy Master worthier pupils had — The best were bad.”
One day, that August, a thrill of human communication shot under the Atlantic Ocean from continent to continent. By a strange chance the quick-travelling report of it reached the campers among the primeval woods while on a lake excursion. Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
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tells, in his forest notebook, how “Loud exulting cries From boat to boat, and in the echoes round. Greet the glad miracle. Thought’s new-found path Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways. Match God’s equator with a zone of art, And lift man’s public action to a height Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses, When linked hemispheres attest the deed. A spasm throbbing through the pedestals Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill To be a brain, or serve the brain of man. The lightning has run masterless too long; He must to school and learn his verb and noun And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage.”136 This miracle had, indeed, been shown to be possible, yet almost immediately some mischance that befel the cable in the depths of the sea, interrupted its use for seven years. When this occurred, another of our poets, “The Professor,” sent forth the question on everybody’s lips as to who in the Provinces had received and transmitted the few words that emerged from the ocean at the western landing-place. He published the whole conversation, as follows: — DE SAUTY An Electro-Chemical Eclogue Professor: Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal! Lives there one De Sauty extant now among you, Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder, Holding talk with nations? Is there a De Sauty,137 ambulant on Tellus, Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in nightcap, Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature Three times daily patent? Breathes there such a being, Ceruleo-Nasal? Or is he a Mythus, — ancient word for “humbug,” Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed Romulus and Remus? Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty? Or a living product of galvanic action, Like the acarus bred in Crosse’s flint-solution? Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
Blue-Nose: Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger, Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster! 136. In his poem “The Adirondacs” the reception of this wonderful news is told at greater length. 137. The first messages received through the submarine cable were sent by an electrical expert, a mysterious personage who signed himself De Sauty. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me, Thou shalt hear them answered. When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable, At the polar focus of the wire electric Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us; Called himself “De Sauty.” As the small opossum, held in pouch maternal, Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia, So the unknown stranger held the wire electric, Sucking in the current. When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger, — Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy, — And from time to time, in sharp articulation. Said, “All right! De Sauty.” From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples. Till the land was filled with loud reverberations Oi! All Tight! De Sauty.” When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger, — Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker, — Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odour Of disintegration. Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead. Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence. Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended, There was no De Sauty. Nothing but a cloud of elements organic, C.O.H.N., Ferrum, Chlor., Flu., Sil., Potassa, Calc. Sod. Phosph. Mag. Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum, (?) Such as man is made of. Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished! There is no De Sauty now there is no current! Give us a new cable, then again we’ll hear him Cry, “All right! De Sauty.”
Emerson also wrote about this jolly camp adventure, without ever claiming to be in any sense a leader: A JOURNAL. DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW-TRAVELLERS IN AUGUST, 1858. Wise and polite, —and if I drew Their several portraits, you would own Chaucer had no such worthy crew, Nor Boccace in Decameron.
We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends, Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach The Adirondac lakes. At Martin’s Beach We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,— Ten men, ten guides, our company all told. Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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With skies of benediction, to Round Lake, Where all the sacred mountains drew around us, Tahawus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead, And other Titans without muse or name. Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on, Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills, And made our distance wider, boat from boat, As each would hear the oracle alone. By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets, Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower, Through scented banks of lilies white and gold, Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day, On through the Upper Saranac, and up Pere Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass Winding through grassy shallows in and out, Two creeping miles of rushes, pads, and sponge, To Follansbee Water, and the Lake of Loons. Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed, Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore. A pause and council: then, where near the head On the east a bay makes inward to the land Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank, And in the twilight of the forest noon Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard. We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts, Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof, Then struck a light, and kindled the camp-fire. The wood was sovran with centennial trees,— Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir, Linden and spruce. In strict society Three conifers, white, pitch, and Norway pine, Five-leaved, three-leaved, and two-leaved, grew thereby. Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth, The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower. “Welcome!” the wood god murmured through the leaves,— “Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.” Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs, Which o’erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire. Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks, Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor. Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed, Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux, And greet unanimous the joyful change. So fast will Nature acclimate her sons, Though late returning to her pristine ways. Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold; And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned, Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds. Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air That circled freshly in their forest dress Made them to boys again. Happier that they Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind, At the first mounting of the giant stairs. No placard on these rocks warned to the polls, No door-bell heralded a visitor, No courier waits, no letter came or went, Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold; HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop, The falling rain will spoil no holiday. We were made freemen of the forest laws, All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends, Essaying nothing she cannot perform. In Adirondac lakes, At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded: Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain, He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn: A paddle in the right hand, or an oar, And in the left, a gun, his needful arms. By turns we praised the stature of our guides, Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp, To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down: Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount, And wit to track or take him in his lair. Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent, In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides; Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired Three times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve. Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen! No city airs or arts pass current here. Your rank is all reversed: let men of cloth Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls: They are the doctors of the wilderness, And we the low-prized laymen. In sooth, red flannel is a saucy test Which few can put on with impunity. What make you, master, fumbling at the oar? Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here. The sallow knows the basket-maker’s thumb; The oar, the guide’s. Dare you accept the tasks He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes, Tell the sun’s time, determine the true north, Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods To thread by night the nearest way to camp? Ask you, how went the hours? All day we swept the lake, searched every cove, North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay, Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer, Or whipping its rough surface for a trout; Or bathers, diving from the rock at noon; Challenging Echo by our guns and cries; Or listening to the laughter of the loon; Or, in the evening twilight’s latest red, Beholding the procession of the pines; Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack, In the boat’s bows, a silent night-hunter Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist. Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck Who stands astonished at the meteor light, Then turns to bound away, —is it too late? Sometimes we tried our rifles at a mark, Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five; Sometimes our wits at sally and retort, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle; Or parties scaled the near acclivities Competing seekers of a rumoured lake, Whose unauthenticated waves we named Lake Probability, —our carbuncle, Long sought, not found. Two Doctors in the camp Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout’s brain, Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew, Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow, and moth; Insatiate skill in water or in air Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss; The while, one leaden pot of alcohol Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds. Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants, Orchis and gentian, fern, and long whip-scirpus, Rosy polygonum, lake-margin’s pride, Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge, and moss, Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls. Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed, The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp. As water poured through the hollows of the hills To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets, So Nature shed all beauty lavishly From her redundant horn. Lords of this realm, Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day Rounded by hours where each outdid the last In miracles of pomp, we must be proud, As if associates of the sylvan gods. We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac, So pure the Alpine element we breathed, So light, so lofty pictures came and went. We trode on air, contemned the distant town, Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge, And how we should come hither with our sons, Hereafter, —willing they, and more adroit. Hard fare, hard bed, and comic misery,— The midge, the blue-fly, and the mosquito Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands: But, on the second day, we heed them not, Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries, Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names. For who defends our leafy tabernacle From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,— Who but the midge, mosquito, and the fly, Which past endurance sting the tender cit, But which we learn to scatter with a smudge, Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn? Our foaming ale we drunk from hunters’ pans, Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread; All ate like abbots, and, if any missed Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss With hunters’ appetite and peals of mirth. And Stillman, our guides’ guide, and Commodore, Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Æneas, said aloud, “Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Food indigestible”: —then murmured some, Others applauded him who spoke the truth. Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday ’Mid all the hints and glories of the home. For who can tell what sudden privacies Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry Of scholars furloughed from their tasks, and let Into this Oreads’ fended Paradise, As chapels in the city’s thoroughfares, Whither gaunt Labour slips to wipe his brow, And meditate a moment on Heaven’s rest. Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke To each apart, lifting her lovely shows To spiritual lessons pointed home. And as through dreams in watches of the night, So through all creatures in their form and ways Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant, Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense Inviting to new knowledge, one with old. Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler? Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye. Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird, Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light, Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?
And presently the sky is changed; O world! What pictures and what harmonies are thine! The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene, So like the soul of me, what if’t were me? A melancholy better than all mirth. Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect, Or at the foresight of obscurer years? Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory, Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty Superior to all its gaudy skirts. And, that no day of life may lack romance, The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down A private beam into each several heart. Daily the bending skies solicit man, The seasons chariot him from this exile, The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair, The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along, Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home. With a vermilion pencil mark the day When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falls Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront Two of our mates returning with swift oars. One held a printed journal waving high Caught from a late-arriving traveller, Big with great news, and shouted the report For which the world had waited, now firm fact, Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea, And landed on our coast, and pulsating With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries From boat to boat, and to the echoes round, Greet the glad miracle. Thought’s new-found path Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways, Match God’s equator with a zone of art, And lift man’s public action to a height HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Worthy the enormous clouds of witnesses, When linked hemispheres attest his deed. We have few moments in the longest life Of such delight and wonder as there grew,— Nor yet unsuited to that solitude: A burst of joy, as if we told the fact To ears intelligent; as if gray rock And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind; As if we men were talking in a vein Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs, And a prime end of the most subtle element Were fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves! Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops, Let them hear well! ’t is theirs as much as ours. A spasm throbbing through the pedestals Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent, Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill To be a brain, or serve the brain of man. The lightning has run masterless too long; He must to school, and learn his verb and noun, And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage, Spelling with guided tongue man’s messages Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea. And yet I marked, even in the manly joy Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat, (Perchance I erred,) a shade of discontent; Or was it for mankind a generous shame, As of a luck not quite legitimate, Since fortune snatched from wit the lion’s part? Was it a college pique of town and gown, As one within whose memory it burned That not academicians, but some lout, Found ten years since the Californian gold? And now, again, a hungry company Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade, Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools Of science, not from the philosophers, Had won the brightest laurel of all time. ’Twas always thus, and will be; hand and head Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift, The other slow, —this the Prometheus, And that the Jove, —yet, howsoever hid, It was from Jove the other stole his fire, And, without Jove, the good had never been. It is not Iroquois or cannibals, But ever the free race with front sublime, And these instructed by their wisest too, Who do the feat, and lift humanity. Let not him mourn who best entitled was, Nay, mourn not one: let him exult, Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant, And water it with wine, nor watch askance Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit: Enough that mankind eat, and are refreshed.
We flee away from cities, but we bring The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers, Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts. We praise the guide, we praise the forest life; But will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore Of books and arts and trained experiment, Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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O no, not we! Witness the shout that shook Wild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hail The joyful traveller gives, when on the verge Of craggy Indian wilderness he hears From a log-cabin stream Beethoven’s notes On the piano, played with master’s hand. “Well done!” he cries; “the bear is kept at bay, The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire; All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold, This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall, This wild plantation will suffice to chase. Now speed the gay celerities of art, What in the desert was impossible Within four walls is possible again,— Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill, Traditioned fame of masters, eager strife Of keen competing youths, joined or alone To outdo each other, and extort applause. Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep. Twirl the old wheels? Time takes fresh start again On for a thousand years of genius more. The holidays were fruitful, but must end; One August evening had a cooler breath; Into each mind intruding duties crept; Under the cinders burned the fires of home; Nay, letters found us in our paradise; So in the gladness of the new event We struck our camp, and left the happy hills. The fortunate star that rose on us sank not; The prodigal sunshine rested on the land, The rivers gambolled onward to the sea, And Nature, the inscrutable and mute, Permitted on her infinite repose Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons, As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.
November 11, Thursday: The schooner Thomas Kingsford ended its season at Oswego, New York. It had transported 117,400 bushels of grain out of the Chicago area and transported 17,500 barrels of salt into the Chicago area. In this shipping season it had completed one trip more than the record number between the two ports, in spite of being detained in Chicago for ten days each trip (once it had been detained for twelve days) while waiting for cargoes.
November 11: Goodwin brings me this afternoon a this year’s loon (Common Loon Gavia immer), which he just killed on the river, – great northern diver, but a smaller specimen than Wilson describes and somewhat differently marked. It is twenty-seven inches long to end of feet by forty-four, and bill three and three-quarters to angle of mouth; above blackish-gray with small white spots (two at end of each feather).3 Beneath, pure white, throat and all, except a dusky bar across the vent. Bill chiefly palebluish and dusky. You are struck by its broad, flat, sharp-edged legs, made to cut through the water rather than to walk with, set far back and naturally stretched out backward, its long and powerful bill, conspicuous white throat and breast. Dislodged by winter in the north, it is slowly travelling toward a warmer clime, diving in the cool river this morning, which is now full of light, the trees and bushes on the rink having long since lost their leaves, and the neighboring fields are white with frost. Yet this hardy bird is comfortable and contented there if the sportsman would let it alone.
