All the Battles Fit to Print

Norman Desmarais, a librarian at Providence College, has announced the publication of The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in Canada and New England: Battles, Raids, and Skirmishes. He says it:

covers 403 battles, raids and skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, most of which do not get covered, even in the most detailed history books. It intends to provide comprehensive coverage of the confrontations of the American War for Independence and to serve as a guide to the sites.

The text identifies the location of the sites as best as can be determined, provides the historical background to understand what happened there, indicates what the visitor can expect to see and identifies any interpretive aids. It includes URLs for websites of various parks and tourist organizations.

The publisher’s website offers a thorough bibliography, lists of all battles and skirmishes in the war, and a gallery of photographs, though without descriptive labels. (In other words, in true New England fashion, if you don’t already know where you are, you don’t belong there.)

Since the appendices cover all of the eastern U.S., and as far west as Arkansas and Illinois, I assume that Desmarais is working on a book or two about the Middle and Southern Colonies. And what about the Caribbean?

Looking Back on Dr. Church and Mary Lobb

I started investigating Dr. Benjamin Church’s last years because I’d made an error in an old posting about him, and wanted to be more accurate. And I admit to hoping to find new information to make up for the lapse.

In that respect, I think I filled out details of the abortive attempt to trade Dr. Church for Dr. James McHenry, prisoner of war, future aide-de-camp to George Washington, and future Secretary of War.

There are more Dr. Church mysteries to clear up. Though documents confirm that his widow was named Sarah, some early sources say he “married Miss Hannah Hill, of Ross, in Herefordshire, a sister of his early friend, a young student in London.” So Sarah Church might have been the doctor’s second wife. And we still don’t know the name of his mistress.

What really tickled me about that inquiry was how it spiraled off in a direction I never imagined. I looked up Capt. James Smithwick’s name in hope of tidbits about Dr. Church’s departure, and stumbled into the life of the captain’s widow, Mary Lobb—separated from her next husband, joining Boston’s first Catholic church, doling out real estate in her dotage.

Those topics fit Boston 1775 promise of “unabashed gossip,” my cheeky term for intriguing facts about individuals’ lives. They taught me a lot, and offered a great reminder of how the approximately 16,000 people in Revolutionary Boston were interconnected in so many ways. Because of that social network, looking through historical keyholes at individuals helps to illuminate the broad social movement behind the launch of the U.S. of A.

That movement also spiraled off in directions that people of the time never imagined. In the late 1760s, Dr. Benjamin Church joined other Massachusetts gentlemen in protesting Parliament’s new taxes, an attempt to restore autonomy to their traditional, Congregationalist-dominated society. Fifteen years later, their movement had led to Mary Lobb’s freedom to worship in a Catholic church in the heart of Boston. Amazing.

(Above is an image from the Massachusetts Historical Society showing the bustling center of Boston in 1801, as painted by James Brown Marston.)

A Final Glimpse of Mary Lobb

Yesterday I discussed the precedent-setting marriage of Capt. James Smithwick in 1800. He appears to have died just ten years later, leaving his wife with two small children. Fortunately, her sister died in 1813. That meant the widow Smithwick could move her small family in with her widowed brother-in-law, looking after the house while he provided for everyone. The eldest of all the young cousins, Edward Kavanagh, eventually represented Maine in Congress. (This picture of him comes courtesy of the Maine Historical Society.)

Capt. Smithwick’s mother, Mary Lobb, died before 1817. Another item from the Massachusetts court records gives us a glimpse of her last years.

In her will Lobb had left one of her properties to a seven-year-old grandson, Francis Campbell Smithwick, specifying that the tenant, William Jordan, would be his guardian and manage the property for his benefit until he turned twenty-one.

Jordan then came up with deeds showing that Lobb had signed the same property over to him after that will. He now owned it outright, he said. And that was a step too far. Some of the boy’s relatives sued Jordan. The lead plaintiff was another grandson—also named James Smithwick, just to make my searches more confusing.

