If you’ve paid any attention to the internet recently you may be aware that the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer just came out. While completely tonally different, many people are watching them as a double feature and the “correct” order for doing so is hotly debated. Personally, I plan to see Oppenheimer first and then Barbie. This is the order recommended by most of my friends who have seen the films. With all the excitement about the movies, I decided to dig around and see what the MHS collection has to offer related to either movie. It turns out, we have quite a few relevant items that I want to highlight here.
Rebeccah perched on a rocking chair, looking uncomfortably into my soul
The first is “Rebeccah,” a doll from the 19th century with a fascinating and somewhat romantic history. While she has no Ken counterpart, she had plenty of experience with Transcendentalist culture at Brooks Farm and presumably lived a very happy existence among the children. Founded in 1841, Brooks Farm was meant to be a communal utopia but ultimately failed in 1846. By the doll’s own account (a letter pinned to her petticoat when she arrived) she had a happy life inside the commune as well as out and was enjoyed by generations of children. Though she is made of cloth and porcelain rather than the plastic of Barbies, Rebeccah fulfills the same basic function. She is a toy, but one filled with meaning and the expectations of what women and girls are meant to be. While she no longer fulfills that function and instead spends her time in our stacks, she still provides insight into girlhood in the 19th century.
The Barbie movie is, of course, not the only movie in this “double-header” summer flick extravaganza.
Oppenheimer is a biopic looking at the creation and aftermath of the atomic bomb through the complicated life of the scientific director of the project. Nuclear weapons remain a contentious topic and conversations about nuclear proliferation are picking up, which makes this film especially timely. Within the MHS collections are the Sen. Leverett Saltonstall Bikini Atoll Papers, which chronicle Senator Saltonstall’s experience of seeing the 1946 Able and Baker tests detonate in the Pacific. Reading these documents and examining the photographs, it is clear how destructive the bombs were, to the point that Bikini Atoll is still not habitable, nearly 70 years after the last test. Carl A. Hatch, chair of the Evaluation Commission for Operation Crossroads, noted in his message to President Truman after the Baker test bomb that:
As was demonstrated by the terrible havoc wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bikini tests strongly indicate that future wars employing atomic energy may well destroy nations and change present standards of civilization.
To us who have witnessed the devastating effects of these tests, it is evident that if there is to be any security or safety in the world, war must be eliminated as a means of settling differences among nations.
And Hatch was not alone. As early as 1946, the “father of the atomic bomb” was lobbying hard against the further use of the bombs he shepherded through creation, despite his advocacy prior. Oppenheimer maintained a strong anti-nuclear weapons stance for the rest of his life.
While on the surface neither movie has much in common with the other and neither do the collection materials I pulled for this blog, I appreciate the juxtaposition of two radically different stories coming out on the same day. The thrilling intensity of the Oppenheimer story paints a picture of a horribly destructive weapon of war and the minds who created it. The spirit of Barbie is bright pink and sparkly and fun but presents interesting conversations about power and who has it. Both films tell us something about what humans care about and are interested in exploring. They ask what we think is worth saving, which is reflected in the collections of the MHS.
**Note that WGA(https://www.wgacontract2023.org/) and SAG-AFTRA(https://www.sagaftra.org/) are on strike, which includes those who worked on these films. I fully support the strike, however neither union has called for a consumer boycott.**
In the summer of 1785, John Quincy Adams was trapped on a ship slowly making its way across the too-still waters of the Atlantic. The eighteen-year-old was leaving behind Europe, his parents, and his friends, to return to Massachusetts and to his father’s alma mater, Harvard College.
Four days into his journey, on 25 May, Adams bemoaned relentless seasickness, static landscapes, and indifferent companions. “The Events that happen on board a Vessel are very seldom interesting, and the life we lead is very lazy and tiresome. Our Company on board . . . is not in general such as I should have wished.”
One of the crew, Mr. Well de Singler, was the same age as John Quincy, but friends they were not. “His manners are by no means agreeable. . . He is full of his knowledge, and does not doubt but he is the most learned man on board though the youngest. He commonly engroces the conversation wherever he is, and maintains his opinion in the most positive manner, upon any subject whatever. His principles are to fight with every body, and upon the most trivial occasions; he even gives to understand, that if opportunities fail, he takes care to create them. He pretends to be of noble birth and affects to despise every body who is not noble. In short I think it an unlucky circumstance that I am obliged to remain with him during 50 days.”
