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Plunkett Fleeson, Revolutionary Upholsterer

Posted / Material Culture, Revolutionary Characters

Plunkett Fleeson upholstered this elaborate easy chair a few years before the Revolutionary War.

A prosperous craftsman whose trade serves the very wealthy is an unlikely sort of revolutionary. He has too much invested in stability to welcome economic upheaval, and too much invested in relationships with customers, suppliers and peers to welcome revolutionary change—or so it would seem. Yet such craftsmen were among the active supporters of American resistance to British policies in the 1760s and political revolution in the 1770s. Paul Revere is the best known, but he was one of many, including the curiously named Plunkett Fleeson, the most successful upholsterer in eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

Why did they do it?  They weren’t simply following their wealthy patrons. In most cases their customers were divided about resistance and revolution, and ultimately between patriots and loyalists.

No single or simple answer will suffice. Great movements are rarely shaped by simple motives and single causes. Revolutions occur when the aspirations and anxieties of a wide variety of people collide and find common expression in a movement larger than any of them. People had many and varied reasons for embracing the cause of resistance to the impositions of the British government in the 1760s and early 1770s, and those who followed the logic of their resistance into revolution, as many did, had their own reasons for doing so.

We can only understand the Revolution by exploring those reasons, rather than assuming participants all fit into neat patterns aligned with occupation, wealth, ethnicity, religion or region. Such patterns are suggestive, but they often do not explain the positions historical actors adopted or the actions they took, which were often contingent on circumstances that are not apparent at the broad level of social identity.

Discerning why Plunkett Fleeson embraced the Revolution and what it meant to him is hampered by the fact that he did not leave us many letters and papers recording his thoughts or justifying his actions. We have the records of what he did, spread out in fugitive invoices, newspaper advertisements and entries in the surviving ledgers and correspondence of the people with whom he did business. We also have the material remains of the work he did and contemporary descriptions of that work. Fleeson’s craft and the business he built around it consumed most of his life. If we are to understand why he became a revolutionary, and what the Revolution meant to him, we must begin with upholstery, however remote that may seem from the business of revolution.

Plunkett Fleeson lived most of his long and successful life as a colonial subject of the British crown. He spent nearly all of it in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1712. The town was then thirty years old, and had a population of around three thousand people. It was an unsophisticated place, with muddy, unpaved streets joining a cluster of low, inelegant little houses, barely more than a settlement on the edge of Britain’s Atlantic empire—a place of little consequence and no pretense, culturally dominated by Quakers who expressed a preference for the plain and simple. Philadelphia offered little else.

The upholsterer was a luxury craftsman largely unknown in seventeenth-century America. The first Philadelphia craftsman identified as an upholsterer, or “upholder,” was John Budd, whose name and occupation were recorded on a 1693 tax list. Between 1700 and 1760, some eleven upholsterers worked in Philadelphia. By mid-century, the successful upholsterer was much more than a specialized craftsman in the furniture trade. He was part craftsman and part entrepreneur whose chief stock in trade—fine fabrics—was the most expensive part of fitting out a stylish house. The most successful upholsterer was an interior designer and arbiter of taste, upon whom the wealthy relied to help decorate their homes in the best English manner.

When Plunkett Fleeson opened his own upholstery shop in 1739, Philadelphia was just beginning to lift itself out of the mud and had become a town of modest consequence. Dr. Alexander Hamilton, an Englishman on a tour of the colonies in 1744, wrote that it was “much like one of our country market towns in England. When you are in it the majority of the buildings appear low and mean, the streets unpaved and therefore full of rubbish and mire.”

Unimpressive as it was, Philadelphia was the market town for a rural hinterland that stretched for many miles in all directions, with a port that conducted a lively trade, shipping foodstuffs, lumber and other raw materials up and down the Atlantic coast and to Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, as well as with Britain itself. Philadelphia’s merchants were growing wealthy and developing a taste for better things, including upholstered furniture, curtains and mattresses tightly packed with hair and feathers rather than loosely filled with wool.

Fleeson satisfied their wishes and prospered with them, earning enough to acquire a good house at 113 Chestnut Street. Next door lived Anthony Benezet, a Quaker schoolmaster who became the first great antislavery spokesman in the Atlantic world. Benjamin Franklin, who was about Fleeson’s age, owned the lot in back. Fleeson benefited from a growing network of connections in commerce and public life, and was rewarded with highly visible public business. When the new State House (which we know as Independence Hall) was completed, Plunkett Fleeson supplied the curtains.

He was thirty-seven in 1749 when he joined the Philadelphia Associators, a private militia organized because the pacifist Quaker leaders of Pennsylvania refused to raise a militia to defend the city in time of war. He was made an ensign. As his business prospered he contributed generously to public improvements. In 1752 he was among the founders of the Hibernia Engine Company and an early contributor to the Pennsylvania Hospital, of which he served as a director. He was also proud to serve the public as a craftsman. In 1753 he reupholstered the chair used by the speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and in 1754-1756 he furnished new window curtains for the State House.

By then he was successful enough to acquire the large lot at the corner of Fourth and Chestnut, where he conducted his business at “the Sign of the Easy Chair.” Unlike many craftsmen and tradesmen, Plunkett Fleeson did not live over his shop. From the 1750s onward, he was among the richest taxpayers in the city’s prosperous Middle Ward. He generally ranked from the eighty-sixth to the ninety-fifth percentile in wealth.

By the late 1750s, Fleeson was more a businessman than a craftsman, employing seamstresses, painters and other craftspeople as well as upholsterers, commissioning work from cabinetmakers and joiners, and always buying and selling, his frequent advertisements offering “ready money for Horse hair and Cow tails” and “maple chairs as cheap as from Boston.” His reputation rested on his elaborately upholstered easy chairs, which were a symbol of refinement and elegant living only the wealthy could afford.

