John Adams famously described the vice presidency as “the most insignificant Office” ever devised. Less well known is why he said this or that there came a day when he revealed that the office actually mattered a great deal.
As vice president, Adams spent his days in the Senate, sitting in a chair, reading the proposed legislation, and listening to the senators’ debate. It was tiresome, boring work for a man of thought and action. “This Confinement will injure my health,” he wrote to his eldest son, John Quincy, in April 1790. After France became a republic and declared war on Great Britain, Americans, caught in the cross-fire, disagreed over the Washington administration’s official policy of neutrality. Writing to Abigail Adams on 19 Dec. 1793, John explained his role in foreign affairs as vice president:
“I am very apprehensive that a desperate Antifœderal Party, will provoke all Europe by their Insolence. But my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived: and as I can do neither good nor Evil, I must be born away by Others and meet the common Fate.”
John Adams letter to Abigail Adams, 19 December 1793
During his tenure as the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James’s in the mid-1780s, Adams tried to negotiate a commercial treaty with Great Britain. But the former mother country, able to trade freely with the disunited States, had no need for a formal agreement. By early 1794, John Jay was about to undertake a special mission to finally negotiate a treaty with Britain, but Democratic-Republicans in Congress were still pushing anti-British legislation to restrict trade. John confided to Abigail on 3 April 1794, “The Times are so critical and Parties so nearly ballanced that I cannot in honour, nor consistently with my Duty abandon my Post. There are so many wild Projects and Motions and so many to support them, that I am become of more importance than Usual.” Twelve days later, he wrote, “The Senate will now be called upon to show their Independence, and perhaps your Friend to shew his Weakness or his Strength.”
John Adams letter to Abigail Adams, 15 April 1794
A bill to prohibit British imports passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 59 to 34. In the Senate, the vote was as close as could be: 13 for and 13 against. It was up to the vice president to break the tie. On 28 April, John Adams blocked the bill, and cleared the way for Jay to sail to England and into history, successfully negotiating the 1794 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, commonly known as the Jay Treaty.
On 24 June 1795, John Adams once again sat in his chair in the Senate, and recorded the votes as the senators gave their advice and consent to the Jay Treaty by the required two-thirds majority. This new treaty not only improved relations with Great Britain, but demonstrated American independence from France. You can read more the Jay Treaty and about the ways John Adams shaped the vice presidency in the Adams Papers editorial project’s forthcoming volume 21 of The Papers of John Adams.
The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors. Major funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Packard Humanities Institute, and the Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund. All Adams Papers volumes are published by Harvard University Press.
When the MHS acquired the letters of Augustus Percival, the condition of the collection left a lot to be desired. The letters themselves were presentable enough, at least as presentable as we could reasonably expect 150-year-old documents to be, but the collection was a jumble. Letters were out of order; envelopes were missing; pages were separated, mismatched, or torn at a fold; some appeared to be fragments; and many were undated or partially dated (for example, with just a day of the week). Without better arrangement and description, the collection would be incoherent to researchers.
First, some background: Augustus Percival (1830-1883) was a mariner out of Cape Cod. He engaged in trade with China, Taiwan, South Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore, working his way up from first mate to captain of his own ship. From 1868 to 1883, he wrote detailed, multi-page letters to his wife Mercy (Higgins) Percival back in East Orleans, Mass., and these are the letters that make up the collection.
In fact, the letters are really more like a diary. As the days passed, Percival wrote and wrote, adding new pages as needed, until he came to a port or encountered a ship that could deliver the whole bundle back to Massachusetts. So each letter covers multiple dates and locations.
It was my job to catalog the collection, and it was going to take careful reading, content analysis, and physical examination—in other words, a combination of contextual and physical clues—to reassemble the letters and render them useable for researchers. Complicating matters was the sheer density of the material. Most of the letters were written on thin, fragile paper, and Percival made good use of every inch of every page, writing all the way to the edges on both sides.
Augustus Percival to Mercy Percival, Shanghai, 28 Nov. 1868
The MHS holds no other manuscript collections related to Augustus Percival, his family, or any of the ships on which he sailed. Between 1868 and 1883, he traveled on at least five different ships to far-flung locations in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. So I started by using the dated letters in the collection to reconstruct his movements.
