By Darcy Stevens, Phd student, University of Maine, 2020 Society of the Cincinnati short-term fellow

“This native Kansan is going to the Birthplace of the American Revolution!” That was my first thought after I processed the feeling of honor of being named a Society of the Cincinnati fellow. I envisioned long satisfying days in the Massachusetts Historical Society archives then evenings exploring historic Boston. I’d snap selfies in front of Faneuil Hall and the Old North Church. I’d tour the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and maybe catch a ball game at Fenway (I’m not all nerd). At the end of my fellowship, I would have material for great articles and personal stories alike!

It was not meant to be. Like the rest of the country, I spent most of the last 14 months working from home. There would be no Boston, but thanks to the work of the amazing staff at MHS and technology my fellowship research could move forward remotely.

Readers will have guessed that I study the American Revolution. Specifically, I examine allegiance and neutrality in the Borderlands of Maine – Nova Scotia. My interest is in revealing how inhabitants navigated the contentious social landscape during this period. The Borderlands was home to Loyalists, Patriots, and Neutrals, soldiers and militiamen, Indigenous leaders and politicians. Their interwoven stories illustrate the complexity of living surrounded by friends and foes in wartime.

This was true for the inhabitants of Bagaduce (now Castine). When the British arrived in 1779 there were very few settlers. Patriot forces launched the Penobscot Expedition to rout the British, were soundly defeated, and the British held the region for the remainder of the war. In just a few months the handful the previously isolated settlers were surrounded by Loyalists from distance places, British, Scottish, and German soldiers, and their families. Their lives would become entangled and interdependent. There is much yet to uncover about Bagaduce and I am excited to discover what it will reveal.

While Bagaduce has received most of my attention so far, I have also spent some time examining Colonel John Allan. A Nova Scotian Patriot, Allan commanded the American forces at Machias and was superintendent of the Eastern Indians. In the latter role he worked tirelessly to secure an allegiance with the Wabanaki. He was convinced that without their support, or at least their neutrality Maine would fall to the enemy. His letters give the impression of a self-confident, almost brazen man, who wasted no time on deference and flowery composition. He was busy; he cut to the chase and didn’t sugar-coat the facts. I think Allan and I would have gotten along famously.

The MHS holds a collection of John Allan’s papers and since receiving digital copies I have spent many happy hours poring over them. During my research on Bagaduce and the Penobscot Expedition I had not come across Allan. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find a letter he wrote about the event. Allan reported he received a request from General Solomon Lovell, at Bagaduce calling for reinforcements on 1 August. Allan then detailed the many reasons he was not ready to sail for another nine days. On the same day he received a second message from Lovell asking him to “proceed with all Expiditon & bring as many of the Militia as Could be spared” Allan learned of British ships in the much closer Passamaquoddy Bay.[1] Yet, he delayed his departure for another four days, until he learned those British ships were only trade vessels. Still fearful of an attack on Machias when he finally set out for Bagaduce he took only one hundred men. This was two full weeks after Lovell’s first request. On the fourth day of travel Allan sees great billows of smoke, suspects the settlements were burning, decided he did not have enough men or provisions, and turned back for Machias. Meanwhile, Lovell’s papers are replete with his optimism that Allan was on the way.  Lovell wrote that on 13 August he “every moment expected a reinforcement by Colonel Allan.”[2] But that was the day British reinforcements arrived. Allan still had not left Machias. The next day the last of the Patriot ships were captured or scuttled and the remaining troops went scurrying through the Maine wilderness.

Perhaps the loss was inevitable. The British had a vastly superior navy. Still, reading Lovell’s account next to Allan’s makes me wonder. We will never know. What we do know is that Allan felt no responsibility. In fact, he was decidedly put out by the loss, as if the affair was a major inconvenience for him. He opens his letter to the President of the Massachusetts Council by writing:

The Unhappy and Unparalled Defeat at Penobscott, has put this Department in a most Critical & Dangerous Situation, such as Requires the Vigelant attention for its Preservation—The Various objects I am Compelled to Turn my thoughts & Time to, will prevent my being so Explicite in my Communicating Matters as I would wish.

He goes on to complain of the effect the defeat had on the relationship with the Wabanaki.

