In previous Beehive posts, I’ve introduced you to several members of the Clarke family. Well, the Clarkes were related by marriage to the illustrious Boston Lowells, so the Perry-Clarke additions at the MHS also include papers from members of that family.
If there were prizes for the most prevalent 18th- and 19th-century Boston Brahmin names, “Anna Cabot Lowell” would have to be up there. Our catalog lists four of them, and that doesn’t even include married women or namesakes. The one I’d like to highlight today is Anna Cabot Lowell (1768-1810), a.k.a. Nancy.
Letter from Anna Cabot Lowell to Ann Bromfield, 3 February 1799
Nancy was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on 30 March 1768, the oldest of Judge John Lowell’s nine children. Her biological mother, Sarah (Higginson) Lowell, died when Nancy was four years old, and her father re-married twice. Nancy herself never married or had children, and died of tuberculosis on 18 December 1810 when she was 42 years old.
But her family connections aren’t the reason I wanted to write about Nancy today; her letters are just really entertaining! To give you a sense of her style, here’s what she wrote about her friend Betsey Lee on 3 February 1799.
She still laughs & Rants, is rational & absurd in the same breath, & after exhausting the powers of the English language finds she cannot express herself – in short is the same extravagant, good, charming, provoking girl she ever was. […]
I went to one play with her, the Castle Spectre, with which we were highly entertained. We were told afterwards that we ought not to have been […] but we unluckily suffered ourselves to be pleased before we considered the propriety of being so and have been honest enough to own it.
A prolific correspondent with a wide social network, Nancy was one of those people who elevated letter-writing to an art. Her friends included Ann Bromfield (later Mrs. Tracy); Eliza Susan Morton Quincy, wife of Congressman Josiah Quincy; and Scottish author Anne MacVicar Grant. The Perry-Clarke additions contain many of her letters to Bromfield—like the one quoted above—and the MHS also holds a collection of her correspondence with Quincy and Grant.
Nancy’s letters are alternately funny, mournful, worried, silly, and philosophical, but always intelligent and well-written. The gossip also flew fast and furious, especially when it came to who was “paying attentions” to whom. In fact, some of the gossip may have been too much for Anna’s niece, another Anna Cabot Lowell (1808-1894), who compiled her aunt’s letters in 1881. In addition to adding a few explanatory annotations, this younger Anna was probably the one who scribbled out some apparently incriminating passages.
According to Eliza Quincy’s memoir, “For intellectual gifts and exalted character, Miss Lowell held an acknowledged pre-eminence among her contemporaries in Boston. Her writings, both in prose and verse, are stamped with genius.”
Quincy’s youngest daughter, named in her friend’s honor, also had a way with words and became a published poet.
On 7 September 1842, John Quincy Adams took his seat on the 6 o’clock A.M. train from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. The weather was warm, with more than thirty people crowding onto the train. Among them were Robert Tyler and John Tyler Jr., sons of President John Tyler. When asked if they had spoken with Adams, Robert “answered no, because [Adams] had abused his father.”
Certainly, John Quincy Adams harbored no love for John Tyler. After former president William Henry Harrison died one month after his inauguration, vice-president Tyler assumed the presidency. It was the first time an acting president had died in office and the Constitution failed to provide clear next steps.
In Adams’ opinion, Tyler should have been “Vice-President acting as President,” but instead Tyler took the office. To make matters worse, Adams found Tyler “principled against all improvement— With all the interests and passions, and vices of Slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution—with talents not above mediocrity” (JQA, Diary, 4 April 1841). This extended to Tyler’s family as well.
John Tyler
“Captain Tyler’s two sons are to him what nephews have usually been to the Pope, and among his minor vices is nepotism,” Adams wrote. “The son John was so distended with his dignity as Secretary that he had engraved on his visiting cards ‘John Tyler junr. Private and confidential Secretary of his Excellency John Tyler, President of the United States.’”
Adams himself was no stranger to nepotism. When he had been a young diplomat, his father President John Adams nominated him for a diplomatic post in Prussia. John Quincy had long vowed he would never take a position given by his father. When he accepted the post out of duty for public service, he felt he had “broken a resolution that I had deliberately formed… I have never acted more reluctantly” (JQA to AA, 29 July 1797).