Fleeson succeeded in selling the trappings of eighteenth-century opulence in a city shaped by Quaker injunctions to live simply and plainly—injunctions that wealthy Quakers seemed to have honored in the breach. William Penn had railed against the folly of excessive ornamentation. “How many pieces of riband, and what feathers, lacebands and the like did Adam and Eve wear in paradise, or out of it?” Penn asked. “What rich embroidaries . . . . trimmings laced gowns, embroidered petticoats, shoes with slipslaps laced with silk or silver lace?” As late as the 1760s, Quaker tracts discouraged “all superfluity in furniture” and directed “moderation and plainness in gesture, speech, apparel, or furniture, of houses,” calling luxurious furnishings “a clog and a hindrance” to living a Godly life.

These were prescriptions, and Philadelphia’s mid-century Quakers did not adhere closely to them. Prohibitions often reflect what people do—otherwise why bother making rules? In fact, surviving decorative arts owned by eighteenth-century Philadelphia Quakers testify to their taste for the finer things. They were a temptation to which successful Philadelphians easily succumbed, and Plunkett Fleeson—an Anglican—was there to help them do it. A 1761 advertisement signaled his role as a tastemaker, offering a secondhand “Sett of yellow and a Sett of green Worsted Bed and Window Curtains, fitted in the best Taste by Mr. Fleeson.”

By then Philadelphia had become the place in British America to buy fancy goods, especially upholstered furniture. Philadelphia craftsmen set the style for the colonies: sophisticated, urbane and refined. The wealthy merchant John Brown of Providence could have ordered his furniture from craftsmen in Providence, Newport or Boston. In 1761 he turned to Fleeson to order “a Compleat Black Walnut Easy Chair with Casters to run on … with Eagles claws” upholstered in “Red Hereteen,” specifying that it “be done well … by a neet workman, and finished as soon as may be.” Fleeson charged Brown nine pounds, eighteen shillings, three pence half penny for the chair—around two thousand dollars in our money. In 1764 Fleeson charged Nicholas Brown of Providence eleven pounds, thirteen shillings, eleven pence for a similar chair.

In 1765 Fleeson offered his customers “crimson, green, blue and yellow Harrateens and Cheneys”—wool fabrics often used for bed hangings—“best Cotton Chints, Bed Patterns, with suitable Trimmings, silk Bed lace, Furniture Check, Flanders and other Bed Ticks,” as well as “a Variety of the best English Tossels.” Beds with elaborate and ingenious curtains, cornices, rods and ruffles were among the most expensive furnishings in stylish homes. Fleeson charged William Armstrong forty-five pounds, fourteen shillings, nine pence for a “full trim’d Bed” in 1762. Only two pounds eleven shillings of that was for the wooden bedstead. The rest was for a chintz, linen and silk confection including a variety of Venetian curtains, tassels, cords and pulleys, which seems likely to have been the most expensive thing in Armstrong’s home.

In the last decades of the colonial period, the colonies were becoming more English, not less—and the ways it was becoming more English included fashion, dress, gardening, architecture and interior design. It was a provincial sort of Englishness that had more in common with Bristol and Norwich than with London, but it was English nonetheless. Wealthy Americans wanted their houses built to the standards set by the latest London pattern books, their furniture in accordance with the latest prescriptions of Thomas Chippendale and his followers, their gardens designed in the relaxed style of contemporary English landscape gardeners, their tables set with the latest wares of Wedgwood and his peers, their sideboards decorated with Chinese ceramics reimported from Britain.

Plunkett Fleeson was an impresario of this cultural transformation, in which American colonists succumbed to the same consumer impulses that were reshaping British cities and towns and the country houses of the wealthy—a taste for Staffordshire creamware and brass buttons and printed fabrics, and to the lure of British commercial amusements, including traveling theater companies and ultimately, resident ones, offering up plays a season or two after their London premiers. Colonial high culture was deliberately, and proudly, imitative—identifying colonial elites and the more prosperous middling class of craftsmen and shopkeepers who served them with Britain.

Philadelphia was no longer the muddy town of Fleeson’s youth. It was, a Scottish peer, Lord Adam Gordon, opined in 1765, “one of the wonders of the world, if you consider its Size, the number of Inhabitants, the regularity of its Streets, their great breadth and length . . . one will not hesitate to call it the first Town in America, but one that bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.”  Plunkett Fleeson, through his civic-minded philanthropy but most of all with his draperies and cushioned chairs and fancy wallpaper, had helped to make it so.

Fleeson was fifty-one years old at the end of the French and Indian War, and like many colonists he probably expected victory and peace to signal the beginning of a new era of prosperity—a time of increasing wealth that would be reflected in his ledgers by expansive orders for fine fabrics, elaborate imported wallpaper, fancy furnishings and other material manifestations of the good life in a triumphant empire of which the North American colonies were an increasingly important and valued part.

He could not have imagined that the British government would institute a program of imperial reorganization that would include imposing unprecedented taxes on the American colonies without their consent. In 1765 Fleeson’s name stood out among those of tradesmen who signed a remonstrance against the Stamp Act. It was not that the tax would impose an unacceptable burden. Fleeson was prosperous, and the tax was small. The king’s subjects in Britain had paid stamp duties for several decades without protest—but they were represented in Parliament, the colonists insisted, while the colonists were not.

The tradesmen did not ground their case on this argument. They complained instead of the consequences of the act for the highly profitable trade between Britain and the colonies. The law, they complained, “if carried into execution in this Province, will further tend to prevent our making those Remittances to Great Britain, for payment of old Debts, or purchase of more Goods, which the Faith subsisting between the Individuals trading with each other requires.” The signers sought repeal of the act, “in justice to ourselves to the Traders of Great Britain who usually give us Credit, and to the Consumers of British Manufactures in this Province.”

The British responses to the colonial protests were startling. Some government spokesmen argued that the colonists were represented in Parliament—that every member represented all of the king’s subjects. This theory of virtual representation struck many colonists as absurd—they replied that the right to consent to taxes was a fundamental right of all Englishmen to which they were as much entitled as the king’s subjects in Britain.

