revolutionaryatlantic

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Was ever any Nation under Heaven capable of being happier than the British—our most invaluable Constitution; & the immense extent of the british Dominions filled with the most loyal Subjects in the World, one would think would make the British Empire the most flourishing & glorious that ever existed.  And so it must be, whenever that excellent Constitution shall be strictly observed & when that loyal People shall be treated like British Subjects.  But unhappy for us, unhappy for G-B. the rising Prospect of that Glorious Empire is obscured if not the View entirely & forever intercepted, by the Gross Vapours of Ministerial Ignorance or Villainy.  But gross as those Vapours are they may be dispel’d by the Rays of Abilities & Integrity; which I hope ere long will shine forth.

John Page to John Norton, 26 August 1768.

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Our All is at Stake, & the little Conveniencys & Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.

George Mason to George Washington, 5 April 1769.

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I think the fortuitous influence of chance so much more decisive of the success or miscarriage of statesmen's schemes, than the skill or dexterity of the most able and most artful of them, that I am apt to attribute much less to the one, and much more to the other, than the generality of historians, either from prejudice to their heroes or partiality to their own conjectures, are willing to allow.

John Hervey (1696-1743), 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second (1855).

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I think it is the mystery of the past that makes it so wonderful. We never can know quite enough about it. All legends are like pictures seen through a fog; it lifts and shows a glimpse, then as quickly closes in again. I always want to know what happened next.

Emily Post, The Title Market (1909), p70.

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Extract (by anticipation) from an Historian of the 20th Century, 4 February 1783.

The situation of America afforded the best hopes of success.  A divided Congress, unused to govern. and many of them giddy with their elevation, jealous of their Generalissimo (as the Long Parliament had been of Cromwell) and he no less jealous of them, an exhausted Treasury, ruined credit, spiritless, ill-cloathed, ill-armed, ill-paid, and mutinying troops, seemed to mark them out, and hold them forth, as victims to an offended and insulted Mother Country.  The Americans too began with justice to suspect the assistance of the French, and to conclude that the restless ambition of that people, rather than their love for liberty, had caused them to cross the Atlantic.  While the British army long mewed up at New-York. in conjunction with unnumbered loyalists, only waited for some spirited Commander, to cut asunder with their swords the chains, which the impotent policy of a deluded P--------t had forged for them, and once more to meet their enemies, and to conquer them. -- Horace Walpole

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My 2015 End-of-Year Heritage Giving Recommendations

My 2015 End-of-Year Heritage Giving Recommendations

2015 has been a curious year for heritage institutions, one that has generated fundamental questions about what they do and how they do it. We have seen the spectacular, the exciting, the innovative, the bizarre, and the inscrutable (sometimes all wrapped into one), which have sparked necessary, and long overdue, discussions of the ways we preserve the past–even, importantly, debates over whose…

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All Dressed Up, With Everywhere To Go: Plimoth Plantation and the Future of Public History

All Dressed Up, With Everywhere To Go: Plimoth Plantation and the Future of Public History

A month or so ago, a friend of mine and I sat on the front porch of Concord’s Colonial Inn, our regular place of refreshment, and talked about the reasons behind the steady decline of large, recreated public history sites like Historic Deerfield, Old Sturbridge Village, and Colonial Williamsburg. A pioneering public historian himself, who established the program at the College of William & Maryth…

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Their is a grate Petition to Yr Honr By Gumby and The old House gang for som meat if yr Honr Think Fitt of it

Simon Sallard, overseer, to John Carter, Virginia plantation owner, 4 November 1736. Copied from Carter’s Waste Book ms in the collections of the Huntington Library.  It is the whole world of a slave society, with all of its preconceptions and presumptions, fit into one sentence.  “The old House gang” is, of course, the enslaved men and women who served Carter’s house quarter, with “Gumby” as their (appointed?) interlocutor.  That their diet lacks meat is revealing enough.  That the language, from a barely literate overseer, is that of Augustan politeness, speaks to the broader cultural imperatives of that time and place.  But that they would put their request to Carter in the form of a “grate Petition” is much more intriguing.  For what it’s worth, Carter granted it and ordered more beef and pork for their regular portions.  