In Adams’ eyes, the same could not be said for John Tyler’s sons. The two men seemed to revel in their newfound power. “Robert is as confidential as John, and both of them divulged all his cabinet secrets to a man named Parmelee and John Howard Payne, hired Reporters for Bennett’s Herald Newspaper at New-York,” Adams wrote (JQA, Diary, 7 Sept. 1842).
John Quincy Adams
Just a few short months later, T.N. Parmelee would be dismissed from the paper for his “indolence and incompetence,” and move to Washington, D.C. to “hang upon the President and his friends,” as reported by the New York Herald on 31 Dec. 1842.
In this way, Adams’ views were confirmed: Tyler’s sons and T.N. Parmalee had little confidentiality to spare. These ethical questions of nepotism, pride, and public good raised the tension between Adams and John Tyler, exacerbating their public issues over slavery.
And though Adams predicted that slavery would ultimately end, he sensed that it would come at a cost. “The conflict will be terrible,” he wrote on 13 Dec. 1838, “and the progress of improvement perhaps retrograde before its final progress to consummation.”
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s digital publishing collaborative, the Primary Source Cooperative.
kkʷey! In part 1, we explored the life of Pial Pol Osunkhirhine, author of the 1830 Wo̲banaki kimzowiawighigan that is held in the MHS archives. Now we are back with part 2 because it turns out that Osunkhirhine’s learning book is not quite written in the language we at the MHS thought it was.
On ABIGAIL, the digital library catalog of the MHS, the learning book was categorized as a “spelling and reading book in the Penobscot dialect of the Abnaki language.” This description comes from Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages, an 1891 publication by ethnologist James Constantine Pilling that also resides in the MHS collections. However, Pilling’s categorization of Osunkhirhine’s native tongue proves inaccurate. My first clue that Osunkhirhine is speaking an Abenaki dialect other than Penobscot was his upbringing at Odanak.
Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages (1891) by James Constantine Pilling.
Abenaki does not refer to a singular tribal nation, but a group of various bands, including the Penobscot, living across Wabanakik (“Dawnland”), or what is now the northeastern US and southern Canada. As we learned in my previous post, the traditionally nomadic Abenaki began settling in various regions in the late 17th century due to warfare and displacement by European colonizers. Some Abenaki settled in present-day Québec and established the communities of Odanak and Wôlinak, while the Penobscot established their primary community in what is now Maine. And the Odanak, Wôlinak, and Penobscot communities were not the only bands of Abenaki in the region–many bands historically lived across Wabanakik but as a result of colonization, were gradually absorbed by the surviving Abenaki nations. Despite their geographical distance, the Abenaki dialect spoken by those at Odanak and Wolinak is closely linked to the Penobscot dialect, though they do have their differences.
My suspicions that Osunkhirhine is not speaking the Penobscot dialect were confirmed by linguist John Dyneley Prince’s 1910 essay, “The Penobscot Language of Maine.” The Abenaki dialect spoken at Odanak and Wôlinak as well as the dialect spoken by the Penobscot both belong to the Algonquian language family. However, residents of Odanak and Wolinak speak a dialect of Western Abenaki–or Canadian Abenaki as Prince describes it–while Penobscot is a dialect of Eastern Abenaki.
In an earlier 1902 essay titled “The Differentiation between the Penobscot and the Canadian Abenaki Dialects,” Prince explains that Abenaki and Penobscot are sister dialects that evolved from a common language, Old Abenaki. The consonant system, grammar, and vocabulary are largely the same between the two dialects. The biggest differences between them are found in the vowel system and intonation. Penobscot has a complex system of intonation and has almost a musical quality to the way syllables are accentuated, similar to the Passamaquoddy language. Meanwhile, the intonation of Abenaki is more monotone–much like the French language the Abenaki were exposed to in New France, later Lower Canada.
With confirmation that Osunkhirine is speaking Western Abenaki rather than Eastern Abenaki, I reached out to our wonderful library team here at the MHS and they quickly updated the listing in our online catalog. Now when you visit Wo̲banaki kimzowi awighigan in ABIGAIL, it categorizes the learning book and Osunkhirhine’s mother tongue as Western Abenaki.