If the lack of agreeable company and interesting sights weren’t enough to make the journey feel endless, nature itself was against him. On most days the wind stood completely still and they made very little progress. When the wind did blow, it blew “directly contrary” to what the sails needed. “Our Wind has been very low for several days. 15 or 20 leagues a day is the utmost extent of our route,” Adams lamented to his diary.
Twenty-three days into the voyage, cabin fever had set in in a big way. “This forenoon,” Adams wrote, “we saw something at Sea, but we could not distinguish what. Some said it was a very large piece of wood. Others, were of opinion, that it was a boat overset. It pass’d at a small distance, and amused us for half an hour. At Sea, such is the continual sameness of the surrounding objects that the smallest trifle becomes interesting.”
Halfway through the odious odyssey, Adams and his fellow passengers had had enough of the baking sun. “We would willingly agree to have less Sun, and more wind,” he complained. “This evening, as we were near the tropic one of the officers, according to the custom universally established, of wetting all the persons on board who have not cross’d the tropic, sprinkled us with a little water.”
To break up the monotony, “one of the passengers, who is fond of such amusements; as the french in general are; returned the officer’s Compliment, with an whole bucket of water.”
John Quincy Adams’s diary entry for 20 June 1785
“This was as a signal to us all,” John Quincy recorded. He and all the other passengers—scholars, physicians, merchants, and officers, Dutch, Swedish, French, and American—“immediately form’d two parties, and we were all, officers and passengers, wet from head to foot before we ended. I believe more than 200 buckets of water were spilt upon the deck in the course of the evening. One of the passengers alone receiv’d thirty buckets.”
If you think connecting with his inner child and having a water fight was out of character for John Quincy Adams…you’d be right. “Such a diversion is not very instructive nor very agreeable, but may be pass’d over for once: I hope it will not be repeated.”
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.
In my last two posts on the Civil War journal of Pvt. Howard J. Ford of the 43rd Massachusetts Infantry, I described his experiences during the Goldsboro Expedition in North Carolina, including the Battles of Kinston and Whitehall. Just one day after Whitehall, on 17 December 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed once again in the third and final battle of the expedition, the Battle of Goldsboro (or Goldsborough) Bridge.
Oil painting of the Battle of Goldsboro Bridge, printed in Edward H. Rogers’s 1883 history of the regiment
When we last heard from him, Howard was lying face down in the middle of a road between the northern and southern firing lines. In his journal, he wrote about the visceral trauma of “expecting every moment would be our last.”
This time, Howard would be spared the worst of the fighting. His company was ordered on an ancillary mission to attack a rebel battery and disable its artillery if possible. He called this engagement the Skirmish of Spring Bank Bridge (known in the south as Thompson’s Bridge), and he spent most of it ducking from tree to tree to avoid grapeshot. Interestingly, he also explicitly acknowledged the danger of friendly fire amidst the chaos: “Some poor fools […] kept blazing away at random, with more danger to us than the rebels.”
Howard survived uninjured, but the Battle of Goldsboro Bridge did claim one of his friends. “The most terrible thing of all,” he wrote, “was the loss of the best and bravest man in the company, Wm. F. Sparrow. A man whose praise is in the mouth of all, from the highest to the lowest.” Cpl. William Freeman Sparrow was a 27-year-old carpenter from Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. Howard also noted the deaths, at Whitehall the day before, of Isaac Young Smith and Theodore Parkman.
Following an individual’s day-to-day wartime experiences in close detail, you can clearly see the inevitable physical and psychological toll combat takes on them. The early days of patriotic fervor and noble ideals become grim determination and sometimes despair. The day after the battle, Howard wrote,
I assure you I shall never fo[r]get that work alluded to on this page. Never!!!! […] I dont know how human nature could stand it. ‘On to Richmond.’ [‘]Follow up your victories.’ ‘Chase them.’ ‘Cut em up.’ & such like ideas sound rather out of place when you come to realize something of the nature of the duties of a soldier.
Howard also admitted that he’d been having nightmares. “All times of night” he’d been waking in a panic, having dreamt that the army was leaving him behind, and these nightmares recurred long after any immediate danger had passed. He was emotionally and physically exhausted, even falling asleep standing up. However, as he said, “I am bound to tough it out.”
