by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

Last spring, the Massachusetts Historical Society acquired a prescription recipe book kept by Charles Lyman Hubbell from 1880 to 1888. In this book, Dr. Hubbell, a physician of Williamstown, Mass. and Troy, N.Y., recorded his own recipes for prescriptions, as well as those he learned from other doctors and medical journals. It’s a very interesting (and sometimes amusing) window into late 19th-century medical history.

Here you’ll find treatments for a wide variety of conditions, organized alphabetically, including acne, anemia, angina pectoris, asthma, bronchitis, cancerous ulcers, catarrh, constipation, consumption, cough, diabetes, diarrhea, diphtheria, dysmenorrhea, dyspepsia, eczema, emphysema, epilepsy, gonorrhea, hair loss, hay fever, headache, heart disease, hernia, itching, neuralgia, night sweats, psoriasis, rheumatism, sciatica, skin disease, tape worm, toothache, and uterine disease.

I have a few favorites. If I look under “F,” for example, I find that the cure for “Feet – Fetid smelling” involves “a solution of Chloral in alcohol and water applied several times a day” or an “application of equal parts Belladonna ointment and glycerine.” One heading that was unfamiliar to me was “Chelsea pensioner,” which Hubbard apparently used as a euphemism for hemorrhoids. And I was intrigued by the page that seems to describe a treatment for “insanity […] cerebral inability & hysterical affection,” though the handwriting is difficult to make out.

Then there’s this:

The heading on this page made me do a double take. It reads: “Nervous, exhausted & irritable females. Hysterical headache, insomnia &c.” What, you ask, is Hubbell’s remedy? Well, I tried to make sense of the medical abbreviations and apothecarial symbols, but only got as far as: one ounce of calcium bromide mixed with four ounces of…something else. Whatever it is, I’m willing to bet it doesn’t cure this particular “condition”!

I was curious to know more about Hubbell, and I found a smattering of biographical details in published histories of his family, his wife’s family, and Rensselaer County, New York. He was born in 1827, the sixth of seven children of Louisa and Lyman Hubbell. He graduated from Williams College in 1846 and Berkshire Medical College in 1848. In 1852, he married Juliette Bulkeley (or Bulkley), with whom he had six children. And during the Civil War, he served as a surgeon for the Black Horse Cavalry and the 12th New York Infantry.

When he started recording the recipes in this volume, he was in his fifties and had been a practicing physician for decades, as well as a member of numerous medical societies. But he also had other interests. Appearing among the medical recipes are recipes for pickled cabbage, sausage, fertilizer, and harness polish (he was interested in horse racing and breeding).

I uncovered just one other story about Hubbell in my research: the sad circumstances of his death in 1890. According to correspondence digitized and made available at the Sibley Watson Digital Archive, Hubbell died unexpectedly the day before his daughter’s wedding. That archive includes a newspaper obituary of Hubbell and a letter by Elizabeth Sibley of Rochester, N.Y., the second page of which reads:

I have nothing of special interest to write, except that just as the marriage ceremony of Elbridge Adams and Miss Hubbell was to take place, the guests all arrived and everything in readiness, Dr. Hubbell went to his room, threw himself on his bed, and died, before anything could be done for him with heart disease. The marriage took place, only a very few friends present.

Was it not terrible? I can think of nothing more dreadful that could have happened, unless the Bride or groom had been taken.

Charles Lyman Hubbell was 63 years old. He’s buried with his wife at Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, N.Y.

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate

On 23 October 1775, Samuel Osgood, a militia leader who fought at the Battle of Lexington and Concord, wrote to John Adams with a military update. In one paragraph he mentions:

“The famous Waters Machine from Connecticutt is every Day expected in Camp. It must unavoidably be a clumsy Business as its Weight is about a Tun. I wish it might succeed [and] the Ships be blown up beyond the Attraction of the Earth for it is the only Way or Chance they have of reaching St. Peters Gate.”

What Osgood is referring to as the “famous Waters Machine” was the first submarine with recorded use in battle. It was built in Connecticut and used in New York Harbor against the British Navy and was called the Turtle because of the way it looked. The submarine was designed for a single occupant and would be positioned just below the water’s surface, with a pipe leading to fresh air. When the operator wanted to submerge, he would close the pipe and let the interior’s cavity fill with water, leaving enough space at the top to breathe for a few minutes. Propellers would move the submarine back to the water’s surface. Replicas of the Turtle can be seen in a few museums around the world; one is at the Connecticut River Museum.

