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."

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!

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.

Lemons to Lemonade on a Trip to Trenton

I spent the day yesterday traveling on business to and from Trenton, New Jersey.  I had never set foot in New Jersey's capitol city before: just noted the big letters on the bridge proclaiming "Trenton Makes, The World Takes" while rattling over the Delaware on Amtrak.  It turns out that I found things there to interest me, which was a blessing because I was in Town in my capacity as a board member of a not-for-profit that had run out of money and was forced to terminate its executive director and cut back on other staff.  It has been a long while since I was faced with the hard task of firing someone for reasons other than poor performance (not that that is any picnic), and I made the trip from Connecticut to show respect and accept my share of ownership of the decision.  Many of my fellow Board members were absent, or only could participate on the phone instead of in person.  It is time, I believe, to absent myself from this Board altogether.  Failure isn't fundable, and dysfunction is depressing.

With these cheery thoughts, I got to Town an hour before my meeting, and started to recognize street names from reading Stephanie Plum paperbacks.  It turns out that Barracks Street was just a block from my meeting at the Capitol Building, and I have reasons to be interested in this 18th-century structure as it features prominently in the opening chapter of my work-in-progress alternative history novel, in which Washington is captured and executed during a failed attack on Trenton.  I was the only visitor to the Old Barracks Museum at 11:00 a.m. yesterday morning, and so had a personal tour with a very engaging guide who has volunteered at the site for nearly four decades (photo credit via answers.com).  The original parts of the building date to the French and Indian War, and it is the only barracks from this period that remains anywhere in the United States.  There is an excellent exhibit on the archaeological finds unearthed at the site of an 18th-century riverside store, including the armor plated scales of the enormous sturgeon that once thrived in the Delaware and other rivers along the Atlantic seaboard. 

None of my Patriot ancestors from New Jersey fought at the Battle of Trenton, but my great Grandfather Archibald Gracie Ogden died there in 1932 after suffering a massive seizure while attending a meeting of the State chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati.  As I walked through the sumptuous halls beneath the Capitol rotunda, I suddenly noticed the portraits of New Jersey's governors and quickly found that of my 4th Great Grandfather, Aaron Ogden, who served a single year term in 1812 and turned down an appointment as a major general to do so.  There are a number of engravings based on this portrait, including the one at left, but I had never before seen the colored original. Note the badge of the Cincinnati pinned to his breast;  he was the president of the New Jersey Chapter for many years. I had no camera with me and cannot find an image of it on-line, so perhaps I have a reason for a return visit. 

We met in Senate Legislative Committee Room #1, but I took so many twists and turns upstairs and down that I felt the urge to shout out "Hello Cleveland!", though I doubt any of the staffers, lobbyists or security personnel would have gotten the reference to Spinal Tap.  The room, when I found it, was laid out in standard fashion, with the curved desks of committee members glaring down on the chairs of those giving testimony.  We were so small a group, we sat below the salt in a semi-circle of our own.  The walls were painted an unfortunate shade of institutional green that almost could have been called pistachio but had a tinge of sickly yellow.  I am sure it was designed to put those in the hot seat even less at ease.  The cool pink marble and gilded halls outside were decidedly in contrast to the parts of the building where the sausages get made.

The meeting did not conclude until practically 4 p.m., guaranteeing that I would have New York rush hour traffic to contend with on my return.  I thought better of the George Washington Bridge cider press and slipped up the Palisades and over the Tappan Zee to the Sawmill and Taconic, getting home by 8:30 with perhaps 45 minutes stuck in traffic.   What otherwise felt like attending a funeral turned out to be a good day in Trenton.

Going Back to Go Forward

I have been an unabashed Civil War buff for 30 years.  I got bitten by the bug in the 4th grade, to such an extent that my social studies teacher asked me to teach this period of history to our class; imagine how that went to the head of a ten year old!  In the 6th grade, I began a Gettysburg cyclorama in newsprint that took two years to finish. Some of my fondest memories are family trips to Virginia battlefields.  I was briefly a teenage reenactor.  I know which ancestors participated in the war (North and South) and have a keen interest in their experiences.

If you looked at the bookshelves in our house - and there are many - you would find the Civil War section dwarfs all other historic periods (though the Africa section, reflecting 4 years spent in Namibia, is a respectable second).  I have outed myself to you all as a collector of high-end Civil War toy soldiers.  If, when I was in college, I had considered going forward with a PhD, it undoubtedly would have dealt with this era.