The battle was a strategic victory for the Union, but only a temporary one. Sources indicate that it took Confederate troops just two weeks to rebuild Goldsboro Bridge and restore their supply lines. Meanwhile, the Union Army’s simultaneous and devastating loss at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia overshadowed events near Goldsboro. The 43rd Regiment returned to New Bern, “a limping lame, blistered, dirty set of men.”
Stay tuned to the Beehive for more of Howard J. Ford’s story.
A couple of years ago, I worked with a group of researchers to digitize a post office account book from Revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island. The book is a dataset in manuscript: it accounts for every piece of mail delivered to Newport residents by the colonial postal system between 1771 and 1774. This account book contains a wealth of information about life in colonial British North America in the years leading up to the American Revolution: about trade patterns, the dissemination of information, postal demographics. As a literary scholar, I had hoped that this dataset would shed light on the reading habits of Newport Residents during a moment of political upheaval. Did Newport’s postal users read more or differently in these final years of British colonial rule? What can we learn from these communication trends?
I put together a transcription team—(Thank you, Katie Reimer, Taylor & Katie Galusha, Melissa Lawson, and Sam Phippen!!)—to translate this book-based accounting system into a twenty-first century dataset. The work entailed entering the date of arrival, name of recipients, along with postage into columns of a spreadsheet. Such transcription requires a squint—eyestrain to make out the eighteenth-century handwriting. Once in a rhythm with transcription, there’s room for your mind to wander, to notice patterns in the text, and to speculate on the circumstances of postal use. It didn’t take long for our team to identify Newport’s postal “super-users”—George Rome, Aaron Lopez, and Simon Pease—men who received multiple pieces of mail every week. As we typed their names, we imagined their lives: were these men printers or preachers? Merchants, farmers, or teachers? Did they use the mail to incite Revolutionary fervor? Were they corresponding with friends or family at a distance? We wondered: how and why were these men using the mail every day?
The names we learned best—Rome, Lopez, Pease, and roughly 20 others—were all merchants, men with ships in a port city, sending banknotes and receipts through the mail. Roughly half of the mail that arrived at the Newport Post Office was addressed to the same top twenty-five postal users. These “super-users” were all men, and most built their wealth to some degree through the slave trade. They used the colonial postal system because it was the safest way to send large sums of money over long distances. In aggregate, the account book tells a simple truth: the colonial postal system largely abetted the economic interests of elite colonial subjects, fueled the slave trade, and only sometimes worked in the service of everyday Americans. This data-driven picture of the postal system appears much less democratic, and far from Revolutionary. The postal system was a tool for and network of the wealthy and powerful in early America.
When I started this project, I had hoped to find evidence of Obour Tanner in the pages of the Newport post office book. Tanner, a Newport resident, was the friend and lifelong correspondent of Phillis Wheatly (Peters). Tara Bynum, whose scholarly work introduced me to Tanner, describes the women’s letters as a source of joy, profound connection, and pleasure (see Reading Pleasures for more on their correspondence and networks—it’s an enlivening and important book). Though Tanner and Wheatley were enslaved at the time of their correspondence, both women found ways to bridge the gap between Newport and Boston through the exchange of letters.
And yet, they did not exchange their letters through the colonial mail. The Newport Post Office accounts contain no relevant entries for their letters during the period of their known correspondence. Few women appear in these pages at all (out of the over 8,500 pieces of mail that came into the office, only 125 items were addressed to women), and most of these women were white widows. No one in Tanner’s orbit received any mail by colonial post in the months of Wheatley (Peters)’s letters to Tanner. Instead, as usual, the colonial mailbag into Newport was largely filled with banknotes, receipts, and newspapers addressed to local merchants.
Meanwhile, outside of the colonial postal system, Obour Tanner and Phillis Wheatley (Peters) relied on their networks of friends and allies for the transmission of their letters. When she asks Tanner to send a reply to Mr. Whitwell’s, or to John Peter’s home, or by way of Rev. Samuel Hopkins, she “contextualizes and places herself as a friend, servant, slave, and woman in New England and the greater Atlantic world” according to Tara Bynum’s Reading Pleasures. When we read Wheatley’s letters for their postal systems, we see her integrated within a broader community of mutual aid: friends and allies who carried letters for one another.
A letter from October 30, 1773 offers special insight into Wheatley (Peters)’s approach to long distance correspondence. The letter’s cover is spare—addressed simply “To—Obour Tanner in Newport,” folded, and sealed with red wax. As this letter was not sent through official postal channels, there is no postage denoted on the cover (and this letter long pre-dates envelopes, postage stamps, standardized cancellations, and other recognizably postal features).