This research experience reminds me that history truly is a living, breathing thing that we are all continuously still learning to understand, whether you are a seasoned historian or a new National History Day student. It also perfectly exemplifies the importance of researching deeply and checking your sources as you work on your NHD projects!
by Thomas A. Rider II, PhD Candidate: University of Wisconsin-Madison
As darkness fell on August 16th, 1775, 143 New England soldiers, of the colonial army besieging British-occupied Boston, quietly left their fortifications outside Cambridge and advanced into the mile-wide, no-man’s-land that separated the opposing lines. This ad hoc force included officers and men from all six regiments of Brigadier General John Sullivan’s command, an arrangement that simplified assembling the detachment but ensured most of its troops were unfamiliar to each other. Privates John Clark and Jason Russell, for instance, had probably never met prior to this mission. But before the next sunrise, their destinies would collide violently, leaving Russell dead, Clark arrested, and their comrades starkly aware of the confusing and dangerous nature of nighttime operations between the lines.
The men were headed to Plowed Hill, a position overlooking the British defenses at Charlestown Neck. After the fighting at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, the Americans had implemented a poor-man’s siege of Boston and Charlestown, constructing an arc of redoubts and entrenchments from Roxbury, through Cambridge, to the Mystic River. While colonial troops regularly patrolled between these fortifications and the British lines, sometimes skirmishing with the enemy, they recognized the need to dominate this area if they were ever to advance their siege works. By late July, soldiers of the Plowed Hill “picquet” occupied several fortified houses, only nine-hundred yards from their foe, to monitor redcoat activities and exert some control over the contested space between the lines.
Taking positions so close to the enemy at night and in silence was difficult but upon reaching Plowed Hill an officer managed to emplace Clark and several other men as sentries, fifty yards forward of the outpost buildings. Their orders were to challenge anyone they saw to their front. If, after three attempts, they received no countersign, they were to open fire. These sentinels had no idea that other Americans, including Russell, scouted closer to the British lines, further down Plowed Hill.
After peering into the darkness for several hours, Clark saw movement. He issued a challenge – there was no response. He cried out again and again and “snapped his piece” as a warning. One-hundred yards away, Russell and other patrolling soldiers heard Clark’s nervous calls but did not believe it was their party being hailed. Still, Russell laid down next to a tree. Clark witnessed Russell’s furtive movement just as troops manning the fortified houses implored him to fire. Clark discharged his musket, killing Russell instantly.
Seconds later, a sergeant rushed to Clark’s position, informing the “affrighted” private that he had shot a comrade, not a redcoat. Clark was arrested, but a court of inquiry soon acquitted him of any misconduct and even praised him for “doing his duty as a good soldier” – words that probably did little to assuage his conscience. The Americans had discovered that even in the absence of the enemy, duty between the siege lines could be deadly. They had many more lessons to learn before they would drive the British from Boston.
Brigadier General John Sullivan’s Orderly Book, 21 August 1775, part of the Revolutionary War Orderly Book Collection at the MHS. These pages record the proceedings of a court of inquiry into the death of Private Jason Russell during the Siege of Boston. This may be the only detailed account of this tragic incident.
Materials Referenced:
John Sullivan’s Brigade, Continental Army (Orderly Book, Winter Hill, Cambridge, July 18, 1775 – 27 March, 1776), Revolutionary War Orderly Books, Massachusetts Historical Society.
Letter from Alexander Hamilton to Angelica Church, 6 December 1787
I was recently thinking about Hamilton, the Broadway-hit musical written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and first performed in 2015, and wondered what MHS collection and archive pieces we have that connect to Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804), one of our Founding Fathers. To my delight, I found two letters from him to his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church (1756–1814). A paragraph in one of the letters that Hamilton wrote compares to words in the musical, specifically in Church’s song, “Take a Break:”
In a letter I received from you two weeks ago
I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase
It changed the meaning, did you intend this?