1 English? 2 And green-briar, according to November 7th and 11th, 1855; and perhaps a few other shrubs. 3 It must have been a red-throated loon. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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P. M.–To Island and J. P. Brown’s cold pond. A cold day. Now seek sunny and sheltered places as in early spring, the south side the island, for example. Certain localities are thus distinguished. And they retain this peculiarity permanently, unless it depends on a wood which may be cut. Thousands of years hence this may still be the warmest and sunniest spot in the spring and fall. I hear here a faint creaking of two or three crickets or locust£e, but it is a steady sound,–not the common cricket’s,–long-continued, and when one pauses, generally another continues the strain, so that it seems absolutely continuous. They are either in the grass or on the bushes by the edge of the water, under this sunny wood-side. I afterward hear a few of the common cricket on the side of Clamshell. Thus they are confined now to the sun on the south sides of hills and woods. They are quite silent long before sunset. Snow-fleas are skipping on the surface of the water at the edge, and spiders running about. These become prominent now. The waters look cold and empty of fish and most other inhabitants now. Here, in the sun in the shelter of the wood, the smooth shallow water, with the stubble standing in it, is waiting for ice. Indeed, ice that formed last night must have recently melted in it. The sight of such water now reminds me of ice as much as ofwater. No doubt many fishes have gone into winter quarters.138
The flowering dogwood, though still leafy, is uninteresting and partly withered. Gossamer reflecting the light is another November phenomenon (as well as October). I see here, looking toward the sun, a very distinct silvery sheen from the cranberry vines, as from a thousand other November surfaces, though, looking down on them, they are darkpurple. Speaking of twiggy mazes, the very stubble and fine pasture grasses unshorn are others reflecting the light, too, like twigs; but these are of a peculiar bleached brownish color, a principal ingredient in the russet of the earth’s surface.139 Going by the willow-row above railroad, scare up a small duck,–perhaps teal,–and, in the withered grass at Nut Meadow Brook, two black ducks, which rise black between me and the sun, but, when they have circled round to the east, show some silvery sheen on the under side of their wings. Am surprised to see a little ice in this brook in the shade, as I push far up it through a dense field of withered bluejoint,–a spot white with frost, a few inches over. Saw a small pool in the woods also skimmed over, and many ice-crystals heaved up in low ground. Scare up a bird which at first ran in the grass, then flew,–a snipe. See only a very few small water-bugs in the brook, but no large ones nor skaters. Vide account of eel~ in Tnhme for November 9th. ’ Vide November 8th. As a general rule, the leaves hold on longest on our indigenous trees and shrubs which were the first to leaf out, e. g. aspen, white birch, meadow-sweet, gooseberry, roses, sallows. In the shade of the wood, on the hillside just west of the cold pond, am surprised to see the frost about the cistus not in the least melted. This, at least, is an evidence that cold weather is come. Looking closely at it, it reminds me by its form and position of the decodon bark half cracked open. It consists of four or five thin curled shavings of frost, so to speak horizontally grained, placed vertically and based on the stem, one within another, and curling toward the same side, forming a sort of fool’s cap of different thicknesses, or cockles, or sugar-plums. It seems it is so cool that the frost about the cistus does not melt all day, in the shade. Coming home I have cold fingers, and must row to get warm. In the meadows the pitcher-plants are bright-red. This is the month of nuts and nutty thoughts,–that November whose name sounds so bleak and cheerless. Perhaps its harvest of thought is worth more than all the other crops of the year. Men are more serious now. I find, in the wood-path this side that pond, thirteen kernels of corn close together, and five of them have the gcrm uncovered, the thin husk that was over them torn off. This might have been done accidentally by thesquirrel (?) in separating it from the ear or in transporting it. And this may be the origin of some accounts of their eating out the germ to prevent its sprouting. If they do eat it, perhaps it is because it is the softest (as it is) and perhaps the most savory part. These were at least a third of a mile from a corn-field.l
138. 139. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The tail-coverts of the young hen-hawk, i. e. this year’s bird, at present are white, very handsomely barred or watered with dark brown in an irregular manner, somewhat as above, the bars on opposite sides of the midrib alternating in an agreeable manner. Such natural objects have suggested the “watered” figures or colors in the arts. Few mortals ever look down on the tail-coverts of a yolmg hen-hawk, yet these are not only beautiful, but of a peculiar beauty, being differently marked and colored (to judge from Wilson’s account of the old) from those of the old bird. Thus she finishes her works above men’s sight. 1 Vide fall of ’59. The scarlet oak leaf! What a graceful and pleasing outline! a combination of graceful curves and angles.
These deep bays in the leaf are agreeable to us as the thought of deep and smooth and secure havens to the mariner. But both your love of repose and your spirit of adventure are addressed, for both bays and headlands are represented,–sharp-pointed rocky capes and rounded bays with smooth strands. To the sailor’s eye it is a much indented shore, and in his casual glance he thinks that if he doubles its sharp capes he will find a haven in its deep rounded bays. If I were a drawingmaster, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully. It is a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats. How different from the white oak leaf with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed! 1 I [Excutrsioru, p. 280; Riv. ~44.] Some white oak leaves retain a smothered inward crimson fire long after they have fallen very pure and complete, more interesting to me than their fresher glow, because more indestructible,–an evening glow. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1859
May 1, Sunday: A revolution against Austrian rule began in Parma.
In the Ungers Casino of Vienna, Nachtigall-Polka op.222 by Johann Strauss was performed for the initial time.
New York State began directly letting its contracts on canal work, no longer allowing that function to be performed by the supervisor of the Contracting Board.
At this point the Unitarian congregation of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, in Cincinnati, Ohio was at a low of a couple hundred, since the BIBLE believers of his congregation had recently separated themselves to constitute a “Church of the Redeemer,” and so he delivered his “East and West” sermon in which he described the Redeemer concept of Jesus Christ as “an idea out of the dark ages.” The Reverend Conway confessed he was no “believer in what the churches call Christianity” as it would be a “pious insult to the holiest relations of life” to suppose Jesus to have lacked a human biological father.140
Waldo Emerson lectured on ““WEALTH”,” a topic appropriate for downtown Boston, to the Parker Fraternity141 in the 1,500 comfortable seats of the Boston Music Hall, and wrote to Thomas Carlyle on the
140. Moncure Daniel Conway. EAST AND WEST: AN INAUGURAL DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CINCINNATI, O., MAY 1, 1859, BY M.D. CONWAY, MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. Pamphlet. Cincinnati: Truman & Spofford, 1859. READ THE FULL TEXT
141. The megachurch “28th Congregational Society” established by the Reverend Theodore Parker, who had gone to live in Italy in an attempt to recover his health. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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American race problem:
I flatter myself I see some emerging of our people from the poison of their politics the insolvency of slavery begins to show, & we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black Vomit extirpating by mere diking & planting. Another ground of contentment is the mending of the race here.
My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term “Africanism” not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term “Africanism,” nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.
This “putrid Black Vomit” of which the Sage of Concord here speaks is of course the yellow fever, an infection which needs to be extirpated. The disease was called Yellow Fever because it damages the liver in such manner as to cause jaundicing of skin and eyes, and was called black vomit because a classic manifestations of severe HDT WHAT? INDEX
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infection was hemorrhage into the mucous membranes, with frightful vomiting of dark blood.
However, putrid Black vomit also was, of course, in the opinion of the Sage of Concord, the words that were coming out of the mouths of Americans of color, whose infectious thoughts and presumptions were as delusion-provoking in the white man as the fevers of this plague. What we would regard as two separate topics, the prevention of the tropical disease and the prevention of the tropical human, were quite conflated for a 19th- Century white man of Emerson’s mentality. The dark man and the dark vomit were predicting the same thing: the blackness of death. Preventing the one was preventing the other.
(Is it any wonder that this Emerson had blacklisted Frederick Douglass a decade earlier for membership in the Town and Country Club? His dark words would have been a “disabling virus” within polite literary discourse. Society, meaning white society, was not ready for that.)
May 1: Hear the ruby-crowned wren. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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We accuse savages of worshipping only the bad spirit, or devil, though they may distinguish both a good and a bad; but they regard only that one which they fear and worship the devil only. We too are savages in this, doing precisely the same thing. This occurred to me yesterday as I sat in the woods admiring the beauty of the blue butterfly. We are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the earth and cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they eat more grubs than they do cherries, and the only account of the insects which the State encourages is of the “Insects Injurious to Vegetation.” We too admit both a good and a bad spirit, but we worship chiefly the bad spirit, whom we fear. We do not think first of the good but of the harm things will do us. The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects–butterflies, etc.– which God has made and set before us which the State ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are injurious to vegetation! This is the way we glorify God and enjoy him forever. Come out here and behold a thousand painted butterflies and other beautiful insects which people the air, then go to the libraries and see what kind of prayer and glorification of God is there recorded. Massachusetts has published her report on “Insects Injurious to Vegetation,” and our neighbor the “Noxious Insects of New York.” We have attended to the evil and said nothing about the good. This is looking a gift horse in the mouth with a vengeance. Children are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. The parents remind me of the devil, but the children of God. Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, “Is it not poisonous?” Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. So described, they are as monstrous as if they should be magnified a thousand diameters. Suppose I should see and describe men and houses and trees and birds as if they were a thousand times larger than they are! With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature. P. M.–To Second Division. Very warm. Looking from Clamshell over Hosmer’s meadow, about half covered with water, see hundreds of turtles, chiefly picta, now first lying out in numbers on the brown pieces of meadow which rise above the water. You see their black backs shine on these hummocks left by the ice, fifty to eighty rods off. They would rapidly tumble off if you went much nearer. This heat and stillness draws them up. It is remarkable how surely they are advertised of the first warm and still days, and in an hour or two are sure to spread themselves over the hummocks. There is to-day a general resurrection of them, and there they bask in the sun. It is their sabbath. At this distance, if you are on the lookout, especially with a glass, you can discover what numbers of them there are, but they are shy and will drop into the water on a near approach. All up and down our river meadows their backs are shining in the sun to-day. It is a turtle day. As we sat on the steep hillside south of Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, we noticed a remarkable whirlwind on a small scale, which carried up the oak leaves from that Island copse in the meadow. The oak leaves now hang thinly and are very dry and light, and these small whirlwinds, which seem to be occasioned by the sudden hot and calm weather (like whirlpools or dimples in a smooth stream), wrench them off, and up they go, somewhat spirally, in countless flocks like birds, with a rustling sound; and higher and higher into the clear blue deeps they rise above our heads, till they are fairly lost to sight, looking, when last seen, mere light specks against the blue, like stars by day, in fact. I could distinguish some, I have no doubt, five or six hundred feet high at least, but if I looked aside a moment they were lost. The largest oak leaves looked not bigger than a five-cent-piece. These were drifting eastward,–to descend where? Methought that, instead of decaying on the earth or being consumed by fire, these were being translated and would soon be taken in at the windows of heaven. I had never observed this phenomenon so remarkable. The flight of the leaves. This was quite local, and it was comparatively still where we sat a few rods on one side. Thousands went up together in a rustling flock. Many of the last oak leaves hang thus ready to go up. I noticed two or more similar whirlwinds in the woods elsewhere this afternoon. One took up small twigs and clusters of leaves from the ground, matted together. I could easily see where it ran along with its nose (or point of its tunnel) close to the ground, stirring up the leaves as it travelled, like the snout of some hunting or rooting animal. See and hear chewink. See a little snake on the dry twigs and chips in the sun, near the arbutus, uniformly brown (or reddish-brown) above except a yellowish ring on the occiput, the head also lighter than the body; beneath vermilion, with apparently a row of light dots along each side. It is apparently Coluber amaenus (?), except that it has the yellowish ring. Luzula campestris. Also the Oryzopsis Canadensis by the Major Heywood path-side, say a day, or April 30th, six inches high or more, with fine bristle-like leaves. See a thrasher. What is that rush at Second Division? It now forms a dense and very conspicuous mass some four rods long and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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one foot high. The top for three inches is red, and the impression at a little distance is like that made by sorrel. Certainly no plant of this character exhibits such a growth now, i. e. in the mass. It surprises you to see it, carries your thoughts on to June. The climbing fern is persistent, i. e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.
July 13, day: In an endurance race at the Empire Trotting Course in Albany, New York, Louis “Deerfoot” or “” Bennett the champion of the Cattaraugus and Albert Smith the champion of the Tonawandas attempted to run 100 miles in 90-degree heat and high humidity within 13 hours. Bennett gave out after 28 miles and Smith managed to pass the 50-mile mark at 7 hours and 28 seconds but gave out after 61 miles.
[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR 13 JULY] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
Prohibited from practicing geology in the state of New York because he had attempted to explain to James Hall the actual age of the Taconic Mountains, Ebenezer Emmons had removed to North Carolina to become that state’s first state geologist. In this year, his THE SWAMPLAND OF NORTH CAROLINA as well as his MANUAL OF GEOLOGY: DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF COLLEGES AND ACADEMIES (New York: A.S. Barnes & Burr). While in North Carolina he would make the 1st discovery of fossil teeth of an ancient crocodile, Deinosuchus, that had been so enormous that it had preyed on carnivorous dinosaurs.
PIONEER OF SCIENCE At the age of 76, Professor Chester Dewey, feeling no longer able to maintain the pace, resigned as professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at the University of Rochester. He consented, however, to retain a nominal connection with the university and to provide instruction to its students to whatever extent he would feel able. His last scholarly efforts would be review articles on THE TRUE PLACE OF MAN IN ZOOLOGY and AN HDT WHAT? INDEX
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EXAMINATION OF SOME REASONINGS AGAINST THE UNITY OF MANKIND.
THE SCIENCE OF 1860
July 12, Thursday: Henry Thoreau received a letter from Charles C. Morse of the Atheneum & Mechanics Association of Rochester, New York.142 Atheneum & Mechanics Association Rochester N.Y.
Henry D. Thoreau
Dear Sir: I have been unable to obtain from our booksellers your “Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers” and therefore enclose you the supposed price. You will please send it to my address by mail.
I would also inquire if you are in the lecture field and whether you could be obtained to deliver two or more lectures upon scientific subjects before our association the coming winter?
