By Laura Williams, Visitor Services Coordinator

As America’s first historical society, our institution has had the honor, privilege, and responsibility to build and care for a vast collection of letters and various other correspondences. Through gathering these items over the years, the role of the postal service in keeping citizens connected throughout history is apparent. Though it may be easier to maintain relationships in the digital age, the mail delivery service is still a vital part of society from rural communities to those without reliable access to e-mail or social media. It could also be said that a hand-written note carries a much more lasting impression and warm sentiment! The roots of the U.S. Postal Service as an American institution have played an instrumental part in our nation’s history, growth, and success.

Prior to the establishment of post offices in the colonies, “correspondents depended on friends, merchants, and Native Americans to carry messages.” [1] Mail could typically be left at inns and taverns for pick up and delivery, and eventually the Crown did institute a postal service for the colonies with Benjamin Franklin serving as joint Postmaster General. Franklin was born in Boston and had a knack for gathering and circulating news and ideas through journalism and publishing at an early age. Working under his brother James at The New-England Courant, and writing satirical pieces under the pseudonym “Silence Dogood,” he always pushed the limits on political correctness. Though he had been appointed joint Postmaster by the Crown in 1753, he was ultimately “dismissed in 1774 for actions sympathetic to the cause of the colonies.” [1]

Of course, following the American Revolution the U.S. established its own system as a new country. This establishment of the U.S. Postal Service by the Second Continental Congress took place on 26 July 1775.  Franklin revised the new organization and created an operational system from which our current postal service still functions today. [1]

Following Franklin’s term as Postmaster General was that of Ebenezer Hazard, this time under the U.S. Constitution. Before his appointment, Ebenezer Hazard was a Princeton-educated New York City printer and post office surveyor. In fact, he was a good acquaintance of MHS founder Jeremy Belknap, who described him as his “guide, philosopher, and friend.” In another interesting turn of events, Hazard was the first person elected a corresponding (non-resident) member of the MHS in 1792. Check out a letter between the two of them here. Next, Samuel Osgood, a 1770 Harvard graduate, was President Washington’s Postmaster General from 1789 to 1791. Samuel Osgood also appears in correspondences in both the MHS Adams and Paine Papers collections.

Many more important historical figures carried the title of Postmaster General and helped the service reach the present day. Without Franklin’s successful design and influence on the postal service in the U.S., it is quite possible that our extensive collections would have been impacted with longer delivery times or lost mail. Explore the Society’s extensive collections of papers and letters.

[1] “Colonial Times; The Postal Service Begins.” The United States Postal Service: an American History, Government Relations, U.S. Postal Service, 2020, pp. 2–4.

by Susan Martin, Processing Archivist & EAD Coordinator

This is the fifth part of a series about the letters to William and Caroline Eustis at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

When working with manuscripts at the MHS, I often read something unexpected that makes me stop short. This happened when I processed the letters to William and Caroline Eustis, a remarkable collection of letters by U.S. presidents, cabinet members, a first lady, the Marquis de Lafayette, and others.

The passage that caught my eye was: “The detention of the Indians as hostages is liable to the most serious objections. The most extreme case only would justify it.”

These sentences appear at the top of a letter from President James Madison to Secretary of War William Eustis, dated 8 September 1812 and marked “private.”

My curiosity was piqued, so I decided to investigate. I found the letter to which Madison was replying at Founders Online, a project at the National Archives containing searchable transcriptions of the papers of founding fathers. William Eustis had written to Madison the previous morning:

By the mail of this day I have only time to submit for consideration a suggestion which has been made of the expediency of detaining the Indian chiefs as hostages. If their tribes should become hostile it is in my mind doubtful whether they may not be useful with their influence among them; if they are not hostile detaining them will give great cause of offence.

To learn more about the historical context of this correspondence, I backtracked through Madison’s papers. I wondered what had prompted Eustis’ suggestion and whether it was carried out. One source led me to another and another, and I finally pieced the story together.

Ask someone what they know about the War of 1812, and you’ll probably hear of naval battles between the United States and Great Britain, the impressment of sailors, and the burning of Washington, D.C. But Native Americans played an incredibly significant role in the war. Many of the indigenous peoples, fearing the further loss of their territories to the expanding United States and encroachments by white settlers, decided to fight alongside Great Britain. The great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, for example, with his brother Tenskwatawa, led a multi-tribal confederation allied with the British.