 The Dishonorable Flight (permit the Expression without Censure from a feeling of Mortification for the Disgrace brough on the Arms of our Country) of the Americans on the Penobscot River has given a wound to our Indian Affairs.[3]

Well, I said he was brazen.

Given the amount of work Allan put into wooing the Wabanaki, his complaint seems fair. What struck me, aside from his caustic statements, was the extent to which Bagaduce and Machias were entangled. At Bagaduce original settlers, loyalists, and British troops lived, worked, and socialized together. Their lives were obviously entwined. The same was true for the inhabitants and Patriot soldiers at Machias. Allan’s letter revealed how interconnected these disparate and distance communities were to one another and with the Indigenous communities of the region. This is an important point that I had yet to consider.

I still believe a close examination of these small Borderlands communities will reveal a great deal about the social landscape of the American Revolution. But now I am more mindful of how distant and seemingly unrelated events will impact my Borderlands actors and their decisions about allegiance and neutrality.

[1] John Allan to Jeremiah Powell, President of the Council of the State of Massachusetts Bay. September 10, 1779, Machias. John Allan Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Collection.

[2] “Addendum To General Lovell’s Letter to Massachusetts Council.” Sept. 3.1779. As printed in General Solomon Lovell and The Penobscot Expedition, 1779. By Chester B. Kevitt. Weymouth MA: Weymouth Historical Commission, 1796. 120.

[3] Allan to Powell

By Cassy Jane Werking, PhD Candidate, University of Kentucky, Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Research Fellow at the MHS

The ship in the distance gave hope to Lucy Lord Howes Hooper, passenger aboard the American Southern Cross. Her vessel was not lost at sea because civilization was in sight. The ship, however, served as an unexpected reminder of a civilization fraught with conflict—the American Civil War. The feeling of hope felt by Massachusetts natives Lucy Lord Howes Hooper and her husband, Captain Benjamin Howes, quickly vanished as the approaching Confederate ship, sailing under the disguise of the British flag and taking advantage of Britain’s neutrality, announced that all on board the Southern Cross were now prisoners of war for the Confederacy. Hooper watched the Confederate flag quickly replace the English flag and commented, “I had been standing on deck all this time in the rain, watching the proceedings with an aching heart.” [1] The discomfort of the rain falling on her head may have matched the discomfort she felt in her heart about the situation unfolding in front of her eyes and the uncertainty that would undoubtedly follow. Passengers packed belongings as quickly as possible, evacuated the ship, and boarded the Confederate Florida before their capturers burned the American Southern Cross. Hooper served time as a Confederate prisoner of war for six days in June 1863 alongside her husband who was the merchant captain of the Southern Cross. They were on route from Mazatlán, Mexico with a shipment of brazilwood when the Confederates found them. [2] Hooper left the ship she referred to as home in an unusual way. She stated, “I was wrapped in the American flag and lowered over the side in an arm chair into the boat, with one of my cats in my lap.” [3] This unusual scene highlights the variety of forms the Civil War took and the unsuspecting civilians who were caught in the cross hairs.

The experience of Lucy Lord Howes Hooper shows that the Confederacy took advantage of fluid borders in international waters through Confederate privateers with the goal of destroying Union commerce. Hooper’s story provides a female perspective from the southern end of the North American continent to contrast with northern regions that my dissertation explores—the international border between Canada and the United States.  The Confederacy extended its reach beyond the borders of the South and beyond the United States. Hooper’s diary and my dissertation contribute to the more recent trajectory of Civil War scholarship that has involved “internationalizing” the war’s scope. Historians have examined Europe and South America to broaden our understanding. They have also highlighted the importance of Latin American nations to the Civil War Era. Examinations ranged from the escapades of filibusters before the war like William Walker, who led a private expedition into Nicaragua in order to acquire land needed for the expansion of slavery, to the lives of white southerners who did not want to live in the United States during Reconstruction. Yet, North America on a larger scale remains understudied. Analyzing international borders by land, and by water, adds a new dimension to how the scholarship conceptualizes the geography of war and builds on recent studies of borders as contested spaces.