The court decided that Mary Lobb had shown “evidence of extreme old age, and habits of intoxication.” The deeds were therefore void, her “extreme old age and imbecility having been taken advantage of, by the pretended grantee.” The court removed Jordan as the child’s guardian and created a “trust estate” instead.

And that ends my gossip about James Smithwick and Mary Lobb.

The Younger James Smithwick’s Controversial Marriage

The sea captain James Smithwick, who disappeared at sea with Dr. Benjamin Church in 1778, left behind a son, also named James. I mentioned him back here. When young James grew up, he also became a mariner. Most of the references to “Captain James Smithwick” that I found when I was seeking reports of Dr. Church’s departure turned out to be about the son.

The younger James Smithwick’s mother, Mary Lobb, appears to have raised him and his sisters as Catholics. He became a business partner of James Kavanagh and Matthew Cottrill, who arrived in Boston from County Wexford, Ireland, about 1781 and eventually set up a shipyard in Newcastle, Maine. Together the three owned a ship called the Hibernia, which was captured by a French privateer in 1800.

Father Francis Matignon, Boston’s first long-tenured Catholic priest, presided over Cottrill’s marriage in 1793, and Kavanagh’s in 1794. Then in 1800 the younger James Smithwick wanted to marry Mrs. Kavanagh’s sister, Eliza Jackson.

At this point Matignon’s former student Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus was working as a missionary to the Indians out of Point Pleasant, Maine. He had become known, at least in America, as John Cheverus. (Eventually he became the first Catholic bishop of Boston, and the picture of him above comes from the blog of his latest successor.) Capt. Smithwick and Miss Jackson asked Cheverus to marry them at the Kavanaghs’ home on the first day of 1800.

The Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review was one of the publications that reported the wedding months later, when the news reached Boston:

At Damascotty [i.e., Damariscotta], by the Rev. John Chevers, Capt. James Smithwick, to the amiable and accomplished Miss Eliza Jackson, both of this town.

Naturally such an event led to a landmark lawsuit.

Under the Massachusetts marriage law of 1786, Cheverus was not authorized to marry Smithwick and Jackson. The law specified that a clergyman could marry couples only in the town where he was settled as a minister. But Cheverus had come to Damariscotta for the marriage; according to the Roman Catholic Church, his parish included all of Massachusetts and Maine.

Cheverus himself recognized the conflict between those two authorities because he advised the Smithwicks to go to a justice of the peace the day after the ceremony to make sure their marriage was legal in the eyes of the state. But he was nonetheless hauled up on charges.

Some analyses of this case say that Massachusetts Attorney General James Sullivan prosecuted it as a way of clarifying the law, perhaps even changing it. Sullivan had represented Matignon in a previous lawsuit aimed at freeing Kavanagh and Cottrill from having to pay taxes to support their town’s Protestant minister.

In August a grand jury in Wicasset indicted Cheverus. Cottrill paid his bail. The court of common pleas found in the priest’s favor, and Sullivan declined to prosecute further. However, Judge Theophilus Bradford took it upon himself to continue the case to the next court session. On the day in March 1801 that the second trial was to start, Bradford suffered a stroke. Nobody else pursued the matter, and thus a precedent was created.

TOMORROW: A last glimpse of Mary Lobb from yet another court case.

Mary Lobb: divorced Catholic church lady

Being a widow with young children didn’t make Mary Lobb unusual in eighteenth-century Boston. Even living apart from her second husband probably wasn’t that odd, especially after the disruption of the war. What makes Mary Lobb notable is that she became a stalwart Catholic.

It’s quite possible that Mary Lobb had long thought of herself as a Catholic. The 1944 History of the Archdiocese of Boston says Mary Lobb was “Born in 1734, the daughter probably of Patrick Connell, mariner and sea-captain,” but it’s also possible she came from Ireland. Though she was married and saw her children baptized in Boston’s Anglican churches, those might simply have been her best choice before the 1780s. Up until the Revolution, after all, Boston was a site of violent annual anti-Catholic parades.