The Turtle’s design was the work of two men—David Bushnell, who had graduated Yale College in 1775, and Isaac Doolittle, a clockmaker. While at Yale, Bushnell proved that gunpowder could be ignited and exploded underwater, and he used this knowledge to design underwater mines and torpedoes. With Doolittle, he designed a mechanically triggered time bomb and the first propeller. Combining these designs together, he and Doolittle created and built the Turtle.

Although the original idea was to use the Turtle to force the British out of Boston Harbor, the machine took too long to build, and the British had already evacuated Boston for Canada. Once the Turtle was built and undergoing tests in Connecticut, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin both heard about it, and Franklin was able to tour it. Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army spent two weeks learning to operate it proficiently. It was then time to deploy it against the British.

By that time the British Navy was occupying New York Harbor. On 6 September 1776, Sergeant Lee deployed the Turtle to attack the HMS Eagle, commanded by Admiral Howe, a move that might have delivered a decisive blow to the British Navy. The plan was to launch the Turtle at night and get as close to the HMS Eagle as possible, then submerge the submarine to go under the ship and attach a bomb to its underside by use of a hand auger. However, once Lee was under the ship, his auger hit metal, not wood as planned, and the bomb would not attach. As dawn approached, he abandoned the mission, and although the submarine had worked, the mission failed.

The Turtle was used in two more missions, both of which also failed, and then was lost during the Battle of Fort Lee in New Jersey, when the British sunk the sloop transporting it. Although the Turtle’s missions failed and the submarine was lost, it marked the beginning of an age of innovation in the newly formed United States at a time when the former colonists were eager to find a new identity.

By Laura Wulf, Photographic & Digital Imaging Specialist

As you may have read in a previous post, the MHS created a new tool for volunteers to crowdsource manuscript transcriptions with the goal of making our content more accessible. We’re still looking for volunteers and invite you to set up an account and start transcribing!

When we started developing and testing this crowdsourcing tool, we first transcribed letters written by Charles F. Morse during the Civil War as well as some diaries of John Rowe, a prominent merchant living in Boston in the late 18th century. Most recently we have been working with a collection of journals kept by Luman Boyden, a Methodist clergyman hired by the Boston City Missionary Society to visit and assist the city’s poor and immigrant families in East Boston in the mid-19th century. This is the collection I’d like to focus on here. Below are some of the people and stories that we’ve run across in our work.

The Boston City Missionary Society was originally known as the Boston Society for the Moral and Religious Instruction for the Poor. Still in existence today, it is now known as City Mission—the oldest multi-service agency in New England and the second oldest in the United States. Founded in 1816, the organization was started by members of Old South Church and Park Street Church. According to the society’s By-Laws, it’s mission was to further “the religious and moral instruction of the poor in the city of Boston.” [1] Boyden and his fellow missionaries were hired to go door-to-door distributing religious material, offering some financial and legal assistance, and promoting temperance, Sunday schools and summer youth programs, all of which laid the groundwork for the establishment of Boston’s first primary schools as well as the founding of the Boston YWCA.

Boyden often found himself in heartrending and unusual situations during these home visits and he wrote about them in the journals that he kept between 1854-1863. Sometimes his notes are short and list-like, while other times he includes vivid descriptions and even follow-up information. Boyden approached his missionary work zealously. His desire to help those in need, while admirable and sometimes effective, can also sound, to our modern ear, judgmental and narrow-minded. His work does seem to take a toll on him, and some entries can sound impatient and exasperated.

First let me introduce Luman Boyden to you in his very own words, written on his birthday, 12 November 1854:

“My birth day, 49 years old, I am led to inquire is it possible? I am compelled to answer yes! My head is grey, my eyes about 2 years since began to fail & within a few days have used [glasses] some in the day time. I can walk as rapidly as ever & perhaps feel but little more fatigued. The Lord has greatly blessed for which I think I feel thankful.”

His missionary work takes him to places such as the “Insane Asylum” on 1 November 1854:

“It was a most solemn sight.  The inmates appeared calm, some quite gloomy — some smiled & apparently happy — some started back with fear & all were objects of great compassion.

And he visits a State Prison the very next day:

“…went into the State Prison.  about inmates.  They are not allowed to speak or even look to each other or to strangers & no one paid us the least attention.  about 7 in for life —  One man about 40 years of age, has served one term at Concord, one at Charlestown, & about three days since returned to Concord for 7 years.  How different from the scene of yesterday.  The contrast between the Maniac & the convict is great still the sight of both must excite the sympathy of those who behold them.”