Yours Respectfully Chas. C. Morse 142. Charles C. Morse had been born in Dorsett, Vermont in 1832, and educated at Burr Seminary in Manchester. He had come to Rochester in 1851 as a clerk in the retail shoe store Sage & Pancost. As the firm transited into wholesale manufacturing its name became Sage, Pancost & Morse. Morse would become vice president and manager of Union Bank, 3d vice president and executive commissioner of Rochester Savings Bank, a director of the Niagara Falls International Bridge Company, and a director of the City Hospital. He and Belinda Brewster Morse had two daughters, Linda and Hilary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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He replied: Concord July 12th 1860 Mr Charles C morse Dear Sir– I mail to your address today a copy of my “Week” as you request– I am in the lecture field– –but my subjects are not scientific — rather transendental & aesthetic– Such as “Walking or the Wild” “Autumnal Tints” &c— Even if the title were scientific, the treatment would hardly be so – in a popular sense. If you think that your audience will incline or erect their ears to such themes as these — I shall be happy to read to them Yr respectfuly Henry D. Thoreau
July 12, Thursday: Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here. The best way to drink, especially at a shallow spring, or one so sunken below the surface as to be difficult to reach, is through a tube. You can commonly find growing near a spring a hollow reed or weed of some kind suitable for this purpose, such as rue or touch-me-not or water saxifrage, or you can carry one in your pocket. Juncus militaris. The river at 8 P.M. is eight and three quarters inches above summer level. Just after the sun is set I observe the dewdrops on the pontederia leaves. (Do not know how early they begin to form.) Even when the leaf stands perpendicular, the drop is collected at the uppermost point, and then, on a slight jar or agitation of the water, runs down the leaf. This is the only broad and thick leaf that rises above the water, and therefore it appears to be the only one that collects the dew thus early. A Mr. Bradshaw, taxidermist, carpenter, etc., etc., of Wayland, tells me that he finds the long-eared owl there in summer, and has set it up. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1861
December: The final section of New York’s Genesee Valley Canal, from Olean to Millgrove Pond, was completed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1862
April: The Continental Monthly, a magazine devoted to literature and national policy, in its 4th issue, offered information in regard to “The Huguenot Families in America,” in particular in regard to the Huguenots of Ulster County in upstate New York: It is said that the lands of the early Huguenot settlers in Ulster County were so arranged in small lots, and within sight of each other, as to prevent surprise from the Indians whilst their owners were cultivating them. Louis Bevier, one of the most honored patentees, was the ancestor of the highly- respectable family bearing his name in that region. When he was about to leave France, his father became so exasperated, that he refused to bestow upon him the commonest civilities. Nor would he condescend to return the kind salutations of another son in the public streets, affectionately offered by the pious emigrant, and for the last time. Another of the patentees, Deyo, visited France to claim his confiscated estates, but, failing of success, returned. Kingston, at this early period, was the only trading post or village for the French Protestants, and sixteen miles distant from their settlement, although in a straight line. Paltz was not more than eight miles west of the Hudson River; this route, M. Deyo undertook, alone, to explore — but never returned. It was thought that the adventurous Huguenot died suddenly, or was devoured by the wild beasts. A truss and buckle which he owned were found about thirty years afterwards, at the side of a large hollow tree. His life seems to have been one full of toils and dangers, having endured severe sufferings for conscience’ sake, before he reached Holland from France. For days he concealed himself in hiding places from his persecutors, and without food, finally escaping alone in a fishing boat, during a terrific storm. The descendants of the Ulster Dubois are very influential and numerous in our day, but there is a tradition that this family at one time was in great danger of becoming extinct. For a long while it was the custom of parents to visit Kingston, for the purpose of having their children baptized. M. Dubois and wife were returning from such a pious visit, and while crossing the Roundout, on the ice, it gave way, plunging the horses, sleigh and party in the rapid stream. With great presence of mind, the mother threw her infant, an only son, upon a floating frozen cake, which, like the ark of Moses, floated him safely down the stream, until he was providentially rescued. For some time this child was the only male Dubois among the Paltz Huguenots, and had he perished on that perilous occasion, his family name would also have perished with him; still there were seven females of the same house, called the seven sisters, all of whom married among the most respectable French Protestant families. To no stock do more families in Ulster County trace their origin than HDT WHAT? INDEX
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that of Dubois. Some antiquarians deny this tradition of the seven sisters, but contend that they were Lefevres. There were two Le Fevres among the Ulster patentees. Their progenitors it is said were among those early Protestants of France who distinguished themselves for intellectual powers, prominence in the Reformed Church, with enduring patience under the severest trials, and death itself. Le Fevre, a doctor of theology, adorned the French metropolis when Paris caught the first means of salvation in the fifteenth century. He preached the pure gospel within its walls; and this early teacher declared “our religion has only one foundation, one object, one head, Jesus Christ, blessed forever. Let us then not take the name of Paul, of Apostles, or of Peter. The Cross of Christ alone opens heaven and shuts the gates of hell.” In 1524, he published a translation of the New Testament, and the next year a version of the Psalms. Many received the Holy Scriptures from his hands, and read them in their families, producing the happiest results. Margaret, the beautiful and talented Princess of Valois, celebrated by all the wits and scholars of the time, embraced the true Christianity, uniting her fortune and influence with the Huguenots, and the Reformation thus had a witness in the king’s court. She was sister to Francis the First, the reigning monarch. By the hands of this noble lady, the Bishop of Meuse sent to the king a translation of St. Paul’s Epistles, richly illuminated, he adding, in his quaint and beautiful language, “They will make a truly royal dish of fatness, that never corrupts, and having the power to restore from all manner of sickness. The more we taste them, the more we hunger after them, with desires that are ever fed and never cloyed.” Abraham Hasbroucq, which is the original orthography of the name among the patentees, was a native of Calais, and the first emigrant of that family to America, in 1675, with a party of Huguenot friends; they resided for a while in the Palatinate on the banks of the Rhine. To commemorate their kindness, when they reached our shores the new settlement was called “De Paltz,” now “New Paltz,” as the Palatinate was always styled by the Dutch. Here, also, the beautiful stream flowing through New Paltz was known by the name of Walkill, after the river Wael, a branch of the Rhine, running into Holland. The first twelve patentees, or the “Duzine,” managed the affairs of the infant settlement as long as they lived, and after their death it was a custom to elect a court officer from among the descendants of each, at the annual town meetings. For a long period they kept in one chest all the important papers of their property and land titles. The pastor or the oldest man had charge of the key, and reference was made to this depository for the settlement of all difficulties about boundaries. Hence they were free from legal suits as to their lands; and to this judicious, simple plan may be traced the well-known harmony of the numerous descendants in this region, — the fidelity of their landmarks, with the absence of litigation. We know of no region in our land where property has remained so HDT WHAT? INDEX
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long in the same families, as it has at New Paltz; since its first settlement, there has been a constant succession of intermarriages among the French descendants, and many continue to reside upon the venerable homesteads of their early and honored forefathers. Devoted as the Huguenots ever had been to the worship of the Almighty, one of their first objects at New Paltz was the erection of a church. It was built of logs, and afterwards gave place to a substantial edifice of brick, brought from Holland, the place answering the double purpose of church and fort. Their third house of worship was an excellent stone building, which served the Huguenots for eighty years, when it was demolished in 1839, and the present splendid edifice placed on the venerable spot and dedicated to the service of Almighty God. It is related that a clergyman of eccentric dress and manners, at an early period, would occasionally make a visit to New Paltz, and, for the purpose of meditation, would cross the Walkill in a canoe, to some large elms growing upon a bank opposite the church; on one occasion the stream was low, and while pushing across with a pole, it broke, and the Dominie, losing his balance, pitched overboard. He succeeded, however, in reaching the shore, and proceeded to the nearest house, for the purpose of drying his clothes. This partly accomplished, he entered the pulpit and informed his congregation that he had intended to have preached a sermon on baptism; but, eyeing his garments, he observed that circumstances prevented, as he could now sympathize with Peter, and take the text, “Lord, save, or I perish.” To serve God according to the dictates of their own conscience, had ever been a supreme duty with the French Protestants, and paramount to everything else. For this they had endured the severest persecutions in France, and had sacrificed houses, lands, kindred and their native homes; they had crossed a trackless ocean, and penetrated the howling wilderness, inhabited by savage tribes — and for what? — To serve their MAKER, and the RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE. They had been the salt of France, and brought over with them their pious principles, with their Bibles, — the most precious things. Some of these faded volumes are still to be found among the children of the American Huguenots, and we have often seen and examined one of the most venerable copies. It is Diodati’s French Bible, with this title:— LA SAINTE BIBLE, INTERPRETEE PAR JEAN DIODATI, MDCXLIII. IMPRIMEE A GENEVE. The sacred book is 219 years old, in excellent condition, and well covered with white dressed deerskin, its ties of the same HDT WHAT? INDEX
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material. It was brought to America by Louis Bevier, a French Protestant of Ulster, and has been preserved as a precious family relic through nine generations. It was carried from France to Holland, and thence to New Paltz. “Blessed Book! the hands of holy martyrs have unfolded thy sacred pages, and their hearts been cheered by thy holy truths and promises!” There is also a family record written in the volume, faintly legible, of the immediate descendants of Louis Bevier and his wife, Maria Lablau, from the year 1674 to 1684. Above anything else did the Huguenots of France love their BIBLES. Various edicts, renewed in 1729, had commanded the seizure and destruction of all books used by the Protestants, and for this purpose, any consul of a commune, or any priest, might enter the houses to make the necessary search. We may therefore compute by millions the volumes destroyed in obedience to these royal edicts. On the 17th of April, 1758, about 40,000 books were burned at one time in Bordeaux; and it is also well known that at Beaucaire, in 1735, there was an auto-da-fé almost equal to that of Bordeaux. It was a truly sad day, in France, when the old family BIBLE must be given up; the book doubly revered and most sacred, because it was the WORD of GOD, and sacred too from the recollections connected with it! Grandparents, parents, and children, all, from their earliest infancy, had daily seen, read and touched it. Like the household deities of the ancients, it had been always present at all the joys and sorrows of the family. A touching custom inscribed on the first or last pages, and at times even upon its margins, the principal events in all those beloved lives. Here were the Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and the Deaths. Now all these tender, pious records must perish at once in the flames. But mind, immortal mind, could not be destroyed; for free thought, and truth, and instruction, among the people, were companions of the Reformation, and books would circulate among all ranks throughout Protestant France. The works generally came from Holland through Paris, and from Geneva, by Lyons or Grenoble. Inside of baled goods, and in cases and barrels of provisions, secretly, thousands of volumes were sent from north to south, from east to west, to the oppressed Huguenots. The great work which Louis XIV. believed buried beneath the ruins of his bloody edicts still went on silently. At Lausanne was established a seminary, about the year 1725, where works for the French Protestant people were printed and circulated. The Bishop of Canterbury, with Lord Warke, and a few foreign sovereigns, actively assisted in the founding of this institution. Thus did that beautiful town become the source of useful and religious knowledge to thousands, although it was conveyed far and wide in a very quiet and secret way. One man was condemned to the galleys for having received barrels, marked “Black and White Peas,” which were found full of “Ostervald’s Catechisms.” How strange it seems to us, writing in our own Protestant land, that cruel authority should ever have intervened with matters of faith! What can be more plain or truthful than that there HDT WHAT? INDEX
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should be liberty of conscience; and that God alone has the power and the right to direct it, and that it is an abuse and a sacrilege to come between God and conscience? After the revocation of the edict of Nantes and the death of Louis XIV., his royal successor sometimes vaguely asked himself why he persecuted his Protestant subjects? when his marshal replied, that his majesty was only the executor of former edicts. He seemed to have consoled himself that he had found the system already established, and he only carried out the errors of his predecessor. Forty years of remorseless persecutions against his best subjects, without asking himself why! Of all the weaknesses of his reign, this was the most odious and the most guilty; his hand was most literally weary of signing cruel edicts against the Protestants of his kingdom, without even reading them, and which obedience to his mandates had to transcribe in letters of fire and blood, on the remotest parts of his realm. Let us return to the Frenchmen of Ulster, who for some time after their emigration used their own language, until a consultation was held to determine whether this, or the English or Dutch, should be adopted in the families. As the latter was generally spoken in the neighboring places,—Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Newburgh,—and also at the schools and churches, it was decided to speak Dutch only to their children and servants. Having for a while, however, continued the use of their native tongue, some of the Huguenot descendants in the Paltz still write their names as their French ancestors wrote them more than two centuries ago. Dubois, Bevier, Deyeau, Le Fevre, Hasbroque, are well-known instances. Petronella was once an admired name among the Huguenot ladies, and became almost extinct in Ulster at one time. The last was said to have been Petronella Hasbroque, a lady distinguished for remarkable traits of character. Judge Hasbroque, of Kingston, the father of the former President of Rutger’s College, was very anxious that his son would give this name to one of his daughters. In case of compliance, a handsome marriage portion was also promised; but the parents declined the generous offer, whether from a dislike to the name, or a belief that the property would be theirs, at any rate, some day, is not known. A granddaughter, however, of a second generation, named her first- born Petronella, and thus gratifying the desire of her near kinsman, secured a marriage portion for the heir, and preserved the much-admired name from oblivion — certainly three important results. It was a well-known and distinguished trait of the New Paltz Huguenots, that but few intermarriages have taken place among their own families (Walloon); they differed in this respect from all other French Protestants who emigrated to America and mingled with the other population by matrimonial alliances. In Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and other neighborhoods, near by, there is an unusual number of Dutch names — the Van Deusens, Van Benschotens, Van Kleeds, Van Gosbeeks, Van De Bogerts, Van Bewer, and others, almost ad infinitum, whilst for miles around HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the populous and wealthy town of Old Paltz scarcely a family can be found with such patronymics. Notwithstanding, somewhat like the Israelites, these Frenchmen classed themselves, in a measure, as a distinct and separate people; still, the custom did not arise from any dislike to the Hollanders, — on the contrary, they were particularly attached to that people, who had been their best friends, both in Holland and America; and these associations were ever of a most friendly and generous character. After a while, the Huguenots of Ulster adopted not only the language, but the customs and habits of the Dutch. After the destruction of the Protestant churches at Rochelle, in 1685, the colonists of that city came in such numbers to the settlement of New York, that it was necessary sometimes to print public documents not only in Dutch and English, but French also. We do not wish to make our articles a Doomsday-book for the Huguenots, still it is pleasant for their descendants to know that they came from such honorable stock, and, with all of our boasted republicanism, we are not ashamed that we are so born. Here are some of the names to be found in the old records of Ulster:— Abraham Hausbrough, Nicholas Antonio, “Sherriffe” Moses Quartain, “Leon,” Christian Dubois, Solomon Hasbrook, Andries Lafeever, Hugo Freer, Peter Low, Samuel Boyce, Roeleff Eltinge, “Esq.,” Nicholas Roosa, Jacobus DeLametie, Nicholas Depew, “Esq.,” Philip Viely, Boudwyn Lacounti, “Capt.” Zacharus Hoofman, “Lieut.” Benjamin Smedes, Jr., “Capt.” Christian Dugo, James Agmodi, Johannis Low, Josia Eltin, Samuel Sampson, Lewis Pontenere, Abra. Bovier, Peter Dejo, Robert Cain, Robert Hanne, William Ward, Robert Banker, John Marie, Jonathan Owens, Daniel Coleman, Stephen D’Lancey, Eolias Nezereau, Abraham Jouneau, Thomas Bayeuk, Elia Neau, Paul Droilet, Augustus Jay, Jean Cazeale, Benjamin Faneil, Daniel Cromelin, John Auboyneau, Francis Vincent, Ackande Alliare, James Laboue (Minister). In 1713-14 we find, in an address of the ministers and elders of the Huguenot Church in New York, “Louis Rou, Minister of the French Church, in New York, John Barberie, Elder, Louis Cané, ancien (the older), Jean Lafont, ancien, André Feyneau, ancien.” To another religious document there are Jean la Chan, Elias Pelletrau, Andrew Foucault, James Ballereau, Jaque Bobin, N. Cazalet, Sam’l Bourdet, David Le Telier, Francois Bosset. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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September 1, Monday: People were killing each other at Chantilly/Ox Hill.