Confederate Lieutenant John Newland Maffitt treated Hooper less like a prisoner and more like a guest. He offered Hooper his personal room for her to stay in and taught her to play Solitaire. Hooper was from Dennis, Massachusetts and even talked about Cape Cod with Maffitt in which the captain reported that the Cape Cod girls are “great flirts.” [4] Interesting conversations may have briefly diverted Hooper’s attention away from her capricious situation, but she remained uncomfortable because there was no destination or freedom in sight. Hooper demurred, “Still prisoners we are discounted, suffer considerable from ennui, a dull rainy disagreeable day.” [5] Hooper knew that the ticket to her release hindered on the presence of a non-American ship coming in the path of the Confederates. Ultimately, the French ship Fleur De Para unknowingly liberated Hooper, her husband, and a handful of other passengers. The Confederate privateers posing as Englishmen explained that they saved them from a burning vessel, but secretly kept the remainder of the crew as prisoners.

Examining Confederate actions in international waters and the safety of civilians threatened on ships, shows that the Civil War, despite its name, was not a war that transpired only within the borders of the United States, but also on the border, specifically in the “borderlands.” Therefore, a fuller understanding of the war that encompasses all the diverse actors, like Hooper, who were affected and their varied experiences of war requires a reframing of the Civil War that positions it as a fight that played out across North America.

[1] Lucy Lord Howes Hooper, 6 June 1863 [electronic edition], [Page unnumbered; (Page 1 of sequence)], Lucy Lord Howes Hooper diary, 1862-1863,  Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=2505&pid=25.

[2] This description is from the project: Civil War, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[3] Ibid., [Page unnumbered; (Page 2 of sequence)].

[4] Ibid., 7 June 1863, [Page unnumbered; (Page 3 of sequence)].

[5] Ibid., 10 June 1863, [Page unnumbered; (Page 3 of sequence)].

By Lauren Duval, NEH-MHS Long-term Research Fellow, Assistant Professor of History, University of Oklahoma

This past fall I was delighted to spend time at the Massachusetts Historical Society as a research fellow. Analyzing British-occupied cities during the American Revolution, my research centers the urban household and examines how civilian families navigated the disruption of occupation and the consequence of this experience, both during and after the war. The voluminous correspondence of the loyalist Murray family proved an exceptional source for examining these dynamics, offering a fascinating glimpse into how one Boston family navigated the hardships of martial law during the early months of the war.

On April 20, 1775, in the wake of the battles at Lexington and Concord, Bostonians awoke to startling news that they were, in the words of one woman, “Genl. Gage’s prisoner[s]—all egress, & regress being cut off between the town & country.”[1] In the months that followed, both the British army and the militia (later Continental army) besieging Boston were hesitant to allow civilians to cross military lines, fearing disease, espionage, and the loss of resources. Some fortunate Bostonians managed to secure passes.[2] Many others, however, lingered in the besieged city (whether by choice or circumstance), where they endured food shortages, disease, plunder, and violence, and struggled to communicate with friends and family outside the British garrison.

The Murray family was stranded on both sides of the lines. Residing in Boston alongside his wife, Elizabeth, and youngest daughter Betsy, loyalist James Murray occupied his time by gardening and reading books, the latter of which he jokingly referred to as “the best friends now left to me.”[3] His sister, Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith Inman and eldest daughter, Dolly Murray Forbes dwelt at the family’s Brush-hill estate, in Cambridge, surrounded by Continental troops. Later in the occupation, Betsy, to her parents’ distress, would abandon the garrison to shelter at Brush-hill.[4] Crossing the lines was nevertheless a fraught endeavor, even with permission. In the fall of 1775, for instance, Elizabeth Inman was advised to remove into the garrison for safety. She obtained a pass to visit Boston and became stranded there for the remainder of the occupation.[5]

Despite being separated by only a few miles, the Murray family was divided by both wartime circumstances and military boundaries. Obtaining passes from commanding officers, they arranged meetings at the military outposts that separated the British garrison at Boston from the Continental camp in Cambridge. Such conferences permitted them to visit, exchange news, and offer reassurances of safety. But they were far from private. As James Murray explained in July 1776, a British officer would observe the family’s gatherings “to be Eye & Ear Witness of all that passes.” This precaution, Murray explained, was for the family’s protection and he strongly advised “the Ladies . . . to use the same precaution, on their side: the Times require it.”[6] With various family members stranded on either side of the lines, dependent upon the protection of both armies, the Murrays could ill-afford to be charged with treasonous behavior by either faction. Witnesses, both British and Continental, who could attest, if necessary, to the content of the family’s conversation was an important shield against such charges. Still, the Murrays were cautious not to meet too frequently, fearful of raising suspicions among Massachusetts revolutionaries.[7]