Government spokesmen and other commentators replied that the colonists did not enjoy the same rights as Englishmen living in the British Isles—that by leaving Britain the colonists had sacrificed many of those traditional rights. Some writers went further and argued that the colonists were not like Englishmen at all—that they were royal subjects living on the barbarous frontier of the king’s domain. The most severe of these critics wrote that the colonists were coarse, unrefined and lived like the woodland savages that surrounded them, and that such people had no claim on the rights of Englishmen. As the imperial controversy degenerated in an endless series of intemperate polemics, this argument was repeated over and over.

The imperial crisis of the 1760s led from protest to resistance to rebellion because it touched the lives of colonists from many different walks of life. Each had his or her own perspective on the crisis. To a settler in the backcountry, for whom a larger or better farm held out the prospect of a better life, the royal proclamation of 1763 forbidding settlement beyond the mountains loomed large, as it did for many speculators who hoped to grow rich. For learned men, constitutional and legal arguments about parliamentary authority loomed large.

For luxury craftsmen who had prospered by bringing the most refined English tastes to Philadelphia, the British argument that they were not entitled to the same rights as other British subjects challenged the results of a lifetime of work. Colonial urban centers were provincial and their high style culture imitated London tastes, but by the 1760s the latest London fashions reached Philadelphia nearly as fast as they reached provincial centers in Britain. Fleeson and other high style craftsmen thought of themselves as an integral part of the British cultural world and were dismayed to learn that the British government regarded them as socially and culturally inferior—as less than the full participants in British cultural life that they had worked so hard to become.

The Townshend Duties hit hard at the luxury market. Taxing paint, paper, lead, tea and glass, the duties were aimed at the wealthy—Fleeson’s customers sitting in their fashionable parlors sipping tea, surrounded by walls adorned with imported paint and wallpaper, the room illuminated by natural light streaming through large, elaborate windows with glass panes fixed in place with lead.

Fleeson’s business depended heavily on imported English luxury goods, most importantly fabrics that could not be woven in the colonies, but all manner of other refined goods for which there were no substitutes produced in the colonies. Non-importation was hard on his business, but he persevered. In 1769 Fleeson offered his customers  “American Paper Hangings, manufactured in Philadelphia of all kinds and colours, and not inferior to those imported,” explaining that “there is considerable duty imposed on paper hangings imported here, and it cannot be doubted but that every one among us who wishes prosperity to America will give a preference to our own manufactures.” For Fleeson, this advertisement was a kind of declaration of independence.

Fleeson’s financial success insulated him from the business setbacks non-importation imposed on less established merchants and tradesmen. Fleeson probably had a substantial inventory of imported fabrics accumulated in his workshop at Fourth and Chestnut—enough indeed to give the “Sign of the Easy Chair” an enormous advantage over his younger, aspiring competitors. In the 1760s and 1770s Fleeson’s competitors included Samuel How, Thomas Lawrence, William Martin, John Webster and John Read—some of them craftsmen trained in London shops who advertised their sophisticated credentials in the newspapers.

Philadelphia-born Plunkett Fleeson nonetheless remained the leader, the gold standard in the trade. As the imperial controversy disrupted trade, Fleeson had considerable competitive advantages—a rich network of clients, a reputation as a craftsman of impeccable standards, and the assets to weather adversity. He had a substantial inventory of imported materials to work with and the financial asset sto deal with interruptions in business. With few of these advantages, his competitors found resistance and revolution potentially devastating. Fleeson did not.

Plunkett Fleeson was also nimble enough to take advantage of the new business opportunities the crisis offered. When George Washington was in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, he sought out Fleeson to supply the Fairfax County militia with drums and flags—and the revolutionary upholsterer was ready to oblige him. On November 29, 1774, Washington’s Philadelphia agent William Milnor reported to Washington that “Mr Fleecen assures me the Drums Coulers &c. shall be ready to come with the first Vessels & you may be assured I shall forward them with the Utmost speed.” Fleeson also provided Washington with a silk sash to go with his Virginia regimental uniform. When Washington appeared at the next spring at the Second Continental Congress in full military uniform, the sash he wore was probably the one supplied by Plunkett Fleeson.

When war finally broke out, Fleeson embraced the business opportunities it presented. In 1775 he advertised “drums, colours and other military instruments of the most approved kinds, and will endeavour to execute distant orders with the utmost despatch.” At least one of Fleeson’s “colours” survives—the regimental standard of the First Pennsylvania Batallion. On February 29, 1776, the Committee of Safety authorized payment of twenty-four pounds for “Drums, &c” supplied to the First Pennsylvania Batallion. Fleeson subcontracted this work out to a “Colonel Waine.” In a surviving invoice for his work dated August 26, 1775, Waine charged Fleeson eight pounds, five shillings for supplying “a Battan Taffaty Colour, Staff, Spear, Tassels” and four pounds, seven shillings for “a Division Colour Compleat.” In the spring of 1776, Fleeson manufactured three campaign tents for George Washington—a large marquee for dining and another for sleeping, along with a smaller baggage tent.

Plunkett Fleeson was sixty-four years old in the summer of 1776—far too old for military service—but he was widely regarded as a civic leader and embraced public service with enthusiasm. In June 1777 he was appointed a judge of the Philadelphia City Court. Like many active patriots, Fleeson left the city when the British army approached, and did not return until the British evacuated in June 1778. He kept busy that summer and into the fall administering oaths of allegiance and serving on the grand jury investigating the conduct of citizens accused of collaborating with the British during the occupation. The grand jury returned several indictments for treason—a capital offense—but ultimately only two of the convicted were executed. In 1780, “Squire Fleeson,” as he was affectionately known, was promoted to presiding judge of the city court.

In December 1783, Fleeson had the pleasure of addressing George Washington on behalf of the city government when Washington passed through Philadelphia on his way to Annapolis to resign his commission as commander-in-chief. In his address, Fleeson praised “the infinite Goodness of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe” for “raising up among us an illustrious Personage, with the most shining Abilities and conspicuous Virtues to lead, direct and animate by His Conduct and Example. Who this great Character is, shall be a Blank in our Page; being confident that every grateful Heart and generous Hand will be ready to fill it up.”