In upstate New York, enlargement of the Erie Canal to carry 270-ton boats had been completed at a total cost of $31,000,000.
This enormous sum of money had, of course, been flushed right down the toilet — as the era of the canal in the US was at this point simply over.143
November 11, Tuesday: The city of Rochester, New York banned many public amusements and any form of gambling, including shuffle board, card playing, billiards, and bowling, where money or liquor might be won. Even kite flying and swimming in the Erie Canal were interdicted, between 6 AM and 8 PM.
143. The Erie Canal can be said to be coextensive with Thoreau’s life, in that it started in 1817 and came to its far end in 1862. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1863
October 1, Thursday: The German Diet voted for united action against Denmark.
Ebenezer Emmons died. Eventually, his nemesis James Hall, who had caused him to be exiled from the State of New York, would be buried near his grave in New York — which just shows to go you. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1864
Samuel H. Hammond removed to Watertown, New York.
August 9, Tuesday: An editorial in the New-York Times advocated that the state of New York acquire the Adirondack mountain region for purposes of preservation.144 CONSERVATIONISM
144. The conservation movement was little more than a shabby fraud. From the historical record, these early environmental technocrats were intent not on solving our ecological crisis but on destroying the earth as quickly as possible. Their net impact has been negative: we would have been better off had we never had a conservation movement, to teach us how to manage our looting so that we looted with greater and greater effectiveness and economy. According to Samuel P. Hays’s EXPLORATIONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: ESSAYS BY SAMUEL P. H AYS (Pittsburgh PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998), these men were mere pawns of the powers that be, careerists bought by their careers: Conservation, above all, was a scientific movement, and its role in history arose from the implications of science and technology in modern society. Conservation leaders sprang from such fields as hydrology, forestry, agrostology, geology, and anthropology. Vigorously active in professional circles in the national capital, these leaders brought the ideals and practices of their crafts into federal resource policy. Loyalty to these professional ideals, not close association with the grass-roots public, set the tone of the Theodore Roosevelt conservation movement. Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources. The idea of efficiency drew these federal scientists from one resource task to another, from specific programs to comprehensive concepts. It molded the policies which they proposed, their administrative techniques, and their relations with Congress and the public. It is from the vantage point of applied science, rather than of democratic protest, that one must understand the historic role of the conservation movement. The new realms of science and technology, appearing to open up unlimited opportunities for human achievement, filled conservation leaders with intense optimism. They emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limitations.... They displayed that deep sense of hope which pervaded all those at the turn of the century for whom science and technology were revealing visions of an abundant future.... Conflicts between competing resource users, especially, should not be dealt with through the normal processes of politics. Pressure group action, logrolling in Congress, or partisan debate could not guarantee rational and scientific decisions. Amid such jockeying for advantage with the resulting compromise, concern for efficiency would disappear. Conservationists envisaged, even though they did not realize their aims, a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best determine how to achieve it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1865
Two petroleum test holes were drilled in the Town of Freedom, and would provide a short-lived source of oil. Job Moses brought in a producing commercial oil well southwest of Olean, the 1st such well in New York State.
March 17: At Rochester, New York the Genesee River flooded, washing away part of the Erie Canal’s banks and flooding the downtown’s Crossroads area. The D.R. Barton Building (the Commercial Bank Building) was among those destroyed, as were the offices of the Rochester Democrat in the Eagle Hotel Building. The New York Central and Erie Railroad bridges and the tracks between Rochester and Syracuse were washed out. An island below Lower Falls and a bar at the mouth of the Genesee River were created. The floodwaters lasted two days. Damages would be estimated at $1,000000.
A kidnap plot by John Wilkes Booth failed when President Abraham Lincoln did not arrive as expected at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington DC. The presidential itinerary had changed, and Lincoln –ironically– was attending at the time a reception in the lobby of Booth’s hotel. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Here is the President’s last photograph, showing him carefully posed as always in the manner which, photographers had learned, would minimize the impact of the one eye that stared always toward the nose:
The front page of The Liberator featured General Lee’s famous letter to a member of the Confederate Congress who had asked Lee whether it was a good idea to consider enlisting slaves owing to the lack of Southern manpower. Lee had replied: “I think the measure not only expedient, but necessary. The enemy will certainly use them against us if he gets possession of them. In answer to your second question, I can only say that, in my opinion, the negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers I think that those that are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise, in my opinion, to require them to remain as slaves. The course to pursue, it seems to me, would be to call for such as are willing to come, with the consent of their owners.”
Also in this issue of The Liberator there appeared the following notice: COLORED MEN WANTED, For the United States Navy. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
May 9, Tuesday: President Andrew Johnson issued an Executive Order taking federal control over Virginia and cautioning that any person continuing to attempt to exercise any political, military, or civil power, authority, jurisdiction, or right by, through, or under Jefferson Davis, late of the city of Richmond, and his confederates, or under John Letcher or William Smith and their confederates, or under any pretended political, military, or civil commission or authority issued by them or either of them since the 17th day of April, 1861, would be deemed and taken as in rebellion against the United States and dealt with accordingly (by the way, it might be good for your health to take an oath of allegiance).145
Harrison Gray Dyar got married.
In Deerfield, New York, a group was sitting around the stove of the Pratt & Owens store engaged in pleasant conversation, when at about 9:30PM Mr. Milton Pratt got up and went into the rear office. Mr. Owens heard some unusual sound and followed just in time to catch him as he fell. He had slashed his throat horribly with a razor. “No reason is known for the act.”
145. I was reading about a speech President Obama recently made, in which he referred to the United States of America as a plural rather than singular noun. The commentator alleged that the president had misspoke, but I remembered Thoreau writing in WALDEN, “It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power.” Did Thoreau commit the same boo-boo then that the president has now? Oh, tookie tookie! To get a definitive factoid, I turned to Google's “ngram” service (you can yourself try it). Plugging in the search phrase “United States is,United States are”, it turns out that linguistic drift from usage of “United States of America” as a plural noun to usage as a singular noun has been remarkably slow and steady. There has been no particular period of great change in our usage. There has merely been instead, a slow steady gradual drift from the plural usage, toward the singular. This is interesting because our professional historians are forever informing us that the Civil War was some sort of fulcrum point, at which the Federal Government made of itself a singularity rather than a plurality. No, what the ngram search reveals is that the Civil War was not such a fulcrum point. No, there was not any such great leap in usage associated with the years 1860 to 1865. The chart is marked only in its graduality. You cannot discover in this ngram chart when the Civil War occurred, or when the federal government suddenly became an overwhelming force swamping the individual state governments. Our historians have been making this stuff up out of whole cloth. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1866
The Reverend George Washington Hosmer left his position as the minister of the Unitarian Church of Buffalo, New York to become President of Antioch College. He would be the first president of the college’s Unitarian period.
Spring: Fenian forces gathered at Buffalo, New York. IRELAND
June: An armed force of Fenians crossed the upper reaches of the Niagara River, occupied the village of Fort Erie and defeated Canadian militia, at the Battle of Ridgeway, Ontario. The Fenians, faced with gathering British and Canadian resistance, soon regrouped themselves in Buffalo, New York. United States authorities would block further such raids along the river frontier. Fenian activities would, however, continue into the early 1870s, and friction between the neighbor nations would remain high. IRELAND HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1867
February: An ice dam built up at the piers of Rochester, New York’s Erie Railroad bridge, diverting waters of the Genesee River into the Genesee Valley Canal and flooding parts of the 3rd and 8th wards.
December 5, Thursday: Chester Dewey died in Rochester, New York.
Francis George Curtis was born, 3d child of George William Curtis and Anna Shaw Curtis.
Charles Dickens read at the Tremont Temple in Boston, “Nickleby” and “Boots at the Holly Tree Inn.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1868
US canal engineer E.H. Gill died in Richmond, Virginia.
Lake Ontario’s American Line of steamboats sold out to Canada’s Royal Mail Line.
The initial steamboatSTEAMBOAT to use the Erie Canal, the Edward Backus, arrived in Rochester, New York with a load of coal from Ithaca.
January 27, Monday: The ceiling of Rochester, New York’s First Presbyterian Church collapsed a 2d time.
March 10, Tuesday: English novelist Charles Dickens visited Rochester, New York.
July: John Sturla became the 1st child born to Italian parents in Rochester, New York.
July 9, Thursday: Mayne Reid’s father the Reverend Thomas Mayne Reid, Sr. died at the age of 92.
The Democrats closed their convention after nominating Horatio Seymour of New York, with Missouri’s Francis P. Blair, Jr. as his running mate.
Amendment XIV to the federal Constitution of the United States of America was adopted, requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction and, cynically we may add, on this day South Caroline and Louisiana were readmitted to the federal union despite the fact that they blatantly had no intention of ever providing such equal protection under the law. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
THE MATTER, EXPLAINED
Unionist govt. appointed by Missouri Constitutional Convention 1861 Missouri
Elected Union & unelected rump CSA governments from 1861 Kentucky
July 24, 1866 Tennessee
June 22, 1868 Arkansas
June 25, 1868 Florida
July 4, 1868 North Carolina
July 9, 1868 South Carolina
July 9, 1868 Louisiana
July 13, 1868 Alabama
July 21, 1868; July 15, 1870 Georgia
January 26, 1870 Virginia
February 23, 1870 Mississippi
March 30, 1870 Texas
August 3, Monday: Deacon Abner Huntley of Cuba, New York, joined the Gold Templars, at the age of 101.
October 7, Wednesday: Cornell University was founded, in Ithaca, New York. Andrew D. White was its first president.
October 22, Thursday: The Corning Flint Glass Works began operations in Corning, New York.
In Monroe County, Arkansas, Congressman James Hinds was killed by a Ku Klux Klansman.
Walt Whitman wrote from Providence, Rhode Island to John Burroughs: Dear friend, I have been thinking about you this morning, and will write a few lines, though without any thing special to communicate. My vacation is nearly done, & in four or five days more I shall be back in Washington. I have been here in Providence the past week, as guest of Thomas Davis, a manufacturer here, & formerly M.C. — have had a good time generally, in a quiet way — am going on to New York this afternoon, & shall be back in Washington on HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
the 27th— William O’Connor is here in Providence — I have been with him a good deal — he is not very well, but goes around— Will finish my letter in New York, & mail it thence to-morrow. Walt.
November: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. unsuccessfully opposed Benjamin Franklin Butler for election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. During this year he had earned large retainers for admiralty work and so, for reasons of health, he was able to go off on a brief European vacation. The Danas moved their residence to 361 Beacon Hill, Boston.
Hull’s stone giant was transported by rail and wagon to Cardiff, New York, and buried on Stub Newell’s farm.
December 19, Saturday: Rochester, New York’s Eagle Hotel Building burned down forcing the Democrat to move to a building at Main and Graves.
December 28, Monday: The Rochester, New York City Council adopted The Seal of the City of Rochester. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1869
George William Curtis declined the editorship of the New-York Times. He also declined the office of Secretary of State for the State of New York.
Lydia Thompson left New-York to take her burlesque company on a US tour.
A group of commercial buildings on the waterfront of New-York between Main and Docks streets was destroyed by fire.
Mary Mason Jones created the famous “Marble Row” of elegant Italianate residences at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New-York.
Jay Cooke and Company became the financial agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Thomas Alva Edison patented an improved stock ticker.
Jay Cooke and Company became the financial agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Thomas Alva Edison patented an improved stock ticker.
The Reverend Lyman Abbott resigned as pastor of the New England Congregationalist Church.
February 15, Monday: Austin Steward died in Canandaigua, New York.
September: Sojourner Truth began an extended lecture tour in which she would speak in Rochester, New York, in New- York, in Philadelphia, and in Vineland, New Jersey, keeping her traveling into the following January. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1870
In Rochester, New York –where Sam Patch had leaped to his death down the falls of the Genesee River– Glen House was built down in the gorge below the last of the falls.146
Gone But Not Forgotten
The local Democratic newspaper was threatening that if any Rochester men were to continue in a practice of making rude remarks as ladies walked past them, it would begin to publish their names.
146. Paul E. Johnson’s SAM PATCH, THE FAMOUS JUMPER (NY: Hill & Wang). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
A children’s book was published in New-York, titled THE WONDERFUL LEAPS OF Sam Patch.
January 13, Thursday: Rochester, New York’s Veterans of the War of 1812 met in the Court House. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1871
Henry Stephens Randall represented Cortland County in the New York State Assembly.
The Syracuse City Waterworks Company began drawing water from Onondaga Creek, an unsafe source, polluted by glue factories and tanyards.