Wheatley (Peters)’s closing note to Tanner offers a glimpse into its delivery. She writes: “the young man by whom this is handed you seems to me to be a very clever man knows you very well & is very Complaisant and agreeable. – P.W.” The letter was delivered by a friend, a man they mutually respected and admired for his intelligence, kindness, and demeanor. Phillis Wheatley (Peters)’s note on the letter’s delivery works to fortify and celebrate their friendship and mutual esteem. Was the clever letter-carrier close at hand when the poet finished her letter to Tanner? Did she read the line aloud to him with a smile and a wink—before folding and sealing the letter? Did this near-flirtation and unequivocal praise from a celebrated poet cause the man to blush? Or beam with pride? A letter delivered under these terms—directed through a statement of friendship and admiration—enlivened and encouraged community. Honoree Jeffers’ extraordinary scholarly and creative work in The Age of Phillis wonders whether this letter carrier might be John Peters, the man Phillis Wheatley would later marry. These letters testify to and were carried by people who cared for one another.
Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, October 30, 1773
The colonial post office never delivered for Phillis Wheatley (Peters); but her friends did. First, during her lifetime, by establishing their own postal networks in which travelling friends and allies carried letters for one another. Then, Obour Tanner delivered Wheatley’s letters a second time—when she archived them with the Massachusetts Historical Society—thereby forwarding them to generations of readers and researchers.
When I started my fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I was motivated by Wheatley (Peters)’s long distance correspondence tactics, Tanner’s archival efforts, and I was skeptical of overly celebratory narratives of postal history. While my book-in-progress studies the United States Post Office Department rather than the colonial-era system, the mailbag’s mercantile allegiance endured throughout the nineteenth-century, as did the mail’s race and gender-based exclusions.
In the archive of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I encountered historical materials that further attuned my thinking about the allegiances and exclusions of the US Post Office Department. When I read the enormous 4-page broadside “Proposals for Carrying Mails in the United States” I was first struck by the sheer size of postal operations in 1824. The Postmaster General advertised contracts for mail carriers on nearly 400 routes throughout the country—each printed in small font covering every inch of the oversized pages. Each route paid a sizable sum: an amount the USPOD presumed would cover the operating expenses for a stagecoach line (which contractors would then supplement by selling passenger tickets and by carrying small freight). Each contract was an avenue into middle class life, geographically distributed throughout the length and breadth of the country. And yet, “no other than a free white person shall be employed to carry the mail,” the broadside advertises. Not only were these nearly 400 lucrative contracts awarded on a whites-only basis, the lower paid postrider and mailcoach driver positions were likewise closed off to Black Americans. The formal exclusion of Black labor from the postal system further extended to local postmasterships and clerkships. This racial exclusion existed until the end of the Civil War, and had a profound influence on the distribution of wealth along racial lines in the nineteenth century. In this period, the US Post Office Department was the largest employer in the country, and it only handed out jobs to white people. I was left with enduring questions about the broader social effects of this policy—would white postmasters serve Black correspondents? In what ways would a postmaster’s surveillance curtail textual expression, connection, and circulation?
Proposals for Carrying Mails in the United States, broadside, 1824
Later, when scouring every detail of the photo “Country Post Office,” I wondered about the locks and the highly-specialized leather portmanteau hanging on the wall behind the women reading their letters. The Post Office Department commissioned state-of-the-art locks and distributed the keys only to local postmasters. The leather portmanteaus worked in tandem with the locks to secure the mail and protect the contents from water. When read in tandem with the photo’s more central figures—the reading women—I’m reminded of the ways the post office in the nineteenth century worked on behalf of some Americans and worked to lock-out others. The post office delivered for these women—it offered a place of respite where they could read, warm themselves after their walk to the local office. At the same time, the locks are testaments to the exclusionary nature of the postal system in the nineteenth century—a network that both shaped and constrained communication.
