“He lost some of the country dialect”

Osgood Carleton, the cartographer mentioned yesterday, advertised a lot in Boston newspapers between 1787 and 1808.

In those years he had his school of mathematics and navigation to promote. He had almanacs and other books to sell for a while. Then he sold his maps. He sold design services, and more.

The man’s oddest newspaper notice appeared in the Herald of Freedom in 1790:

Osgood Carleton,
HAVING been frequently applied to for a decision of disputes, and sometimes wagers,* respecting the place of his nativity, and finding they sometimes operate to his disadvantage: Begs leave to give this public information—

that he was born in Nottingham-west, in the State of New-Hampshire—in which state he resided until sixteen years old; after which time, he traveled by sea and land to various parts, and being (while young) mostly conversant with the English, he lost some of the country dialect, which gives rise to the above disputes.

* Several Englishmen have disputed his being born in America.

BOSTON, AUGUST 20, 1790.

In an article for the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, David Bosse tentatively linked Carleton’s accent with a statement in a 1901 profile: as a teen-aged soldier he became a clerk for John Henry Bastide, the British military engineer. If Carleton indeed spent his late adolescence in a British household, his might have ended up with more England than New England in it.

Bosse documents that Carleton lived in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, from 1763 to 1768, marrying there before returning to his home province. Again, that would have exposed him to more British natives than living on a farm in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

But why was it important to make this public pronouncement? One possibility is that being thought British made a man vulnerable to naval impressment. However, the Royal Navy wasn’t at war in 1790, and Carleton wasn’t traveling.

Another is that Carleton understood his potential customers were looking for an American, especially so soon after the war. But Bostonians were quite friendly to British ex-pats in this period, usually welcoming them as converts to republicanism. In a field like cartography, being able to claim European training was probably a plus.

Significantly, Carleton’s ad pointed to “Several Englishmen” disputing or even betting on his background. That might be a way to avoid criticizing local customers, or it might reflect the truth: the men insisting Carleton was British were English themselves.

Carleton was a former Continental Army officer, having enlisted as a regimental quartermaster with the rank of sergeant in May 1775 and risen to lieutenant in January 1777. At the end of 1778 he asked to be listed in the Corps of Invalids for health reasons. Carleton still served until April 1783, taking on administrative tasks like moving money around. After the war, he joined the Society of the Cincinnati.

British visitors to Boston might have heard Carleton speak of those experiences in his British-sounding voice and hinted that he was disloyal—and he might not have liked that. But those visitors weren’t his customers. 

In the end, I suspect that Carleton decided to declare the facts about his birth simply because they were facts. As a teacher, cartographer, and surveyor, he valued precision. He was already a regular advertiser in the Herald of Freedom, so it would have been easy to run this announcement for a week.

Carleton’s singular notice might have arisen from the same impulse depicted in the famous xkcd cartoon: “Someone is wrong on the internet!”

Mapping Boston in 1795

ARGO (American Revolutionary Geographies Online) offers a new article by John W. Mackey titled “Practical Knowledge and the New Republic.”

It begins:

Perhaps what is most visually striking about Osgood Carleton’s recently rediscovered 1795 map of Boston is its sheer size. At approximately seven feet by six and a half feet, this wall map dwarfs many other Boston maps of the late eighteenth century, including Carleton’s own 1797 work, which until recently was considered the largest Boston map from this period known to be extant in a collection.

This isn’t a printed map but a drawing. The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association donated it to the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library in 2021. Based on a cartouche dedicating the map “To the Select-Men of the Town of Boston,” curators deduced it was originally town, then city property.

Indeed, volume III of a report on Documents of the City of Boston, for the Year 1879 (published 1880) had an appendix listing “Plans of Boston in the City Surveyor’s Department,” and that included:

Boston, 1795.—An original map. Surveyed by Osgood Carleton for the Select-men.

