Walking the Berkshires

"We are Avenging the Cause of Virgin Innocence" (Knyphausen's Raid Part VIII)

Photo credit: Portrait of Hannah Caldwell from the museum of the 1st Presbyterian Church, Elizabeth, NJ.

"Let us remember...in order to add vigour to our genius, and force to our descending swords, that we are avenging the cause of virgin innocence" said a student at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).  The death of Mrs. Caldwell, wife of Rev. James Caldwell, reportedly at the hands of the Royalist army during Knyphausen's Raid, sparked outrage throughout Revolutionary America.  As discussed in the previous post, the circumstances of her death may never be precisely known, but the accusation that it was a deliberate murder did more to harm the British cause than even the muskets of the patriot forces.

In the weeks and months that followed her killing, a barrage of outrage and charges of the most unforgivable behavior were leveled against the Royalists in connection with the death of Hannah Caldwell. Her grieving widower, no stranger to the power of the pulpit, wrote a letter for publication in which he dismissed British claims that her killing was no assassination, calling it "a violation of tender feeling, without provocation, deliberately committed in open day, nor was it ever frowned on by the commander."  

It was the custom in those times to publish letters anonymously or with a pseudonym, but there was one loyalist who wrote an account of Mrs. Caldwell's death for newspaper publication under his own name.  Ebenezer Foster was a former Justice of the peace from Woodbridge, New Jersey and among the Tory 'refugees" who crossed over from Staten Island in the wake of Knyphausen's invasion force.  Approaching the parsonage in Connecticut Farms, he writes:

"I soon saw a group of soldiers in and about said House, and on my nearer approach, heard some of them mention, (rather piteously), a woman's being shot in the house, as soon as the crowd dispersed, I entered the house and not without difficulty , found her laying on her back on a bed that stood in a small, dark, back bedroom, (for I don't recollect that it had any window) tho' it had two doors that opened into other apartments.  She was to appearance death, and had a cloth carelessly thrown over her face, which I did not remove but left her, expecting the troops would soon march, when her friends might take care of her..

...[I] did not return in less than three hours, when some person who was near Mr. Caldwell's house, told me the woman was stripped, and thrown off the bed, but that a British officer's coming in, had prevented the soldiers from carrying off her cloaths: On entering the house I found her laying on her face on the floor beside the bed, and most of what cloaths had been pulled off by her side.  I concluded that she had been taken off the bed that the bedding might be taken from under her..."

Foster's account is intriguing as much for what he confirms in the patriot claims about her death as what he contradicts. Regardless of how she died, there is no doubt that her corpse was mistreated and her personal effects plundered along with the house.  Foster is scrupulous not to identify any specific unit with this shabby looting, implying that it happened sometime between when the British advanced beyond Connecticut Farms and when they returned.  He claimed that he and another loyalist made a close inspection to determine the cause of Mrs. Caldwell's death:

"We found that on account of a pantry that was building on the back side of the house, a small spot of covering had been pulled off opposite to the bed whereon the Lady sat, the only ball we could discover that had touched the house was the one that killed her: It appeared to have come from a northern direction (in the course of the Rebel fire) and passed between the joints of the plastered wall, it seemed to have passed so far above the bed as to have hit her above the girdle and its passing through her left breast, I account for by supposing her to have been in a stooping posture..."

There is no mention of broken glass such as reportedly cut the face of young Abigail Lennington as she watched the soldier shoot through the window: no confirmation that there was even a window at all.  Mr. Foster's reputation as "a Gentleman of great integrity" as well as a very loyal subject was cited in the newspaper account to give weight to his evidence, but whether or not it is factual reporting on his part the court of public opinion was already convinced that the killing had been deliberate.  Furthermore, the outrages perpetrated in the burning of the village and looting of its houses were there for all to see, right down to the roads strewn with he stuffing of feather beds.

And what of the claim that the shot came from the American lines to the north?  That is an odd direction.  Maxwell's men were initially arrayed along a ravine running roughly southwest to northeast and facing a royalist advance from the southeast.  The patriots then withdrew to the northwest  along a road toward Springfield as their left flank was turned by another royalist column that advanced from the east or northeast of their position.  Shots "from the north" could therefore have come from either side.

Samuel Steele Smith's out of print Winter at Morristown 1779-1780: The Darkest Hour (1979) includes several surprises for students of Knyphausen's Raid in the form of material not generally encountered elsewhere.  Sometimes, as with the complete order of battle that appears in the Appendices, the information is indispensable.  At least once, Smith confuses the actions of one unit with another (but we will address that matter in due course).  Smith dispenses with the killing of Mrs Caldwell in a single line as he describes the melee at Connecticut Farms, but later returns to it when addressing how news of her death spread throughout the countryside.  He then includes this startling paragraph:

"Some years later, there was an admission.  A New Jersey militiaman, Private Frazee Craig, of Captain Amos Morse's Company, of Colonel Jaques Essex County Regiments, testified that he was 'at the Farms [Connecticut Farms] when Mrs. Caldwell was shot by one of Capt. [John] Craig's men', also of Col. Jaques regiment. The shooting by an American, if indeed, he did it, surely was accidental."