Country Post Office, photograph by the Kilburn Brothers
These archival encounters helped me reframe my longstanding postal research to be better attuned to both the possibilities and prohibitions of the mail. Postal Hackers—the project’s new title—tells the stories of the nineteenth-century outsiders who laid claim to postal resources and sometimes broke the system that structured their exclusion. The project is motivated by the ingenuity of hackers like Henry “Box” Brown who used a private express company to mail himself out of enslavement; and by Harriet Jacobs whose letters conveyed by hand from a tiny attic crawlspace and put in the mail in Northern cities (thereby receiving location-based cancellation stamps) convinced her enslaver to seek her out in the North. Brown and Jacobs’s strategic use of the postal system allow them to find spaces of freedom and safety on their own terms. My book project also highlights the petition of Mary Katherine Goddard—Baltimore’s revolutionary era postmistress, who was fired for being a woman in 1790. Though she never got her job back, Goddard’s textual campaign—a petition signed by 250 men from Baltimore, a letter of support from George Washington, and her own newspaper writing on the matter—measure important changes in postal power in the early national period. Taken together, these stories help measure the particular nature of postal authority; the economic allegiances of the Post Office Department, as well as the social and literary effects of postal incorporation.
Thinking through the collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society was integral to this project. The collections helped refine and clarify my understanding of the nineteenth-century postal context. Just as powerful was the effect of drafting Postal Hackers from the same building that houses Phillis Wheatley’s writing desk and her unstamped, community-building letters. These materials testify to the limits of state postal systems—as well as the fortitude and creativity of Black letter writers who relied on their own networks for the exchange of letters.
Further Reading:
Bynum, Tara. Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. University of Illinois Press, 2023.
Bynum, Tara, Brigitte Fielder, Cassander L. Smith, eds. Special Issue “Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley’s Futures,” Early American Literature 57.3 (2022).
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Age of Phillis. Wesleyan University Press, 2022.
On July 141881, Sheriff Pat Garett shot notorious outlaw Billy the Kid. Those of us from the generation who watched the movie “Young Guns” know the story well and immediately begin hearing the twangy guitar chords from Jon Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory playing in our heads. Many are familiar with the story and legends surrounding Billy the Kid as well as the debate as to whether he was a ruthless killer or a folk hero who stood up to corruption the only way he knew how. To add another level to the depth of his character, one of the few existing photos of Billy the Kid, is well, not very outlaw-like at all; In fact, it is a photo of Henry McCarty, his sweetheart, and his friends, (‘the Regulators’), all playing a game of croquet. i
“Hold the tea sandwiches! Croquet?”
(Bon Jovi might have just dropped his guitar.)
Indeed, Croquet!
The rage sweeping the nation from 1860 to 1890 was croquet. It caught on like wildfire in the 1860s and anyone who could afford to buy the necessary equipment and possessed some form of a lawn, was found carrying a mallet whenever they could. Croquet was a game changer because it brought equality to outdoor games and sports. As well, women who had previously been resigned to parlor activities were able to play in open air with or against their male counterparts. ii
Frederick Tudor was known to have staked out the first croquet lawn in 1859 at Nahant, MA. Nahant went on to house many more croquet lawns. A post-war generation of young people were able to break away from their parents’ norms and embraced croquet as the latest fashion. Journalists and novelists alike helped spread its popularity, and the game appeared in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s My Wife and I (1871), both cases using the game to symbolize courtship and competing ideals. Outdoor exercise was a new way for men and women to interact and lead to further social recreation. By 1890 the zeal over croquet was replaced by tennis, bicycling and other lawn games, but croquet had thoroughly swept the nation. Winslow Homer beautifully documented the popularity of the game in his illustrations Harpers Magazine and in a series of oil paintings. The game spread with westward expansion and was played all the way from the East Coast to newly settled towns in California.
At the Massachusetts Historical Society, you can find photos, engravings and print material that feature croquet. Simply type the word “croquet” as a keyword search in our online catalog, Abigail, and explore the related titles. Below are a few examples.
Croquet Grounds, photograph by Heywood. Boston, Mass. : Frank Rowell, [187-] 2 photographic prints mounted on card : albumen, stereograph, black and white ; image 7.8 x 7.1 cm (each), mount 8.5 x 17.2 cm http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=221133[Trinity Park croquet players] [photograph] New Bedford : S.F. Adams, [18–] 2 photographic prints mounted on card : albumen, stereograph, black and white ; image 8.3 x 7.5 cm (each), mount 8.5 x 17.5 cm http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=219797Genl. Grant & his family [graphic] / painted from life by Wm. Cogswell, Washington, D.C. ; engraved by John Sartain, Phila. Philadelphia : Published by Bradley & Co., 66 Nth Fourtn St. ; Rochester, N.Y. : R.H. Curran, c1868. 1 print : engraving and mezzotint ; image 61.7 x 47.5 cm, on sheet 71 x 55.6 cm http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=195801
This summer try your hand at croquet, a true American pastime since 1860!