As for the cartographer:

Osgood Carleton was born to a New England farming family in 1742 and had little schooling. At age 16, he began military service in Nova Scotia during the Seven Years’ War, and he later served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. While he was born in New Hampshire and appears to have lived for a time in Haverhill, Massachusetts and in Maine, it was in Boston that Carleton made his mark and built the bulk of his career. Armed with mathematical skills presumably gained during his military service, Carleton earned his living putting these skills to practical use: he became a surveyor, a contributor to the ubiquitous almanacs of the era, and the leading cartographer in Massachusetts during his lifetime. . . .

he also left a legacy in his role as a teacher of young men in the City of Boston. . . . he offered on an array of practical mathematical skills from navigation to surveying and mensuration to gunnery, bookkeeping, and the projection of spheres and maps.

Mackey’s article discusses and displays Carleton’s maps of Massachusetts, one of which was eventually printed with state approval, as discussed back here.

The 1795 Boston map captures the town’s post-war transition. Carleton marked the place for the “New State-house” on “State Land.” That new government building would be dedicated that year.

Mackey also discusses how this map didn’t label Oliver’s Dock, though Carleton had used that as a landmark in advertising his school. By 1795 he may have moved to “an unfinished building in Merchant’s Row,” where Robert Bailey Thomas remembered studying under him. Nonetheless, “Oliver’s Dock” was still the official name of that location, preserving the memory of the unpopular royal appointee Andrew Oliver.

Off to a Great Start

Yesterday, after being chosen Speaker of the House by the minimally required 218 members, Rep. Mike Johnson delivered a speech that included these lines about a ceremony earlier in the day:

I was asked to provide a prayer for the nation. I offered one that is quite familiar to historians and probably many of us. It said right here in the program, it says right under my name, ‘it is said each day of his eight years of the presidency, and every day thereafter until his death, President Thomas Jefferson recited this prayer.’

I wanted to share it with you here at the end of my remarks. Not as a prayer per se right now, but really as a reminder of what our third President and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence thought was so important that it should be a daily recitation.

You can no doubt see where this is going.

Monticello’s Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia discusses this prayer among many other spurious quotations attached to the third President’s name with no evidence.

This text is called a “National Prayer for Peace,” and the historic site’s research staff says:

We have no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson. It appears in the 1928 United States Book of Common Prayer, and was first suggested for inclusion in a report published in 1919.

In other words, this text appears to date from the Woodrow Wilson administration, either the “he kept us out of war” period or the “we need a League of Nations” period, and was then officially adopted by a particular denomination of Protestant Christianity. The primary author of the Declaration of Independence did not know this text, nor make it a “daily recitation.”

Monticello also notes that Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was Episcopalian, used this text in his Thanksgiving Day address in 1930. Johnson could thus have connected his speech with a major U.S. President. But of course Roosevelt was a Democrat who expanded the federal government to help Americans during an economic crisis and then helped lead the global fight against fascism. Johnson is serving an ideology and a President with different goals.

As Monticello points out, folks who know anything about Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on religion should quickly doubt any claim that he composed a public prayer like this. Jefferson considered religion a private matter. He was proud of authoring a Virginia law that ended the establishment of religion and guaranteed freedom of thought. As President he broke from his predecessors’ precedents and declined to issue Thanksgiving proclamations.

Here’s a real Jefferson quote on the latter matter. In 1808 the Rev. Dr. Samuel Miller, a Presbyterian minister then based in New York, wrote asking him “to recommend…a day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer.”

The third President replied:

I consider the government of the US. as interdicted by the constitution from intermedling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. this results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the US. . . .

I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct it’s exercises, its discipline or its doctrines: nor of the religious societies that the General government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. fasting & prayer are religious exercises.

It would be hard to find a U.S. President more opposed to a “National Prayer” of any kind than Jefferson.

A New Edition of The Power of Sympathy

As a self-proclaimed propagator of unabashed gossip from Revolutionary New England, I have to note the recent publication of a new edition of The Power of Sympathy.

William Hill Brown published this novel pseudonymously in 1789. Most readers quickly recognized that it was based on a recent sex scandal in the top echelon of Boston society: rising attorney Perez Morton had impregnated his wife Susan’s sister, Fanny Apthorp.

In 1787 that affair led to a baby and parental rejection. In 1788 came a challenge to a duel from a Royal Navy officer and months of newspaper innuendo. Finally, Fanny committed suicide. Brown’s novel presented her character sympathetically—but was the book another layer of scandal?