Smith's source is supposedly testimony given by Craig while applying for a veteran's pension in the early 1830s before Judge Lewis Condit. I have read a subsequent publication of the Condit testimony that includes an account from Craig, but while discussing Connecticut Farms it makes no mention of Mrs. Caldwell.  Assuming he did make such a statement, what are we to make of it?  It was certainly not a welcome revision to the conventional narrative.  When Elizabeth native Capt. William C. deHart, an aide to Winfield Scott who returned from Mexico sick and dying, attempted to make an impartial investigation into the evidence surrounding Mrs. Caldwell's death, he was pilloried for his efforts by his fellow townsmen.

In the end, whatever the cause of her homicide, Mrs. Caldwell's death became a symbol of what was at stake in America's fight for independence.  A year later, her husband was shot by a sentry, and their nine children - "baptised in blood" - were fostered out, including their eldest son whose education in France was sponsored by Lafayette. 

Rev Caldwell's statue, at right, may be seen on Walnut St. in Philadelphia.

Who Killed Mrs. Caldwell? (Knyphausen's Raid Part VII)

This is the latest installment in a series of posts I began more than a year ago on Knyphausen's Raid into New Jersey in 1780. 

The American Revolution was fought as often with the pen as with the sword.  Sometimes what was written was quite literally worth battalions to the Patriot cause.  Thomas Paine's American Crisis stiffened revolutionary resolve in the face of a series of military reverses in 1776.  The murder of Jenny McCrea by two of Burgoyne's native allies the following year brought out the militia in unprecedented numbers to confront the British at Saratoga.  It did not matter that the unfortunate Miss McRea was the fiancee of a loyalist officer;  what was done to her could have been done to any American woman and that was good enough for the patriot press and its readership.

Another incident occurred in 1780 that became as notorious in patriot memory as the death of McCrea.  This tragedy, occurring on June 7th at Connecticut Farms (now Union), New Jersey during Knyphausen's Raid, was kept alive for many months afterward in the press as a symbol of royalist barbarity, Once again, an American woman was killed, but this time she was not only a staunch patriot but also the minister's wife.  Her name was Hannah (Ogden) Caldwell - a very distant relative of mine - and responsibility for her death was laid squarely on the British.  It is not altogether clear that this was the case, but there was little doubt in the minds of the revolutionaries at the time - or indeed of their descendants and subsequent chroniclers - that she was deliberately and foully murdered by the royalist invaders.

The seal of Union County, New Jersey depicts the traditional version of her death at the hands of a red-coated soldier.   It is notoriously difficult to separate fact from fiction in the fog of war, and especially complicated with this conflict, when what was recorded - and by whom - may be just as significant as the gaps in the historic record (and there are many).

Hannah (Ogden) Caldwell was third cousin to my ancestor Aaron Ogden and his brother Matthias, both of whom fought at Connecticut Farms on the day she was killed.  She was the wife of James Caldwell, the Presbyterian minister in Elizabeth Town. Reverend Caldwell was chaplain in my ancestor Elias Dayton's Third New Jersey Continental Regiment in its 1st establishment,  and subsequently served as a Deputy Quartermaster General. 

We tend to overlook that the Revolution was in many ways a religious war as well as a civil one. The evangelical "Great Awakening" of the previous generation challenged traditional church hierarchies and helped establish the underpinning of many of the democratic principles of the Revolution.  The Congregationalists of New England, the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies and the Methodists and Baptists of the Tidewater and back county were particularly affected by this revival and many of their congregations strongly supported the patriot cause.  George III, on the other hand, was the "Defender of the Faith" for the Episcopal church, while the Dutch Reformed church split into factions in reaction to the Great Awakening that foreshadowed where the loyalties of their parishioners would lie in the Revolution.

The foremost patriots in Elizabeth Town, and hence in New Jersey, were members of Reverend Caldwell's Congregation.  His parish house was burned by Tory raiders.  In January, 1780, the church was burned as well by a raiding party from loyalist Staten Island guided by fellow townsman Cornelius Hatfield, whose own father was a noted parishoner.Caldwell subsequently moved his family to Connecticut Farms, a settlement 4 miles outside the town center, and continued his ministry while also helping to acquire supplies for Washington's encampment in the Highlands at Morristown. There are accounts that he preached with loaded pistols before him, and with good reason.  One of the loyalists who burned the church in Elizabeth Town later expressed his regret that "the black-coated rebel, Caldwell, was not then in his pulpit."