I will always have an interest in the history of the United States during the 1860s and an affection for the subject of the Civil War.  I have gradually come to realize, however, that the nature of that attraction is changing.  For all my delight in the minutia of the past, and my capacity to retain and relate vast amounts of historical data and statistics, I find as I grow older that my first obsessive love of the history of the American Civil War has mellowed to a fond regard rather than a fierce and abiding passion.  I am not sure that the label "buff" still applies.

By way of example, consider this blog's archive category for the American Civil War.  There are some fine posts in there, but of late the Civil War has been mentioned only in passing and not as a central feature.  In all there are now 38 posts of mine that make reference to the American Civil War.  That is 38 out of 856 posts since this blog began.  Compare that to the posts that relate to the American Revolution.  There have been 37 of these in this year alone, and 64 all told.  Clearly, I have a more recent interest in the topic, but what else is going on?

A fresh interpretation still has the power to challenge and inspire.  At the moment I am finding more that challenges and inspires in the reading, writing and research I am doing on Revolutionary America.   Perhaps this says as much about me and my broadening interests as it does the state of scholarship in these periods. Part of this shift in emphasis can be explained by the rich archival material I inherited in 2003 relating to branches of my family with prominent members of the Revolutionary generation.  As an historian as well as a genealogist, I find fertile ground in this era with fewer furrows preceding me than with the massively discussed and documented Civil War period.  There is more elbow room for a pioneer, more details about the events of the Revolution that are known to fewer people.  It is a bit like those hardcore birders who several years ago got into identifying lepidoptera and dragonflies.  It was something fresh to do in tandem with the initial interest and activity.

Part of it, though, has to do with significance of these events.  Both the American Revolution and the American Civil War are imbued with myth in modern memory, and it is interesting to compare where we are in our national conversations about the Founders and our founding with how we understand and remember that great tectonic rift in the American psyche with the Civil War at its epicenter.

Invoking the Founders - "what would George do? " - is a distinctive feature of our national politics, and  divining the intent of the Framers of our Constitution as important as legal precedent in our judicial philosophy.  In popular imagination, we tend to look at the creation of our independent democracy as if it were either miraculous or inevitable, and at those who brought our nation into being as peerlessly farsighted.  The achievement was great indeed, but the Founders were very human and whether by design or default, our Independence was neither assured nor the greatest of long shots. 

We do not re-fight the American Revolution the way so many of us grapple with what Faulkner calls "the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863": the moment available "(f)or every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it."  I am unaware that the British rehash "what might have been" had the American War of Independence gone their way.  The descendants of Tories exiled in Canada are proud of their loyalist roots but there it ends.  The descendants of those loyalists who remained in America are assimilated into the national identity.

The American Revolution, unlike the American Civil War, is not an open wound for those who were defeated.  We do not stare out over the Battlefield of Cowpens yearning for victory for our loyalist ancestors who fought there.  We do not, as a rule, have passionate arguments over what books are available at the visitor center at Saratoga as happens today at Gettysburg, or whether battlefield interpretation adequately honors the memory of those on both sides who fought there (though perhaps we should).  What is unsettled about the Revolution is not how we reconcile and remember the war and its consequences, but rather "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure" and how we moderns understand what it will mean to form "a more perfect union."

Lincoln stood in the center of that maelstrom in the Cemetery at Gettysburg and invoked the past to look forward. 

"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

I think, in the end, that Lincoln's words get to the heart of what I appreciate about history today, and what may have changed from when I was ten years old.  I still love the details.  I still delight in new discovery (and sharing new knowledge).  But even as my heart thumps and I yearn to join in the play whenever I get around reenactors (those of earlier periods as well as 19th Century), my historical interest looks both ways.  I believe our understanding of the past informs our future, a future that is neither predestined nor predetermined.  Whether it will actively inform the choices we make or merely provoke reaction depends on us.

 

See You in the Newspapers

Newspaper Archives can be a treasure trove for the genealogist.  A bound copy of The Archives of the State of New Jersey, First Series Vol. XXIX, (Newspaper Abstracts Vol. X), happens to be in our family archive, and within its pages, covering the years 1773 and 1774, are several references to my ancestors that add a bit more color to their already burnished family record:

- (Pg. 51) The New-York Gazette, and the Weekly Mercury, No. 1146, October 11, 1773.  Dateline Princeton, September 30, 1773. 