It was an apt tribute from a man who had spent much of his life filling up the blank walls and empty rooms of Philadelphia’s finest homes, for whom resistance and revolution was a declaration of cultural equality as much as political independence. Plunkett Fleeson died August 21, 1791. His body was interred in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, the elegant Anglican church completed in 1762, when he was on the vestry. The legend on his gravestone has worn to nothing, but his story survives to remind us of the complex motives that shaped our Revolution.

 

Above: Plunkett Fleeson upholstered this elaborate easy chair by cabinetmaker Thomas Affleck, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for John Cadwalader in 1770-1771.

Read about other Revolutionary Characters, including African American soldier Peter Hunter, wounded hero Margaret Corbin and homeless veteran Joseph Winter.

View the Cadwalader easy chair at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

 

 

 

 

The Elusive Peter Hunter

Posted / Revolutionary Characters, The Legacy of the Revolution

On November 4, 1844, Stephen Thomas of rural West Fairlee, Vermont, wrote to Dr. Ira Davis, an old friend, then in Connecticut. Thomas explained that the widow of a Revolutionary War soldier named Peter Hunter had approached him, seeking his help in securing a widow’s pension. In 1832 Congress had passed an act providing pensions to nearly all surviving soldiers of the Revolutionary War. Tens of thousands of men had qualified and received annual pension payments. In the years that followed, Congress extended those benefits to the widows of Revolutionary War soldiers—first to women who were married to soldiers during the war, and later to any widow whose husband had borne arms in the war, so long as she had not remarried.

Peter Hunter had served in a Connecticut regiment, and Thomas asked Davis to make inquiries in Hartford to secure the evidence Mrs. Hunter needed to document her pension claim. Thomas explained that Peter Hunter had “enlisted at Farmington Ct in 1776, was waiter to Genl Putnam during part of his service, & belonging to Col Meigs Regt. She does not recollect the Capt name but the Lieuts names were Saml Mix & _____ Wilson & was at West Point at the time Andre was executed & stood guard over him. [He] was with Genl Wayne she thinks part of the time.”

Thomas added: “Hunter was a Colored man.”

This made documenting his service, which had ended more than sixty years earlier, a challenge. His case, and many more like it, challenge us today. We need to overcome that challenge so we can take the full measure of the heroic participation of African-Americans in our Revolutionary War. That war was not fought to perpetuate slavery. It was fought to establish American independence and create a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—a proposition we are struggling to realize in the lives of men and women of our own time.

Despite the passage of so many years, Mrs. Hunter’s brief account of her husband’s service makes perfect sense. Free blacks were widely employed as servants in the first years of the Revolution, which is consistent with her recollection that her late husband began as a servant to Israel Putnam. So does her account of his later service in a Connecticut regiment, at a time when chronic manpower shortages had eroded opposition to the service of black troops. The regiment she described was the Sixth Regiment of the Connecticut Continental Line, commanded by R. Jonathan Meigs. The light infantry of the regiment participated in Anthony Wayne’s successful attack on the British fort at Stony Point in 1779. The regiment was stationed at West Point and was there in the fall of 1780 when British major John André was imprisoned and executed for his role in Benedict Arnold’s treason.

Ira Davis was probably struck by the widow’s recollection that her husband had stood guard over André at West Point, because his own father, Moses Davis, had served at West Point and had also stood guard over André. We know this because we have a pension file for Moses Davis, documenting his service in the Lexington Alarm, his participation in the Siege of Boston and his later service in the Continental Army.

No such pension file for Peter Hunter survives, probably because documentation of his service consistent with pension regulations could not be produced. Based on his widow’s recollections, Thomas would have been able to draft a declaration, but Connecticut officials would have been hard pressed to confirm his service.

Fourteen or fifteen African-American men from Farmington served in the war. Among them, as Davis may have learned, was one listed simply as “Peter” with the notation “Negro.” Connecticut officials would probably have hesitated to confirm that this man was Peter Hunter, whose widow was living in Vermont. She was unlikely to have been able to direct Thomas to living witnesses who could corroborate her declaration, and finally, pension examiners might have rejected her application for inadequate proof of her marriage to Hunter, since black marriages were not as well documented as white marriages.

The evidence is too thin to know what happened to her case. Perhaps she died before submitting a pension application. Perhaps Thomas, as her agent, advised her that they lacked the documentation needed for a successful application, and she gave up. Compiling the evidence required to secure a pension was daunting to most veterans, and even more difficult for widows. It was far more challenging for African-American veterans and their widows, who were required to produce the same kinds of official evidence as their white peers, but for whom such evidence was often unavailable or very difficult to secure.

The challenges were not insurmountable. Black veterans and their widows did manage to secure pensions. Chatham Freeman, another African-American veteran of the Sixth Connecticut, secured a pension under the Pension Act of 1818. But many others were turned away in frustration. Their loss is our loss as well, because it deprives us of the rich documentation of their service that their pension declarations and the supporting documents would otherwise provide. We learn just enough about Peter Hunter—about his relationship with Israel Putnam, the likelihood that he served in the storming of Stony Point and his role in the trial and execution of John André—to feel that loss.

We can make out the shadows of what might have been, realizing that we may never know his full story. On the eve of the Revolution there were about 3,000 black males over the age of sixteen living in Connecticut, and at least 820 of them served in the war. Peter Hunter was one of them. After the war he moved to Vermont, which undoubtedly appealed to him because the Vermont constitution of 1777 had abolished the enslavement of men over twenty-one and women over eighteen, though it left younger slaves in bondage. Slavery persisted in Vermont, much diminished, for another generation, but it was more receptive to free blacks than most of New England.