This edition has been assembled by Prof. Jennifer Harris at the University of Waterloo and Prof. Bryan Waterman at New York University. It includes not only Brown’s The Power of Sympathy but also his play Occurrences of the Times, exploring some of the same incident as farce, and another closet drama, Sans Souci, alias, Free and Easy, digging into the sensitive spots of upper-class Boston.

Appendices reprint Fanny Apthorp’s final letters, which circulated at the time, and her sister Sarah Wentworth Morton’s poems; newspaper coverage of the case; newspaper essays on the place of women in the new republic; and letters from Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams about proper behavior for young republican gentlemen.

(Early on, people speculated that Sarah Wentworth Morton herself had written The Power of Sympathy, and that Mercy Warren had written the San Souci play. Warren was exasperated by that suggestion, Morton probably humiliated. I find it significant that both women eventually discarded their early anonymity and published under their own names, establishing how they wanted to be remembered as writers.)

The publisher of this new edition, Broadview Press, is based in Ontario. The book appears to have been published in Canada last month, but is scheduled to officially appear in the U.S. of A. this summer.

The Many Books of James Kirby Martin

This week brought the news that James Kirby Martin has died at the age of eighty-one.

Earning his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, which used to have a huge American history department, Martin taught at Rutgers before moving to the University of Houston.

In 2018, more than thirty years later, he retired as the Hugh Roy and Lilli Cranz Cullen University Professor of History. He’d held visiting appointments along the way, of course.

When I started researching the actual war part of the Revolution, I knew I was going to use James Kirby Martin’s books. His biography Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered is an excellent scholarly dig into well-trodden ground, and his edition of Joseph Plumb Martin’s memoir, titled Ordinary Courage, is probably the best.

Martin and Mark Edward Lender wrote A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789, as well as Drinking in America: A History, 1620-1980, and they edited Citizen Soldier: The Revolutionary War Journal of Joseph Bloomfield.

Then I found Martin was also coauthor with Joseph T. Glatthaar of Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution. Collaboration seems to have been one of his skills.

And those are just some of his books. His oeuvre extends from Men In Rebellion: Higher Governmental Leaders and the Coming of the American Revolution to Insurrection: The American Revolution and Its Meaning, as well as edited collections. One of his retirement projects was a novel written with Robert Burris about an entirely different period of history.

At the time of his death, Martin was still working. His Revolutionary War projects included a book about Fort Ticonderoga and a study of just war theory. I hope collaborators can complete those projects.

It wasn’t till after I’d read some of James Kirby Martin’s books that I had the pleasure of meeting him at a conference produced by America’s History, L.L.C. Later I also saw him at the Fort Plain Museum conference. Because he studied the actual war part of the Revolution, Jim Martin knew that his work attracted a lot of interest outside the academy, and he was happy to chat with readers and researchers from all walks of life. We’ll miss him.

“Hardships only make him firmer”

On 1 Jan 1775, 250 years ago today, young Joseph Cree went out into the streets of New York City with copies of the New-York Gazetteer, published by James Rivington, and a handbill asking for tips.

Joseph’s handbill read:

VERSES
Addressed by JOSEPH CREE,
To the
Gentlemen and Ladies,
To whom he carries the
NEW-YORK GAZETTEER.
January 1, 1775.

KIND SIRS, a young and bashful Boy,
Now comes, with Heart brimful of Joy,
To see, if you by some small Favor,
Will please t’encourage such a Shaver---
Though small, he has strove to do his Duty,
And hopes that he did always suit ye;
Through Frost and Snow and scorching Heat,
He has gone with News from Street to Street;
Without a Whimper or a Murmur,
For Hardships only make him firmer.
And now he thinks there’s some Pretence,
T’ obtain of you a few good Pence;
Or something that his Heart will cheer,
And make him merry this NEW-YEAR.

This is a sample of “carrier verses.” It’s unusual in two ways. It makes no mention of current events, possibly because the politics of 1775 meant any comment would offend someone. And it specifies the name of the printer’s boy distributing it; though some other surviving examples did that, most didn’t.

Cree family historian Gary L. Maher has stated that Joseph Cree was born in 1765, which would make him nine years old as he delivered those newspapers. If so, he probably didn’t write or set this verse himself, as some older printing apprentices did. The lines definitely emphasize how little he was.