When Madison and Eustis exchanged these letters in early September 1812, they were reeling from the devastating loss of Fort Detroit. Gen. William Hull, tricked by British troops and their Native American allies into thinking that his forces were outnumbered, had surrendered the fort on August 16. Hull was reviled as a coward for the act, and President Madison received frantic letters from white settlers who feared that “savages” would sweep through the entire area.

At the same time as the siege of Fort Detroit, an important council was underway about 200 miles south at Piqua, Ohio. Secretary of War Eustis had invited the chiefs of a number of tribes to meet with U.S. commissioners and discuss a possible treaty. Some accepted, but others declined, distrusting the promises of the federal government and fearing the meeting was a pretense for taking more land.

According to the Letter Book of the Indian Agency at Fort Wayne 1809-1815 (p. 170), the Piqua council convened “August 15 and lasted for about three weeks.” That means it was these chiefs Eustis proposed taking as hostages in his letter to the president on September 7. Apparently negotiations weren’t going well.

Madison, quoted at the top of this post, was reluctant, but he didn’t rule it out. He wrote back, “The opinion of Clarke at least ought to [be] in favor of it. Is that known?” Clark was none other than William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. He was serving as U.S. agent for Indian affairs at St. Louis, Missouri. Clark may have nixed the idea, or perhaps the risk was considered too great, because the plan was never carried out. I found no other references to it.

The War of 1812 ended with the Treaty of Ghent, which essentially returned the United States and Great Britain to the pre-war status quo. But the territorial rights of the indigenous peoples were abandoned at the bargaining table. The British troops withdrew, and American expansion continued unabated.

I would urge anyone interested in the history of Native American treaties to read this petition I found while browsing the Madison papers online. Submitted to Madison on 5 February 1812 by representatives of the Wyandot Nation, it’s a heartbreaking plea for the preservation of the tribe’s ancestral territory, much of which had already been ceded to the U.S. Hearing that they may lose what little land they had left, the petitioners wrote, “We, the Wyandotts, are now a small nation. Unless you have charity for us, we will soon be forgot.”

The Wyandots were forcibly removed to a reservation in Kansas in 1843.

I’m also reminded of the MHS collection of sketches made by Cheyenne and Kiowa prisoners in 1877. These men were held by the U.S. military at Fort Marion, Florida, for the same reason William Eustis gave 65 years before: to prevent uprisings. Though they arose from tragic circumstances, the drawings are beautiful, and you can view all of them online at our website.

 

By Angela Tillapaugh

This sculpture, located in the Reading Room of the MHS, shows Cupid sitting on the back of a moving tortoise. His wrists and ankles are bound by a single bolt of fabric and he looks off into the distance.  The artist behind this sculpture is the 19th century sculptor Richard Saltonstall Greenough, who was born in Boston and moved to Italy as a young adult to pursue a career in sculpting. Italy was a popular choice for expatriate sculptors due to the abundance of marble quarries and numerous skilled craftsmen.[i] It was challenging to study sculpting in the United States as most sculptures were utilitarian, such as tombstones and weathervanes. American artists, like Richard Greenough and his older brother, Horatio, were among the early artists who introduced Neoclassical sculpture to the States. Neoclassical art was born in Rome after the discovery of ancient sites like Pompeii in the early 19th century. After these archeological findings, there was a resurgence of interest in classical antiquity and many artists began creating works that emulated the art from ancient Rome and Greece.

This sculpture of Cupid is undoubtedly a Neoclassical work of art, which often used Greek and Roman mythology as subject matter. Greenough usually sculpted portraits. In Cupid and the Tortoise, Cupid is a portrait of Amy Shaw Warren. The portrait is based on sketches Greenough made of Warren when she was three years old. Neoclassical art often mixed portraiture with mythology, presenting someone in the guise of a mythological figure could help convey a story or ideas about them to a viewer. Cupid is an appropriate choice to use for a portrait of a child, as he is usually depicted as a baby or a young boy.

Cupid is often used in art to suggest the state of love between other figures in the work. A bound Cupid could represent someone’s dominance over love, or a languishing romance between two people. But here, Cupid is alone except for the tortoise. Perhaps Cupid was punished for getting into mischief which is another common story in mythology.  Someone could have tied up Cupid as a punishment and then placed him on the back of a tortoise to be sent home to his mother, Venus. Regardless, Greenough provides the viewer with no visual cues that could explain why Cupid is bound by the wrists and ankles and sitting on a tortoise. Instead, Greenough places the focus on individual elements of the sculpture such as the portrait of Amy Shaw Warren and the beautifully detailed tortoise.  It is the choice of the viewer to fill in their own interpretations of why exactly Cupid is being carried away by a tortoise.