Like inhabitants of occupied cities throughout British North America, the Murrays struggled with the lack of private communications. They lamented the necessity of leaving letters unsealed for inspection and bemoaned the uncertainty of conveyance. The Murrays, with their regular visits at the lines, were in some ways, more fortunate than those families who had to settle for letters or word-of-mouth reassurances of safety. When possible, the Murrays used private channels, entrusting their missives to neighbors who had obtained passes to cross the lines. Such conveyances were nevertheless circumspect; nothing of consequence could be committed to paper, lest the letter be intercepted.[8] Occasionally, the Murrays sent letters and goods via servants and enslaved messengers, whose roles as laborers permitted them to more easily traverse military lines.[9] Such mobility could, however, be perilous. Enslaved laborers were routinely plundered and kidnapped. Disease flourished near military encampments. Like white civilians, the enslaved could become trapped within the garrison, far from their own families and where they encountered far more difficulties in learning about their loved ones’ well-being. Proximity to the British army nevertheless offered a chance for freedom, and approximately twenty thousand self-emancipated men, women, and children made their way to the British lines during the war.[10]

Despite scrupulous planning, miscarried letters, delayed passes, and other mishaps disrupted the Murrays’ meetings.[11] Weather could deter visits, especially in the frigid winter months.[12] Wartime circumstances introduced additional fears; in the midst of civil war, surrounded by two armies, safety was no guarantee. Hinting at the strain of nine-months-long separation, in January 1776, James Murray wrote to his daughters, requesting them to “bring with you as healthy & chearful Countenances as you did at our last [meeting].” “Your very looks will be a feast to your old Father tho not a Word pass,” he assured them.[13] But even as such glimpses fortified the family for the hardship ahead, the long period of separation exacerbated other worries. Parted from his grandsons for several months, James Murray and his wife Elizabeth worried that “they will have quite forgot us.”[14] Each time the family sent off a letter, they worried, as Dolly expressed to her father in May 1775, that “it may be the last time we can hear from you.”[15]

Although only one facet of the wartime disruption that Bostonians faced in the early years of the war, the experiences of the Murray family underscore the deeply personal and intimate ways in which the war affected American families. Residing between two armies, the challenges that the family faced speak not only to the hardship that civil war inflicted on civilians residing in and around the Boston garrison, but also illustrate in vivid detail the consequences of these circumstances on daily life and familial relationships. As Dolly Forbes feared, the separation from her parents did become permanent. Like many Boston loyalists, James and Elizabeth Murray evacuated Boston with the army in March 1776. They eventually settled in Halifax, where James died in 1781, far from the family that he had valiantly struggled to keep unified during the war.[16]

[1] Sarah Winslow Deming Journal, April 20, 1775.

[2] Permit to pass through British lines, May 1775, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, 1774–1775.

[3] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsey Murray, October 2, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2 (garden); James Murray to Elizabeth Inman, May 23, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2 (quotation).

[4] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsey Murray, October 2, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[5] Memorial of Dorothy Forbes of Milton to the Honble. Council & House of Representatives of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, December 12, 1775, Murray Robbins Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 4.

[6] James Murray to Elizabeth Inman and Dolly Forbes, July 26, 1775, Murray Robbins Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 4.

[7] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsy Murray, Feb 10, 1776 (James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[8] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes and Betsy Murray, November 6, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[9] For a few examples, see James Murray to Elizabeth Inman, May 17, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2; James Murray to Elizabeth Inman, Boston, Thursday, May 18, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2; Elizabeth Inman to Ralph Inman, 29th & 30th May 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2; Elizabeth Inman to Dorothy Forbes and Betsy Murray, October 28, 1776, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[10] Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2005): 261.

[11] Letter to Betsie Murray, February 23, 1776, Murray Robbins Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 5, (miscarried); Elizabeth Inman to Ralph Inman, Sunday April 30, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2 (delayed).