However, Maher has also found a Joseph Cree enrolled in the New York militia in 1779, and a fourteen-year-old wouldn’t have been enrolled in the militia. So perhaps Joseph was older.

Cree started to work as a printer for Shepard Kollock’s New-Jersey Journal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, about 1783, the same year that Rivington gave up his newspaper in New York. Cree married a woman named Ann Crissey or Creesy, and they had children. City and county records show him living in Elizabeth in the 1790s.

While newspaper owners’ names appeared in their pages regularly, the employees who printed those pages usually remained anonymous. Cree’s name didn’t appear in any newspaper until the 18 Sept 1798 New-Jersey Journal:

DIED.
On Sunday night [16 September], in this town, of the yellow fever, which he caught in New-York, JOSEPH CREE, Printer, for fifteen years a journeyman with the Editor of this paper.—He has left a worthy woman and four small children to deplore his loss.

Cree was buried in the graveyard of Elizabeth’s First Presbyterian Church, twenty-three years after he passed out his greeting for the new year.

Battling Myths and Misinformation about 1775

As we reach the cusp of the Sestercentennial year of 2025, I’m highlighting some articles I’ve written for the Journal of the American Revolution discussing myths and mistaken beliefs about the events of 1775.

Some of these articles were published in the past year, some more than a decade ago.

Here are the tl;dr versions with links to the full-length originals.

American Patriots didn’t call the laws that Parliament passed in 1774 to reform Boston (and Massachusetts as a whole) the “Intolerable Acts.” That term arose decades later in U.S. history textbooks. George III’s blanket term for those laws was “Coercive Acts.” Full article.

Tarring and feathering was a painful and humiliating public punishment, but it wasn’t fatal. Full article.

Dr. Joseph Warren didn’t obtain inside information about the British army march to Concord in April 1775 from Margaret Gage, Gen. Thomas Gage’s wife. Instead, he consulted with a man we’ve never heard of: a knife-maker named William Jasper. Full article.

Israel Bissell didn’t carry news of the fighting at Lexington south, and no single courier rode went all the way to Philadelphia. The first rider was named Isaac Bissell, and he carried the news to Hartford, Connecticut. Full article.

There’s solid evidence that Col. Israel Putnam (not Col. William Prescott) issued the order “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. That phrase didn’t come from the Prussian army but from the Royal Navy. Full article.

Maj. John Pitcairn wasn’t fatally shot as he topped the wall of the provincial redoubt at Bunker Hill. Of the many men credited with that fatal shot, the best evidence points to Salem Poor, but he probably shot a different British officer. Full article.

Gen. George Washington didn’t respond to news of a gunpowder shortage in August 1775 by creating a false rumor of an adequate supply and feeding it to the British inside Boston. That was a novelistic touch created by a biographer misreading his sources. Full article.

Finally, my article for Age of Revolutions on how the “Join Or Die” snake evolved into the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake remains one of that site’s most read. While this essay doesn’t refute a clearly mistaken belief, I argue that those were two different species of American snakes: the glass snake and the rattlesnake.

If more people avoid repeating those myths and errors in the coming year, then my work will have benefited the world. And we can all move on to repeating new myths and errors.

“Global 1776” Conference in Hong Kong, Mar. 2026

Both demonstrating and exploring the global reach of the American Revolution is this conference announcement from the University of Hong Kong.

“Global 1776: Imperial Worlds in Upheaval”

The American Revolution is often told as a national story. Yet it was also part of a series of world events which culminated in a global age of imperial crisis lasting from the 1760s through the 1820s. That crisis was simultaneously intellectual, cultural, political, social, and economic.

In some places, established empires lost power. In others, new empires took shape. In the Americas, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, local forces demanded change. Was the American Revolution paradigmatic? Did the age of global imperial crisis have a center?

The University of Chicago, the University of Hong Kong, and the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society will hold a conference at the University of Hong Kong on 12-14 March 2026 on the theme “Global 1776.”