For more on croquet and so much more please explore our online catalog, Abigail, our collection guides and our Digital Collections.
For this blog post, I thought I would return to my more science-y roots. I mentioned in a previous blog post that I was raised in a family with a lot of focus on science. One of the ways we did that was rocket launching. As a child, I used to launch all kinds of rockets. While explosives are not my preferred experimental matter, I do have very fond memories of building and launching these (air-pressurized and non-explosive) rockets hundreds of feet into the air. With July Fourth approaching, I thought it would be the perfect time to explore some MHS materials on fireworks and rockets while reminiscing about my own experiences. Our collections have quite a few fireworks-related material, but one of the most interesting is a how-to book called Artificial fireworks : improved to the modern practice, from the minutest to the highest branches which includes recipes and illustrations so that you too can make big, colorful 1776 fireworks.
I elected not to create any of these fireworks myself, not least because I don’t think I can just roll up and purchase a lot of these ingredients without ending up on a government watchlist. But it was a very interesting read nonetheless! The author was an officer in the British Army and his writing style reflects the terse, clipped language I associate with military efficiency. Brisk, but clear and easy to read once you get past the ſ, or long s, in place of our modern round s. I learned that if you add the right kind of minerals, you can make virtually any color in a variety of shapes and showers. Different materials alter the color of flames, a fun experiment if you have a fireplace and a penchant for risk-taking. To make white fireworks, use saltpeter, sulfur, meal powder (also called black powder), and camphor. To make blue, the ingredients are saltpeter, sulfur, and meal powder. To make red, add saltpeter, sulfur, antimony, and Greek pitch (aka rosin). And voila! Everything you need to make your own fireworks–except measurements. While some of the recipes do have measurements, they are not nearly as precise as I would expect explosive recipes to be.
Unclear measurements and temperatures are a chronic problem in old cookbooks and one that has been well documented in other Beehive blog posts, such as this one about bread pudding. So in many ways, this is just like so many recipe books in our collection, despite not being nearly as delicious. Do not worry, though—if you want to make a case, aka the rocket body to hold the fireworks, those come with detailed mechanical instructions and illustrations! I actually feel pretty good about my ability to put a case together, assuming I had the pieces and did not have to learn how to cut steel. I am confident that I could learn, but a girl needs some limits, even in her imagination.
Personally, I would recommend sticking to modern fireworks over making your own 18th century ones. Though if you do feel so inclined, feel free to head on down to the MHS and examine the book yourself! In the meantime, enjoy those Fourth of July fireworks and festivities knowing it’s a little safer than in 1776.
When John Adams became president of the United States, he inherited George Washington’s cabinet, including Secretary of War James McHenry. Adams has been criticized for not replacing immediately the inept McHenry with someone competent and loyal. But shortly after Adams took the oath of office, McHenry sent the new commander-in-chief a brief letter and a huge bundle of papers.
James McHenry to John Adams, 13 April 1797
“Conceiving it proper that you should be informed of the arrangements, regulations and instructions, relative to the most important objects in the department of War, I have caused the same to be copied, and herewith respectfully submit them,” wrote McHenry.
On his own initiative, McHenry surveyed the holdings of his department, made judgments about what was most important, and despite the heavy workload he and his clerks faced, had copies made for John Adams.
To help the new president navigate over 150 pages of documents, McHenry included a 2-page table of contents, a handy overview listing the letters to former president George Washington; instructions and negotiations with Native Americans, including the Cherokees and the Creek Nation; information on fortifications; and regulations governing salutes. Because there was not yet a separate department for the navy, McHenry also included the status of the frigates that were being constructed at Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, as well as that of one for the Dey of Algiers.
Table of Contents created by James McHenry, 1797
Although we do not have a letter John Adams wrote thanking McHenry for his industriousness, or commenting on these documents, we do know he received them, for they are part of the Adams Papers archive at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In fact, because of a disastrous fire in the offices of the War Department in 1800, McHenry’s initiative gives historians a treasure trove of what would have otherwise been destroyed. Perhaps historians should be asking, not why didn’t John Adams replace James McHenry in 1797, but why would he?
The upcoming volumes of The Papers of John Adams are an exciting opportunity for a fresh look at the Adams Presidency.