One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days
It says
“My dearest, Angelica”
With a comma after dearest
You’ve written
“My dearest, Angelica”
Fans of the musical will know that in this song Church is teasing her brother-in-law about his grammar, and that the score alludes to a rumored flirtatious relationship between the two. These lines from the musical have been dubbed “comma sexting” on the internet. In the letter from 6 December 1787 in the MHS collection, Hamilton wrote to Church:
You ladies despise the pedantry of punctuation. There was a most critical comma in your last letter. It is my interest that it should have been designed; but I presume it was accidental. Unriddle this if you can. The proof that you do it rightly may be given by the omission or repetition of the same mistake in your next.
Alexander Hamilton to Angelica Schuyler Church, 6 December 1787
This paragraph reads as lighthearted sibling banter, and in a letter from Church to Hamilton on 19 February 1796, she called him her “naughty brother.” Some jocular banter between siblings to show off their knowledge, class, style, understanding, and affection is plausible, considering both Church and Hamilton were known for their witty writing. In the 1780s and 1790s, punctuation, spelling, and grammar were not governed by the rules we follow today, and although spelling was becoming standardized at the time of these letters, a comma in the wrong place was common.
Miranda admitted to taking some artistic license when writing Hamilton. For example, Church was already married by the time her sister, Eliza Schuyler, met Hamilton and later married him. Thus, the musical’s story of Church and Hamilton falling in love at first sight but knowing they couldn’t marry, and Church letting her younger sister marry Hamilton—as the lyrics in “Satisfied” reveal—is not historically accurate.
Read more about Alexander Hamilton in the MHS collection and archives on this Alexander Hamilton Features page.
Portrait of Alexander Hamilton by an unidentified artist, oil on copper, 18–
I’m returning today to one of my favorite collections here at the MHS, the Perry-Clarke additions. One of the reasons I enjoyed processing this collection so much was because of all the fascinating people it introduced me to. One of them was Cora Huidekoper Clarke (1851-1916).
Cora was a botanist and entomologist, as well as a teacher, writer, and amateur photographer. Considering the rarity of historical material documenting the lives of women scientists, I was intrigued. Unfortunately, very few manuscripts created by Cora are extant. The MHS and a few other repositories, including Harvard, hold small collections of her personal papers.
Cora was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, but lived most of her life in Boston. Due to poor health as a child, she was educated at home until the age of 13, but soon made up for lost time. She began studying horticulture at 18, and one of her teachers was renowned historian and horticulturalist Francis Parkman at the Bussey Institution in Jamaica Plain.
It didn’t take long for Cora to make a name for herself in scientific circles. She was a member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society as early as 1871. She served as head of the science department of the first correspondence school in the U.S. and on the council of the Boston Society of Natural History; published papers in scientific journals, sometimes illustrated with her own drawings and photographs; led the botany group of the New England Women’s Club for 35 years; and, in 1884, was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And this is only a partial list of her activities and accomplishments.
Cora’s specialties included mosses, algae, caddisflies, and gall flies. She was so noted for her success in rearing gall flies that several species have even been named after her. Now, I studied library science, not any of your hard sciences, so it’s all a little beyond me, but I understand enough to be impressed!
Page from the Boston Society of Natural History’s Fauna of New England showing species of Diptera identified by Cora H. Clarke
Interestingly, even though Cora had the resources to travel widely, her focus tended to be local. In an undated typescript in the collection, she wrote:
I have always been more interested in studying the natural history of a limited and defined area close at hand, than in wandering to new and distant regions. […] In vain my sister tries to coax me abroad; “I have nothing to do in England.” “You can study the flowers.” [“]But I do not begin to know the flowers of New England.” Little Massachusetts holds overflowing riches in her generous hands.
If there’s a theme running through Cora’s writings (at least the ones I’ve seen), it’s the importance of appreciating natural wonders in your own neighborhood, even literally right under your feet. In the same typescript quoted above, she described the beauty of Boston’s urban flora, including plants growing in the Back Bay Fens right next to the MHS.
Photograph of the Back Bay Fens, taken by yours truly, 20 November 2024
I particularly like this passage, from a piece by Cora called “Friendly Flowers, or Scraping Acquaintance With Wild Flowers, by a Sub-botanist.”