My ancestor Aaron Ogden (1756-1839) graduates from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton).  The commencement exercises included "An English Oration by Aaron Ogden, from Elizabeth Town, On true Honour."  He went on to compile an illustrious war record as a staff officer in Maxwell's New Jersey Brigade and in Lafayette's Corps of Light Infantry at Yorktown, served briefly Congress and a term as governor in 1812, and practiced law in Elizabeth.  Just about every American lawyer practicing today has encountered the landmark Supreme Court judgment Ogden v. Gibbons (which my ancestor lost) that affirmed Federal regulation of interstate commerce.

-  (Pg. 373) Rivington's New-York Gazetteer, No. 54, April 28, 1774.

My ancestor Jonathan Dayton is named as one of four people named by the executors of the last will and testament of the Rev. William Mills, of Jamaica, on Long Island,  as those to whom "such persons as have any demands upon the said estate are requested to send them, on or before the third day of May".  He is listed as Jonathan Dayton, at Springfield, which those who have been following my series of posts on Knyphausen's Raid know lies northwest of Elizabeth Town, NJ.  The Jonathan Dayton in question is not the one who later became the youngest youngest Signer of the US Constitution, who would not yet be 14-years-old when this will was probated, but his grandfather (1701-1776), who came to New Jersey from Long Island and was born in East Hampton. 

On page 412, the sale of land owned by Reverend Mills in Roxbury, Morris County, NJ was later advertised in the The New-York Gazette, and the Weekly Mercury, No 1184, July 4, 1774 with "Jonathan Dayton, 2nd, at Springfield", named once again as one of four overseeing the disposition of the estate.  This "2nd" is perplexing, as the father of the elder Jonathan Dayton was Samuel Dayton (abt. 1666 - 1745/46), and it is highly unlikely that it refers to his 13-year-old grandson. 

Finally, on page 488 there is this item from The New-York Journal; or the General Advertiser, No. 1656, Sept. 29, 1774:

ELIZABETH-TOWN RACES

To be run for, on Tuesday next, at Elizabeth Town, a purse of twenty-five pounds New-York currency, free for any horse, mare or gelding (full blooded excepted) carrying weight for age...The best of three two mile heats.  All horses, &c. to be shewn and entered at the stand, the day before the running, paying twenty-four shillings entrance, or double at the post.  No owners of horses to start more than one horse, or to be concerned in any confederacy.  No less than three reputed running horses to start for the above purse; and certificates to be produced from the breeders, or such as the judges shall approve of. 

The entrance money to be run for the day following the above race, by all except the winning and distanced horses.  the said horses to be entered by Jonathan J Dayton, Broughton Reynolds, or Noah Marsh.  Sept. 7th, 1774

Intriguingly, this notice was printed in the New York Journal well after the race was run.  These are among  the few biographical documents I have found relating to this ancestor Jonathan Dayton (1736-1801). 

- (Pg. 324) The Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 2362, March 30, 1774.

Aaron Ogden's father, Robert Ogden (1716-1787) is named in this article as  one of those responsible for running the Delaware Lottery, the proceeds of which were to help fund the College of New-Jersey (Princeton), among other institutions in New Jersey and Delaware.  Robert Ogden had committed what amounted to political suicide during the Stamp Tax Congress when he argued that each colony should write a protest separately rather than signing a joint document of opposition.  For this he was burned in effigy, but in the 1770s he regained a modicum of approval and his sons Matthias and Aaron became Revolutionary heroes.

- (Pg. 432) The Pennsylvania Journal, July 27, 1774.

My ancestor John Chetwood (1736-1801), a judge from Elizabeth Town and future father-in-law of Aaron Ogden, is named to "a Standing Committee of Correspondence for the Province of New-Jersey."  These committees allowed the various towns and colonies to communicate with each other on the eve of the American revolution, and coordinate their efforts.  This Committee was established at "a general meeting of the Committees of the several counties of the province of New-Jersey, at New-Brunswick, on Thursday the 21st of July, 1774", in which it was resolved:

"We think it necessary to declare that the inhabitants of this province (and we are confident the people of America in general,) are and ever have been firm and unshaken in their loyalty to his majesty King George the Third..." 

Just about everything resolved after this point supported the rights of the Colonies, including the right to tax themselves (and opposing Parliament's claim to be able to do so, and opposing the harsh penalties imposed on the people of Boston as

"not only subversive of the undoubted rights of His majesty's American subjects, but also repugnant to the common principles of humanity and justice."

These newspaper references offer fascinating snippets of my New Jersey ancestors' lives in the last colonial years.