[12] James Murray to Dolly Forbes and Betsy Murray, February 14, 1776, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[13] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes & Betsy Murray, January 10, 1776, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[14] James Murray to Dorothy Forbes and Betsy Murray, November 6, 1775, James M. Robbins Family Papers, Box 2.

[15] Letters of James Murray, Loyalist, ed. Nina Moore Tiffany and Susan Inches Lesley (Boston, 1901), 199.

[16] James Henry Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (J.H. Stark, 1907), 258–60.

by Yiyun Huang, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Dr. Thomas Young (1731-1777) was an important member of the Sons of Liberty and a family physician of John Adams. Although he did not participate in the destruction of tea on December 16, 1773, he played a crucial role in rallying against the consumption of tea. Young wrote an essay highlighting the medicinal risks of drinking tea which appeared in the Boston Evening Post in October, 1773. He aimed to make the case that tea was really a slow poison. One of his methods was to present some extraordinary cases: a farmer’s wife from his hometown “lost the use of her limbs” because of continuously drinking strong tea for four years.[1] But there is something else from this essay that is really fascinating.

Dr. Young’s essay reveals a variety of conduits through which colonial American intellectuals could learn about exotic botanicals such as tea. First, they could read the works of the Jesuit missionaries and other Europeans who had traveled to East Asia. To prove his argument that tea was a slow poison, Dr. Young wanted to know what the Chinese had to say about tea’s medicinal properties. So, he turned to Jean Baptiste Du Halde’s The General History of China (Description de la Chine) and Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amœnitates Exoticæ (Exotic Pleasures) for answers. The MHS has a printed copy of the third edition of The General History of China, which included detailed descriptions of the botanical and medicinal properties of tea. Du Halde based these descriptions on the French missionaries’ translation of Chinese materia medica texts and their observations of the cultivation and production of tea in Fujian province.[2]

Engelbert Kaempfer’s work was another source of information for Dr. Young to learn about tea. Kaempfer (1651-1716) did not set foot in China but had stayed in Batavia and Nagasaki as a physician for the Dutch East India Company in the late 17th century. He provided a lengthy description of tea’s cultivation, preparation, preservation, and medicinal effects in Amœnitates.[3] He took advantage of the knowledge compiled by his predecessors, Chinese expat physicians in Japan, and texts exported to the port of Nagasaki by Chinese merchants. Both Du Halde and Kaempfer’s works provided a balanced description of tea’s health benefits and risks. However, Dr. Young focused on what the two authors said about tea’s medicinal vices, i.e. that it contained corrosive qualities.

The works of the armchair British and continental European physicians also provided ammunition for Dr. Young in denouncing tea. He cited the works of Thomas Short (1690-1772) and Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) to argue that long-time consumption of tea had negative impact on the health of the entire European population. Tissot’s Advice to the people in general, with regard to their health (1771) is in the MHS collections. Both Short and Tissot did acknowledge that tea could render some people ill, but throwing harsh criticism at tea was not their original intention. Instead, they were interested in determining the medicinal properties of tea by situating it within the Galenic framework and conducting new experiments. Short, for example, wanted to use a series of chemical experiments to determine if tea really had the health benefits as claimed by many. He concluded that green tea could cure such bodily disorders as lethargy and headache as it diluted “a thick blood.” He did claim that the Chinese adulterated tea with other ingredients, but these adulterations did not pose serious health risks.[4] Again, Dr. Young ignored Short’s praises of tea but took only the negative side into account.

Dr. Young’s essay was more of a political treatise which aimed to dissuade common people from consuming tea than a scientific study. He took advantage of the global sources available and chose to highlight what these authors said about the negative effects of tea drinking, while ignoring their praises of tea’s health benefits.

[1] Thomas Young, “Messirs Fleets,” Boston Evening Post, October 25, 1773.

[2] Jean Baptiste Du Halde, The General History of China (London: 1734).

[3] Engelbert Kaempfer, Exotic Pleasures: Fascicle III: Curious Scientific and Medical Observations. Trans. and intro. Robert W. Carrubba (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1998), 141-169. For the original see Kaempfer, Amœnitates Exoticæ (Lemgo, 1712), 605-631.

[4] Thomas Short, A Dissertation upon Tea (London: 1730), 43-59.