Kingston’s population exceeded 10,000.
Le Roy druggist Schuyler C. Wells, Sr. began marketing the Shiloh brand of patent medicine.
George Mason opened Connewango’s Rutlege Creamery.
A plan, backed by businessman and politician Erastus Corning, was announced for Albany’s All Saints Cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Albany.
Corning’s son Edwin Corning died.
The Seneca River Towing Path of the New York State Barge Canal, connecting Mud Lock on the Oswego Canal to the outlet of Onondaga Lake, was discontinued.
The canal boat A.D. Hoyt, loaded with rock salt, sank at Lock #8 of the Erie Canal.
The Pennsylvania Railroad bought out the Camden and Amboy Railroad, acquiring the Delaware and Raritan Canal. That canal company lost its use of the Schuylkill Navigation. Net earnings of the Delaware and Raritan Canal — $1,202,419.
Chicago completed the deep cut necessary to convert the upper sections of the Illinois and Michigan Canal to a sanitary canal, reversing the flow of the Chicago River.
Michigan’s St. Clair Flats Ship Canal opened. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1872
Construction began on the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal, connecting Green Bay with Lake Michigan. Maine’s Cumberland-Oxford Canal ceased operations.
The steam-powered canal boat William Newman was built in Buffalo, New York.
During this year, in Section I of the Erie Canal, 17 boats sank.
In Buffalo, New York the screw-propelled Erie Canal boat William Newman was built.
The Suez Canal Company narrowly avoided bankruptcy. EGYPT
May 7, Tuesday: In the course of an argument at Ted Sweeny’s saloon in Buffalo, New York’s Erie Canal district another saloon keeper, John Gafney, gunned down local resident Patrick Fahey.
June 6, Thursday: To test the constitutionality of the ban on women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists registered on this day in Rochester, New York to vote in the American presidential election of November 4th. When she would cast this ballot she would be placed under arrest.
FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1873
With the success of their chocolate business, the Cadbury brothers stopped selling tea and coffee and concentrated purely on chocolate.
German tobacconists in Rochester, New York produced 7,000,000 cigars. (By 1883 their production would total 17,000,000.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1876
Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: There was a well-publicized celebration in Concord of the 100th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. The trains out from Cambridge past Walden Pond were so crowded that two of the expected dignitaries, Mark Twain (who had just published TOM SAWYER) and William Dean Howells, were unable to board and would miss the oration by Waldo Emerson, the ode by James Russell Lowell, and under the weight of all this profundity the spectacular collapse of the speakers’ platform. It was unusually cold, the dinner tent was inadequate to the occasion, and a lot of the visitors would need to deal with the difficulties by getting drunk. The Boston Daily News would comment, about this fiasco, that “There is no difficulty now in understanding the hurried retreat of the British from Concord and Lexington.” Judge John Shepard Keyes orated at Concord’s 1850 Townhouse that “the hill extended beyond where we meet tonight to the road leading to the north bridge. In the ragged curb where that road wound around the side of the hill was buried one of the British soldiers who died of wounds received in the fight at the bridge” (John S. Keyes Papers, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library).
Centennial celebrations (many are three-day celebrations, 3-5 July) were occurring throughout the United States and abroad.
In Philadelphia at Fairmount Park, two separate celebrations included the German societies unveiling a statue of Baron Alexander von Humboldt and the dedication, including an address provided by John Lee Carroll, Governor of Maryland, of the Catholic Temperance Fountain. Meanwhile, Bayard Taylor’s “National Ode, July 4, 1876,” was read at Independence Square, while Susan B. Anthony and others belonging to the National Woman’s Suffrage Association presented and read their Declaration of Rights for Women at the Centennial Celebration. In Philadelphia as well, General Sherman reviews the troops as they paraded.
In Washington DC, at the 1st Congregational Church, the poem “Centennial Bells,” by Bayard Taylor was read by the poet.
The long-standing tradition of Navy vessels participating in July 4th celebrations in Bristol, Rhode Island, began in this year with the presence there of the sloop USS Juniata.
In Washington, 11 couples celebrated the 4th by getting married, while a committee of 13 members of Congress attended a celebration of the Oldest Inhabitants Association, and 300 artillery blasts were fired: 100 at sunrise, 100 at noon, and 100 at sunset.
In Richmond, Virginia, the US and Virginia flags were raised together on the Capitol, for the first time on the 4th in 16 years. The Richmond Grays, an African-American regiment, was in Washington celebrating.
In New Orleans, the monitor Canonicus fired a salute from the Mississippi River.
In Hamburg, South Carolina, black militiamen attempted to march in the parade and white townspeople killed some of them. (These white murderers would of course be found innocent by a white jury.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
In Montgomery, Alabama, the Declaration of Independence was read by Neil Blue, the oldest citizen of Montgomery and the only survivor of those who voted for delegates to the territorial convention which had adopted the Constitution under which Alabama had been admitted into the Union in 1819.
In San Francisco, a mock engagement with the iron-clad Monitor occurred and there was a parade that stretched over 4 miles in length, boasting fully 10,000 participants. The city provided its citizens with a 1st public exhibition of electric light.
In Chicago, at the Turners and Socialists celebration, a revised Declaration of Independence from the socialist’s standpoint was distributed.
In Joliet and Quincy, Illinois, the cornerstone of a new Court House was laid.
In Freeport, Illinois and Chicago, the Declaration of Independence was read in both English and German.
In Evanston, Illinois, a centennial poem “The Girls of the Period” was publicly read by Mrs. Emily H. Miller.
In Wilmette, Illinois, a woman (Miss Aunie Gedney) read the Declaration of Independence.
In Savannah, Georgia, a centennial tree was planted, accompanied by appropriate speeches.
In New-York, on the eve of the 4th, an Irish couple had named their baby American Centennial Maloney.
In Rochester, New York, a centennial oak was planted in Franklin Square.
In Utica, New York, 30 veterans of the War of 1812 joined in a parade — along with a couple of Napoleon’s soldiers for good measure. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
August 14, Monday: Henry Stephens Randall died at the age of 66 at his residence in Cortland, New York after years of bad health. The body would be placed in the Cortland Rural Cemetery. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1877
January: A New York State investigating commission recommended abandoning the Chemung Canal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1878
September 30, Monday: New York closed the Genesee Valley Canal branch to Dansville because of falling revenues.
November 25, Monday: A Comite d’Etudes du Haut-Congo was formed for a Belgian advance into the Congo.
La corona d’Italia for band by Gioachino Rossini was performed for the initial time, in Rome. This had been written in 1868 when King Vittorio Emanuele II nominated Rossini for the Grand Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy, but had never been performed. The production on this day was by seven massed bands, plus 30 drummers.
On this day or the following one, in his 70th year, after long illness, Samuel H. Hammond would die at his residence in Watertown, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1879
August 20, Wednesday: John Humphrey Noyes sent his followers in Oneida, New York a message, renouncing in part the notion of “complex marriage.”
I should’ve kept it in my pants.
A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”
Butterflies and butterflies, (taking the place of the bumble-bees of three months since, who have quite disappear’d,) continue to flit to and fro, all sorts, white, yellow, brown, purple — now and then some gorgeous fellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists’ palettes dabb’d with every color. Over the breast of the pond I notice many white ones, crossing, pursuing their idle capricious flight. Near where I sit grows a tall-stemm’d weed topt with a profusion of rich scarlet blossoms, on which the snowy insects alight and dally, sometimes four or five of them at a time. By-and-by a humming-bird visits the same, and I watch him coming and going, daintily balancing and shimmering about. These white butterflies give
After August 20, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”
A grand twelve-acre field of ripe cabbages with their prevailing hue of malachite green, and floating-flying over and among them in all directions myriads of these same white butterflies. As I came up the lane to-day I saw a living globe of the same, two to three feet in diameter, many scores cluster’d together and rolling along in the air, adhering to their ball-shape, six or eight feet above the ground. [Page 830] HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 25, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
“Specimen Days”
A NIGHT REMEMBRANCE 9-10AM: I sit by the edge of the pond, everything quiet, the broad polish’d surface spread before me — the blue of the heavens and the white clouds reflected from it — and flitting across, now and then, the reflection of some flying bird. Last night I was down here with a friend till after midnight; everything a miracle of splendor — the glory of the stars, and the completely rounded moon — the passing clouds, silver and luminous-tawny — now and then masses of vapory illuminated scud — and silently by my side my dear friend. The shades of the trees, and patches of moonlight on the grass — the softly blowing breeze, and just-palpable odor of the neighboring ripening corn — the indolent and spiritual night, inexpressibly rich, tender, suggestive — something altogether to filter through one’s soul, and nourish and feed and soothe the memory long afterwards.
WILD FLOWERS This has been and is yet a great season for wild flowers; oceans of them line the roads through the woods, border the edges of the water-runlets, grow all along the old fences, and are scatter’d in profusion over the fields. An eight-petal’d blossom of gold-yellow, clear and bright, with a brown tuft in the middle, nearly as large as a silver half-dollar, is very common; yesterday on a long drive I noticed it thickly lining the borders of the brooks everywhere. Then there is a beautiful weed cover’d with blue flowers, (the blue of the old Chinese teacups treasur’d by our grand-aunts,) I am continually stopping to admire — a little larger than a dime, and very plentiful. White, however, is the prevailing color. The wild carrot I have spoken of; also the fragrant life-everlasting. But there are all hues and beauties, especially on the frequent tracts of half-open scrub-oak and dwarf- cedar hereabout — wild asters of all colors. Notwithstanding the frost-touch the hardy little chaps maintain themselves in all their bloom. The tree-leaves, too, some of them are beginning to turn yellow or drab or dull green. The deep wine- color of the sumachs and gum-trees is already visible, and the straw-color of the [Page 831] dogwood and beech. Let me give the names of some of these perennial blossoms and friendly weeds I have made acquaintance with hereabout one season or another in my walks: wild azalea, dandelions, wild honeysuckle, yarrow, wild roses, coreopsis, golden rod, wild pea, larkspur, woodbine, early crocus, elderberry, sweet flag, (great patches of it,) poke-weed, creeper, trumpet-flower, sun-flower, scented marjoram, chamomile, snakeroot, violets, Solomon’s seal, clematis, sweet balm, bloodroot, mint, (great plenty,) swamp magnolia, wild geranium, milk-weed, wild heliotrope, wild daisy, (plenty,) burdock, wild chrysanthemum. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
“Specimen Days”
A CIVILITY TOO LONG NEGLECTED The foregoing reminds me of something. As the individualities I would mainly portray have certainly been slighted by folks who make pictures, volumes, poems, out of them — as a faint testimonial of my own gratitude for many hours of peace and comfort in half-sickness, (and not by any means sure but they will somehow get wind of the compliment,) I hereby dedicate the last half of these Specimen Days to the bees, water snakes, black-birds, crows, dragon-flies, millers, pond-turtles, mosquitoes, mulleins, tansy, peppermint, butterflies, moths (great and little, some wasps and hornets, splendid fellows,) cat birds (and all other birds,) glow-worms, (swarming cedars, millions of them tulip-trees (and all other trees,) indescribably strange and and to the spots and memories beautiful at night over the of those days, and of the pond and creek,) creek. [Page 832] HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 26, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman in Philadelphia PA: “Specimen Days”
EXPOSITION BUILDING — NEW CITY HALL — RIVER TRIP Last night and to-night of unsurpass’d clearness, after two days’ rain; moon splendor and star splendor. Being out toward the great Exposition building, West Philadelphia, I saw it lit up, and thought I would go in. There was a ball, democratic but nice; plenty of young couples waltzing and quadrilling — music by a good string-band. To the sight and hearing of these — to moderate strolls up and down the roomy spaces — to getting off aside, resting in an arm-chair and looking up a long while at the grand high roof with its graceful and multitudinous work of iron rods, angles, gray colors, plays of light and shade, receding into dim outlines — to absorbing (in the intervals of the string band,) some capital voluntaries and rolling caprices from the big organ at the other end of the building — to sighting a shadow’d figure or group or couple of lovers every now and then passing some near or farther aisle — I abandon’d myself for over an hour. Returning home, riding down Market street in an open summer car, something detain’d us between Fifteenth and Broad, and I got out to view better the new, three-fifths- built marble edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions — a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight — flooded all over, faades, myriad silver-white lines and carv’d heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle — silent, weird, beautiful — well, I know that never when finish’d will that magnificent pile impress one as it impress’d me those fifteen minutes. To-night, since, I have been long on the river. I watch the C-shaped Northern Crown, (with the star Alshacca that blazed out so suddenly, alarmingly, one night a few years ago.) The moon in her third quarter, and up nearly all night. And there, as I look eastward, my long-absent Pleiades, welcome [Page 850] again to sight. For an hour I enjoy the soothing and vital scene to the low splash of waves — new stars steadily, noiselessly rising in the east. As I cross the Delaware, one of the deck-hands, F. R., tells me how a woman jump’d overboard and was drown’d a couple of hours since. It happen’d in mid-channel — she leap’d from the forward part of the boat, which went over her. He saw her rise on the other side in the swift running water, throw her arms and closed hands high up, (white hands and bare forearms in the moonlight like a flash,) and then she sank. (I found out afterwards that this young fellow had promptly jump’d in, swam after the poor creature, and made, though unsuccessfully, the bravest efforts to rescue her; but he didn’t mention that part at all in telling me the story.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1880
May 29, Saturday: Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan died in New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1881
August 10: Having had too much to drink, David McDowell of Batavia, New York got up on the narrow railing of the Upper Suspension Bridge and walked entirely across the gorge of the Niagara River –something which, of course, no sane and non-inebriated person would ever attempt– and did so without falling.