Hunter was not the only black veteran to move to Vermont. “Hearing flattering accounts of the new state of Vermont,” black veteran Jeffrey Brace left Connecticut shortly after the war and settled in Vermont, where the emancipated slave supported himself as a farm laborer, working for wages for the first time. “Here I enjoyed the pleasures of a freeman; my food was sweet, my labor pleasure: and one bright gleam of life seemed to shine upon me.”

We can only hope that the same “bright gleam of life” shined on Peter Hunter in Vermont. He is one of thousands of African-American veterans whose full story eludes us. Something like nine thousand African-Americans served in or with the armed forces that won American independence—in the Continental Army and Navy, in the militia, on privateers, and as teamsters, servants to officers and in other roles. They thus made up over four percent of the men in the armed forces during the war, but their average term of service, typically four years or more, was much longer than that of white soldiers and sailors, who typically served less than a year. Thus at any one time, black soldiers, sailors and support personnel probably accounted for between fifteen and twenty percent of the effective strength of the armed forces. They were particularly conspicuous during the latter stages of the war, when white recruitment slowed considerably.

By the 1840s the memory of African-American veterans of the Revolutionary War had faded. “Of the services and sufferings of the Colored Soldiers of the Revolution,” the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote in 1847, “no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. They have had no historian. With here and there an exception, they have all passed away, and only some faint traditions linger among their descendants. Yet enough is known to show that the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportion of the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War.”

Neither Peter Hunter nor his widow—whose name we do not even know—ever collected a pension for his service in the Revolutionary War. We can now only pay our debt to him, and thousands like him, by struggling to recover the memory of their service and by assembling and interpreting the evidence, faint and forgotten as it may be, of their courage and commitment to the cause of freedom.

 

The image above is a detail from Don Troiani’s painting, Soldier of the Sixth Connecticut Regiment (2019). Mr. Troiani’s depictions of uniforms and equipment are scrupulously documented. His depiction of the Sixth Connecticut’s distinctive leather helmet with the initials “GW” is based on his latest research. The image is used here by special permission of Mr. Troiani.

The story of Peter Hunter is one of many accounts of the post-war experience of Revolutionary War soldiers included in America’s First Veterans, the companion book to our exhibition on the veterans of the Revolutionary War.

For the experience of another black soldier who endured enslavement and fought for his freedom, read The Heroic Jeffrey Brace.

Read the letter from Stephen Thomas to Dr. Ira Davis, November 4, 1844, in the American Revolution Institute Digital Library.

For the experience of another African-American widow with the pension system, see Damani Davis, “The Rejection of Elizabeth Mason: The Case of a ‘Free Colored’ Revolutionary War Widow,” originally published in Prologue Magazine in 2011.

 

Why We Honor George Washington

Posted / Basic Principles, Revolutionary Characters

We honor George Washington more than any other American.  A state and dozens of cities, towns, and counties are named for him, as are mountains, parks, universities, bridges, highways, and streets. His home, lovingly maintained for more than 160 years by private citizens rather than the government, is a national treasure attracting nearly a million visitors each year. Hundreds of statues and dozens of monuments are dedicated to his memory. The greatest is an obelisk —the tallest monumental column in the world—in the heart of the capital city we named in his honor during his lifetime.

As we celebrate our national independence at a time of crisis in our cultural life, we should reflect on what he did to merit such honor.

George Washington was born into a world ruled by kings, where no one was truly free. Slavery and servitude were common. The right to participate in public life was limited to men of property. People were subjects, not citizens. No one was secure in the right to speak or worship freely. Women were subordinated to men — their talents stifled, their natural rights ignored, and their civil rights denied. It was a world of grotesque injustice, repellent to the modern mind.

Washington was born into privilege and grew to manhood in that world. At forty-three, having secured wealth and influence, he risked everything to command an army to secure the liberty and independence of the United States. It was an army of ordinary men—farmers and tradesmen, young and old, from every part of the new country. He forged them into an army of free men. He led that army through trials few could have endured.

After eight years of war, they won the independence of the first great republic of modern times—a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—a nation dedicated, not to the interests of kings and aristocrats, but to the interests of ordinary people. Nothing like it had ever existed.

Washington worked to perfect our nation. He worked to cement the fragile union so the country might survive in a world of predatory powers. He called on Americans to sacrifice their selfish interests for the public good, and spent his life in public service, neglecting his private affairs while devoting his days and nights to the business of the United States.

It was an imperfect nation. Grotesque injustices remained. Yet with each year those injustices became harder to rationalize.

No sooner had the revolutionary generation declared that all men are created equal than the injustice of slavery became a subject of national debate that did not end until slavery was extinguished. No sooner had the revolutionaries declared that all men are created equal than women began to assert that same equality, and to demand the same inalienable rights so proudly asserted as the rights of men.

George Washington was not perfect, but he worked to build a more perfect union. He and the women and men who struggled with him laid the foundation of our freedom in a time of darkness and oppression. They did not finish demolishing the vast framework of injustice they inherited. That has been the task of subsequent generations, including our own. It has been the work of many hands and many minds — of all races, of both sexes — of men and women from many lands, who have come to this great republic to find freedom, and of men and women of our own land, denied freedom, who have followed Washington and fought for liberty.

We ask all Americans to join us in honoring him and those who stood with him, remembering the words of President Obama’s first Inaugural Address: “Let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world . . . that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive . . . that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’”

Wherever men and women fight for liberty, they fight in the spirit of George Washington. Wherever men and women are oppressed—wherever tyrants rule, and wherever people, young and old, are victims of ignorance and bigotry, of racism or sexism—wherever their liberties are denied, trampled or ignored, and people rise up, defiant and proud to demand their inalienable rights—the spirit of George Washington is with them. We should honor him as long as our love of freedom endures.

 

Above: Washington’s Birthday by Charles Baugniet, 1878, Indianapolis Museum of Art

We encourage all our visitors to read Why the American Revolution Matters, our basic statement about the importance of the American Revolution. It outlines what every American should understand about the central event in American history. It will take you less than five minutes to read—and a few seconds to send the link to your friends, family, and colleagues so they can read it, too.