Plants have this advantage over people, that by studying their parts, we can look them up in a book and ascertain their names, homes, families and peculiarities—have you not often wished that we could do this with people? Perhaps we see the same persons morning after morning passing our house or riding in the same car with us, and becoming interested in them in a friendly way, wish we could look in a book and learn their names, families, homes, occupations? We should doubtless learn things about them quite different from what we imagined must be the case.
Kwaï! Welcome to National History Day in MA 2025! Here at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the NHD in MA team is getting excited for contest season. In preparation, we have been brainstorming topic ideas that relate to this year’s NHD theme, Rights and Responsibilities, to share with students as they begin their project research. I wanted to use this blog post to highlight some MHS sources that could inspire an NHD project. Choosing your NHD topic is a very personal experience, and with November being Native American Heritage Month, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to explore sources in the MHS archives related to my own Wabanaki heritage.
My search for Wabanaki history in the MHS collections led me down many interesting research avenues, but it begins with the 1830 publication Wo̲banaki kimzowi awighigan, which translates to “Wabanaki learning book.” The book is small and fragile–only about the length of my hand with a blank front cover that is flaking and detaching from the binding.
Despite its delicate condition, I was so excited to find this learning book and I immediately had questions about its origins, particularly its creators. It was published by Crocker and Brewster, a Boston-based publishing company that published many educational works throughout the 19th century. But who was the author, P.P. Wzo̲khilain?
At first, it was difficult to find consistent and reliable information about Wzo̲khilain because he was known by many names throughout his life. P.P. Wzo̲khilain is simply how his name was transliterated into the Latin alphabet for publication. While attending school, he would go by Peter Masta, adopting the last name of his stepfather. But his given name was Pial Pol Osunkhirhine, or Peter Paul Osunkhirine. Osunkhirhine was born in 1799 and grew up in the Abenaki community of Odanak, meaning “to/from the village,” which is in present day Québec, Canada.[1]
The Abenaki traditionally resided in what is now the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In the late 17th century, displacement and continuous armed conflict between the British, the French, and their respective tribal allies, pushed some Abenaki to migrate to the St. Lawrence river valley and establish communities, including Odanak. And the Abenaki were not alone in seeking refuge at Odanak–the village was historically diverse, with as many as twenty different Indigenous tribal names connected to it at one time or another.[2] Residents even included European Christian missionaries and other colonists, some of whom had been taken captive by Abenaki in battle, but when faced with the opportunity of freedom, had chosen to remain at Odanak.
Just as there was a variety of people migrating to Odanak, it was not uncommon for people to venture outside the village as well. At age 22, Osunkhirine traveled 300 miles to Hanover, NH to attend Moor’s Indian Charity School, which was then operating as a branch of the more widely known Dartmouth College. At the charity school, Indigenous students were taught the liberal arts, sciences, European agricultural practices, and to read and write in English, but according to the school’s own mission statement, the purpose of Moor’s was “More Especially for instructing them in the Knowledge & Practice of the Protestant Christian Religion.”[3] Osunkhirine arrived at Moor’s in 1822 but left after a year due to a dispute regarding tuition payment between school administration and the funder of Osunkhirine’s tuition, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and the Foreign Parts of the World (SSPCK). In 1826, the SSPCK continued to pay tuition and Osunkhirhine was able to continue attending Moor’s.
While in Hanover, Osunkhirhine joined the Congregational Church of Christ and converted to the Protestant sect of Christianity. In 1829, he returned to Odanak and founded his own school, known around the village as the Dartmouth school, in which he taught Abenaki youth the English language and European agricultural practices, believing this would lead them out of the poverty that so heavily impacted Odanak. However, as an Abenaki man and a Protestant in a predominantly Roman Catholic region, Osunkhirine’s founding of the Dartmouth school came with many of its own challenges.
The SSPCK refused to provide long-term funding for the school at Odanak, claiming that its sole purpose was to support Moor’s Indian Charity School back in New Hampshire. Osunkhirhine then sought funding from the government of Lower Canada, but his attempts were blocked by a local Catholic priest who did not want Osunkhirhine preaching Protestantism. The priest would wait until the men of Odanak were away hunting to intimidate Indigenous mothers and prevent them from sending their children to the Dartmouth school. In response, Osunkhirhine rallied support from the chiefs at Odanak and once again appealed to the government of Lower Canada for funds to support his school. This time, both Lower Canada and the local Catholic priest agreed to Osunkhirhine’s school and his teaching religion in it, but only if he did not promote any one sect of Christianity above another.