A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”
As I haltingly ramble an hour or two this forenoon by the more secluded parts of the shore, or sit under an old cedar half way up the hill, the city near in view, many young parties gather to bathe or swim, squads of boys, generally twos or threes, some larger ones, along the sand-bottom, or off an old pier close by. A peculiar and pretty carnival — at its height a hundred lads or young men, very democratic, but all decent behaving. The laughter, voices, calls, responses — the springing and diving of the bathers from the great string-piece of the decay’d pier, where climb or stand long ranks of them, naked, rose-color’d, with movements, postures ahead of any sculpture. To all this, the sun, so bright, the dark-green shadow of the hills the other side, the amber-rolling waves, changing as the tide comes in to a transparent tea-color — the frequent splash of the playful boys, sousing — the glittering drops sparkling, and the good western breeze blowing. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
“Specimen Days”
“CUSTER’S LAST RALLY” Went to-day to see this just-finish’d painting by John Mulvany, who has been out in far Dakota, on the spot, at the forts, and among the frontiersmen, soldiers and Indians, for the last two years, on purpose to sketch it in from reality, or the best that could be got of it. Sat for over an hour before [Page 910] the picture, completely absorb’d in the first view. A vast canvas, I should say twenty or twenty- two feet by twelve, all crowded, and yet not crowded, conveying such a vivid play of color, it takes a little time to get used to it. There are no tricks; there is no throwing of shades in masses; it is all at first painfully real, overwhelming, needs good nerves to look at it. Forty or fifty figures, perhaps more, in full finish and detail in the mid-ground, with three times that number, or more, through the rest — swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux, in their war-bonnets, frantic, mostly on ponies, driving through the background, through the smoke, like a hurricane of demons. A dozen of the figures are wonderful. Altogether a western, autochthonic phase of America, the frontiers, culminating, typical, deadly, heroic to the uttermost — nothing in the books like it, nothing in Homer, nothing in Shakspere; more grim and sublime than either, all native, all our own, and all a fact. A great lot of muscular, tan-faced men, brought to bay under terrible circumstances — death ahold of them, yet every man undaunted, not one losing his head, wringing out every cent of the pay before they sell their lives. Custer (his hair cut short) stands in the middle, with dilated eye and extended arm, aiming a huge cavalry pistol. Captain Cook is there, partially wounded, blood on the white handkerchief around his head, aiming his carbine coolly, half kneeling — (his body was afterwards found close by Custer’s). The slaughter’d or half-slaughter’d horses, for breastworks, make a peculiar feature. Two dead Indians, herculean, lie in the foreground, clutching their Winchester rifles, very characteristic. The many soldiers, their faces and attitudes, the carbines, the broad-brimm’d western hats, the powder-smoke in puffs, the dying horses with their rolling eyes almost human in their agony, the clouds of war-bonneted Sioux in the background, the figures of Custer and Cook — with indeed the whole scene, dreadful, yet with an attraction and beauty that will remain in my memory. With all its color and fierce action, a certain Greek continence pervades it. A sunny sky and clear light envelop all. There is an almost entire absence of the stock traits of European war pictures. The physiognomy of the work is realistic and Western. I only saw it for an hour or so; but it needs to be seen many times — needs to be studied [Page 911] over and over again. I could look on such a work at brief intervals all my life without tiring; it is very tonic to me; then it has an ethic purpose below all, as all great art must have. The artist said the sending of the picture abroad, probably to London, had been talk’d of. I advised him if it went abroad to take it to Paris. I think they might appreciate it there — nay, they certainly would. Then I would like to show Messieur Crapeau that some things can be done in America as well as others. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1882
August 25, Friday: Frank M. Brown of New-York, New York swam across the Niagara River from the foot of the always-deadly American Falls to the Canadian shoreline. The swim was completed in 4 minutes, 46 seconds. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1883
July 24, Tuesday: Captain Matthew Webb, a strong swimmer, had once been honored with a gold medal by the Royal Humane Society of Great Britain for having leaped from the deck of the Cunard steamer Russia to save a sailor who was washed overboard. On August 24, 1875, he had swum the English Channel. At this point someone had promised him $2,000 if he could survive the Whirlpool Rapids of the Niagara River. Jack McCloy rowed him out from the landing of the Maid of the Mist to the middle of the river. At 4:25PM Captain Webb dove from the rowboat into the river. Eyewitnesses say he completed his transit of the rapids in two minutes but was then drawn underwater at the vortex of the whirlpool. There are however conflicting accounts to suggest that what was glimpsed coming out of the rapids was the swimmer’s drowned body. At any rate, the corpse would be recovered four days later near Queenston, mangled, and would be interred at Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1886
January 6, Wednesday: The library in Rochester, New York’s Reynolds Arcade opened.
There was a bad blizzard on the Great Plains.
July 11, Sunday afternoon: Carlisle D. Graham, an English cooper (barrel maker) who had recently immigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had come to Niagara Falls, New York with a five-and-a-half-foot barrel of oaken staves and handmade iron hoops he had fabricated explicitly for the purpose of passing safely through the Whirlpool Rapids of the Niagara River. He had widely advertised that his barrel stunt was to take place on this Sunday afternoon. Inside the barrel his body was inside a waterproof canvas sheath except that his hands poked out so that he could grasp metal handles mounted on the inside of the barrel. The watertight lid was screwed shut, and the barrel was committed to the river. The barrel completed the trip through the rapids in 30 minutes. When the barrel was recovered downstream and the lid unscrewed, it was found that Graham was alive, but extremely sickened and dizzy from his jolting, spinning ride.
August 18, Wednesday: James Scott of Lewiston, New York attempted to swim the Whirlpool Rapids of the Niagara River and was killed.
August 19, Thursday: Carlisle D. Graham, the cooper (barrel maker) who had on July 11th survived an initial trip through the Whirlpool Rapids of the Niagara River inside a five-and-a-half-foot barrel of oaken staves and handmade iron hoops he had himself fabricated, made the trip again, this time with his head sticking out of the barrel. Leaving his head unprotected in this manner would turn out to create a hearing impediment.
August 22, Sunday: A Boston policeman, William Kendall, wearing a cork life preserver, made it intact through the Whirlpool Rapids of the Niagara River.
Carlisle D. Graham had offered $10 for retrieval of his barrel from the Whirlpool Rapids following a daredevil stunt. James Scott planned to take advantage of Graham’s offer but thought it would be a good idea to first get some practice. Making a practice jump into the waters of the Whirlpool from a location west of Thompson’s Point at the Whirlpool, he failed to resurface. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1887
A Civil War militia officer dissatisfied at being passed over for honors and adulation paid to have a monument to General Benedict Arnold’s injure leg placed on the battlefield at Saratoga, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1888
The State of New York took charge of all executions within its jurisdiction. It constructed its 1st “electric chair” with no purpose whatever to diminish the pain or indignity of the execution punishment for crime (this device would not be tried out on a human subject until 1890). COLDBLOODED MURDER
By this point perhaps 15% of the newborn males of the US population were being circumcised. John Harvey Kellogg (the breakfast cereal freak!) offered a “pain and punishment are what is to be desired” attitude in a treatise on treatment for self-abuse and its effects: A remedy [for masturbation] which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.
In Buffalo, New York, the Assumption Roman Catholic Church was founded to serve the Polish community.
The White Caps, an Indiana Ku Klux Klan offshoot, surfaced in the city of Rochester, New York.
Publication of the Reverend Justin Fulton’s WASHINGTON IN THE LAP OF ROME. SURVEY OF AMERICAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM
July 20, Friday: Moses Hartwell, nephew of “Universal Friend” Jemimah Wilkinson, died in Branchport, New York at the age of 91. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1889
The Spiritualist faction of the Oneida Community of upstate New York gained a majority on the Board of Directors. SPIRITUALISM
US canal engineer Horatio Allen died.
The Rochester and Brighton horse car line along Monroe Avenue in Rochester, New York was extended to the bank of the Erie Canal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1890
At the John Brown homestead in upstate New York, the body of Dangerfield Newby was reburied.
George William Curtis was appointed as the Chancellor of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York (he would still be in this position at the time of his death).
March 29, Saturday: Rochester, New York decided to permit horse cars to be retained on a part of State Street where property owners refuse to allow electric trollies.
Theo van Gogh wrote three times on the same day from Paris to his brother in Saint-Rémy, on Vincent’s 36th birthday: My dear Vincent, How happy I should be if I could go to you and shake your hand on the festive occasion of your birthday. Will it be a festive occasion for you, or is your condition still such that you are unhappy? What do you do in the daytime, and do you have something to do to divert your mind? Can you read, and do you get everything you want? Af- ter your last letter I hoped that you had entered upon a period of convalescence, and that you could have told me soon after that you were feeling better. My dear brother, how sad it is for us to be at such a distance from one another, and to know so little what the oth- er one is doing. For this reason I am very happy to be able to tell you that I met Dr. Gachet, that physician Pissarro mentioned to me. He gives the impression of being a man of understanding. Physically he is a little like you. As soon as you come here we are going to see him; he comes to Paris several times a week for consultations. When I told him how your crisis came about, he said to me that he didn't be- lieve it had anything to do with madness, and that if it was what he HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
thought he could guarantee your recovery, but that it was necessary for him to see you and to speak with you in order to be able to make a more definite statement. He is a man who may be of use to us when you come here. Have you spoken about it to Dr. Peyron, and what did he say? I have not yet gone back to the Independents, but Pissar- ro, who went there every day, tells me that you have achieved real success with the artists. There were also art lovers who discussed your pictures with me without my drawing their attention to them. The papers which publish reports on the exhibition are silent about the hall of the impressionists. And it is the best thing they can do, for the majority of those criticisms - well, you know what they are worth. It is beginning to be real spring here. This afternoon Jo and the baby were in the little square in front of Trinity Church. The shrubs are beginning to get green, and the trees show little green tips peeping forth from the buds, all bathed in beneficent sunshine, and the grey colour of the church against the intense blue of the sky was very beautiful. Jo and the child are very well. It is true that there is a little hitch from time to time, but nothing serious. The doctor who came this week said that he was a magnificent child, and he complimented Jo on him. You will see how funny he is in his movements. My dear brother, I am anxious to know whether you are feeling bet- ter, and to receive particulars about your health. Be of good heart and cling to the hope that things will soon take a turn for the better. I am sending you some reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt; they are so lovely. A cordial handshake, and believe me to be your loving brother. Theo
My dear Vincent, We were very pleased to receive your last letter, but we regret from the bottom of our hearts that you cannot give us better news. You will need an enormous amount of patience to surmount the trouble your condition must give you. At any rate there is a tendency toward improvement, which we ought to be glad of to begin with. Cold weather has always had some influence upon you, and so it's possi- ble that milder weather will put you on your feet again altogether, at least let's hope so, and don't tire yourself too much. How happy I should have been if you could have gone to the Exhibi- tion of the Independents. It was the Preview Showing 1, when Carnot 2 was there. I was there with Jo; your pictures are very well placed and make a good effect. A lot of people came to us and asked us to send you their compliments. Gauguin said that your pictures were the chief attraction of the exhibition - the “clou,” he said. He pro- HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
posed an exchange of one of his canvases for one of the Alpine foot- hills. I told him I supposed you would not object, but that on the contrary you would be very pleased to know that he likes your pic- ture. I like it very much too - that picture, I mean - it makes an ad- mirable impression in the exhibition. Seurat is showing a very curious picture there in which he has made an effort to express things by means of the direction of the lines. He certainly gives the impression of motion, but it has a very queer ap- pearance, and it is not very generous from the standpoint of ideas. Guillaumin has a good many things on view, including some very good pieces; de Lautrec has an excellent portrait of a woman at the piano, and a large picture which is very striking. Notwithstanding its scabrous theme it has great distinction. In general it is to be ob- served that the public is beginning to get more and more interested in the young impressionists; at least there are a certain number of art lovers who have started buying. The exhibition of Pissarro's work is over; a lot of people came to see it, and five pieces were sold. For the moment it was all that we could hope for. Bernard and Aurier intend to come to see your latest pictures next Sunday. Enclosed you will find a letter from Aurier. He will be back before long to look at the Gauguins, and to write an article about him. I received the money from your picture from Brussels, and Maus writes me, “As soon as an opportunity presents itself please tell your brother that I was extremely glad of his participation in the Salon of the ‘XX,’ where he has found many lively artistic sympathies in the confusion of the discussions.” Do you want me to send you the mon- ey? I shall hold it for you as long as you wish. I hope, my dear brother, that you will be able to give us a more sat- isfactory report on your health very soon. If only you could see your little namesake you would feel happier. Try to find out from Dr. Pey- ron whether he sees any danger in your coming to Paris as soon as you have recovered from this crisis. Jo gives you her kindest re- gards, and joins me in expressing best wishes for your prompt recov- ery. A cordial handshake. Theo
Dear Vincent, Among all the letters from brothers and sisters which you will re- ceive tomorrow, mine may not be wanting to wish you the best of luck, which I do at the same time on behalf of your little namesake, who cannot do so very well for himself as yet. What he does do is HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
look at Uncle Vincent's pictures with a good deal of interest - the tree in blossom especially, which is hanging over his bed, seems to enthrall him - and further the Rembrandt, although I cannot assert confidently that it is not the gilt frame which attracts him in the latter case. I am happy to say he is growing well, and we long to show him to you. But being a father and a mother is quite an art - perhaps be- cause I had to learn to get used to so many things in the course of that one year - for I never heard other people speak of it in the same way - they had a baby and then everything was all right and things straightened themselves out of their own accord - but it's not like that at all with me. What amazes me most is that such a little child has so much of a personality, against which you are utterly power- less. Now and then he looks at me as if he wanted to say, “What are you doing to me? - I know much more about things than you do.” His are the eyes of an adult and then with a lot of expression. Is it possi- ble that he has the makings of a philosopher? He does not allow his mother much leisure, but I managed to escape for a little while at the opening of the Independents to see your pic- tures there - there was a seat directly in front of them, and while Theo was talking to all sorts of people I sat there for a whole fifteen minutes enjoying the delicious coolness and freshness of the “Un- dergrowth” - it's as though I knew this spot, and had been there sev- eral times - I'm so fond of it. Here is the height of summer - indescribably hot - and I dread the hot days yet to come. I know it sounds a bit like sacrilege now that there is that fine delicate haze of green all over the trees, but I prefer winter after all. I shall have to close this letter in a hurry, for Theo is waiting for it. With best wishes, Affectionately yours, Jo HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
August 6, Wednesday: New York introduced the electric chair for capital punishment. At Auburn State Prison at 6:00AM on this day it was used for the 1st time, to officiously murder one William Kemmler of Buffalo, who had whacked his common-law wife with a hatchet. It was hoped that electrocution by alternating current would be somewhat more humane than hanging, although Kemmler’s lawyers appealed, terming such a manner of death to be both cruel and unusual. George Westinghouse, Jr., a backers of AC current, supported the convict’s appeal, while Thomas Edison, a backer of the rival direct current, plumped for the use of Westinghouse’s AC in the execution (we presume that Edison’s intent was to demonstrate that our nation should standardize on the safer DC — and thus make him an even richer inventor).