As a prominent patriot, Reverend Caldwell was certainly a ripe target for kidnapping, if not worse, by loyalist 'refugees".  But even he considered his family safe from deliberate attack.  As it turned out, they were in great peril at Connecticut Farms, but whether from a stray bullet or intentional murder is an open question.

On the morning of Knyphausen's initial advance on Connecticut Farms, Hannah Caldwell was at home with several of her youngest children, an unrelated girl named Abigail Lennington who may have been a housemaid, and a nurse named Constance Benward.  Her other children had been bundled off in a commissary wagon and her husband had encouraged her to follow, but she insisted that she would stay to protect their property.  It was her misfortune that the battle developed near her home and the patriot defenders held off the royalists for several hours before they were pushed back through the little village.  She had lowered some of her valuables down the well and filled her pockets with other precious items, then sat on her bed near the window to wait out the battle, saying "Don't worry, baby will be our protection.  They will respect a mother."

At some time during the ebb and flow of the battle that day, someone shot Mrs. Caldwell.   Abigail Lennington and one of the servants subsequently gave testimony before a magistrate as to what occurred.  Numerous histories have referenced that testimony, although I have not yet had the opportunity to go to the source.  According to these accounts, Lennington was near the window when she saw a soldier come toward the house, raise his rifle, and fire through the window.  Two balls struck Mrs. Caldwell in the breast, killing her instantly, while broken glass cut Abigail's face.  Sometimes in these histories the soldier is described as "a shot squatty soldier in a red coat."  

Reportedly the British entered the house and rifled the clothes of the dead woman to get at her valuables.  The body was removed while the house was plundered and then most of the buildings in Connecticut Farms were burned (the parsonage among them, despite this account to the contrary).  It is difficult to know precisely what happened from contemporary writing filled with hyperbole.  There was such outrage, in fact, that the royalists in New York felt obliged to file their own accounts in rebuttal.  Rivington's Royal Gazette ran one such refutation by an anonymous British officer:

"Whilst the troops were advancing to Connecticut Farms, the rebels fired out of the houses, agreeable to their usual practice, from which circumstance, Mrs. Caldwell had the misfortune to be shot my a random ball.  What heightened the singularity of this unhappy Lady's fate, is, that upon Enquiry it appears, beyond a Doubt, that the shot was fired by the rebels themselves, as it entered the side of the House from their direction, and lodged in the Wall nearest the Troops then advancing."

This source is hardly less biased than the patriot press, and one wonders whether there was time enough between the killing and the burning of the Town upon the British withdrawal to go inspecting the wall for errant musketballs that may or may not have passed through the breast of Mrs. Caldwell.  Some accounts claim her body was left half exposed in the streets for several hours, while others claim a British officer covered it with his cloak and had it removed to another house.

The argument over what happened to Mrs Caldwell raged long after the smoke had cleared from the burning village. More than anything else, her death inflamed the revolutionary arbor of the defenders of New Jersey, who readily believed her killing was intentional.

Ebenezer Foster, a loyalist and former colonial Justice of the Peace, wrote his own account of the Caldwell murder for publication. We will discuss its merits in a subsequent post.

"By God! They Are Fleeing From a Shadow!"

When an ancestor's blue-colored utterances make it into the history books, the family genealogist owes it to posterity to give the episode its due.  One of my Ogden ancestors - two brothers who were officers in the New Jersey Continentals during the American War of Independence -  is said to have answered a request by one of Washington's staff officers for an explanation of the collapse of the advanced wing at Monmouth Court House with an exasperated oath, followed by the memorable line; "Sir, they are fleeing from a shadow!"  A fine sentiment, and perfectly in the keeping of the character of either Colonel Matthias Ogden of the 1st New Jersey, or Brigade Major Aaron Ogden, his brother and my direct ancestor.  But which of these swore a blue streak for posterity, and how was the incident recorded?

Various 19th century histories relate the episode differently and manage to make almost as great a muddle of things as the confused battle itself.  Joel Tyler Headley's Friendship's Memorial (1853)  appears to be wrong in two points, as it ascribes the question to Washington himself, and credits the reply, prefaced by "a terrible oath", to someone named Osgood instead of Ogden. Henry Beebe Carrington's (1897) Washington, the Soldier reports that two of Washington's aides, Harrison and Fitzgerald, encountered Major (Aaron Ogden) who replied to their question "with an explicative."  Everett Titsworth Tomlinson's The Boys of Old Monmouth (1898) says that it was Colonel (Matthias) Ogden who responded to one of Washington's aides "in a towering passion." 