In November 1788 a priest named Abbé Claude F. B. de la Poterie, who had arrived in Boston as chaplain to the French fleet, celebrated the Roman mass in what had been the Huguenot Church on School Street. He was soon joined by another priest named Louis Rousselet. This was the beginning of a formal Catholic presence in the town. It wasn’t a smooth start—both men had scandals in their past, and the new bishop for the U.S. of A., headquartered in Baltimore, dismissed each after a short time.

The Rev. John Thayer took up duties as Boston’s priest in June 1790. He was a native of the town, born in 1755 and raised Protestant. In 1781 he had traveled to France to learn the language, then did more study in Europe. In May 1783 Thayer was in Rome, where he chose to convert to Catholicism, as he described in a memoir published five years later.

Samuel Breck, who had met Thayer in Europe during a brief period of being a Catholic himself, described the reopening of the church:

We fitted up a dilapidated and deserted meeting-house in School-street that was built in 1716 by some French Huguenots, and it was now converted into a popish church, principally for the use of French Romanists. A subscription put the sacristy or vestry-room in order, erected a pulpit, and purchased a few benches. A little additional furniture and plate was borrowed.

Thomas H. O’Connor’s Boston Catholics says:

One of the first and most active members of Father Thayer’s little congregation was Mrs. Mary Lobb (née Mary Connell), widow of a sea captain…

Thayer was a bit of a loose cannon; in 1790 the bishop in Baltimore wrote that he had “proved turbulent, ambitious, interested,” and combined “much ignorance with consummate assurance.” The bishop sent him to do missionary work in Kentucky. Thayer then had the better idea of starting a Catholic school for American girls, and went to Europe to raise funds. He died in Limerick in 1815.

The Rev. Dr. Francis Matignon (1753-1818) arrived in 1792, first serving as an assistant to Thayer and then taking over. He had been driven out of France by the Revolution. Abbé Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus (1768-1836), Matignon’s former student, arrived in October 1796 to assist him. And their landlady was Mary Lobb.

That 1944 history of the archdiocese says, “Father Matignon lived at the house of Mrs. Mary Lobb, in Leverett’s or Quaker Lane (now Congress Street), in what was a small Catholic section.” Lobb donated money to help build the new Church of the Holy Cross, which stood from 1803 to about 1862 (shown above late in its existence). As late as 1810, Mary Lobb was a subscriber to a book by John Milner answering an anti-Catholic tract.

TOMORROW: Mary Lobb and her family get involved in a landmark lawsuit.

Statuary Lunch at Massachusetts Historical Society, 4 Dec.

The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Beehive blog says that as part of the Brown-Bag Seminar series, Library Assistant Heather Merrill and Boston By Foot volunteer Tod Forman will speak about “Legacies in Stone: Some Statues of Boston” on Friday, 4 December, starting at 12:00 noon.

Based on the title, I assume this is a version of the same presentation as described on a flyer Tod gave me last month:

Often taken for granted, each and every sculpture comes with a life story, a history, a reason for being, criticism, controversy and placement issues and, of course, a sculptor.

Legacies in Stone is an entertaining one-hour illustrated lecture that should appeal to anyone interested in the history, the art, the politics and the characters that inhabited the Boston of days gone by.

In addition, on Thursday evening at 5:15 the M.H.S.’s Boston Area Early American History Seminar discusses Elaine Forman Crane’s “Cold Comfort: Rape and Race in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island.” with comments by Gerald F. Leonard of Boston University Law School.

The End of Mary Lobb’s Marriage

When Capt. James Smithwick was lost at sea in early 1778, as I recounted last week, he left in Boston a widow named Mary and at least three children under the age of ten. Mary remarried the following spring to a man named George Lobb.

That match didn’t work out. By 1781 Mary Lobb was petitioning to end the marriage.