Summer trips have a long tradition. Several motives inspire them including weather, health, visiting family, or travel to see the world. Collected here are some quotes from summer letters and diaries kept in the archives of the MHS.
Let’s begin with the oldest quote. In it, Thomas Mott asks John Winthrop his advice in crossing the Atlantic during the summer:
I humbly thancke you that you were so mindfull of my busines. and I would desier you to send me word whether or not there goe noe more shipps over into New England this summer, and if they doe at what time they doe goe, and whether if a man should goe over this summer, if the winds lye so that a man may returne next summer with the wind, and goe over againe the same summer conveniently. As yet my mind stands inclinable though I heare of great rubbs in the way, but if god hath ordained it for my good I hope the Lord will make the rough wayes smooth.
In this quote, Elizabeth Seccombe writes to Robert and Sophie Valentine some news about her relationship and where she has been all summer.
I have just returned from England where I have been for the last two months to try & get rested & strong again I should have written before I went but I was too sick & sad to do so & have kept putting off the evil day when I have to tell you two dear people that I have left Amy we have not seen or written to each other for three months & there seems no chance for our ever meeting again she does not wish it so that ends it.
The following quote is from Charles Francis Adams’s diary regarding the invitation from his father, John Quincy Adams, to visit for the entire summer.
Received an urgent letter from my father inviting my Wife and myself to spend the Summer with them. I suppose I must accede to it. If it was not for the inconvenience that it puts us to I should like it very much.
Some summer trip information is added to the end of letters as well wishes such as in this 30 June 1946 letter from Leverett Saltonstall to Eleanor Brooks Saltonstall.
In my previous blog posts, I have explored MHS collections related to WWII. It likely isn’t a surprise by now that the Society holds a relatively small but strong number of these collections. But did you know that several of them are personal narratives of Jewish American soldiers? As we near the end of Jewish American Heritage Month, and having just observed Memorial Day, I want to highlight a handful of these Jewish voices in our collections.
One is the Robert E. Siegel papers, which I looked at for two blog posts this past year. Robert was a young soldier killed in France in 1944, and his mother compiled two scrapbooks in her quest to have him posthumously awarded the Bronze Star. As a Jewish American, I found it deeply moving to see this work of love and grief, especially the pages filled with notes of condolence from friends and family alike. In letters to his parents during training, Robert writes of attending events hosted by the Jewish Welfare Board, a non-profit which, alongside other organizations like the YMCA, attended to the spiritual and recreational needs of soldiers during the war.
Another collection is the Levovsky family papers, which contains letters by two brothers overseas to family back home. David (“Dave”) Levovsky served with the U.S. Army, 681st Quartermaster Laundry Company, and his brother Simon (“Sy”) with Army counterintelligence. David’s letters are not the narratives of combat that we largely see portrayed in popular films and books – his unit’s work is part of the massive infrastructure needed to move men and machines across a continent, and which we often forget about when thinking about the war. It’s fascinating to read about how David uses his “Jewish” (Yiddish), augmented by some German, to communicate with Polish and Yugoslavian POWs who are on labor detail. The Levovskys exchanges High Holiday greetings, andDavid is sent gifts of dried fruit (except from his sister Bertha, who sends a salami – his response is truly hilarious). He attends services when he can, and in one especially moving letter, recounts meeting a Jewish refugee in Normandy, “a nice little old lady with a blue dotted kerchief over her head” who visibly relaxes when in the company of David and fellow Jewish soldiers.
New Year’s greetings V-mail from David Levovsky to family back home.
The last collection I want to share is the Samuel L. Barres papers, recently written about by Meg Szydlik in her series on disability in the archives. Samuel was Jewish, the only son of immigrant parents. When he wrote home to his widowed mother, he sugarcoated his experiences so as not to make her worry. He speaks fondly of her home cooking, writing that he really can’t think of anything else for her to send him unless she could send him some herring or gefilte fish (agree to disagree here, Samuel). Like David Levovsky, he refers to his Yiddish as Jewish, and helps his mother with her English through gentle lessons in his letters. I couldn’t help but draw parallels to my grandmother’s family – like Samuel, she and her brothers were born to Jewish immigrant parents. All three of my great uncles served in WWII (as did my grandfather), and at the time of the war were children of a widowed mother. He had passed away when my grandmother, the youngest, was seventeen, the same age as Sam.
New Year’s card from Samuel Barres to his mother Sarah – note the Jewish Welfare Board logo at the top.