So which Ogden was it?  Aaron Ogden was himself a staff officer on that day, acting as Assistant A.D.C. to General Alexander "Lord Stirling" who commanded the left wing of the Army, but carrying orders all over the battlefield.  Matthias Ogden was commanding Maxwell's Brigade, which included his own regiment and was part of the advanced wing.  This was the wing of the army that was retreating when Washington sent his aides forward to discover what was happening.

Robert Hanson Harrison was a senior secretary to Washington, and his memory of the events of this day would be in particular demand afterward, for the officer in charge of the advanced wing, Maj. General Charles Lee, was subsequently courtmarshalled and cashiered over his mismanagement of his command.  John Fitzgerald was another secretary and aide-de-camp.   If these were the two sent by Washington as indicated above, they would have been the ones to record what Ogden said, and it is most likely that they met Matthias and not Aaron Ogden.

A number of historians agree.  Stryker's The Battle of Monmouth (2006) says that Matthias Ogden called out "in great anger" to Harrison; "by God, they are fleeing from a shadow."  Wheeler's The Ogden Family in America (1907) quotes the most colorful account of this profane profundity: "with the fierce wrath of the lion disdaining his chains, when interrogated by Colonel Harrison as to the cause of the retreat, answered with great apparent exasperation; 'By G-d, sir, they are fleeing from a shadow!'"

So it seems that Harrison is indeed the source, and Matthias Ogden the cussing colonel. And indeed, in the courtmarshall proceedings, Harrison's testimony provides confirmation:

"I then proceeded down the line, determined to go to the rear of the retreating troops, and met with Colonel Ogden.  I asked him the same question, whether he could assign the cause, or give me any information why the troops retreated.  He appeared exceedingly exasperated, and said; 'By God!  They are fleeing from a shadow!"

With such (quite literally) damning testimony, Charles Lee was finished as a commander.  Harrison went on to be one of Washington's six original appointments to the Supreme Court, though illness prevented him from serving.  He died in 1790, followed just a year later by Matthias Ogden who was stricken by Yellow Fever.

"By God!" is a comparatively mild oath, even in Ogden's day.  Whatever choice words may have salted his speech beyond this were tactfully omitted in the accounts by Washington's staff.  He was not the only one who was "exceedingly exasperated" on that day, and his curses were said to have been eclipsed by those uttered by his Commander in Chief when he rebuked General Lee on the field.  What Washington may have said in a great temper can only be surmised, but there is no record of any phrase leaving his lips quite so memorable as "fleeing from a shadow."

Cabinet of Curiosities #13 (Baker's Dozen Edition)

The Cabinet of Curiosities Blog Carnival is back in town, bringing assorted marvels to light from forgotten museum cases and the murky recesses of fading family lore.  Where else do you find yeti crabs and the World's weirdest and most bizarre perfumes presented side by side for your reading convenience? Think of us as the sort of Whitman's sampler P.T. Barnum might have concocted if he hadn't gotten sucked into the animal cracker racket.

Like its namesake curiosity cabinets of old, CofC makes little effort to categorize its offerings, separating sheep from goats and ensuring that nary the twain shall meet.  Whatever meaning there may be in this mélange comes from its constituent parts and the relationships that you or I are inclined to draw among them.  If you are as fascinated as they are at Urlesque.com by the Top Eleven Weirdest Burgers (including this fetching hamburger dress, modeled at right), perhaps you might see a connection between this item and the image of the yeti crab, above, instead of, say, a more logical link to this marvelous collection of some of the weirdest boots that they've ever seen over at StyleTips101.    Who am I to prescribe?  The author, as those terminally nihilist French deconstructions have been muttering for decades in themusty corners of academe, is decidedly dead.   Long live the text (and context)!  Hopefully this disclaimer will assuage the wrath of my indignant spouse, who declares that comparing a woman dressed as meat with a crab is utterly beyond the pale.  Right, and someday pigs will fly.

Brian at Ancestors At Rest was astounded to find this family photograph which could be a missing link in the the evolution of the Afro.  There are some pictures of me in college when I foolishly teased out my long ringlets into something that would have looked fetching on a Borneo head hunter.  Hopefully this turn of the 20th century photograph was taken along those same lines.  Gena's Genealogy discovered a photograph of Francesco Lentini: "The Human Tripod" in a family archive, and suspects that a Nebraska relative who once housed traveling circus performers my have encountered the three-legged Lentini while he was part of Buffalo Bill's outfit.

CanadaGenealogy, or 'Jane's Your Aunt', which hosted the 11th CofC back in November, delves into her grandmother's button box and finds it a 'marvelous mélange.' 

Miles Meyer of Miles' Genealogy Tips shares the story of a remarkable family artifact: the original steamer trunk that his 3rd-great grandfather carried to America from Germany in 1854.  This tangible piece of the past becomes a touchstone of discovery, as Meyer's traces the path of his ancestors' immigration.  "Starting with just one artifact, an old steamer trunk , I have now gained a much more in depth understanding of the trials that the early immigrants had to endureto come to our great country."