If you share our concern about ensuring that all Americans understand and appreciate the constructive achievements of the American Revolution, we invite you to join our movement. Sign up for news and notices from the American Revolution Institute. It costs nothing to express your commitment to thoughtful, responsible, balanced, non-partisan history education.

 

Lessons from a Revolutionary Epidemic

Posted / Revolutionary Events

This painting death coming for Revolutionary War sailors is a reminder that epidemic disease killed more soldiers and sailors in the Revolution than bullets.

George Washington’s aggressive response to epidemic disease during the Revolutionary War offers lessons for today. That war was fought not just against British forces, but against an enemy far more dangerous—smallpox.

Smallpox was one of the most dreaded diseases of the eighteenth century. A viral illness, smallpox caused high fever, severe headaches, vomiting, pains in the loins and back, and the eruptions that gave the disease its name. Smallpox was extraordinarily virulent; individuals exposed to the virus, which passed by contact, were almost certain to be infected.  One attack usually conferred immunity to future infection. Smallpox was endemic in eighteenth-century Britain; the island was rarely free of the disease. It was almost constantly present in London and often ravaged the countryside. In Britain death seems to have claimed between fifteen and twenty percent of those infected. Smallpox was among the most common causes of death in eighteenth-century London. Ten percent of deaths in the city between 1731 and 1765 (which averaged about 23,300 total each year) were attributed to the disease. The number reached an all-time high in 1751, when some 3,538 Londoners died from smallpox—most of them children under five.

Smallpox was far less common in North America. It passed through the colonies in epidemic waves that typically began in the port cities and spread outward. The disease appeared sporadically in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, and passed into the surrounding areas before gradually fading. A smallpox epidemic was no less virulent in North America, but the low density of the population—early America’s version of “social distancing”—discouraged its transmission. Smallpox was consequently less likely to reach epidemic proportions in the Chesapeake, the Carolinas or Georgia, where the population was dispersed and towns were few and small. Ships trading along the tidewater rivers sometimes transmitted the illness to particular plantations, but such outbreaks tended to be localized. Annapolis and Williamsburg were infected occasionally, but even in those towns epidemics were typically short.

Smallpox infection in Britain’s mainland colonies in North America seems to have been distributed more or less evenly across the age spectrum, because the North American population contained a much larger percentage of non-immune adults. Adults were better able to endure the ravages of the disease than children, so the mortality rate among colonists was lower than in Britain. About ten percent of infected colonials seem to have died. But American epidemics seemed particularly bad to contemporaries, because the large percentage of non-immunes meant that outbreaks tended to involve a much higher percentage of the people in any community than would be infected in a comparable English population. This fact led some to speculate that Americans were somehow intrinsically more susceptible to the disease.

The Revolutionary War occurred during one of the worst smallpox epidemics in American history, which ultimately reached from maritime Canada to Central America (and brilliantly documented by Elizabeth Fenn in her book, Pox Americana—winner of the 2004 Society of the Cincinnati Prize). Its spread has been traced from colonies on the Atlantic seaboard all the way to the Indians living on the Pacific coast. Unlike today’s virus, which spread from continent to continent in days and weeks, and infected people around the world within a few months, the smallpox epidemic that paralleled our Revolution took years to reach the farthest parts of the continent, passing from traders to Indians and from Indian to Indian across the West. This was possible because the smallpox virus, unlike SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), remains stable and capable of infecting victims for long periods outside a human host. The coronavirus needs a host, and dies within hours on most surfaces.

When the Revolutionary War began, most of the young men who would serve in the Continental Army and the militia had never been exposed to smallpox. A much larger proportion of the British and Hessian soldiers who came to America had been exposed to it, and were immune. This put the Continental Army, which was always short of manpower, at a considerable disadvantage.

Eighteenth-century people had very little understanding of disease transmission, and incorrectly attributed many diseases caused by pathogens to environmental conditions like bad air, foul smells and damp weather. But they understood that smallpox passed from one person to another and that contact with the sores and scabs of an infected person was almost certain to infect a non-immune. The close quarters of an army camp was ideal for spreading the epidemic disease.

George Washington understood how debilitating smallpox could be to a young man. The disease had barely touched Virginia in his youth, but he contracted it in 1751 when he went to Barbados with his brother Lawrence. Smallpox was endemic to Barbados, kept alive there by the constant arrival of non-immune, recently enslaved Africans. The Washington brothers undoubtedly encountered the virus shortly after they arrived, at the home of one of their hosts, where the children were sick with the disease. Lawrence, who had been to boarding school in England, was undoubtedly immune. Nineteen-year-old George was not.

Young George might have encountered an infected child face-to-face, inhaling small infectious droplets or carrying the virus to his mouth or nose on his hands. But since the infectious nature of smallpox was understood, it seems unlikely that George risked direct personal contact with an infected person. He probably kept his distance, but he could have picked up the virus in another way. The virus can be present in scabs and dried-out bodily secretions, and desiccated but still dangerous particles can circulate in the air or be carried to a new host on inanimate objects. Someone changing bed linen, sweeping floors or even opening the window in a sickroom might have swirled infectious material into the air and ultimately into George Washington’s lungs.

That was on November 4. The disease has a two-week incubation period, and like clockwork George fell ill on November 17, later recording in his diary that on that day he had been “strongly attacked with the small Pox.” He was confined to the brothers’ rented house until December 12.  He suffered, but that suffering conveyed immunity that protected him during the Revolutionary War.

Smallpox was already present in Massachusetts when Washington arrived to take command of the Continental Army in the summer of 1775. He took steps to isolate the soldiers from infected townspeople and contain the unfortunates who had already contracted the disease. Daily inspections were instituted to check men for symptoms, and immune troops were placed on the front lines. Washington established a dedicated smallpox hospital. These steps undoubtedly flattened the curve of infection, slowing the spread of the disease, but could not stop it. New recruits, many of whom came from areas where smallpox was rare, contracted the disease after arriving at the crowded camps. Washington knew that nothing would kill the patriotic spirit of the new recruits converging in Cambridge faster than a smallpox epidemic in the army.