Like each collection here, the Barres papers are a treasure trove, and I can’t do them justice in a blog post. However, Day, I wanted to highlight an appeal written by Samuel’s friend Bill Carmen, who was the national commander of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, as well as instrumental in the construction of the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Titled “Why Should I Join The Jewish War Veterans,” he speaks of solidarity between veterans organizations against antisemitic prejudice – people who call Jewish soldiers cowards who “sat out the war in the Quartermaster Corps and never left the States.” (This is the same unit with which David Levovsky served, as you’ll recall – he did not sit out the war, and even left the states.) “We helped win the war,” Carmen writes. “[l]et’s not give up now!”
Appeal by Bill Carmen on why Jewish soldiers should join the Jewish War Veterans group.
Exploring these collections, I experience a range of emotions – sadness, fierce pride, feelings of familiarity and tenderness reading these soldiers seek out the comfort of their religion and upbringing far from home, what I know too having grown up as an Ashkenazi Jewish person in Massachusetts. All this in a war that always was and proved itself further to be deeply, horrifically personal.
Further reading on these collections can be done by visiting the MHS, and I really recommend that you do. I also want to share the Library of Congress page for the 2023 Jewish American History Month, as well as this blog series by Claire Jones on Judaica in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society.
This is the second installment in a series. To read Part I, click here.
A few weeks ago, I introduced you to Howard J. Ford and his Civil War journal, held by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The MHS holds many collections related to the Civil War, of course, but this journal is truly remarkable. It’s not often we get such an honest and intimate look at a soldier’s inner life.
On 4 September 1862, Howard J. Ford of Cambridge, Mass. enlisted for nine months’ service in the 43rd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. He started his journal one week later, on the day he reported to Camp Meigs at Readville, Mass. I call it a “journal,” but it really consists of loose pages of stationery that Howard initially titled “Memoranda” and sent home at intervals over several months.
Pages from the journal of Howard J. Ford, Nov. 1862
Howard and his younger brother George were mustered in as privates on 24 September. The first few pages of Howard’s journal contain brief, dashed-off entries about life in camp, equipment issued, duty details, and the weather (mostly rain). But the 43rd Regiment was stationed at Readville for just six weeks, leaving from Boston Harbor on 10 November 1862. Their destination was New Bern, North Carolina.
The weather seemed to bode well. As Howard wrote, “This morning the sun shines and he seems almost like a stranger.” The men sang “Home, Sweet Home” as their ship pulled away from shore. And Howard made the following pledge in his journal: “I dont [sic] intend to come home if I have […] to save my life by being a coward or disobeying orders. Howard.”
His ship, the Merrimac, and two other troop ships, the Mississippi and the Saxon, traveled as a convoy under the protection of a gunboat, the Huron. The voyage was relatively uneventful, except for the usual bouts of seasickness and an accidental shooting. (Lt. Henry A. Turner shot himself in the foot “in consequence of carelessly handling his pistol while cocked.”)
When Howard disembarked in North Carolina on 15 November, he was unimpressed, calling it “a mean sort of a place.” Traveling inland, he described the landscape in more detail, including soil that was a combination of “sand & swamp”; architecture (“chimney on the out side of the house”!); and “that peculiar moss hanging [from trees] in pretty festoons.” He also began to see “contrabands,” or enslaved people who had escaped bondage and now worked for or sold goods to Northern troops.
The Union camp, later named Camp Rogers, was located on the southern bank of the Trent River. But even though Northern troops had occupied New Bern for the past eight months, Howard was disappointed to find “no tents, barracks or food ready for us.”
His journal entries at New Bern contain a lot of vivid descriptions, even a few sketches. For example, here’s how he explained a skirmish drill to family members back home:
In this style of fighting the men keep at least 5 paces apart, so that it is more difficult to hit them than in the ordinary way. We also move more rapidly. It is lively work. One minute we are scattered over a long line, and the next rallied by fours, or perhaps sections or platoons. All up in a cluster with our bayonets looking like a porcupine sticking out in every direction to keep off cavalry. Sometimes we load and fire lying down, kneeling, advancing, retreating.
Howard knew Confederate troops were positioned nearby and that the next battle was probably imminent. He told his family that he anticipated having “a chance at the rebels” within the month. When each soldier was issued twenty rounds of ammunition, he wrote ominously, “This looks warlike.”
Stay tuned for more about Howard J. Ford in my next post!