Terry Thornton of Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi, has a fish story about the welcoming fish   that graces his doorway.  

"Some references suggest that my articulated fish may be composed of "Turkish silver" and that it be of fairly recent origin dating to not earlier than the 1920s. As more and more families used a spice box shaped like a tower for the spice ritual, some suggest that the popular fish ritualware piece became more of a decorative piece than as a ritual spice container. The date and place of origin of my fish are unknown. One reference was found to a three-piece set of almost identical fish from the early 1930s but in three sizes (one much larger and one much smaller than the 9.5 inch one I have) used as decorative objects in the style of earlier articulated fish spice boxes."

Liz at the curiously named My Big Fat Cajun/Irish/Scottish/English/German/French/Southern Family Blog discusses the difficult questions raised by her Grandma Elia's French New Testament, and asks;  

"Was she swept off her feet when she left her family for a non-Cajun Protestant? Did he attend church? Was it important to him, or was it important only that Elia not be Catholic? Was she ever accepted by her parents again?"  

Thomas MacEntee, erstwhile blogger at Destination: Austin Family and past host of Cabinet of Curiosities #10, gives us the story of the mahogany bar and what lurks inside.  Thomas unveils each marvel it contains with seductive glee:

"Next, we unlock the doors.  Yes there is a lock which allows entry into the lower portion of The Bar - a bit of a chastity belt, as it were - where the serious business takes place.  If you know my family you know that a lock is required on most all liquor cabinets and bars."

 

A Christmas Compendium of Curiosities at Damn Data  describes a15th century Feast of Fools when

 

"mask-wearing, cross-dressing priests and clerks ran amok through their church, burnt old shoes as mock incense and ate black pudding at the altar! "

 

What relation, if any, this medieval festival has to baby jumping, which grown men dressed as the devil have been doing in Spain since the 1600's, I will leave to others to determine, but at least they have the decency to leave the bull running out of it.  

 

Among the curious modes of transportation you might wish to consider include riding the moon bats to Saturn.

 

Or you might try one of the world's weirdest and largest bikes, which World of Technology tells us includes the Guitar Bicycle, near 40 feet long. 

 

Just in time for Presidents Day, Offbeat Earth rolls out the newest models of the world's weirdest cars.  The Mini Cooper pick-up looks like it has just enough payload capacity for a pony keg.

 

Finally, one of CofC's favorite sites, the glorious blog Curious Expeditions, maintains a Flickr site as well, featuring oddities and Curiosities of Nature.  If you think a box of taxidermy eyes is just the thing to add to M. Diane Roger's grandmother's button box or Thomas MacEntee's bar, then clearly this carnival was made for you.  Why not consider hosting next month's edition?

Cabinet of Curiosities #13: Call for Posts

We have reached a Baker's Dozen of these things since I launched C of C back in the Fall of 2006.  There is no dearth of wierdly wonderful material out there to agregate and add to each month, so why not consider whether you have a post, or a lead to a link, or just the taste for adventure required to add to the mix?  Recall that while our Curiosity Cabinet is a marvelous melange - and manages to engage everyone from family historians to scientists to artists in fields both sacred and profane - we still have a few standards.  We value dstyle as well as substance.  We are not shills for subjects that manage to miss even this very broadsided barn.  We are not a one person operation.  Aside from that, we have few limitations.  So bring it on.  Send us your best by this Sunday the 18th of January for Monday's edition.  feel free to use the handy submission form, and if you have a hankering to host one of these things, you have only to ask. 

(Image courtesy of Asterix NZ)

I Spy

I've been enjoying Alexander Rose's Washington's Spies; The Story of America's First Spy Ring, not only for the solid writing and his excellent detective work piecing together the inner workings of Patriot espionage in and around New York, but also because it contains a trove of period details you won't find in the D.A.R. archives or in your ancestor's Society of the Cincinnati biography.

Rose memorably describes New York during this period as "A bustling mercantile metropolis descended into a mare'snest, the leading red-light district in North America, the black market capital of the Revolution."  A third of it gutted by fire, the city was a brimming caldera of Tory refugees, smugglers, soldiers of the British empire and prisoners of war rotting away in floating hulks and packed on land in noisome hells where they died in appalling numbers. 

More than 500 prostitutes worked the notorious "Holy Ground" - then owned by the Church of England - at the site of today's "Ground Zero".  During the American occupation of the City in 1776, many a militiaman became "hors de combat" with the clap, and it was no different when New York became the main British garrison of the war. 

Loyalist privateers based in New York captured thousands of prizes during the war, and this fact reminds me that I am long overdue for a post on the remarkable career of Connecticut privateer and very distant relation Gideon Olmsted.  We shall remedy that situation early in this new year, as well as get back to the half finished series of posts I started last Summer on Knyphausen's Raid  which left off after the Battle of Connecticut Farms. 