While Washington’s precautions—similar to the self-quarantines and social-distancing policies of the moment—were based on the best science of his time, there was only one proven solution: inoculation. Vaccination was unknown. Inoculation had been introduced to Boston by Cotton Mather during the 1721 smallpox outbreak. This risky procedure involved making a cut in the skin of a healthy person and inserting the virus, usually in the form of pus from the skin eruptions of an infected person. Inoculation, in most cases, conveyed a mild case of the dreaded sickness. The pox were typically limited to the area around the incision, and the associated fever and other symptoms less severe than those originating from an infection that began in the lungs.

The procedure was dangerous. Patients under inoculation could develop a full blown case of the disease and die, and they were as contagious as other smallpox sufferers and had to be isolated until recovery. The risk of inoculation accidentally spreading the disease made it a highly controversial procedure. Without proper regulation and supervision, inoculation might destroy the army and spread the disease to civilians.

The cost of failing to act became clear during the invasion of Canada in the winter of 1775-1776. American forces were devastated by smallpox during the Siege of Quebec. After interacting with infected locals (purportedly sent into American lines by the British army), the epidemic spread quickly through the American army. Disorganized attempts at inoculation left the whole army contagious and suffering. The spread of the virus and lack of supplies made their position untenable. The army withdrew from Canada in defeat. Everyone knew—the British, Congress, even deserters—that sickness had been the invading army’s downfall.

Washington decided that inoculation was a risk he had to take to build up the army’s immunity. Washington listened to the advice of doctors and became convinced that inoculating troops before they entered active duty was the most effective strategy. By January 1777, this became army policy. “The Small Pox by inoculation,” the commander-in-chief wrote to his brother John Augustine, “appears to me to be nothing.” He ordered all of his slaves inoculated and reported that they “are likely to get well through the disorder.” If he were a member of the House of Burgesses, Washington wrote, he would “move for a Law to compel the Masters of Families to inoculate every Child born within a certain limited time under severe Penalties.”

Ensuring the health of the troops was a key to a successful Revolution. The Board of War asked Dr. Benjamin Rush to write a pamphlet about keeping soldiers healthy for the use of the Continental Army officers. “Fatal experience,” Rush wrote, “has taught the people of America that a greater proportion of men have perished with sickness in our armies than have fallen by the sword.” Rush prescribed proper dress and diet as well as exercise, personal hygiene and orderly, clean encampments providing proper sanitation and access to good water. Lack of uniforms, tents and adequate food often made following Rush’s guidelines impossible for the young officers responsible for carrying them out. They did their best, which blunted the force of disease and helped keep the Continental Army in the field. Their best efforts, and the best efforts of the officers of the Continental Navy and of the French army and navy, could not stop the ravages of epidemic disease. Contagious illnesses claimed thousands more lives than battle.

There was no glory in it. Artists celebrated men giving their lives in battle rather than those who suffered and died in a struggle with one of the war’s more dangerous enemies—smallpox, dysentery, measles, influenza and typhus among them. Only once, it seems, did a contemporary artist grasp the deadly importance of disease to the war and depict it on canvas.

The subject of the painting, which is among the treasures in our collections, is Thomas François Lenormand de Victot, a French naval officer who served under Admiral d’Estaing and later, Admiral de Grasse. Wounded at Grenada in 1779, he was denied a glorious death in battle. He died at Martinique in 1782 from an epidemic of fever that swept through the French fleet. In the painting—undoubtedly commissioned by his family—Lenormand is dead in the foreground, but his risen spirit confronts Death, protecting his stricken sailors, facing the war’s great killer with courage and dignity.

Epidemic diseases wracked the armies and navies of the Revolution, but Washington’s energetic, proactive response flattened the curve—it slowed the spread of disease and helped the Continental Army prevail in a war that demanded much more than tactical skill or courage in battle. After the disaster at Quebec, smallpox never overcame an American army.  Washington and his senior officers worked ceaselessly to prevent the spread of disease among their troops. There was no glory in it, but it saved lives, and ultimately saved the Revolution.

Our republic was founded by people who committed themselves to the greater good. We are called to do the same. Washington protected his troops and we are called to protect ours. The soldiers on our front lines include grocery clerks, medical professionals, delivery men on scooters, sanitation workers and the thousands of others risking exposure while working to maintain essential services.  We are protecting the republic Washington and his generation fought to create. Like Washington, we need to act before the disease decimates us. Washington learned from experience. We should learn from his example.

Kathleen Higgins

 

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For more on the efforts to prevent the spread of disease in the Continental Army, read Benjamin Rush’s 1778 Directions for Preserving the Health of Soldiers, in our Digital Library of the American Revolution.

Joseph Plumb Martin, Everyman

Posted / Revolutionary Characters

It’s not every man who can play Everyman, but Joseph Plumb Martin pulled it off with what looks like effortless ease. His Narrative of some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier is one of the most insightful, passionate and carefully crafted first-hand accounts of the Revolutionary War—and the most successful. You can hardly pick up a book about the Revolutionary War written in the last forty years without bumping into Joseph Plumb Martin. He’s the most quotable, and most quoted, common soldier of the Revolution. But he’s more than that, and more interesting.

Martin’s Narrative was rescued from over a century of obscurity by George Scheer, a frequent contributor to American Heritage magazine, who discovered a copy of the first and only edition of the book, published in 1830, in the library of Morristown National Historical Park. He transcribed it, added an introduction and gave it to the world as Private Yankee Doodle, published by Little, Brown in 1962. It took off, appealing to patriots and cynics in equal measure, and has never gone out of print.