With a rough timeline of his whereabouts, I could then look at each orphaned page and try to plug it into the narrative based on contextual clues. I could generally tell, for example, if a passage was written at sea or on land. Percival might also mention someone by name who was a crew member of a specific ship or an acquaintance at a specific port.
Although he wrote his letters over the course of many days, Percival typically started each new day on a new page. As a result, many pages that looked like they might be the start of a new letter turned out to be subsequent pages of a continuous one. Thankfully, he was assiduous about addressing and signing his correspondence, so if a page didn’t begin with “my dear wife” or end with “your affectionate husband,” it was most likely part of a larger whole.
Percival did number the pages of his letters, but his numbering proved to be unreliable. And even dated entries on the same page were sometimes out of order. For example, in one instance, he left his unfinished letter on the ship, started a new one onshore, then accidentally left that behind and returned to fill in a blank space on the original page. It was only when I wrangled all the individual manuscript pieces together and read through them chronologically that the narrative made sense.
Percival used various types of stationery—folded half-sheets, whole sheets, off-white paper or blue, even green—and different colors of ink. These kinds of physical clues might indicate that two pages belonged together, but then again they might not! When he ran out of supplies, Percival scrounged for whatever was handy. You could say that the physical condition of the collection, as much as the content, reflects Percival’s peripatetic life.
In a few cases, I resorted to using paper folds or rust stains to match sheets together. Based on the folds of two separate pages, I could make a pretty good guess that they’d been sent in the same envelope. If they’d been paper-clipped and that clip had rusted, the stains lined up. Sometimes it came down to piecing fragments together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Augustus Percival to Mercy Percival, “at sea,” 17 Apr. 1869
As you can imagine, this process was painstaking and required a much closer reading of the material than I’m usually able to do. It was ultimately successful, though; I was able to date all the fragments, reassemble all the letters, and fill in the gaps of Percival’s story.
It was also worthwhile because the collection is truly fascinating. Percival describes life as a sailor in more detail than we usually get in a collection like this, including crew politics, customs in various countries, encounters with pirates and missionaries, the Chinese opium trade, South African diamond mining, and much more. One passage about Percival’s fight to protect his ship from armed looters reads like a dime novel. He lived an adventurous life and made some remarkable friends along the way, like Abbie Clifford.
Augustus Percival died on his ship, the Thomas A. Goddard, on 14 Oct. 1883 and was buried at sea. He was survived by his wife Mercy and three children, Mary, Augustus, and George.
Known to her friends and family as “Clover,” Marian Hooper Adams was born in Boston, 13 September 1843, to Robert W. Hooper, an eye doctor, and Ellen (Sturgis) Hooper, a poet and a Transcendentalist. Clover and her two older siblings were raised by her father after Ellen died of tuberculosis when Clover was only five.
Clover married historian and writer Henry Adams, great-grandson of President John Adams, in 1872. They moved to Washington in 1877, where Clover was known for her wit and celebrated salon. She took up photography in 1883 and her work as a portraitist and landscape photographer was admired within her social circle. Although asked to publish some of her photographs, she declined.
After seeing Clover’s amusing portrait of her dogs Possum, Marquis and Boojum in “Three Dogs at Tea in Garden” recently, I wondered if she had an affinity for taking photographs of dogs. And the answer is yes!
The photograph that inspired this blog post: Three dogs at tea in garden, by Marian Hooper Adams, 1883-1884. This photograph features Possum, Marquis and Boojum.
Although her main subjects were mainly landscapes or portraits of her friends and family in various settings, dogs made it into these portraits ten times out of the one hundred and thirty seven photographs held in the MHS collection. In her two and a half year career as a photographer from 1883-1885, seven percent of her photographs contain dogs!
Her favorite dog to include in her portraits was Marquis, who appears in five of the ten portraits, although Boojum with three and Possum with two portraits are close runners up. What I find most fascinating about Clover’s dog portraits is their clarity. Portraiture in the 1880’s was becoming easier for the subject, as exposure, or sitting, time was down from minutes to seconds. But it could still have been up to 64 seconds depending on the time of day, year, and lens used on the camera. These long exposure times lead photographers to ask their subjects to sit very still or they must choose to take pictures while their subjects naturally repose, or rest. After viewing many of Clover’s portraits, it is clear she preferred mainly the latter and you can see why in this image of a young boy and dog in front of a windmill.