As to the spy ring that is central to Rose's story, it is a gripping tale with invisible in and ciphers aplenty, but it also includes insights from recent scholarship that shed new light on old controversies.  Rose reveals that it is now known that the great fire that swept through the western third of the city as the patriots retreated from MManhattan may later have been encouraged by ad hoc arsonists, but was initially sparked by careless British camp followers hunkered down in a storehouse near Whitehall-dock.  They "procured from an adjacent yard a number of pine boards, the ends of which they places in the chimney [with] their opposite points resting on the cedar floor of the apartment" and subsequently left their fire unattended. 

I also had not been aware that the discredited Major Robert Rogers of French and Indian War fame had a central role in the discovery and capture of American spy Nathan Hale.  In 2000, a manuscript was donated to the Library of Congress that was written by Connecticut Tory Consider Tiffany and had been kept by his family for many generations.  Tiffany's account describes how Roger's suspected a spy had been smuggled across the Sound, and later not only spotted hale but through a ruse of friendship got him to betray himself in front of witnesses.  A British diary by an officer of the 40th foot confirms that Rogers was the spycatcher, recording that "Nathan Hales, a Captain in the Rebel Army & a spy was taken by Majr. Rogers..."

Aside from these juicy details, I believe I may know a descendant of Washington's spy-master, Benjamin  Tallmadge, and am going to put the question to my friend when I return to work tomorrow.  Both he and Benjamin Tallmadge share the same last name and come from the same part of Long Island.  Tallmadge retired just down the road from me in Litchfield, Connecticut, and his portrait at right of is in the collection of the Litchfield Historical Society.

Not only that, I discovered yet another mention of my ancestor Matthias Ogden in Washington's Spies, who not only concocted a plan to kidnap the heir to the British throne but also managed his own intelligence network while commanding the 1st New Jersey Continentals.  Just last month, in fact, I received a message from a descendant of one of his officers - Captain Daniel Baldwin, who lost lost a leg at Germantown - asking if I had any information about his later work as a spy in Newark's "Neutral Ground" reporting to Matthias Ogden.  Such are the joys of geneablogging!

Cabinet of Curiosities #12: Greatest Story Ever Told Edition

Welcome to the 12th edition of Cabinet of Curiosities, where today we're tossing out the milk and cookies and leaving Santa some legs and lox instead. This is how curious holiday traditions begin, you see, so that nowadays we think nothing at all of dragging trees indoors and festooning them with chintz and tinsel to celebrate the birth of the son of God and the arrival of his secular avatar in the red suit.  'Tis the season when even the most irreligious among us are steeped in ritual, be it our evergreen curiosity cabinets or that handed down recipe for coffeecake without which whatever Holiday you adhere to just wouldn't be right.

M. Diane Rogers of CanadaGenealogy decks the halls with some of her Christmas Curios, including "any number of chipped, cracked, broken, or otherwise unwanted items that I've saved for Christmas over the years."  My grandfather had a name for the moth-eaten angels, armless porcelain cupies and bedraggled feathers from Easter bonnets that my grandmother gave second lives as ornaments.  "Shmelts!", he would snort, and banish them to the dark side of the Tannenbaum.  There are Shmelts on every tree, and even when they do not make it out of the box we cannot bear to part with them.

Janet the Researcher favors a holiday tableau from her childhood featuring a plastic church and evergreens.    

Midge Frazel of Granite in my Blood tells the wonderful story of the Norwegian paper cut-out of girls dancing with trollsthat has a treasured, if incongruous place in her holiday display.  Our Skandi friends are open minded sorts, and would not begrudge a Tomtin a little merriment with the merry maids.  They also are open to museums that take on such uninhibited subjects as homosexuality among non humans, or so we learn from Dr. Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaeology who notes that the Stockholm Museum of Natural History has an ongoing exhibition that includes a model depicting nasal intercourse among two presumably consenting male dolphins.  Really.  I wonder if you can get it as an ornament from the museum gift shop? 

Gay dolphin statues are not yet part of any known Christmas tradition, but there are even more curious sculptures that apparently are.   Daylife asserts - and offers photographic evidence for the claim - that "Statuettes of well-known people defecating are a strong Christmas tradition in Catalonia, dating back to the 18th century as Catalonians hide [them] in Christmas Nativity scenes and invite friends to find them."   Rather makes the case for Catalan nationalism.

When Lorine McGinnis Schultze thinks about holiday fare, it features Christmas Toast in a Victorian toast rack which belonged to her English great-grandmother.  