Divorce was unusual in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, but not unheard of. Among the divorced people I’ve read about are:

• printer Isaiah Thomas, who discovered his wife Mary had an affair with Benjamin Thompson.
• Ann Lovell, whose husband John (eldest son of the longtime schoolteacher with the same name) went insane. (Brent Simon’s Witches, Rakes, and Rogues tells that story.)

In addition, Thomas Paine’s separation papers were recently rediscovered. Thanks to PhiloBiblos for the tip.

In Massachusetts between 1692 (when the Crown established a new royal charter) and 1786, the governor and Council heard divorce cases. Nancy F. Cott’s article “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts” in the William and Mary Quarterly says:

Puritan divorce theory allowed divorce for incorrigible enmity between spouses or for dangerous abuse, but canon law prescribed only separate bed and board. . . .

Of the twenty-three Massachusetts petitions entered on grounds of cruelty,…Not a single one granted divorce.

“Separate bed and board” meant the spouses were legally separated, with husbands paying a sort of alimony, but no freedom to remarry. Wives usually asked for that status, perhaps because they knew it was the best they could realistically hope for.

Mary Lobb petitioned for a separation from her husband George on grounds of cruelty in 1780 or ’81. I haven’t seen the documents of her filing, so I don’t know what she said George had done. Gov. John Hancock and the Council dismissed Mary’s first petition, and she sued again the next year, offering more evidence. That time the body ruled that she deserved “separate bed and board.”

Mary Lobb also took steps to support herself and her children. The town licensed her to sell tea in 1781, then approved her “as a Retailer of Spirituous Liquors at her Shop in Fish Street” in January 1782. That August, town records say:

The Selectmen agree to allow Mrs. Lob, for a Building improved as a Watch house, Seven pounds ten p Annum to commence from the expiration of the last Quarter

The 1798 tax valuation listed Mary Lobb as the owner of three buildings: her home on Reas Court North and more valuable houses rented to “Mary Jenkins” on Fish Street and “Mrs. Doble” on Middle Street.

TOMORROW: What made Mary Lobb really stand out in eighteenth-century Boston.

Old South Remembers the Tea Crisis in December

Old South Meeting House, site of the large public meetings that led up to the Boston Tea Party, will host three events next month looking back at that history.

First come two lunchtime lectures by Prof. Benjamin Carp of Tufts University, drawing on his research for the upcoming book Teapot in a Tempest.

• Thursday, 3 December, 12:15 P.M.: “what led to American outrage in 1773, who became politically active in protesting the Tea Act, and why it ended with the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor. Learn about the global forces of trade and empire that influenced the colonies and why Boston became the site for this grassroots protest."
• Thursday, 10 December, 12:15 P.M.: “The Boston Tea Party lives on in history and memory, inspiring speakers for and against slavery, women’s suffragists, anti-immigration advocates, Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless modern tax protests. But most of the images of the Tea Party are wrong, the Mohawk disguises are misunderstood and Americans’ penchant for coffee has little to do with politics.”

Admission to each lecture is $5.00, $4.00 for students and seniors, free for Old South members. Lunching is encouraged.

Finally, on Sunday, 13 December, from 5:30 to 7:00 P.M., Old South presents the annual reenactment of the Tea Party. The site’s press release says:

Old South’s Tea Party Players will portray historic icons such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and John Hancock and recreate the events of Dec. 16, 1773, when more than 5,000 colonists gathered at Old South Meeting House to debate a British-imposed tea tax.

The reenactment is open to the public, and audience members are invited to choose sides—Patriot or Loyalist—and lend their support for or against the tariff. They will witness first hand how the fiery debate that evening in 1773 decided the fate of over 46 tons of tea and set into motion the events that ultimately led to the Revolutionary War.

That debate will be followed by “a theatrical storytelling piece that will transport you back to Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773.”

Tickets are $8 per person, available through the Old South website, direct from the ticket service, or by calling 800-838-3006.

(Image above from Salada Tea, the reenactment’s “official tea sponsor.” Folks can also sign up for Salada’s “Too Good To Toss” Sweepstakes.)