A blurred image shows the movement of the subject during the exposure time while a photograph was taken. And in this image where Clover took a photograph while Brooks Adams, her brother in law, was caring for a horse shows some very specific blurring.
You can see that the dogs would need to be specially trained to stay still for up to 64 seconds, which Clover may have achieved. Or the dogs may be used to being in repose with their human companions. I especially enjoy the images that look as if Clover captured a moment between the human and dog where they are relaxing with each other.
Dandy can be seen here relaxing while Betsy Wilder, beloved housekeeper from Clover’s youth, knits on a porch.
In the images which appear more staged, rather than at rest, you can see that the dogs are upright and either looking at the camera, or looking at their human companion.
This image is from a glass plate negative, displayed in positive as the printed portrait is much more difficult to see. The subject of this portrait, Boojum, is seen quite clearly at the feet of Mrs. Jim Scott, a neighbor who came along for a day at the beach.
Toto and Marquis are seen here comforting Miss Langdon, who is in mourning attire for her recently deceased grandmother, on the same porch steps which we saw Marquis playing with Henry.
Marquis is seen here relaxing, perhaps after a brisk walk, with James Lowndes. This may have been on the same day as the other image with James Lowndes.
Natalie Dykstra writes in her biography Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, “If Clover could be playful and mocking in her pictures, as with her “dogs at tea” photograph, a send-up of social convention she occasionally found tedious, she could also evoke sadness or an intense feeling of loss.” I do feel that although the subject of dogs can be whimsical, especially for photography in the 1880’s, that their human companions mostly evoke sadness.
The second and last in Clover’s “dogs at tea” series features Marquis and Possum. This one has a more natural setting and no white backdrop giving the image a feeling that the viewer happened upon this tea party that was already occurring.
Today, 9 June , marks the anniversary of a tragic day in the history of Worcester, Mass. and the surrounding areas. On this day 68 years ago, a catastrophic tornado swept across the county, causing massive damage and killing 94 people. The MHS holds a collection of 72 photographs taken by Boston photographer Alfred K. Schroeder in the aftermath of the tornado.
The statistics are staggering: 94 killed, 1,288 injured, 4,000 buildings damaged or destroyed, hailstones the size of baseballs, winds exceeding 300 miles an hour, debris thrown as far as Cape Cod, and over $52 million in damage (in 1953 dollars). The tornado lasted 84 minutes, mowing a path about 45 miles long from Petersham to Southborough. When it hit the county seat of Worcester—the second most populated city in Massachusetts and home to over 200,000 people at the time—the storm was a mile wide. Ten thousand residents, or 5% of the population, lost their homes that day. (Some sources put this number as high as 15,000.) The 1953 Worcester tornado still ranks as one of the worst in U.S. history.
The storm must have been a terrifying sight to see. When it first touched down, eyewitnesses reported seeing three funnels simultaneously. Among the hardest hit areas were the campus of Assumption College (now the site of Quinsigamond Community College) and the Burncoat Hill and Great Brook Valley residential neighborhoods. Other, smaller tornadoes were also hitting other parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire at the same time.
These tornadoes were part of a weather system that had moved in from the Midwest. However, forecasters had only called for severe thunderstorms in Massachusetts, so residents were taken almost completely by surprise. Because of this disaster and others, as well as technological advances, today’s meteorological warning systems are much more robust.
WorcesterTelegram and Evening Gazettespecial edition, 18 June 1953
Nine days after the tornado, the WorcesterTelegram and Evening Gazette issued a special edition dedicated to the storm, headlined in capital letters: “TORNADO.” This item is also part of the MHS collections. The paper contains 40 pages of pictures of the destruction, as well as horrifying personal stories. For example, a two-week-old infant named Charles C. Oslund of Holden, Mass. was killed when he was literally torn from his mother’s arms by the winds.
The Fujita scale by which we categorize tornadoes today was not introduced until 1971. Looking at the data, meteorologists have retroactively categorized the Worcester tornado as an F4, though it is generally believed to have reached F5 intensity in some locations.
See the MHS website for more of Schroeder’s striking images. The Worcester Historical Museum has also posted some terrific 1953 newsreel footage showing the extensive damage and clean-up efforts in the wake of the storm.
