In my last two posts on the Civil War journal of Pvt. Howard J. Ford of the 43rd Massachusetts Infantry, I described his experiences during the Goldsboro Expedition in North Carolina, including the Battles of Kinston and Whitehall. Just one day after Whitehall, on 17 December 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed once again in the third and final battle of the expedition, the Battle of Goldsboro (or Goldsborough) Bridge.
Oil painting of the Battle of Goldsboro Bridge, printed in Edward H. Rogers’s 1883 history of the regiment
When we last heard from him, Howard was lying face down in the middle of a road between the northern and southern firing lines. In his journal, he wrote about the visceral trauma of “expecting every moment would be our last.”
This time, Howard would be spared the worst of the fighting. His company was ordered on an ancillary mission to attack a rebel battery and disable its artillery if possible. He called this engagement the Skirmish of Spring Bank Bridge (known in the south as Thompson’s Bridge), and he spent most of it ducking from tree to tree to avoid grapeshot. Interestingly, he also explicitly acknowledged the danger of friendly fire amidst the chaos: “Some poor fools […] kept blazing away at random, with more danger to us than the rebels.”
Howard survived uninjured, but the Battle of Goldsboro Bridge did claim one of his friends. “The most terrible thing of all,” he wrote, “was the loss of the best and bravest man in the company, Wm. F. Sparrow. A man whose praise is in the mouth of all, from the highest to the lowest.” Cpl. William Freeman Sparrow was a 27-year-old carpenter from Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. Howard also noted the deaths, at Whitehall the day before, of Isaac Young Smith and Theodore Parkman.
Following an individual’s day-to-day wartime experiences in close detail, you can clearly see the inevitable physical and psychological toll combat takes on them. The early days of patriotic fervor and noble ideals become grim determination and sometimes despair. The day after the battle, Howard wrote,
I assure you I shall never fo[r]get that work alluded to on this page. Never!!!! […] I dont know how human nature could stand it. ‘On to Richmond.’ [‘]Follow up your victories.’ ‘Chase them.’ ‘Cut em up.’ & such like ideas sound rather out of place when you come to realize something of the nature of the duties of a soldier.
Howard also admitted that he’d been having nightmares. “All times of night” he’d been waking in a panic, having dreamt that the army was leaving him behind, and these nightmares recurred long after any immediate danger had passed. He was emotionally and physically exhausted, even falling asleep standing up. However, as he said, “I am bound to tough it out.”
The battle was a strategic victory for the Union, but only a temporary one. Sources indicate that it took Confederate troops just two weeks to rebuild Goldsboro Bridge and restore their supply lines. Meanwhile, the Union Army’s simultaneous and devastating loss at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia overshadowed events near Goldsboro. The 43rd Regiment returned to New Bern, “a limping lame, blistered, dirty set of men.”
Stay tuned to the Beehive for more of Howard J. Ford’s story.
The MHS Education Department is excited to announce our cohort of student and teacher fellows for the 2023 season!
Each year, the MHS offers fellowships to three K-12 educators and one high school student; offering the opportunity to explore the Society’s archives. Teacher fellows are invited to research and create educational materials using documents and artifacts from MHS collections, responding to a gap in their curriculum or diving deeper into classroom content knowledge. High school student fellows work with a teacher mentor to research a topic of their choosing and create a project to share their findings, gaining experience in the field of history and working in archival spaces.
We are thrilled to be working with the following scholars this year:
Swensrud Teacher Fellows
Sydney Slayer, Lyons Township HS (Illinois) is investigating American imperialism in South America and Hawai’i.
Matt Weiss, Verde Valley HS (Arizona) is exploring shifts in Haudenosaunee politics and diplomacy in the early 1700s.
Kass Teacher Fellow
Michael M. Khorshidianzadeh, Victor School (Acton, MA) is researching Massachusetts progressivism and peace movements in the lead-up to World War I.
John Winthrop Student Fellow
Sahai Virk, Milford HS (Milford, MA) is examining the history of medical care and health care on marginalized populations and communities in Massachusetts.
Our Education fellows will present their findings in blog posts later this fall.
For those who are interested in applying, the MHS Education Fellowships are available to all K-12 educators and high school students from all U.S. states and territories. Applications for next year’s fellowship cohort will open in January 2024. Visit our website for more information and sign up for the Education newsletter to be the first to hear about next year’s applications!
A couple of years ago, I worked with a group of researchers to digitize a post office account book from Revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island. The book is a dataset in manuscript: it accounts for every piece of mail delivered to Newport residents by the colonial postal system between 1771 and 1774. This account book contains a wealth of information about life in colonial British North America in the years leading up to the American Revolution: about trade patterns, the dissemination of information, postal demographics. As a literary scholar, I had hoped that this dataset would shed light on the reading habits of Newport Residents during a moment of political upheaval. Did Newport’s postal users read more or differently in these final years of British colonial rule? What can we learn from these communication trends?