[i] Tolles, T. (2004, October). American Neoclassical Sculptors. Retrieved July 08, 2020, from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ambl/hd_ambl.htm

 

by Susan Martin, Processing Archivist & EAD Coordinator

This is the fourth  part of a series about the letters to William and Caroline Eustis at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to read Part I, Part II, and Part III.

On 30 March 1813, Paul Hamilton wrote to his friend and former colleague William Eustis in Boston. Both men had been serving in the Cabinet of President James Madison at the start of the War of 1812 just nine months before, Hamilton as Secretary of the Navy and Eustis as Secretary of War. But by the time this letter was written, both had resigned.

I found an extensive biography of Paul Hamilton, particularly his early years, in the History of Higher Education in South Carolina (pp. 127-133). He was a South Carolinian, born in 1762 and the only one of his parents’ three children to live past the age of five. He fought with the state militia in the American Revolution while still a teenager. Beginning in 1785, he served in several public offices, sitting for a few terms in the South Carolina legislature before his election to the governorship in 1804. He was a rice planter and enslaver.

His elevation to the federal government came in 1809, when he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Madison. Less than four years later, Hamilton regretted accepting the job. He wrote this letter to Eustis while the resignations of both men were still fresh.

We rejoice at the degree of contentment which your letter discloses as having relation to your retirement to private life, in which state if happiness can ever be found on our earth, there alone is it to be met. Would to God that I had learned sooner the verity of this Doctrine, in which case, I would not have been tempted to leave my peaceful tranquil home for the possession of the place I lately held under the general government, the tenure of which (I have experienced) was but chaff before the breath of calumny whispering in the ear of Timidity.

A tortured metaphor, to be sure, but his bitterness is clear. So what had gone wrong?

According to the National Archives’ Founders Online, Secretary of the Navy Hamilton “was increasingly beset by rumors of alcoholism, lax record keeping, appointment of unqualified persons, and extravagant contracts.” Biographer Raymond Walters, Jr. does not mince his words, either, in his 1957 book about fellow Cabinet member Albert Gallatin. He calls both William Eustis and Paul Hamilton “amiable incompetents” (p. 251). Jeff Broadwater, in his 2012 biography of James Madison, says that “Eustis and Hamilton provided sectional balance in the Cabinet and not much else” (p. 147). President Madison apparently met with Hamilton twice to relay concerns about his management of the department and essentially pressured him to resign.

By all accounts, Madison’s Cabinet was a mess. Even Hamilton seemed to agree. In my favorite passage of the letter, he used another metaphor to describe the dynamics of the group, this one much more robust and eloquent.

In a field in which you and I once held a place, there is not much of Harmony. Ice, Oil, Vinegar & Mustard can never form a wholsome [sic] concrete, for any earthly purpose.

Now Hamilton found himself on the outside, and he resented it. With so much going on in the world, he was no longer entitled to privileged information and could only repeat gossip. Who would be appointed minister to Russia to negotiate the end of the war? His guess was as good as anybody else’s.

Hamilton wrote this letter from Washington, D.C., while he waited for the roads to become passable enough for his trip home. His next steps were uncertain. Madison had nominated him as Commissioner of Loans for South Carolina, but he was reluctant to accept. He’d soured on government, but admitted that the $2,000 salary would help pay for the education of his younger children. (He and his wife had eight children, the youngest of whom was only eight.) As he considered the future, he said: “We are creatures of contingencies, and justly has it been written that, ‘no man knoweth what a day may bring forth.’”

Ultimately, the decision was made for him. The U.S. Senate rejected his appointment, and Hamilton retired to private life after all. He died on his plantation in 1816 at the age of 53.

Hamilton’s tenure as Secretary of the Navy was not a complete failure. He is particularly recognized for the passage of the Act Establishing Navy Hospitals in 1811, which appropriated funds for the construction of the first permanent medical facilities for sailors.

For more on Paul Hamilton, I recommend this small collection of his personal papers digitized by the University of South Carolina Libraries. And of course, you can read the rest of this letter and other letters to William Eustis and his wife Caroline at the MHS website.