By Neal Millikan, Series Editor for Digital Editions, The Adams Papers
Transcriptions of more than 500 pages of John Quincy Adams’s diary have just been added to the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary, a born-digital edition of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The new material spans the period September 1801 through July 1809 and chronicles Adams’s experiences as a senator in Washington, D.C., and a professor at Harvard.
John Quincy Adams was selected to be a member of the U.S. Senate in February 1803, elected to the position by a Massachusetts legislature controlled by the Federalist Party. Taking his seat in October, Adams charted an independent political course, voting on issues as he believed they related to the national good and not simply to Federalist interests. This was most obvious when he voted for the embargo in December 1807, which sought to punish France and Great Britain for their punitive trade restrictions by prohibiting U.S. vessels from trading with European nations.
By supporting the embargo, Adams in effect voted against the Federalist Party, whose New England contingent relied heavily on merchant shipping for their economic livelihood. He was also supporting the policy of President Thomas Jefferson, his father John Adams’s political adversary. Jefferson, who had defeated the senior Adams in the presidential election of 1800, was the leader of the opposition party, the Democratic-Republicans. After the embargo vote, John Quincy recorded his reasoning in his diary: “On most of the great national questions now under discussion, my sense of duty leads me to support the administration, and I find myself of course in opposition to the federalists in general.” He went on, however, to clarify that he had “no Communication with the President other than that in the regular order of business in Senate.” Indeed, Adams recognized that owing to his personal stances on the main issues of the day, “my political prospects are declining.”
As his political career floundered during this period, his personal finances also received a setback due to the 1803 failure of London bankers Bird, Savage, and Bird. While this failure negatively impacted John Quincy’s savings, he was more worried about his parents, John and Abigail Adams, for whom he had heavily invested with Bird, Savage, and Bird, the funds planned for their retirement. To help protect his mother and father from financial ruin, John Quincy sold his personal property and practiced extreme personal economy. He moved his family out of their Boston home and back in to the small house in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he had been born. He recounted these actions in his diary, noting that while “I have practiced all the economy I thought practicable” he found to have “needed still more.”
There were, however, some bright spots for John Quincy Adams during these years. He and his wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, and eldest son, George Washington Adams, welcomed two additional children into their family: John Adams was born on 4 July 1803 and Charles Francis Adams on 18 August 1807. He also enjoyed his tenure as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position to which he was elected by the Corporation of Harvard University on 24 June 1805. He spent significant time researching and writing thirty-six lectures, delivering the first one on his thirty-ninth birthday, 11 July 1806. After that lecture, he proudly recorded in his diary that it “was well received, and could I hope that the issue of the whole course would but bear a proportion to the effect of this introduction, I should be fully satisfied.” The lectures were published in 1810.
For more on his life in this period, read the headnote, or, navigate to the entries to begin reading his diary. With this release, transcriptions of forty years of John Quincy Adams’s diary, from 1789 to 1829, are now freely available on the MHS website. In addition, the side-by-side viewer tool allows users to access images of the over 5,700 diary manuscript pages that accompany these transcriptions.
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 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission also support the project through funding for the Society’s Primary Source Cooperative.
By Darcy Stevens, Phd student, University of Maine, 2020 Society of the Cincinnati short-term fellow
“This native Kansan is going to the Birthplace of the American Revolution!” That was my first thought after I processed the feeling of honor of being named a Society of the Cincinnati fellow. I envisioned long satisfying days in the Massachusetts Historical Society archives then evenings exploring historic Boston. I’d snap selfies in front of Faneuil Hall and the Old North Church. I’d tour the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and maybe catch a ball game at Fenway (I’m not all nerd). At the end of my fellowship, I would have material for great articles and personal stories alike!
It was not meant to be. Like the rest of the country, I spent most of the last 14 months working from home. There would be no Boston, but thanks to the work of the amazing staff at MHS and technology my fellowship research could move forward remotely.
Readers will have guessed that I study the American Revolution. Specifically, I examine allegiance and neutrality in the Borderlands of Maine – Nova Scotia. My interest is in revealing how inhabitants navigated the contentious social landscape during this period. The Borderlands was home to Loyalists, Patriots, and Neutrals, soldiers and militiamen, Indigenous leaders and politicians. Their interwoven stories illustrate the complexity of living surrounded by friends and foes in wartime.