After Westinghouse’s AC had been fed to him for 17 seconds, the badly burned Kemmler was noticeably still alive — but the supply had been depleted. After allowing the generator to charge up again, an attempt was made to stop the man’s moaning, this time with the voltage increased to 2,000 volts. After the AC had been on for more than a minute, smoke was rising from Kemmler’s head and the stench of burning flesh made it obvious that the convict had indeed passed on.
Elsewhere in the state of New York on this day, “Cy” Young was pitching his 1st major-league baseball game. SPORTS
September: Elmira, New York began electric trolley service, along Maple Avenue.
November 4, Tuesday: Rochester, New York’s Lake Avenue electric trolley line began operations.
November 15, Saturday: At this point in the Wall Street panic, C.M. Whitney & Company, Gallaudet & Company, and Decker Howell & Company, all of New York, had failed, as well as Barker Brothers, a Philadelphia company. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
December 18, Thursday: Radio pioneer Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in New-York (but, at the time this was just another baby).
The world’s initial electric subway system and deep level tube railway, the City and South London Railway from Stockwell to William Street, opened to the public.
At a private event in honor of Joseph Joachim at the Hochschule für Ausübende Tonkunst in Berlin, with String Quartet no.2 being performed for the initial time, when Joachim attempted to offer was to improve the piece, the composer Carl Nielsen ever so politely refrained from engaging in such discussion.
Professor Joseph Leidy had visited several times the establishment of a Mr. John Ernst Worrell Keely who claimed to have devised a new motor of extraordinary force, termed a “hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacue- engine,” that seemed to be able to run in his house at 1422 North 20th Street in Philadelphia without fuel other than water and air and which any day now might be turned to some useful purpose such as alleviating drudgery while providing humankind with ample leisure time in which they might develop their talents. The Keely Motor Company had since 1872 burned its way through almost a hundred millions of (today’s) investor dollars. On this day Professor Leidy endorsed this project, writing on his card to a friend “Keely appeared to me to have command of some power previously unknown.”
December 24, Wednesday: Buffalo, New York began permanent electric trolley service with its Main Street line. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1893
Rochester, New York’s Clinton Avenue was extended south across the Erie Canal, to the city line. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1894
August 11, day: The cornerstone of Rochester, New York’s Central Police Station was laid.
August 14, day: Electric trolley service began in Canandaigua, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1897
In Rochester, New York, the Law and Order Society generated grand jury indictments and bench warrants were issued to baseball players for violating local laws against playing on Sunday. SPORTS HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1898
The US Army began improvements on the Minnesota Canal.
When the costs on the as-yet-uncompleted 2d enlargement of the Erie Canal reached $9,000,000, the New York assembly passed a stop law halting this construction. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1900
As Rochester, New York’s population reached 163,000, a little under 3,000 births were recorded during this year.
The Canada Steamships Lines’ steamboat Kingston went into service on Lake Ontario, connecting Rochester with Ontario.
Eastman Kodak introduced the Brownie camera. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1901
In upstate New York, to meet a rising demand for power, the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power & Manufacturing Company began an expansion program, building a 2d powerhouse and enlarging its Hydraulic Canal.
February 22, day: Governor Theodore Roosevelt visited Buffalo, New York to attend the dedication at the Sixty-Fifth Regiment Armory of a memorial to those who had died of malaria as a result of the Spanish American War. He then addressed the local Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).
October 24: On her 46th birthday, needing to repay a loan on her ranch in Texas, Mrs. Annie Edson Taylor climbed into a barrel and went over the Niagara Falls. She was a widow and schoolteacher weighing in at 160 pounds. Her barrel was constructed of white Kentucky oak staves held together with seven steel hoops. It was 22 inches in diameter at the head, 34 inches in diameter in the middle and 15 inches in diameter at the foot. It was four and a half feet long. For ballast a 100-200 pound anvil was placed at the barrel’s bottom. Mrs. Taylor began her trip from the north side of Little Grass Island situated just off of the American side of the Niagara River upstream of Goat Island. She was dressed in a long black dress and a flowery hat. About 600 feet from shore Mrs. Taylor climbed into her barrel, standing on the anvil. The spaces around her were packed with a small mattress and wadding, and the lid was screwed down. A bicycle pump was used to pressurize the air inside the barrel to 30 pounds per square inch. At 4:05PM the barrel was released and drifted toward the Canadian side before going over the Horseshoe Falls. It wasn’t until 4:40PM that rescuers could get close enough to the barrel along the Canadian shore to cut the top away and let her out. Upon emerging, Mrs. Taylor commented “Nobody ought ever do that again.”
Following this stunt which had brought only slight cuts and bruises, for the remainder of her life Mrs. Taylor would be able to support herself meagerly by posing for photographs with tourists. Upon her demise she would be buried in Niagara Falls, New York in the stunters’ section of Oakwood Cemetery. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1905
In Buffalo, Richard J. Garrity began operating two Erie Canal boats in the lumber trade (his young son, future author Richard G. Garrity, was accompanying him).
Construction began on the New York State Barge Canal, at Waterford, on the north side of the Mohawk River.
The New York legislature authorized the Cayuga and Seneca Canal of the New York Barge Canal System. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1906
March 13, Tuesday: Susan Brownell Anthony died of heart failure at her home in Rochester, New York at the age of 86. Her body would be placed in the Mt. Hope Cemetery.
June: Construction was begun on the Schoelkopf Bridge over the Hydraulic Canal at Niagara Falls. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1907
The Tonawanda, New York High School basketball team defeated the other high school teams and eventually took on college teams such as those of Keuka College and Yale University varsity. It even managed to score 38 points against its opponent’s 43 in a match against a professional team, the German Orioles of Buffalo. SPORTS
September: Contract 12 was awarded to Stewart-Kerbaugh-Shanley to dredge a channel from Oneida Lake to Mosquito Point on New York’s Seneca River, for the Barge Canal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1908
Work began on the portion of the Barge Canal between Oneida Lake and Mosquito Point, on the New York’s Seneca River.
The Schoelkopf Bridge over the Hydraulic Canal at Niagara Falls was completed.
State senator George F. Argetsinger of Rochester sponsored a bill to require New York to turn abandoned canal rights-of-way over to its municipalities (the bill would fail). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1909
The New York legislature voted to improve the state’s canal system from the junction of the Seneca and Clyde rivers to Cayuga Lake (the Cayuga Canal) and from there to Seneca Falls (the Seneca Canal).
Parcels of land adjoining the State’s canal terminal property on the west side of Baldwinsville were purchased to be the site for State-operated drydocks for its Barge Canal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1910
July 24, Sunday: New York awarded a $24,750 contract to the Sherman-Stalter Company to repair Dam #1 and a fish ladder on the Cayuga and Seneca Canal at Cayuga.
November 8, Tuesday: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who regarded war with Japan as inevitable, was elected to the New York Senate. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1911
New York Senator George F. Argetsinger and Assemblyman Frank A. Waters secured legislation allowing cities to have the first chance to purchase abandoned canal rights-of-way at an appraised price fixed by the State Board of Canals.
Construction of the Barge Canal prism between Three Rivers and Baldwinsville was nearly complete. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1913
January 11, Saturday: New York’s 13th Auto Show was featuring the initial sedan type car, the “Hudson” (gotta have one of those).
New York signed a $1,171,914 contract with the Larkin & Sangster Company to construct a dam and locks for the Seneca and Cayuga Canal at Seneca Falls.
The final run of the final horse-drawn streetcar on the streets of Paris (henceforward all this would be electric, and horseshit-free). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1914
February 24, Tuesday: New York contracted with the Sherman-Stalter Company to dredge the Seneca River between Demont’s bridge and Waterloo, at a cost of $948,530, as part of the Cayuga and Seneca Canal project. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1915
New York’s Barge Canal’s Waterford Flight was completed.
April 15, Thursday: Armenian refugees from villages surrounding the city of Van arrived and notified the inhabitants that 80 villages in Van Province were already obliterated and that 24,000 Armenians had been killed in three days. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
In Petrograd, Alyksandr Skryabin played the final recital of his life.
While at an internment camp at Ruhleben, Germany, Ernest MacMillan completed the oratorio England: an Ode and sent it to his examiners for the DMus at Oxford. WORLD WAR I
El amor brujo, a ballet by Manuel de Falla to a story by Martínez Sierra, was performed for the initial time, at the Teatro Lara, Madrid. It received a mixed response.
New York’s Barge Canal’s Lower Aqueduct at Crescent was demolished, in preparation for the opening of the new section between Waterford and Rexford, set for the following month.
August: The portion of New York’s Barge Canal between Mosquito Point, on the Seneca River, and Oneida Lake was completed, including Lock #23. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1916
A polio epidemic struck 28,767 Americans of whom some 6,000 would die (2,000 in the state of New York alone).
“Nathan’s” was founded on the boardwalk of Coney Island when Nathan Handwerker took the advice of some former coworkers (a singing waiter Eddie Cantor and his pianist Jimmy Durante), and undercut the hot dog pricing of competitors.
The Champlain Canal portion of New York’s Barge Canal was opened.
August: The right-of-way of the Hydraulic Canal at Niagara Falls was opened to the public, as a park. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1917
January 4, Thursday: Calhoun Doty Geiger was born in Jacksonville, Florida.147
On the first day of New York’s legislative session, a bill was introduced to give women in the state the right to vote. FEMINISM
A Mr. Goppert of the German Embassy visited Enver, Talaat, and Foreign Minister Halil to convey the message that this “forced Islamization” thingie that was going on in their country –something that had no conceivable connection either with military exigency or with the security of the state– needed to cease instantly. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
At 5:45PM there was an aurora borealis, and then at 10:45PM a very pronounced one. “Notwithstanding the advanced phase of the moon, the whole northern half of the hemisphere was affected by it, and had the moon been absent the sight would have been truly magnificent. As it was, great beams shot up vertically and horizontally, the latter forming great arches, and the former appearing like searchlights. Frequently an immense area of the sky would become illuminated as if by a great cloud of mist, and the light would pass up to the zenith with lightning rapidity, appearing like clouds of light being wafted upwards from the N. horizon. The clouds were mostly greenish, like a gas-mantle, but the background of the sky was pale ruby.”
Our national birthday, Wednesday the 4th of July: The Centennial Celebration of the Turning of the First Shovelful of Earth in the Construction of the Erie Canal was held at Rome, New York.
Citizens of Paris celebrated our 4th of July with us as General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing received a gift of American flags from French President Poincaré. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY
147. The family pronounces its name with the G as in “go” and the EI as in “eager.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1918
The Lake Rice/Bay of Quinte section of the Trent-Severn Waterway opened.
The New York State Barge Canal was completed. Downtown Utica had been successfully bypassed. The Erie Canal dam at Tonawanda had been removed so that tug-pulled Barge Canal boats could transit from Tonawanda to Buffalo. Periodic flooding in the area had also been alleviated. Construction began of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Grain Terminal as a terminus for the State Barge Canal.
May 10, Friday: The Barge Canal bypass at Rochester, New York opened. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1921
Rochester, New York authorized a subway in the old Erie Canal bed. The canal bridge on West Main Street was removed.
Tonawanda acquired former Erie Canal property from New York State (part of that land would become Niawanda Park).
The motorship Day Peckingpaugh built in Duluth, Minnesota was transported to New York where it would be used to carry building materials on the Barge Canal. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1922
Maintenance shops for the New York State Barge Canal were erected at Pittsford, Baldwinsville, and Waterford.
To alleviate congestion, the Rochester & Syracuse Railroad interurban constructed a cutoff in the bed of the abandoned Erie Canal at Lyons. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1923
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal ceased commercial operation.
New York Barge Canal maintenance facilities at Baldwinsville, Pittsford, and Waterford were completed. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1924
September 26, Friday: Franklin Delano Roosevelt resigned as Secretary of the Navy in order to run for governor of the State of New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1926
Ernest Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES.
Rochester, New York annexed the Andrews Farm, Genesee Valley Park, and abandoned lands of the Erie Canal, increasing its municipal size to 34.76 square miles.
July 9, Friday: Mother Mary Alphonsa (Rose Hawthorne Lathrop) died at her Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1927
The Baldwinsville maintenance shop of the New York Barge Canal was declared unsuitable, dismantled, and moved to the Syracuse terminal.
Sigmund Freud wrote that: [I]n general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it —the present, that is to say, must have become past— before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.
I don’t know, but do wish I knew, the day and the occasion on which Freud inquired of fellow psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”148
March 5, Saturday: Irish opposition leader Eamon de Valera arrived in Rochester, New York to visit his mother.
March 22, Tuesday: The Norwich Sun printed an interview with Nuel Stever, a former boatman on the Chenango Canal.