The book has been packaged and repackaged under titles including The Diary of Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier and Ordinary Courage. Paperback versions are commonly assigned in college courses. Selections from the Narrative appear in anthologies on the Revolution and on the experience of war, including one assembled by John McCain. A version for children is available as A Young Patriot: The American Revolution as Experienced by One Boy and another as Yankee Doodle Boy. Martin has shown up in the PBS series Liberty’s Kids. Passages of the Narrative enrich documentaries. His name rolls by in the credits of nearly every miniseries and feature film on the Revolutionary War. The National Park Service named the hiking trail circling Valley Forge the Joseph Plumb Martin Trail. He’s become one of our best-known revolutionaries. He’s everywhere.

Given the book’s history, its modern popularity is a surprise. Martin was a seventy-year-old veteran when his account of nearly eight years in Washington’s army was published by Franklin Glazier in Hallowell, Maine, a town on the Kennebec just below Augusta. Glazier printed almanacs, sermons, schoolbooks, statutes, law reports and a little church music. Martin’s Narrative was an outlier, and it seems unlikely that Glazier printed more than a few hundred copies. Martin explained that he wrote the book to satisfy his friends and did not expect it to “reach beyond the pale of my own neighborhood.” Surviving copies are rare, and the fact that George Scheer stumbled onto one in the late 1950s is remarkable.

It was not the first autobiographical narrative of a common soldier, but it is an early one. Memoirs of generals were common fare in Britain from the late seventeenth century, as were moralizing tracts and fantastic tales retailed as the work of ordinary soldiers, but genuine accounts of military service written by enlisted men and junior officers were something new in the early nineteenth century, made possible by the declining cost of printing and improvements in book marketing that made it practical, if not very profitable, for little printers like Glazier to publish them.

Martin was born in Massachusetts in 1760 and raised by his maternal grandparents in Connecticut. The family valued education—his father, the Reverend Ebenezer Martin, had graduated from Yale. Joseph’s youth was interrupted by the Revolutionary War and he never attended college. He joined the Connecticut militia in 1776 and served in the defense of New York City. Discharged at the end of 1776, he enlisted as a private in the Connecticut Continental Line in April 1777 and served for the duration of the war. He was assigned to the light infantry in 1778 and promoted to corporal, and in 1780 he was transferred to the new Corps of Sappers and Miners and promoted to sergeant. He fought in several of the major engagements, including Brooklyn, Kip’s Bay, Harlem Heights, White Plains, Germantown, Fort Mifflin, Monmouth and Yorktown, and was among the last Continental soldiers discharged in 1783.

More than forty years passed before Martin began writing his narrative of the war. It’s an old man’s book, based on memories filtered through decades of ordinary struggles and striving, successes and disappointments. Yet it’s often a young man’s voice we hear when we read it, which suggests a clever old man did the writing. The narrator is contrived for effect—not a fiction, but not quite the author himself.

That the narrator is an invention is signaled by Martin’s insistence that the book consists of nothing but “the common transactions of one of the lowest in station in an army, a private soldier.” In truth, Martin wasn’t a private for long. His assignment to the light infantry placed him among the army’s elite troops, and his quick promotion to corporal and later sergeant suggests that he stood out, despite his youth. Literate in an army filled with barely literate soldiers, he must also have been industrious and reliable. The son of a Yale-trained minister, he probably read in his spare time and wrote letters home.

He wants us to imagine young Private Martin as just another one of the boys. “I never studied grammar an hour in my life,” he says, “when I should have been doing that, I was forced to be studying the rules and articles of war”—the strained “forced to be studying” has the deliberate, country-rube cadence of an invention like Huck Finn or Brer Rabbit.

He drops the Everyman pose to tell us in his own voice: “I never learned the rules of punctuation farther than just to assist in fixing a comma to the British depredations in the state of New York; a semicolon in New Jersey; a colon in Pennsylvania, and a final period in Virginia,” ending with “a note of interrogation, why we were made to suffer so much in so good and just a cause.” A man who invents puns about punctuation was probably never one of the boys.

Martin’s alter ego is a somewhat roguish fellow, a joker and a trickster, whose place near the bottom of the social scale provides him with a perspective on the seedier side of the Revolution. He really sees history from the bottom up, a vantage point from which hypocrisy, deceit, greed and corruption are in plain view. The rest of us see what’s happening above. He sees what’s really happening from below, a not-so-innocent young man adrift in an war filled with chicanery, selfish opportunism, abused authority and hopeless bumbling.

His Narrative is a tale of needless suffering and exploitation. “Almost every one has heard of the soldiers of the Revolution being tracked by the blood of their feet on the frozen ground,” he wrote. “This is literally true; and the thousandth part of their sufferings has not, nor ever will be told.” Americans had the means to support the war, he says, but too many of them were content to let others do the fighting while they raked in the spoils, from petty swindlers taking advantage of hungry soldiers, to embezzlers, cheats and war profiteers. Continental officers, he complained, were too often cruel, vindictive and unfeeling.

Enlisted men had won the war, yet in the end they had been “turned adrift like old worn-out horses.” For decades veterans were disappointed by the government’s unfulfilled promises of land grants, back pay and compensation for the collapse of the Continental dollar. “The country was rigorous in exacting my compliance to my engagements,” Martin wrote, “but equally careless in performing her contracts with me; and why so? One reason was, because she had all the power in her hands, and I had none. Such things ought not to be.”

Much of the modern popularity of Martin’s Narrative lies in his raw critique of the selfishness and vice he witnessed. Yet for all his cynicism and frustration, he was a patriot who confessed he felt “a secret pride swell my heart” at Yorktown, “when I saw the ‘star-spangled banner’ waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries.”

Few men wrote about our Revolutionary War with such unsentimental clarity or condemned its corruption and failures more bluntly. Yet he was amazed that men “starved and naked, and suffering every thing short of death . . . should be able to persevere through an eight years’ war, and come off conquerers at last!” The Revolution, for all its vices, astonished him. It should astonish us, too.

 

Joseph Plumb Martin is one of many remarkable veterans of the Revolutionary War featured in our current exhibition, America’s First Veterans, on view at the headquarters of the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati through January 31, 2021.

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