We invite contributions on any aspect of this age of imperial crisis. Scholars may propose papers or panels with a range of methodologies and themes. We are especially interested in work that focuses on peoples and places that have received less attention from scholars of the Revolutionary era, especially Asia, India, West Africa, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Ireland, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Work that crosses imperial and historiographic boundaries and uses comparisons or connections to put the American Revolution in broader dialogue is especially welcome.

The conference steering committee consists of:

• James R. Fichter, Associate Professor, Global and Area Studies, University of Hong Kong, author of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776.
• Michelle Craig McDonald, Librarian and Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, author of the upcoming Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States. 
• Steven Pincus, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and the College, University of Chicago, author of The Heart of the Declaration. 
• Brendan McConville, Professor of History Boston University, Head of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, author of The King’s Three Faces. 
• Christine Walker, Associate Professor of History, University of Hong Kong, author of Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire.

Travel support and “opportunities for conference publications” are available for presenters. The deadline for submitting proposals is 20 Apr 2025. Proposals for papers should consist of a 250-word abstract and c.v. for each presenter. Proposals for panels should also include a file indicating the names of the panel, the authors of panel papers, and the discussant/moderator. Use the "SUBMIT" link at the conference website or send email to [email protected].

Understanding the Context of The New-England Primer

The Louisiana law requiring public schools to display a version of the Ten Commandments (now blocked from taking effect while a civil-rights lawsuit is settled) also requires the display of a “context statement” about those rules.

That context doesn’t discuss where the Ten Commandments appear in the Jewish Bible, or how the Sermon on the Mount depicts Jesus riffing on them, or how different faiths present different texts.

Instead, that mandated “context statement” is written to justify the posting of the Ten Commandments themselves in public schools. It begins:

The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments.

For a “context statement,” that’s missing historic context.

It’s true that most editions of The New-England Primer included questions and answers about the Ten Commandments. That’s because that little book reprinted the Westminster Catechism, a set of 107 questions and answers that children were supposed to memorize.

This text was created in 1646–1647, during the ascendancy of the Puritans in England. There had been many forms of Christian teaching for the masses before. The Church of England and Church (Kirk) of Scotland agreed to a synod in Westminster to produce an official catechism for those two faiths.

As a result, the Westminster Catechism held sway in what became Congregationalism, and thus in New England, even as the Anglican Church swung back toward episcopacy. The Presbyterian Church adopted that text for three centuries. Baptists revised that catechism to fit their understanding of salvation, and within decades individual authors published their own versions and expositions, some becoming quite popular.

That catechism did indeed devote “more than forty questions” to the Ten Commandments, or an average of more than four per Commandment. That’s because its authors didn’t think children could really understand the Ten Commandments just by reading, or even memorizing, those rules. That should raise questions about the value of posting simply those Commandments in school.

But even more salient to the Louisiana law is that The New-England Primer was not created for use in public schools. Under colonial New England’s educational systems, families were responsible for teaching children how to read English. They could do so in the home or in private neighhorhood schools, often called “dame schools.” That’s when young children studied The New-England Primer.

The public schools were established to provide boys aged seven or above with more advanced lessons: in Latin and Greek in the grammar schools, in handwriting and business math in the writing schools. A boy had to demonstrate he was already reading English well before being admitted into either of Boston’s Latin Schools, and after that his reading assignments consisted mostly of classical writers.

Thus, the true context of The New-England Primer actually casts doubt on what the Louisiana law is trying to mandate. That book contained the Ten Commandments not because they were universal but because it served the particular religious faiths that had adopted the Westminster Catechism. Those Commandments weren’t displayed on their own because the authors of that catechism thought children wouldn’t understand them correctly that way. And that textbook wasn’t created for American public schools but for home and private education.

False Witness about What James Madison Wrote

Earlier this year, the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring all public schools in the state to display a particular edited version of the Ten Commandments in a particular size starting on 1 Jan 2025.

A federal judge has blocked that law from taking effect on the grounds that it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment bar on governments establishing religion.

In attempting to justify itself, the law cites some historical facts about earlier invocations of religion in American civic life, though not the Ten Commandments. The law’s only citation specifically mentioning those supposedly foundational rules is:

History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States of America, stated that “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments”.

That is, however, a lie. The editors of the James Madison Papers have said that those words don’t appear in his writings, and that idea is antithetical to what Madison did write about the basis of the Constitution and the place of religion in government.