The Challenges of Pinning John Adams Down on Religion

As I mentioned yesterday, despite the Federalist Party’s portrayal of John Adams as a better Christian than Thomas Jefferson, the two men’s faiths were rather similar. Neither believed in the divinity of Jesus, but both admired Jesus’s teachings. Both men heartily distrusted religious hierarchies.

Pinning down Adams’s beliefs further can be difficult because he was a difficult man. On 28 Aug 1811 he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush:

I agree with you in Sentiment that Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free Government, but of social felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society.

Yet the following year, in the same letter I quoted on Thursday, Adams told Rush:

I agree with you, there is a Germ of Religion in human Nature so strong, that whenever an order of Men can persuade the People by flattery or Terror, that they have Salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, Violence or Usurpation.

Adams’s statements on religion also tended to be personal. Not in the sense that, as Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” Rather, personal in the sense that Adams often thought he was being personally and unfairly attacked—he even took that as a sign of his virtue. He therefore spent a lot of ink refuting what he thought others might say about him.

Here, for example, is more context for the quotation above about how he saw “Religion and Virtue” as fundamental:

I agree with you in Sentiment that Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free Government, but of social felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society. But if I should inculcate this doctrine in my Will, I should be charged with Hypocrisy and a desire to conciliate the good will of the Clergy towards my Family as I was charged by Dr. [Joseph] Priestley and his Friend [Thomas] Cooper and by Quakers, Baptists and I know not how many other sects, for instituting a National Fast, for even common Civility to the Clergy, and for being a Church going animal. . . .

If I should inculcate those “National, Social, domestic and religious virtues” you recommend, I should be suspected and charged with an hypocritical, Machiavilian, Jesuitical, Pharisaical attempt to promote a national establishment of Presbyterianism in America, whereas I would as soon establish the Episcopal Church, and almost as soon the Catholic Church. . . .

If I should recommend the Sanctification of the Sabbath like a divine, or even only a regular attendance on publick Worship as a means of moral Instruction and Social Improvement like a Phylosopher or Statesman, I should be charged with vain ostentation again, and a selfish desire to revive the Remembrance of my own Punctuality in this Respect, for it is notorious enough that I have been a Church going animal for seventy six years i.e. from the Cradle; and this has been alledged as one Proof of my Hypocrisy.

As you can see, this letter was almost all about how the many enemies of John Adams would distort whatever he said, so he was best off saying nothing. We have to dig beneath his self-pitying declarations to find out how he viewed religion, as opposed to how he suspected or hoped people viewed him.

One detail I find notable is Adams’s distinction between two ways of recommending going to church: “the Sanctification of the Sabbath,” as ministers would have it, and “regular attendance on publick Worship as a means of moral Instruction and Social Improvement like a Phylosopher or Statesman.” Which was the basis for his own behavior? Which did he recommend for other people?

John Adams’s Days of “Solemn Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer”

To spot what might have been controversial about John Adams’s proclamations of Thanksgiving holidays on 9 May 1798 and 25 Apr 1799, it’s useful to compare them to others issued before he took office:

• 18 Dec 1777, proclaimed by the Continental Congress.
• 26 Nov 1789, proclaimed by George Washington as President.
• 19 Feb 1795, again proclaimed by Washington.

Beliefnet has Congress’s resolution of 1777. Pilgrim Hall has the texts of five presidential proclamations from 1789 to 1814. (The last came from James Madison.)

One difference pops up right away from the dates. Adams declared holidays in back-to-back years. Though that tradition didn’t continue in 1800, the Adams administration made such proclamations at a higher rate than any previous national government.

Some analysts say people saw Adams’s messages as ominous because they got into political matters, suggesting Americans pray that “our public councils and magistrates may be especially enlightened and directed at this critical period“ in 1798, and that “the United States are still held in jeopardy by the hostile designs and insidious acts of a foreign nation” in 1799.

But Washington’s proclamations also mentioned politics, both generally (“render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed“ in 1789) and specifically (“the suppression of the late insurrection” in 1795).