But mostly he visits people in their homes. One home belongs to a Mr. Pickles, whose name appears regularly in the journals, and seems to be a tailor who lives with his children and his chickens all under the same roof and even in the same room:

1855 June 27

“My visit at Mr Pickles was rather peculiar… As I entered I found him at his work, three children & a flock of chickens in the room & one hen shut up in a closet. He appeared quite solemn &… was at work on a nice coat.”

Sometimes the people he is trying to help are also trying to help others in even worse circumstances. On 4 May 1855 Boyden describes a man who,

“Tho very poor…has opened his door for a blind woman who for months [has] been aided by city missionaries & others. She will not go to the almshouse but prefers sleeping on the floor in that or some other wretched mansion and subsists by begging.”

One day earlier, on 3 May 1855 Boyden seems a little less compassionate.

“Today an Irishwoman expressed a strong desire to have her children brought from Ireland…She said one was going on 27 — another 25 and another going on 17. I…told her that her children I thought were old enough to help themselves.”

Boyden writes often about his temperance work. He is much disturbed by the use of alcohol and the effects it has on those he meets.

On 15 September 1855 he writes about a visit to a family and ends his description with a succinct expression of exasperation:

“… the woman was nursing an infant & said that her husband had been sent to Deer Island for 8 months — Crime getting drunk & beating her. They have seven children, she said the oldest was 10 years old — So much for Rum.”

The entry continues and we get more of a sense of the relations between neighbors.

“In another tenement, an american woman formerly lived in Paris Street She said that the woman just mentioned was as bad as her husband & that they owed her 3 dollars for food, crackers & herring. I saw a bar in another room & that seemed to tell the story. Last winter this woman had a bar & I asked her if she sold intoxicating drink She then said no she only kept candy.  A number of tumblers behind the bar appeared unnecessary to affect the sale of candy.  O the misery produced by intemperance.”

His wry and understated comment about the tumblers made me chuckle. Boyden’s use of the term “american” is also noteworthy. He uses other descriptions such as “Irish”, “Irish Catholic” or “colored”, so “american” may be used to mean “white”, this at a time before the European immigrants were accepted as either “white” or “american”.

I opened with Boyden’s own words and I’ll end with this surprising entry from the teetotaling author himself:

1855 Septr. 16

“Was quite unwell & came to Chelsea and took a swett, by drinking some gin in hot water. It is nearly twenty five years since I have drunk any before & now used it for want of other medicine. Where I believe it kills hundreds when it helps one I view it as almost wrong to use it under any circumstances”

I’ve only shared a small selection from these fascinating diaries. There’s much more to be discovered in these journals. Vareoloid smallpox? Poisoned pond water? An incident of cayenne pepper being purposefully blown into the eyes of children? All this and more awaits your discovery at www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0538. Consider joining the transcription efforts.

[1] https://beatleyweb.simmons.edu/collectionguides/CharitiesCollection/CC023.html

By Marc-William Palen, University of Exeter, MHS-NEH Long-term Research Fellow

On the evening of 3 June 1904, the opulent Hotel Vendome in Boston’s Back Bay hosted a now-forgotten gala. The members of the American Free Trade League were celebrating the centenary of the birth of Richard Cobden. As the diners finished their meals, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835-1915), took to the podium. The great-grandson of John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society proclaimed that “as Americans,—citizens of the United States,—to Richard Cobden we owe a debt of political gratitude than which we owe none greater to any European. . . . I am here also as a Free-trader; one who believes in the economic dispensation of Adam Smith, as developed by Richard Cobden.”

Now you might be asking yourself who was this Richard Cobden character? And why were Boston’s leading liberal lights like Charles Francis Adams, Jr. singing his praises at the turn of the twentieth century?

The name of Richard Cobden (1804-1865) is now largely a forgotten one in American history. Briefly, he started a radical free-trade movement in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s that had long-lasting repercussions for Britain and the world. He helped overturn Britain’s Corn Laws–high tariffs on foreign grain—ushering in nearly a century of the island nation’s adherence to the ideology of free trade. Cobden was a Liberal radical, a staunch opponent of British imperialism, an antislavery advocate, and a leader of the mid-century international peace movement. Cobden and his disciples believed that protectionism was a policy designed to prop up the aristocratic landed elite at the expense of the British workingman; high tariffs also led to trade wars, and trade wars to military conflict. Free trade instead promised democratization by undermining the power of the aristocrats; cheap food to Britain’s poorest; and friendlier relations with Britain’s trading partners.