Brian at Ancestors at Rest turns to a very special bowl full of goodies that was a wedding gift to his great-grandparents in 1904.  "The poor old thing may not look like much, the flowers are faded and worn, the rim has a large chunk that was broken and then glued back (with not too much success) by my Great-Grandfather. It has no monetary value whatsoever. But to me it is priceless."

Over at Caroline's Miscellany, there is magic in a cup, for she has a a treasured collectionof lithophanes!  "In the bottom of each cup is a picture. In fact, the bottom of each cup is a picture. When you first look inside, it just appears to be a bumpy surface, but the moment you hold the cup to the light, an image appears. The different thicknesses of porcelain provide the light and shade."

Melody Lasalle of The Research Journal has the story of a Christmas curiosity of an entirely different sort: her grandmother's lost pajamas!  The December holiday season spawns countless family legends that we delight in dusting off through the years as if they were ornaments of blown glass and finest crystal.  In our family, we have the tale of the Christmas Eve when my cousins drove all the way to Boston from Chicago, and ten minutes after they arrived their station wagon and all it contained had been stolen.  Boston was then - and may still be - a contender for the car theft capital of the country, but nevertheless my father immediately went from block to block with the notion that he could find it and save Christmas.  And he did.  Except for the hot wired ignition, nothing had been taken.

For those of a pagan persuasion, Gil of Gilocafe offers up a tale from Aztec Mythology and the star-crossed lovers Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl  who the gods covered in snow and changed into mountains.

Here's wishing you and yours all the joys of this curious season, and if you happen to find meat-flavored cologne in your stocking this year, it probably has no bearing on whether you've been naughty or nice.  Just that bags featuring Carla Bruni in the buff were unavailable at Burger King.

Missed by a Myles

It used to be that having a Mayflower Pilgrim in your family tree made you a member of a rather exclusive club.  With each successive generation the odds that you or the person you marry have a Plymouth pedigree are exponentially greater.  Thanks to the bottleneck of the Black Death, and a quirk of genealogy that has more slots available for ancestors with each preceding generation than there were individual people alive back then to serve in that capacity, just about all of us with European ancestry can justly claim to be royal bastards of one sort or another.

Still, for Yankees of old Puritan stock there is a special allure to finding a Brewster or Alden in the family foliage.  There is, in fact, a Mayflower Pilgrim lurking in my ancestral files somewhere though I cannot offhand recall his name - who was one of the many who did not survive that first winter of 1620-1621.  His wife and children remained behind in England, and one of his progeny eventually made a more successful go of it in the New World.

And then there is Thomas Standish.  That is a name to capture the imagination, for it would be tantalizing indeed to link my ancestor who was born in 1612 and died in 1693 with the red-bearded captain of the Plymouth militia made famous in a wholly fictional romance by Longfellow. 

 Myles Standish came over with his wife Rose, who died with so many others that winter.  his second wife Barbara arrived in Plymouth in 1623 and all of his known children were by her.  None of these is Thomas Standish, whosettled in WethersfieldCT.  Wethersfield, which vies with Windsor for the claim to be the oldest settlement in Connecticut, was established by Puritans from Plymouth.  Could Thomas Standish have been a child of that first marriage, left in England as a lad of eight?  So far, there is no verified connection between the two Standishes.

Thomas Standish had a daughter Lydia who married John Belden, of an old Norman Yorkshire family with links to noble houses, and from there to Charlemagne, and ancient Picts, and if the Royal pedigrees are to be believed - to Joseph of Arimathea, but no Myles.  Not yet. 

Rara Avis from the Suffragist Years in Massachusetts

From time to time, something I have researched and written about here out of personal interest is found by those looking for specialist knowledge on the web.  That is the fun of having diverse interests and an inquisitive mindset, though there is risk of becoming something of a dilettante, or worse, succumbing to what my sister calls MARS or Male Automatic Response Syndrome, in which those of my gender with this affliction feel compelled to hold forth on any topic regardless of qualification.  Perhaps you have seen this at play around the holiday dinner table, or in certain gatherings of men in the legal profession (which might property be called MARS bars).

Nonetheless, blogs can be great aggregators of related data, and good blogging, like good research, is also capable of synthesizing and intelligible whole out of all of those pieces.  So I was delighted when I was contacted by someone who was searching the web for information about woman suffragist memorabilia and stumbled upon something I had written about my Gr-great Aunt Het the suffragist, or possibly about a suffragist curiosity in my possession that once belonged to her.  This person hoped I could help untangle the puzzle of an item that turned up in an old shed on land in Maine, and though I am no expert I know a bit about the topic and how to use the web to do research and I said I'd have a go. 

There was no picture, but the item was described to me this way:

I have a metal bird that we found in an old shed on our property in Maine.  It is blue and gold and says Votes for Women Nov. 2..it also says in small letters...