Three books published in 1989 attributed those words to Madison:

• George Grant, Trial and Error: The American Civil Liberties Union and Its Impact on Your Family.
• Mark A. Belilies and Stephen McDowell, America’s Providential History.
• David Barton, The Myth of Separation.

All three were written by fundamentalist Christian ministers publishing through fundamentalist Christian presses (in Barton’s case, through his own organization).

As his source for the Madison quotation, and for other claims, Grant pointed to Harold K. Lane’s Liberty! Cry Liberty! (Boston: Lamb & Lamb Tractarian Society, 1939). Beliles and McDowell offered no citation. Barton cited Beliles and McDowell.

In his 1992 reissue of The Myth of Separation, Barton changed his citation to match Grant’s Liberty! Cry Liberty! and added a 1958 issue of Progressive Calvinism, itself citing that year’s calendar from the Spiritual Mobilization organization.

Authors defending Barton and themselves against the charge of lying about the quotation point to Liberty! Cry Liberty! as evidence that people have attributed those words to Madison since 1939. Except that citation also appears to be a lie.

Chris Rodda has detailed her unsuccessful quest to find a copy of Liberty! Cry Liberty! anywhere. It’s not in the Library of Congress or Harvard University, the nation’s two largest repositories. The book has no entry in WorldCat. Nor is there other evidence of the publisher or author existing. Grant has never supplied a copy or explained where he saw one.

Rodda has made a convincing case that the real source of this “quotation” are speeches that law school dean Clarence Manion delivered in the early 1950s in support of the Bricker Amendment. Manion interspersed accurate quotations from Madison with his own exegeses, which of course reflected his own ideas of politics and religion and which many Madison experts disagree with. Later in that decade, it appears, people assembling non-scholarly religious publications assigned Manion’s words to Madison himself.

After that, a series of authors saw a “quotation” from a famous Framer that confirmed their existing belief and repeated it without checking for an original source, all the way to the Louisiana law. So is this a simple chain of error, the authors to be blamed for no more than carelessness?

I don’t think the idea of simple mistakes is tenable. For one thing, someone came up with that suspicious citation of Liberty! Cry Liberty!, and many other people have repeated it without anyone apparently confirming the publication even existed.

Secondly, scholars pointed out the falsehood of the Madison quotation decades ago. The Madison Papers editors addressed it in 1993. Robert S. Alley published about it in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal in 1995. The Washington Post published a letter about it in 1999. Chris Rodda wrote out her investigation in 2016.

Even Barton and his organization now acknowledge that the Madison quotation is “unconfirmed” after more than twenty years of zealous searching. (I’ve discussed other obvious errors from Barton here and here. And we mustn’t forget how Barton’s effort at publishing through a religious press with higher standards was recalled in 2012.)

In sum, the Louisiana legislature used a false claim to justify promulgating a particular religious text to schoolchildren. That claim had been publicly shown to be false before the parents of some of those children were even born. The lack of evidence for that claim can easily be found through a simple web search, including at the website of the author most responsible for spreading the falsehood. That doesn’t add up to simple carelessness. That’s educational negligence.

TOMORROW: What The New England Primer says about the Ten Commandments.

Christopher Machell and the Additional Companies

Earlier this month I wrote about Capt. Christopher Machell of His Majesty’s 15th Regiment of Foot.

Some sources have said that British officer was wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and I knew his regiment wasn’t even in North America at that time. Apparently more reliable sources said he was wounded in the “Battle of New York,” but when that was remained a mystery.

Also a mystery: Why if Machell lost an arm in 1776 did he remain on the regiment’s rolls through the end of the war?

I was pleased but not surprised to receive answers from Don Hagist, author most recently of Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution and editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.

Here’s Don Hagist as this month’s guest blogger, plugging the holes in that short series about Capt. Machell:

During the American Revolution British regiment on service in America maintained a cadre of officers and non-commissioned officers in the British Isles for recruiting. Called “Additional Companies”, these were not companies in a structural sense, but financial vehicles to allow for the expenses of the recruiters, and for the recruits.

Every so often, when enough recruits had been raised and trained, they were sent to America under care of one of the Additional Company officers, and an officer in America returned to Britain to join the recruiting service.