Osunkhirhine was never deterred by the opposition he faced for his Protestant beliefs. In 1835, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions named Osunkhirhine missionary to the Abenaki. Three years later, Osunkhirhine established the first Protestant church at Odanak. In addition to his 1830 learning book, Osunkhirhine would go on to publish the Ten Commandments, Gospel of Mark, and hymns in his native Abenaki, as well as theological essays in English.
So now we have uncovered a glimpse into the life of Pial Pol Osunkhirhine, author of Wo̲banaki kimzowi awighigan. But when I began looking into the author’s background, I did not expect my research to lead me to even bigger questions and ultimately, a discovery about our understanding–or misunderstanding–of Osunkhirhine’s native tongue…
How did you enjoy the “rich mental feast” of Anne MacVicar Grant’s Letters from the Mountains? (Not ringing a bell? You have a bonus blog post to read!) I so enjoyed getting to know Mrs. Grant. It’s easy to fall in love with someone through their letters—what merits inclusion, what advice they give to one in need, how they comfort a friend who mourns, and especially the humorous and generous way they see those around them.
My only sadness in reading Grant’s Letters is the fact that she and Abigail Adams never met. We’ve all read a book or listened to a lyric that felt like it was written just for us. How badly do we want to sit down and chat with someone who understands us on that profound level? I have no doubt Adams and Grant would have been the best of friends.
Speaking of Abigail’s dearest friend, last time I promised that John would have the next pick. While I desperately wanted to pick a fun book that I would enjoy reading, in my heart of hearts I know John’s idea of fun has to do with the science of government. Thus, our pick is William Ellis’s translation of Aristotle’s Treatise on Government.
A page from the volume, featuring comments in Adams’s own hand.
What better way to get inside a person’s head than to see what sentences struck them and required underlining? Or to read where they disagreed and why? This is essentially a chance to pick John Adams’s brain. Seize it!
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding of the edition is currently provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Packard Humanities Institute. Major funding for the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary was provided by the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, with additional contributions by Harvard University Press and a number of private donors. The Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also supports the project through funding for the Society’s digital publishing collaborative, the Primary Source Cooperative.
On 22 April 1790, John Adams and Congress learned of Benjamin Franklin’s death due to pleurisy, a lung condition. Upon learning of his friend’s death, Adams wrote an imagined conversation between four historical figures, as they waited for Franklin’s arrival in the afterlife. Adams then filed it away and more than two decades later came across it while searching “among a heap of forgotten rubbish for another paper….” In 1813, he added to the bottom of the work:
“Quincy Nov. 24. 1813.
This little thing, was written at Richmond Hill, or Church Hill, where I lived in New York in 1789, in an Evening after the News arrived of Dr Franklins Death, and after I had retired to my Family, after presiding in the Senate of U.S. The moment when it was written is the most curious Circumstance attending it.”
This style of writing—the imagined conversation—was popularized by the Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata (b. ca.120 CE) and was utilized by the French writer Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757). The conversationalists in this imagined scenario were Charlemagne (747–814), the first Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; Frederick II (1194–1250), another Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a French philosopher, originally from Switzerland, whose novels inspired the French Revolutionaries and the subsequent Romantic generation; and James Otis (1725–1783), a lawyer and politician from Massachusetts and a friend and mentor to John Adams, who also happens to be one of my favorite pre-Founding Fathers.
James Otis, Jr., by Joseph Blackburn, 1755. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The conversation starts discussing Franklin and whether he had “passed the River,” perhaps meaning the River Styx, with Otis saying he had not and he cared not. Otis also says, “[Franklin] told some very pretty moral Tales from the head—and Some very immoral ones from the heart. I never liked him: so if you please We will change the subject. Populus Vult Decipi, decipiatur was his Maxim.” Populus Vult Decipi, decipiatur is noted to mean “The people want to be deceived, so let them be deceived.”
That sentence captures James Otis’s eloquence with words, as well as Franklin’s temperament. Perhaps John Adams should have been a writer, not a politician?