"Mass woman suffrage assn. Gertrude H. Leonard-Teresa A. Cr....something...Have you heard of this item... It is about 11 1/2" long and 3 1/2" wide at the widest part..

Here was a bonanza of useful data that I was sure could help establish the provenance of the item and connect it to specific people and events.  I started with Gertrude H. Leonard and the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, and immediately had all the Google hits I could wish for.  Once I had the middle name, I was able to find a biography of Gertrude Halladay Leonard in Harvard Univerity's Women's Rights Collection:

Gertrude Halladay Leonard (1868- ) - suffragist.

Scope and Content: She first became interested in the suffrage cause in 1905, and for the next 12 years gave an increasing amount of time to the Mass. Woman Suffrage Association. From 1912-1917 she was chairman of the State Board of Directors and was virtually acting president as Alice Stone Blackwell was often unable to fulfill her duties as president. She was parade chairman of the first Boston Suffrage Parade. Along with Theresa Crowley, Mrs. Leonard was greatly responsible for the work of lobbying in the Mass. Legislature in favor of a suffrage bill. Mrs. Leonard resigned from her chairmanship of the Mass. Woman Suffrage Association in 1917 and spent the next few months in France working with the Red Cross. In 1925-1926 she worked as an organizer for the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association.

There is some confusion in the sources I found on line (even from the same Harvard source) concerning her date of death, given as 1919 but clearly impossible if she were a Leagyue of Nations organizer in the mid 1920s.  In any case, this same biography provided the name and biography of the other woman, Teresa A Crowley.

Lawyer, suffragist, and amateur actress Teresa A. (O'Leary) Crowley was born in Wakefield, Mass., in 1874. As chairman of the Legislative Committee of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, TAC led several successful campaigns against anti-suffrage politicians; she was remembered as one of the leading outdoor suffrage speakers.

Crowley's Irish heritage is interesting, given that many in the Suffrage movement, and particulalry in NAWSA in the critical decade leading up to winning the franchise in 1920, were upper middle class Protestant women.

And the date, November 2, turns out to a milestone of sorts in the History of the suffrage movement in Massachusetts.  On that date in 1915 the male voters of the state defeated a referendum that would have amended the US Constitution to give all women the right to vote.

As in 1895, the referendum is once again defeated by Massachusetts voters, reflected by the votes in Beverly. The only community in the state of Massachusetts to vote in favor of suffrage is Tewksbury with a vote of 149 to 148. Statewide, only 35.5% was in favor. Four states in the east vote on full suffrage for women: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. All four states vote in the negative. "

All this, I might add, took less than 15 minutes to pull together using nothing other than Google.  I am not qualified to appraise the value of this item, but it is clearly of deep historical value as a relic of the suffrage movement in Massachusetts, connected to two of its foremost leaders and to a critical, heartbreaking vote on whether women should be empowered with the vote.

 

As always, the journey of this suffragist bird from 1915 to a shed in Maine is the last piece of the puzzle and one I may not be able to unravel. I have told the owner of this item that whatever is the ultimate decision made about its dispossition, that I would hope that it would find a good home where its historic significance is recognized.  In the meantime, the research has been great fun. 

Unfriendly Fire

The Confederate Brigadier in the northern branches of our family tree is a fascinating anomaly.  Oral tradition held that General Archibald Gracie, the third in four successive generations to bear that name, had his head blown off by a cannon ball at Petersburg.  Contemporary newspaper accounts in our family archive variously describe the agent of his destruction as shell fragments and even a sniper's bullet, but thanks to a niche area of Civil War studies and a book by Jack D. Welsh detailing the The Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, I believe I can now say with certainty that he kept his head but was done in by artillery fire.

"He was killed December 2, 1864, in the Petersburg trenches by the explosion of a Parrott shell.  He was looking through a telescope at the time, the top of his head exposed.  His neck was fractured, and he was struck three times in the shoulder."

Welsh also provides more information about a wound General Gracie received in 1863.

"On December 14th, 1863, near Bean's Station, Tennessee, his left arm was struck by a rifle ball; that same day, after having it examined, he returned to the field.  The surgeon could detect no lesion of the bones.  Later examination revealed that the musket ball had struck his forearm posteriorly two inches below the elbow, passing deeply and transversely through the deep flexors, and had come out before the radius.  Twenty days after the injury, the limb was markedly swollen, and the little and ring fingers wee paralyzed.  Abscesses formed, and at the end of six weeks, two exfoliations were removed.  Rapid recovery followed.  Gracie rejoined his brigade in April 1864, while it was located in the vicinity of Lick Creek (Virginia)."

Gracie probably convalesced in Richmond, with his wife Josephine Gracie née Mayo.  A child was born to this couple on December 1st, 1864, which was also Gracie's birthday.  He had received leave to go visit his wife and newborn daughter just before he went to inspect the trenches.  He was 32 years old.