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Grave Truths: A Williamsburg That Is "For Ever England"

Grave Truths: A Williamsburg That Is “For Ever England”

We know there are graveyards large and small throughout Williamsburg, Virginia, that date from the revolutionary era.  There are formal cemeteries, like that surrounding Bruton Parish Church, and much more intimate family graves, tucked discretely behind colonial houses.  They represent the final resting places of the well-known (a signer of the U.S. Constitution, children of U.S. presidents and

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It is the nature of great events to obscure the great events that came before them.

Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (1884).

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All persons who undertake to narrate from hearsay things which are supposed to have taken place before they were born are liable to error, and are apt to call in imagination to the aid of memory: and hence it arises that many a fancy piece has been substituted for genuine history.

James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 2nd ed. (1870), 211.

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"My Servants Really Live Like Kings & Queens": Below Stairs Intruding Above Stairs, ca1774

“My Servants Really Live Like Kings & Queens”: Below Stairs Intruding Above Stairs, ca1774

Downtown Abbey and its highly problematic depiction of the experience of servants at the end of the era of widespread bonded servitude has tended to color the opinions of many viewers about the nature of such lives.  More important is the reminder that it can, and should, provide us with that servitude was–and is–a spectrum as expansive as the Atlantic Ocean, from slavery at the clearest end to…

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This morning Mr Sargeant and one Mr Morice attended His Majesty's Councill to present a Paper drawn up by them declaring upon their oath that They had heard a Popish Gentlewoman in Flanders say that she had heard Gaven (The Jesuit lately executed) maintain that the Queen might Lawfully kill The king for the violation of her Bed.

William Blathwayt to the Earl of Carlisle, 18 February 1680.  When it comes to history, context is everything.  The Queen in question is, of course, Catherine of Braganza, a Catholic, and the King, Charles II, whom was constitutionally incapable of not violating her bed (the exact number of children borne by his mistresses will likely never be known, but it would range in the dozens).  More important is the light this extract sheds on the intense fear and distrust of Catholics--and Jesuit priests, in particular (popular bogeymen of the 17th- and 18th-centuries)--that was an important part of Anglican political culture from the 1500s on.

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[R]ecovering the lost was at all events...much like entering the enemy's lines to get back one's dead for burial.

Henry James, The Sense of the Past (1917).

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"I will not force my daughter to marry utterly against her will": A Governor, A Planter's Daughter, and the Perils of Passion

The signature of Francis Nicholson.

Most people will probably agree that Francis Nicholson (1655-1728), by the time of his second go-round as Virginia’s resident governor in the early 1700s, was, to put it mildly, a complete basket case and in the midst of the crisis of his life in the winter of 1702-1703.  In the language of the 18th-century, he became “undone.”  And that’s saying quite…

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"America Must Fall": A Rhode Island Loyalist in Canada Takes Stock in 1786

A bit of sarcasm and a great deal of pessimism about the path that Rhode Island chose in separating from Great Britain, from the standpoint of James Clarke, from Newport.  Three years after independence, Clarke was clearly neither sanguine about the young country's future, nor accepting of its reason for going it alone.  

"I hope Prospects brighten at Newport and that you begin to realise some of the many Benefits which Independence and a new Constitution were to give you -- A whole Continent ruined to get rid of ideal Taxes -- Without a Friend, unconnected with Great Britain, groaning under the severest Burthens, deprived of the Advantages of Commerce, and forsaken by all the World are Evils of so extensive a Magnitude and in their Consequences so Fatal, that America must fall under its accumulating Pressure -- My attachment to our native Country is so fervent and sincere that I could freely give up my Life and Ten Thousand more if I possessed them could I restore dear Rhode Island to its former happy happy situation."

James Clarke in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to A. Coggeshall, Newport, Rhode Island, 5 February 1786 (Mss, Huntington Library).

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There is too much democracy in Massachusetts Bay. Virginia has no democracy in its government; Connecticut is totally democratical; and yet there is no colony so obedient as Connecticut. I infer from this, not that one government is better than another; but that, in every form of government, the discontented will be the disobedient country -- an engine of the tyrant, made to be as large or as small as he pleases.

Edmund Burke during a debate in Parliament over the American troubles, on this date in 1769.