In other words, when Cobden was alive, and when Charles Francis Adams, Jr. was giving his homage forty years after Cobden’s death, free trade was an important ideology of transatlantic leftwing radicalism. This ideology went by a variety of names at the time. One was the “Manchester School” owing to the ideological movement’s home base of Manchester, England. The other was, of course, “Cobdenism.”

Cobdenism’s importance has been ably traced within British history.[1] But what about Cobdenism’s radical influence within American history? As it turns out, beyond Britain, this free-trade ideology had its most numerous disciples within the United States, who set their sights on turning the protectionist nation into a free-trade nation like Britain.[2]

To understand this, we need to look to Massachusetts’s leftwing radical past.

The first American subscribers to Cobdenism were among the most radical abolitionists. Freeing trade was, for them, the next logical step after ending slavery on the road to emancipating mankind.

Reverend Joshua Leavitt deserves due credit, and ably highlights the radical confluence of the antislavery and free-trade movements. The Massachusetts-born Congregationalist minister, founder of the antislavery Liberty Party, and editor of the abolitionist periodical Emancipator sought a resolution at London’s 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention condemning the Corn Laws. Their repeal, he argued, would enable Britain to import free-grown wheat from the American northwest rather than slave-grown cotton and tobacco from the south. In 1842, Leavitt next went to the US Congress to lobby for them to pressure the British to repeal the Corn Laws. He brought a similar case to the 1843 London antislavery convention, before undertaking a free-trade lecture tour with Richard Cobden. Upon returning to the United States, Leavitt founded anti-Corn Law organizations across the American northeast and west to keep up the grassroots pressure and as a sign of solidarity with his British free-trade allies.[3]

Leavitt would thereafter become one of the first honorary (non-due paying) members of London’s Cobden Club upon its creation in 1866, a year after Cobden’s death. Its motto was “Free Trade, Peace, and Goodwill Among Nations.” Other early US Cobden Club members included Boston abolitionist firebrand William Lloyd Garrison, Boston transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, Boston economist Edward Atkinson, as well as various members of the Adams family, including Charles Francis Adams, Sr., Henry Adams, and Charles Francis Adams, Jr.

After the Civil War and the end of US slavery, the Republican Party rebranded itself as the party of protectionism and imperial expansion.[4] As a result, the GOP became the main target for many of these same Massachusetts radicals, who became leaders of the late nineteenth-century free-trade, peace, and anti-imperialist movements. For them, as for Cobden, these were all one and the same cause.

A new generation of even more radical Massachusetts free traders joined the fray at the turn of the century under the auspices of the Anti-Imperialist League (AIL), which was most active in Chicago and Boston. The AIL was created in 1898 in opposition to the US war with Spain during the Republican presidency of William McKinley, “the Napoleon of Protection.” The AIL’s officers were predominantly American Cobdenites, many of whom would go on to spearhead the peace movement during the First World War.[5]

As Boston AIL officer Erving Winslow put it at the outset of the Great War in his pamphlet Tariffs After the War, “there is one simple and solid foundation for world harmony . . . the foundation of economic peace, a firm and straightforward movement towards free trade.”

The leftwing leaders of the US free-trade movement, many of them from Massachusetts, counted among the most pro-active actors within the US peace and anti-imperial movement. After 1898, these included William Lloyd Garrison’s children—William Lloyd Garrison Jr. and Fanny Garrison Villard—as well as Morefield Storey, AIL president, and Erving Winslow, AIL secretary, both of whose papers are held at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Fanny Garrison Villard would go on to co-found the Women’s Peace Society in 1919. Its motto was “Immediate and universal disarmament. Abolition of mob violence. Free trade, the world over.” Another Garrison child, Frank Garrison, would become the president of the Boston-based International Free Trade League upon its founding in 1918, a radical leftwing peace organization dedicated to undermining protectionism in the United States and across the globe.

Massachusetts’s leftwing free-traders—its Cobdenites—thus played a central part within the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century US peace and anti-imperialist movements. And this was the radical backdrop Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s forgotten speech in Boston’s Back Bay in early June 1904.

[1] See, especially, Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Peter Cain, “Capitalism, War and Internationalism in the Thought of Richard Cobden,” British Journal of International Studies 5 (Oct. 1979): 229-247; Anthony Howe, “Radicalism, Free Trade, and Foreign Policy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in William Mulligan and Brendan Simms, eds., The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660-2000 (London, 2010): 167-180; Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 14 (April 1962) 489-501; Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, ed., Rethinking Nineteenth Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (London: Routledge, 2006); Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[2] Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, c. 1846-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[3] Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, 16-19; Marc-William Palen, “Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 37 (June 2015): 291-304.