Kuomintang troops entered and invest Shanghai.
Canto a Sevilla for voice and orchestra by Joaquín Turina was performed for the initial time, in Madrid.
148. “Was will das Weib?” Presumably this would have been during or after 1925, the year in which Freud treated her for an inability to experience orgasm during missionary-position sex. It seems relevant to point out that although the biographer of the famous man, Ernest Jones, has seen fit to make record of his inquiry, it seems not to have occurred to him to make a record of the princess’s response or even whether there had been one. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1928
Duce Benito Mussolini’s life story up to this point was offered to the English-reading public as MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, in a translation by former US Ambassador to Italy Richard Washburn Child. In this writing he comes across as a sterling character of impeccable patriotism.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to be Governor of the State of New York.
In California during this decade, William Dudley Pelley, a scriptwriter, son of a Protestant minister of Lynn, Massachusetts, had “experienced death” for seven minutes and made contact with an oracle. His oracle would guide him to become “the Chief” of a secret Silver Shirts Legion in California, the Pacific northwest, and the deep south, fifteen thousand to fifty thousand strong. The gazette version of this American Nazi movement would be termed the Liberation.
JEMIMAH WILKINSON Führer Adolf Hitler was hard at work on a 2d-volume sequel to MEIN KAMPF. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
“It is not by chance that the American union is in the state in which by far the greatest number of bold, sometimes unbelievably so, inventions are currently taking place. The achievements of a thousand racially questionable Europeans cannot equate with the capabilities of a thousand racially first-rate Americans.” — Adolf Hitler, 1928 HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1929
January: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as Governor of New York State. His wife Eleanor Roosevelt would serve as eyes and ears, for the inspection of state institutions.
March 12, Tuesday: Life being about more and more and more power, Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated that the state of New York build dams. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1930
September 8, Monday: Ku Klux Klan members in Westchester County, New York pledged their All-American support for Naziism. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1940
Rochester, New York annexed abandoned Erie Canal lands near Monroe Avenue, and property near the airport, increasing its municipal size to 35.25 square miles.
In a grandiose gesture, Ernest Hemingway attempted to pay his night’s bar bill at New York’s Stork Club with his $100,000 royalty check for the screen rights to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Club owner Sherman Billingsley asked him to wait until closing receipts had been accumulated, before cashing the check.
Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York was in receivership and was purchased by John D. Rockefeller. He would open it to the public in 1943. (The public would not be informed that this had been a slave plantation.)
Hulan E. Jack was elected New York State assemblyman for Harlem. In New York, Circulation of the Sunday edition of the Daily News approaches 4,000,000. In New York, Pagliacci is telecast from the Metropolitan Opera House.
Critic-author Irving Howe graduates from New York’s City College. José Ferrer makes his New York professional stage debut playing the lead in Charley’s Aunt. In New York, Archaeologist-historian J. Sheldon Fisher buys the market building at Valentown, near Victor.
76,465 people of Polish descent live in western New York.
In New York, The Smith family mansion in Peterboro, once home to abolitionist Gerritt Smith, is destroyed by fire.
In New York, Prattsburg doctor Arthur Limouze presents his restored Narcissa Prentiss House to the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church.
In New York, the state’s Tender #10 was given a new engine.
In New York, J. Ward’s replica of his statue “The Indian Hunter and His Dog, Hector” in Cooperstown was relocated to Lake Front Park. In Rochester, New York,the Italian-language newspaper La Stampa Unita changes its name to The Rochester Press and introduces features in English.
In Rochester, New York,130 buses are ordered over the next two years to replace remaining trolley cars.
In Rochester, New York,Wegmans food markets begin carrying frosted (frozen) foods. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
In Rochester, New York,The Cataract Brewing Company goes out of business.
In Rochester, New York,The Kendall Houseparty variety show, hosted by Foster Brooks, premieres on radio station WHAM, runs one season.
In Rochester, New York,The Reynolds Arcade building was air-conditioned. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1941
Samuel Hopkins Adams’s CANAL TOWN.
Niagara Falls, New York’s Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corporation purchased the uncompleted 1894 Love Canal for storage of its chemical wastes. The Aluminum Company of America plant, the largest remaining industry alongside the Hydraulic Canal of Niagara Falls, shut down.
Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.”
In Rochester, New York, 489 garbage collectors and street cleaners attempted to form a union and their employment was terminated.
Because it stood above the planned Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Castle Garden aquarium at the foot of Manhattan Island was closed and the more interesting and unusual of its denizens of the deep were transferred to the zoo in the Bronx (and later to Coney Island in Brooklyn). A preservation effort was begun — but meanwhile the wrecking balls removed the roof, upper stories, and other structures that had been accretions to the original 1811 fortress.
January 9, Wednesday: Joan Chandos Baez was born in Staten Island, New York into a family that would become convinced Quakers early in her childhood.
October 23, Thursday: Plain-chant for America for baritone, orchestra and organ by William Grant Still to words of Chapin was performed for the initial time, in Carnegie Hall of New York City (Chapin was the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney-General of the United States).
In Flushing Meadows on Paumanok Long Island, Senator Harry S Truman opened the 1st session of the United Nations General Assembly. For a time during the 1940s and 1950s, the Flushing Friends meetinghouse would be a favorite spot for families of the United Nations. A large, active First Day School would evolve and delegates to the UN would frequently attend Flushing Meeting to speak on aspects of their work. Friend Robert Lea, a member of Flushing Meeting, would host many of these delegates in his home. The relaxed atmosphere and hospitality of a home proved to be so attractive that when the United Nations would relocate to their new building on Manhattan Island, New York Yearly Meeting would open “Quaker House” nearby, as a place of quiet refuge in which delegates might meet for private discussion of issues.
Jewish emigration from Germany was prohibited. ANTISEMITISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1943
Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York was opened to the public (in the year 2002 this National Historical Landmark would begin to acknowledge to the general public that, during its period of activity as a farm, it had been a slave plantation).
The William and Roswell Randall Mansion erected in Cortland, New York in the 1820s was demolished.
In New York, the Caledonia State Fair skips the season because of gasoline rationing.
In New York, Civil engineer Henry Druding was assigned to Sampson Naval Training Center as a lieutenant commander, serving as public works officer.
The Catholic League for Assistance to Poland was organized in Buffalo, New York.
In New York, due to a shortage of heating fuel some plane-spotter towers are shut down, early in the year.
The demolition of the Sixth Avenue elevated line is completed.
Frank Lloyd Wright is commissioned to design the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s One Touch of Venus opens on Broadway. Baltimore-based Nash visits the city.
New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams marries Barbara Day.
Author Pietro di Donato marries Helen Dean. The ceremony is performed by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) sells its Blue Network to Edward J. Noble, to avoid antitrust problems. Noble changes the name of the flagship station WJZ to ABC, which will become the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Geneva: A 30-acre estate adjoining Glenwood Cemetery is donated to William Smith College by Mabelle Houghton Plum, John H., William R., and David F. Harris. Named Houghton House it will be used as a residence and dining facility, later as an art center.
Hobart College contracts with the U. S. Navy to establish a unit of the V-12 program on campus, ensuring sufficient enrollments throughout the war. Louisiana: Future Buffalo minister and photographer Willie B. Seals marries Clara Ellis in Alexandria.
January: The Albany, New York Office of Price Administration caught a number of butchers engaged in the black market. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
March 27, Saturday: Michael Tippett’s String Quartet no.2 was performed for the initial time, in Wigmore Hall, London.
A cable signed by several Soviet composers of standing arrived at Sergei Rakhmaninov’s Beverly Hills home, congratulating him on his 70th birthday.
The Army Chief of Ordnance reported in Washington DC that the soldiers were using a new anti-tank weapon called a “bazooka,” that was based on a “rocket gun” principle (every war they kill you a new way, and yet some people will say there is no such thing as progress).
395 British warplanes indiscriminately dropped 1,050 tons of explosives on Berlin over a period of 50 minutes. Unknown amounts of rubble bounced an unknown number of times. “Is the war over yet?”
The HMS Dasher, a US-built merchant ship originally named Rio de Janeiro and later converted to an escort aircraft carrier and loaned to the Royal Navy under the Lend-Lease Agreement, had seen service in the Mediterranean and on convoy duties to Murmansk. At this point it was in use as a Fleet Air Arm Training ship. At about 4:45PM during the hazy afternoon, in the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, between Ardrossan and the Isle of Arran, while heading for the port of Greenock, its Swordfish planes were practising takeoffs and landings when a pilot misjudged a landing and crashed into a store of aviation fuel drums and explosives. Violent explosions destroyed the Dasher in less than 5 minutes, its bow rising almost vertically before it plunged stern- first. The oil on the water caught fire. 358 died but 149 floaters were salvaged by dozens of small rescue vessels from Ardrossan. (The Dasher now lies upright at 310 fathoms. As the 50th anniversary of its sinking approached, the Royal Naval Association undertook to erect a memorial at Ardrossan.) TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS
The City of Guildford, an Ellerman Lines passenger/cargo ship of 5,157 tons, while enroute from Alexandria to Tripoli, North Africa carrying aviation fuel and munitions, was sunk near Derna by Kapitän-Leutnant Gerd Kelbling’s U-593. 68 crewmen, 11 gunners, and 46 passengers died and there were 13 floaters (U-593 would be sunk on December 13th in the Mediterranean by depth-charges from USS Wain and HMS Calpe; all members of its crew would survive).
United States Naval Air Facility, Natal, Brazil, and Naval Operating Facilities at Victoria, Florianopolis, Fortaleza, Maceio, Recife, Rio Grande do Sul, Santos, and Sao Luiz, Brazil, were established.
United States Coast Guard Cutter #85006 sank after an explosion off Long Island, New York. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1944
June 27, Tuesday: The Republicans met for three days in Chicago, and nominated New York governor Thomas E. Dewey for President and Ohio governor John Bricker for Vice President.
The US Army captured Cherbourg in northern France. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1948
October: In Niagara Falls, New York, a month after his 2d barrel ride, three creditors persuaded a bailiff to seize all the goods and chattels of William “Red” Hill, Jr. The three falls barrels owned by the Hill family sold at forced public auction for a total of $2,900.
When Aircraft Carriers HMS Theseus and Vengeance together with Destroyers HMS Corunna and Jutland participated in a military exercise involving a mock attack upon St. Helena with 30 naval aircraft (for purposes of the simulation, everyone understood, they were pretending that the island was some other island, someplace worth attacking), this must have been just awesome, at least for the islanders. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1950
February 4, Saturday: A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: The first electric portable typewriter was sold in Syracuse, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1960
The population of Boston was 697,197. The demolition of the West End was one of the first large scale urban renewal projects in America — unfortunately for the residents of the West End.
The old Syracuse, New York weighlock building of the Erie Canal was reopened as a canal museum.
“The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history.” — A.J.P. Taylor HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1970
A break in New York’s Barge Canal at Bushnells Basin southeast of Rochester destroyed one home and damaged forty others.
Boatman and author Richard Garrity retired after a lifetime working on the Erie Canal.
October 26, Monday: New York Governor Hugh Carey decided to relocate 561 additional Love Canal families. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1974
August 12, Monday: Phillipe Petitt conceived a highwire walk between Prospect Point Park in Niagara Falls, New York and the Table Rock at the brink of the Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, Ontario.
August 19, Monday: After a Cyprus mob killed our ambassador during hostilities between Turkish and Greek Cypriot forces, US Marines defended the American Embassy in Nicosia while the US Navy evacuated US civilians. USMC US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
The Niagara Parks Commission refused Phillipe Petitt’s proposal for a highwire walk between Prospect Point Park in Niagara Falls, New York and the Table Rock poised above the Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, Ontario. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1976
June 8, Tuesday: A proposal by Henri Julien Rachatin that he be allowed to wire walk across the Niagara River above the Falls was refused by New York State Parks authorities. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1981
June 11, Thursday: The New York State Health Department reported that ex-Love Canal residents were failing to exhibit any abnormally high cancer rate. Admittedly it did look bad, the publicity had been horrible, the public fear was epidemic, but see, this whole thing has been blown way out of proportion — unexpectedly, it has turned out that there’s actually no harm done at all when we build our homes and schools on top of seeping toxic waste! It’s OK, we just lucked out on this one. Who would have supposed?
An earthquake in southeast Iran killed 3,000.
Parliamentary elections in Ireland failed to produce a majority. The ruling Fianna Fáil party lost 7 seats, even though the Dail Eireann was increased by an overall 18 seats. Fine Gael and Labour would form a coalition government. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1982
July 12, Saturday: New York State studies showed dioxin levels in the Love Canal area that were dangerously high.149
149. A “dioxin” would be any chemical that includes a heterocyclic 6-member ring in which 2 of the carbon atoms have been replaced by oxygen, the most toxic of such compounds being 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin or “TCDD” which has a “toxicity index” of 1 meaning of course that no chemical more toxic to life on earth than this has at yet come to our attention. Chemicals of this sort have no known use and are never intentionally produced, so even when they were an ingredient in Agent Orange during the Vietnam War they were merely a contaminant, a by-product, rather than one of the intentionally manufactured herbicides. Dioxin is simply one of the things we are forced to put up with in order to live the death-defying life we choose to live (it concentrates up the food chain and never goes away, la de dah — on the plus side, it means we will never again be able to survive as cannibals). HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1987
BELOVED by Toni Morrison.
The Hudson Mohawk Urban Cultural Park established a visitor orientation exhibit at Lock 2 of the New York Barge Canal, at Waterford. HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
1991
When a Navy F-4 Phantom jet carcass was transported to a Schenectady museum by barge in this year, this transshipment marked the extreme terminus of the long period of commercial shipping via inland waterways such as the Erie Canal.
The New York Folklore Society began a survey of collections and archives in the state.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project New York State HDT WHAT? INDEX
NEW YORK STATE NEW YORK STATE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: March 31, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with