As the war progressed, it was quite common for wounded officers to return to Britain to recover, and joining the Additional Companies was a way to keep them at full pay and working while they convalesced.

Captain Christopher Machell commanded the 15th Regiment’s light infantry company, and was wounded at the battle of Harlem Heights on “New York Island” on 16 September 1776. Because he was no longer fit for that company’s active service, he was transferred into a battalion company, then the following June joined the Additional Companies in Great Britain, where he remained for the rest of the war.

Thanks, Don!

Grand Union Flag Raising Commemoration in Somerville, 1 Jan.

On Wednesday, 1 Jan 2025, the city of Somerville will observe its annual Grand Union Flag Raising, 249 years after Gen. George Washington had a new flag flown in the fortifications atop Prospect Hill.

The program will begin at 11:30 A.M. with a procession from the City Hall to Prospect Hill. The public is invited to participate in this walk along with city officials and guests.

From noon to 1:00 P.M. there will be a ceremony on the hill in the shadow of the present monument. It will feature:

• A reenactment of George III’s message to the rebellious colonies delivered by gentlemen from His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. This will presumably be part of the king’s speech to Parliament in the fall of 1775, which arrived in Massachusetts around the same time as the flag-raising.
• Remarks from people interpreting Martha Washington, wife of the Continental commander-in-chief, and the poet Phillis Wheatley, who several weeks before had sent Washington a complimentary poem.
• Members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.
• A portrayal of Gen. Washington leading the ceremony to raise the new flag, usually interpreted to be the new Continental Navy flag: thirteen red and white stripes for the thirteen colonies at the Continental Congress with the Union Jack in the canton.

Attendees should be prepared for cold weather; this event takes place on a hill during the New England winter. Hot drinks will be available. Participants will also have a choice between small Grand Union flags to wave or blank flags to decorate.

If the weather cooperates, the tower on Prospect Hill will be open to the public following the ceremony. The Somerville Museum will be on hand with souvenirs representing the city’s historic assets.

“This is a great day with the Roman Catholics”

On Saturday, 25 Dec 1779, John Quincy Adams was in the coastal town of La Coruña.

He and his younger brother Charles were accompanying their father on his second diplomatic mission to Europe. Aiming for France, their ship had run into trouble, and the captain had chosen to dock in allied Spain instead.

That provided the occasion for John Quincy to experience another culture. Which his diary shows him doing with characteristic primness:

This is a great day with the Roman Catholics. “Fete de Nouailles” Christmas. However I find they dont mind it much. They dress up and go to mass but after that’s over all is. So if they call this religion I wonder what is not it; after Mass, almost all the Shops in town are open’d.

But stop. I must not say any thing against their religion while I am in their country but must change the subject.

This forenoon Madame Lagoanere [wife of the American consul] sent us some sweetmeats: for my part I was much obliged to her for them, but I shall diminish them but little.

John Quincy’s idea of a proper religious holiday involved closing the shops. That was how people observed fast days in New England, after all. And the gift of sweets seems to have puzzled him. I suspect Charles wasn’t so bothered.

Tales of the Cochran Family

The 8 Sept 1845 Exeter News-Letter followed up the tale of James Cochran’s captivity and return with remarks about his son—though it got that man’s name wrong.

The 8 November Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics reprinted the first paragraph of that account, correctly naming the man as John Cochran:

He led a sea-faring life in his younger days, and sailed out of Portsmouth a number of years, as a ship-master, with brilliant success. A short period before the war of the Revolution broke out, he was appointed to the command of the fort in Portsmouth harbor. The day after the battle of Lexington, he and his family were made prisoners of war by a company of volunteers under the command of John Sullivan, afterwards the distinguished Major General Sullivan of the Revolution, President of New-Hampshire, &c. Captain Cochran and his family were generously liberated on parole of honor.

That paragraph, flattering to both Cochran and Sullivan, now came with the endorsement of one of John and Sarah Cochran’s daughters, who had moved back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

It was, however, wrong. The move on Fort William and Mary led by John Sullivan (shown above) happened four months before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, not the day after. And to read John Cochran’s own accounts from December 1774, it was much less friendly than this retelling describes.