[4] Marc-William Palen, “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890-1913,” Diplomatic History 39 (Jan. 2015): 157-185.

[5] Marc-William Palen, “Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism: The Transatlantic Radicalism of Free Trade, 1846-1920,” in Jay Sexton and Kristin Hoganson, eds., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Duke University Press, 2020): 159-182.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

One of my colleagues at the MHS has made an fascinating discovery within our collections that I’m very happy to tell you about.

The massive collection of Sedgwick family papers at the MHS includes a small diary donated to us by Sedgwick descendant Elizabeth Gaskell Norton in 1924. The author of this diary was not Miss Norton, but a woman identified on its first page as “Mrs. Wm. Seton.” So this is how the volume was originally attributed in the MHS catalog.

Now, the MHS has been around for 231 years, and many women are identified this way in legacy descriptions (“Mrs. Husband’s Name”), particularly those donated to us so long ago. Unfortunately, an archivist processing such a large collection—in this case, about 70 linear feet—doesn’t usually have time to do the kind of in-depth analysis necessary to identify the unknown author of a single item.

But staff members at the MHS have recently spent a lot of time updating descriptions in our catalog, collection guides, and online presentations to bring them in line with modern standards. These efforts include, whenever possible, restoring a married woman’s full name. And fortunately for all of us, my colleague recently found the time to look more closely at this item. What she discovered surprised us both.

Mrs. William Seton was none other than Elizabeth Ann Seton, a.k.a. Mother Seton, the first American to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church!

I won’t attempt to recap Seton’s life story here, but I would like to describe this volume in a little more detail. Coincidentally, the circumstances in which it was written are strikingly relevant today.

The bulk of the diary was kept between 19 November and 27 December 1803. Seton’s husband William suffered from tuberculosis, and the couple, hoping that a different climate might restore his health, had sailed from New York to visit friends in Italy. Their eight-year-old daughter Anna Maria traveled with them. When they arrived at the port of Livorno, however, they received a nasty shock.

Due to a yellow fever epidemic in New York , the family was forced to quarantine for an entire month in a lazaretto, basically a centuries-old coastal prison once used to segregate individuals with bubonic plague.

The lazaretto was bleak, and Seton described her surroundings in suitably dramatic language: “high arched ceilings, like St. Paul’s – brick floor, naked walls & a Jug of water”; “a single window double grated with iron” with an armed guard outside; “a view of the open sea, & the beating of the waves against high rocks”; “bells for the dead” ringing at sunset.

She also described a kind of physical distancing that will sound familiar to us today, more than two years into our own pandemic. The Setons could speak to visiting friends through the barred door, but physical contact was prohibited. Items they had touched could not be touched by anyone else. One day, “an order from the Commandant was sent from our Boat which was received on the end of a stick – and they were obliged to light a fire to smoke it before it could be read.”

The details are terrific. My favorite image is Mother Seton, future saint, keeping warm in her cell by jumping rope! Her faith in God also sustained her. She passed the time reading, praying, singing hymns, and nursing her husband William. The diary is an amazing document of her religious beliefs shortly before her conversion to Catholicism in 1805.

Unsurprisingly, William’s tuberculosis grew worse during his confinement, and he lived just eight days after the family’s release, dying in Pisa on 27 December 1803. The diary breaks off at this point and skips to the middle of 1804, with entries by Seton about the death of her sister-in-law and intimate friend (her “soul’s sister”), Rebecca.

The provenance of the volume is confusing. During my research, I learned that the extant papers of Mother Seton are housed in a number of different repositories and were published in 2000 as part of the Vincentian Heritage Collections at DePaul University. Included is the text of this very diary. Apparently, there are several versions in Seton’s handwriting.

Unfortunately, a sample of her handwriting published in that journal proves that our copy was not written by her.

My best guess is that the volume held by the MHS was copied sometime in the early 19th century from the original, judging by omissions and errors in the text. Seton’s handwriting may have proved difficult to read in places. Our copy comes from the version held by the Sisters of Charity in Riverdale, New York (pp. 251-276, 307-310).

But who copied it and why? The Sedgwick family included many authors and historians, so it’s possible one of them conducted research on Seton. Perhaps it was copied by Jane Minot Sedgwick (1821-1889), who converted to Catholicism in 1853 and founded a Catholic school in West Stockbridge, Mass.

Whatever its provenance, we’ve grateful to have this volume as part of our collections, and we hope the improvements we’ve made to its description will help more researchers find it here.