I think the crucial difference is what Adams asked people to do. He proclaimed a day of “solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” with “fervent thanksgiving” as an afterthought. In contrast, the Congress and Washington asked Americans to pray and give thanks, but they didn’t mention humiliation or fasting.

Fasting was the basis of the New England Puritans’ Thanksgiving tradition. The big dinner came only at the end of a day spent in church while eating little and feeling sinful. Adams’s holiday proclamations weren’t meant to produce “an Establishment of a National Church,” as he claimed his enemies said, but they did try to spread one form of worship nationwide. (I should acknowledge one difference: New England’s Thanksgivings were usually late in the year, after harvest, but Adams pegged dates in the spring.)

The New England Thanksgiving had also developed a political dimension during the build-up to the Revolutionary War. As I discussed last year, observing the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Thanksgiving in December 1774 became a dividing line between Patriots and Loyalists, and thus between the majority Congregationalists and smaller sects that supported the Crown for religious reasons.

That division came on top of ongoing distrust of New England’s Congregationalist establishment for a variety of reasons: old oppression (Quakers, Catholics), being taxed to support someone else’s church (Baptists), too much fervency (Anglicans and Enlightenment skeptics). The Puritan fast day was thus a symbol for a bigger issue about the freedom and equality of faiths.

Finally, religious orthodoxy was also a dividing line between Adams and his rival Thomas Jefferson, at least as the Federalist press portrayed the two men. (In reality, they weren’t far apart in their beliefs.) The 1799 proclamation’s warning about “principles, subversive of the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations,” clearly tried to claim all religion and morality for one side—the anti-French Revolution side—of the U.S. of A.’s politics.

In the end, John Adams’s holiday declarations probably did not decide the election of 1800, despite his later grumbling about “the unpopularity of national Fasts and Thanksgivings.” They were simply another irritant in a series of political disputes.

And what controversy they kicked up didn’t come from their call for “thanksgiving,” but from the “fasting” and “humiliation.” Which, not coincidentally, are the aspects of the New England Thanksgiving that we’ve most thoroughly discarded.

“The Unpopularity of National Fasts and Thanksgivings”

In a letter dated 12 June 1812, John Adams wrote to his old Continental Congress colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush about why he’d lost the presidency twelve years earlier. Adams put the blame on...Thanksgiving!

The National Fast, recommended by me turned me out of office. It was connected with the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church, which I had no concern in.

That assembly has allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Swedenborgians, Methodists, Catholicks, protestant Episcopalians, Arians, Socinians, Armenians, &c, &c, &c, Atheists and Deists might be added. A general Suspicon prevailed that the Presbyterian Church was ambitious and aimed at an Establishment of a National Church.

I was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical Project. The secret whisper ran through them “Let us have Jefferson, Madison, [Aaron] Burr, any body, whether they be Philosophers, Deists, or even Atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President.”

This principle is at the bottom of the unpopularity of national Fasts and Thanksgivings. Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion.

This letter was first published by Alexander Biddle in a volume called Old Family Letters (1892).

Authors have accepted a lot of Adams’s late-life recollections and analyses uncritically, but not this one. The notion that a Thanksgiving proclamation was the most unpopular of Adams’s acts in office seems incredible.

In fact, the American government had already proclaimed occasional Thanksgiving holidays, and they seemed to be popular. The Congress declared one on 18 Dec 1777 (though with Philadelphia under British control, members had less to be thankful for). When Adams’s predecessor, George Washington, issued such a proclamation in 1789, he noted that “both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested” it.

Jefferson didn’t follow his predecessors in this regard, but he also felt the need of “saying why I do not proclaim fastings & thanksgivings,” as he told Attorney General Levi Lincoln. Jefferson found that opening in his famous 1802 letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, which said:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

And after that, Jefferson was reelected while Adams wasn’t. So was there something about Adams’s proclamations that made them more controversial than others?

TOMORROW: What was different about Adams’s Thanksgiving proclamations.