The Portsmouth Journal didn’t name the Cochran daughter or state her age, so we don’t know if she was old enough to recall these events herself or had heard about them from her parents and older siblings.

She provided some new anecdotes:

Not far from this time Gov. J[ohn]. Wentworth took refuge in the Fort, and Captain Cochran attended him to Boston. In his absence the only occupants of the fort were Mrs. Cochran, a man and a maid servants [sic], and four children.

At this time all vessels passing out of the harbor, had to show their pass at the Fort. An English man-of-war one day came down the river, bound out. Mrs. C. directed the man to hail the ship. No respect was paid to him. Mrs. C. then directed him to discharge one of the cannon. The terrified man said, “Ma’am I have but one eye, and can’t see the touch-hole.” Taking the match, the heroic lady applied it herself; the Frigate immediately hove too [sic], and showing that all was right, was permitted to proceed.

For this discharge of duty to his Majesty’s Government, she received a handsome reward.

Again, the timing of this event seems off. Sarah Cochran appears to have been on the family farm rather than at the fort when Gov. Wentworth departed in August 1775. The New Hampshire Patriots would hardly have let her take charge of the guns, and there was little gunpowder left anyway. If something like this story happened, it was probably earlier, under royal rule.

The daughter’s account continued:

It was thought by some of the enemies of Gov. Wentworth that he was still secreted at the fort, after he had left for Boston. A party one day entered the house in the Fort, (the same house recently occupied by Capt. Dimmick), and asked permission of Mrs. Cochran to search the rooms for the Governor.

After looking up stairs in vain, they asked for a light to examine the cellar. “O yes,” said a little daughter of Mrs. C. “I will light you.” She held the candle until they were in a part of the cellar from which she well knew they could not retreat without striking their heads against low beams, when the roguish girl blew the light out.

As she anticipated, they began to bruise themselves, and they swore pretty roundly.—The miss from the stairs in an elevated tone cried out, “Have you got him?” This arch inquiry only served to divide their curses between the impediments to their progress and the “little Tory.”

Was this “little daughter” the same one telling the story or an older sister of the narrator? Was this an anecdote from the militia raids on the fort in December 1774 or truly a search for the departed governor months later?

The Portsmouth Journal then returned to the text from the Exeter News-Letter, adding only one parenthetical correction:

Captain John Cochran, (who was a cousin, and not the father, as has been stated, of Lord Admiral Cochran) immediately joined the British in Boston; and, as it was believed, being influenced by the double motive of gratitude towards a government that had generously noticed and promoted him to offices of honor, trust, and emolument, and for the sake of retaining a valuable stipend from the Crown, remained with the British army during the war. It is due to his honor to state, however, that he was never known to take an active part in the conflict.

At the close of the war, he returned to St. Johns’, New-Brunswick, lived in the style of a gentleman the remainder of his days, and died at the age of 55.

John Cochran’s sister and then his daughter, both living in America, apparently didn’t want people to think he was too fervent in his loyalty to the Crown. Therefore, they insisted he was “never known to have taken an active part in the conflict.”

That’s a direct contradiction to what Sarah Cochran told the Loyalists Commission back in 1787. She described her husband as working for both the British army and the Royal Navy, including in the invasion of Rhode Island, and Abijah Willard backed her up.

The stories offered to American readers in 1845 didn’t say anything about Patriots taking the Cochrans’ property, or the years of separation on opposite sides of the war, or the journey of Sarah Cochran and her chldren to New York.

The tale of Sarah Cochran forcing a British warship to “hove to” and show a pass may also have been shaped to appeal to American readers. Though she reportedly “received a handsome reward” from the Crown for that action, that anecdote depicted a woman in America bossing around a frigate.

Sarah Cochran had told the Loyalists Commission about her husband’s debilitating strokes. Again, a fellow refugee in New Brunswick confirmed that. But John Cochran’s sister, followed by his daughter, didn’t mention his health at all, instead emphasizing how he had “lived in the style of a gentleman.”

Much of the Portsmouth Journal’s article went into Lorenzo Sabine’s compendium of stories on American Loyalists. It was thus an early source on the Patriot raids on Fort William and Mary, but not a very reliable one.