Then the speakers move on to flattering each other, then chastising each other for their faults. In turn, each repents, saying if he returned to earth, he would mend his ways and warn others against acting how he did the first time around.
Upon discovering this piece of writing in 1813, John Adams sent it to James Otis’s sister, Mercy Otis Warren, a playwright and historian. She wrote back, “The sketch in my hand in connection with some of the greatest actors who have exhibited their parts on this narrow stage of human action, is a proof of your correct knowledge of history and your capacity for comparing the ages of Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, Rousseau, and Otis, though in times so remote from each other, and drawing the results of their sentiments and transactions and the operation thereof on the moral conduct of mankind in our own age and in that of Posterity.”
In honor of Election Day tomorrow, I searched the MHS stacks for material related to elections. Unsurprisingly we have a lot! One collection I discovered tells the fascinating story of Charles N. Richards of Quincy, Massachusetts, who, in November 1864, traveled all the way home from Washington, D.C. to vote for Abraham Lincoln.
Diary of Charles N. Richards, 1864Photograph of Charles N. Richards from his obituary in the Washington Evening Star, 21 October 1918
Richards had served in the 13th Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War, but was mustered out after an injury sustained at Antietam. (He was bayoneted in the jaw.) In 1864, he was 23 years old and working in D.C. at the Senate Stationery Room, the department responsible for supplies. He was a fervent Republican and looked forward to casting his first-ever ballot for Lincoln.
Apparently there was some disagreement over his eligibility to vote in his hometown of Quincy because his mother had been living in Dorchester when he came of age. But when the Quincy town clerk sent him the all-clear, Richards started packing. Unfortunately, though many states offered absentee voting, it was only available to active-duty soldiers. So Richards was going to have to cast an in-person ballot in Massachusetts…about 450 miles away.
He set off on 4 November, recording every step of the grueling journey in his diary.
First he tried to catch the 6:39pm train to New York, but couldn’t even get near it because of the crowds. Everyone seemed to be heading north for the election. Richards eventually boarded the 9:30 train, but at Baltimore, he was told his car would be re-routed back to Washington. He had to get out and walk to the President Street Depot, but just missed the train there.
Two or three hours later, he caught a 2:30am cattle car to Philadelphia. For part of the ride, he sat on a pine board with nothing to lean his back against, and the rest he spent on the crowded floor of a passenger car. The train reached Philadelphia in the wee hours of the morning in the middle of a snow and hail storm. Richards hopped on a streetcar to Kensington Depot (changing three times) and arrived in time to catch the 4:00am train to New York.
He ferried into New York at 11:30pm, quickly devoured a meal—his first since leaving Washington—and crashed at a hotel for the night. He was so exhausted that he slept through a fire in one of the other rooms!
The next day was Sunday. Richards had a steamboat ticket, but there were no boats leaving until Monday evening. Ever resourceful, he made friends with a hospital steward, who finagled him a spot in his car on the 5pm train to Boston. The steward was escorting a number of wounded soldiers home to vote. When asked who they were voting for, they replied that “they voted the same way they fought.”
After changing trains in Boston, Richards finally reached Quincy at 8:30am on 7 November. His trip had taken a total of 59 hours. Every step of the way, passengers and passersby had discussed, argued, cheered, and nearly brawled about the candidates.
Unfortunately, it turned out the question of Richards’s eligibility was unresolved. Contrary to what he’d heard, the town selectmen were still divided on the issue, and the canvassing committee advised him to play it safe and not vote. Richards took their advice, but was disappointed.
It was really a severe blow to me. It was with great reluctance that I gave up the chance to cast my first vote for such a cause as the Union & such a man as Abraham Lincoln. […] I knew no other home [but Quincy], nor never had, nor never wished to, and now to be deprived of the privileges of a citizen, and cut off from the place I loved & labored for was mortifying in the extreme to me.
In fact, Lincoln won the town of Quincy, surprising his supporters and detractors alike. On his return to Washington, D.C., Richards learned the “glorious” news that Lincoln had carried the day and that “thanks to a kind Providence, the Election passed off in quietude & in order.” He fell asleep “with a light heart.”