This was true for the inhabitants of Bagaduce (now Castine). When the British arrived in 1779 there were very few settlers. Patriot forces launched the Penobscot Expedition to rout the British, were soundly defeated, and the British held the region for the remainder of the war. In just a few months the handful the previously isolated settlers were surrounded by Loyalists from distance places, British, Scottish, and German soldiers, and their families. Their lives would become entangled and interdependent. There is much yet to uncover about Bagaduce and I am excited to discover what it will reveal.
While Bagaduce has received most of my attention so far, I have also spent some time examining Colonel John Allan. A Nova Scotian Patriot, Allan commanded the American forces at Machias and was superintendent of the Eastern Indians. In the latter role he worked tirelessly to secure an allegiance with the Wabanaki. He was convinced that without their support, or at least their neutrality Maine would fall to the enemy. His letters give the impression of a self-confident, almost brazen man, who wasted no time on deference and flowery composition. He was busy; he cut to the chase and didn’t sugar-coat the facts. I think Allan and I would have gotten along famously.
The MHS holds a collection of John Allan’s papers and since receiving digital copies I have spent many happy hours poring over them. During my research on Bagaduce and the Penobscot Expedition I had not come across Allan. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find a letter he wrote about the event. Allan reported he received a request from General Solomon Lovell, at Bagaduce calling for reinforcements on 1 August. Allan then detailed the many reasons he was not ready to sail for another nine days. On the same day he received a second message from Lovell asking him to “proceed with all Expiditon & bring as many of the Militia as Could be spared” Allan learned of British ships in the much closer Passamaquoddy Bay.[1] Yet, he delayed his departure for another four days, until he learned those British ships were only trade vessels. Still fearful of an attack on Machias when he finally set out for Bagaduce he took only one hundred men. This was two full weeks after Lovell’s first request. On the fourth day of travel Allan sees great billows of smoke, suspects the settlements were burning, decided he did not have enough men or provisions, and turned back for Machias. Meanwhile, Lovell’s papers are replete with his optimism that Allan was on the way. Lovell wrote that on 13 August he “every moment expected a reinforcement by Colonel Allan.”[2] But that was the day British reinforcements arrived. Allan still had not left Machias. The next day the last of the Patriot ships were captured or scuttled and the remaining troops went scurrying through the Maine wilderness.
Perhaps the loss was inevitable. The British had a vastly superior navy. Still, reading Lovell’s account next to Allan’s makes me wonder. We will never know. What we do know is that Allan felt no responsibility. In fact, he was decidedly put out by the loss, as if the affair was a major inconvenience for him. He opens his letter to the President of the Massachusetts Council by writing:
The Unhappy and Unparalled Defeat at Penobscott, has put this Department in a most Critical & Dangerous Situation, such as Requires the Vigelant attention for its Preservation—The Various objects I am Compelled to Turn my thoughts & Time to, will prevent my being so Explicite in my Communicating Matters as I would wish.
He goes on to complain of the effect the defeat had on the relationship with the Wabanaki.
The Dishonorable Flight (permit the Expression without Censure from a feeling of Mortification for the Disgrace brough on the Arms of our Country) of the Americans on the Penobscot River has given a wound to our Indian Affairs.[3]
Well, I said he was brazen.
Given the amount of work Allan put into wooing the Wabanaki, his complaint seems fair. What struck me, aside from his caustic statements, was the extent to which Bagaduce and Machias were entangled. At Bagaduce original settlers, loyalists, and British troops lived, worked, and socialized together. Their lives were obviously entwined. The same was true for the inhabitants and Patriot soldiers at Machias. Allan’s letter revealed how interconnected these disparate and distance communities were to one another and with the Indigenous communities of the region. This is an important point that I had yet to consider.
I still believe a close examination of these small Borderlands communities will reveal a great deal about the social landscape of the American Revolution. But now I am more mindful of how distant and seemingly unrelated events will impact my Borderlands actors and their decisions about allegiance and neutrality.
[1] John Allan to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council of the State of Massachusetts Bay. September 10, 1779, Machias. John Allan Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Collection.
[2] “Addendum To General Lovell’s Letter to Massachusetts Council.” Sept. 3.1779. As printed in General Solomon Lovell and The Penobscot Expedition, 1779. By Chester B. Kevitt. Weymouth MA: Weymouth Historical Commission, 1796. 120.