I put together a transcription team—(Thank you, Katie Reimer, Taylor & Katie Galusha, Melissa Lawson, and Sam Phippen!!)—to translate this book-based accounting system into a twenty-first century dataset. The work entailed entering the date of arrival, name of recipients, along with postage into columns of a spreadsheet. Such transcription requires a squint—eyestrain to make out the eighteenth-century handwriting. Once in a rhythm with transcription, there’s room for your mind to wander, to notice patterns in the text, and to speculate on the circumstances of postal use. It didn’t take long for our team to identify Newport’s postal “super-users”—George Rome, Aaron Lopez, and Simon Pease—men who received multiple pieces of mail every week. As we typed their names, we imagined their lives: were these men printers or preachers? Merchants, farmers, or teachers? Did they use the mail to incite Revolutionary fervor? Were they corresponding with friends or family at a distance? We wondered: how and why were these men using the mail every day?
The names we learned best—Rome, Lopez, Pease, and roughly 20 others—were all merchants, men with ships in a port city, sending banknotes and receipts through the mail. Roughly half of the mail that arrived at the Newport Post Office was addressed to the same top twenty-five postal users. These “super-users” were all men, and most built their wealth to some degree through the slave trade. They used the colonial postal system because it was the safest way to send large sums of money over long distances. In aggregate, the account book tells a simple truth: the colonial postal system largely abetted the economic interests of elite colonial subjects, fueled the slave trade, and only sometimes worked in the service of everyday Americans. This data-driven picture of the postal system appears much less democratic, and far from Revolutionary. The postal system was a tool for and network of the wealthy and powerful in early America.
When I started this project, I had hoped to find evidence of Obour Tanner in the pages of the Newport post office book. Tanner, a Newport resident, was the friend and lifelong correspondent of Phillis Wheatly (Peters). Tara Bynum, whose scholarly work introduced me to Tanner, describes the women’s letters as a source of joy, profound connection, and pleasure (see Reading Pleasures for more on their correspondence and networks—it’s an enlivening and important book). Though Tanner and Wheatley were enslaved at the time of their correspondence, both women found ways to bridge the gap between Newport and Boston through the exchange of letters.
And yet, they did not exchange their letters through the colonial mail. The Newport Post Office accounts contain no relevant entries for their letters during the period of their known correspondence. Few women appear in these pages at all (out of the over 8,500 pieces of mail that came into the office, only 125 items were addressed to women), and most of these women were white widows. No one in Tanner’s orbit received any mail by colonial post in the months of Wheatley (Peters)’s letters to Tanner. Instead, as usual, the colonial mailbag into Newport was largely filled with banknotes, receipts, and newspapers addressed to local merchants.
Meanwhile, outside of the colonial postal system, Obour Tanner and Phillis Wheatley (Peters) relied on their networks of friends and allies for the transmission of their letters. When she asks Tanner to send a reply to Mr. Whitwell’s, or to John Peter’s home, or by way of Rev. Samuel Hopkins, she “contextualizes and places herself as a friend, servant, slave, and woman in New England and the greater Atlantic world” according to Tara Bynum’s Reading Pleasures. When we read Wheatley’s letters for their postal systems, we see her integrated within a broader community of mutual aid: friends and allies who carried letters for one another.
A letter from October 30, 1773 offers special insight into Wheatley (Peters)’s approach to long distance correspondence. The letter’s cover is spare—addressed simply “To—Obour Tanner in Newport,” folded, and sealed with red wax. As this letter was not sent through official postal channels, there is no postage denoted on the cover (and this letter long pre-dates envelopes, postage stamps, standardized cancellations, and other recognizably postal features).
Wheatley (Peters)’s closing note to Tanner offers a glimpse into its delivery. She writes: “the young man by whom this is handed you seems to me to be a very clever man knows you very well & is very Complaisant and agreeable. – P.W.” The letter was delivered by a friend, a man they mutually respected and admired for his intelligence, kindness, and demeanor. Phillis Wheatley (Peters)’s note on the letter’s delivery works to fortify and celebrate their friendship and mutual esteem. Was the clever letter-carrier close at hand when the poet finished her letter to Tanner? Did she read the line aloud to him with a smile and a wink—before folding and sealing the letter? Did this near-flirtation and unequivocal praise from a celebrated poet cause the man to blush? Or beam with pride? A letter delivered under these terms—directed through a statement of friendship and admiration—enlivened and encouraged community. Honoree Jeffers’ extraordinary scholarly and creative work in The Age of Phillis wonders whether this letter carrier might be John Peters, the man Phillis Wheatley would later marry. These letters testify to and were carried by people who cared for one another.
Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, October 30, 1773
The colonial post office never delivered for Phillis Wheatley (Peters); but her friends did. First, during her lifetime, by establishing their own postal networks in which travelling friends and allies carried letters for one another. Then, Obour Tanner delivered Wheatley’s letters a second time—when she archived them with the Massachusetts Historical Society—thereby forwarding them to generations of readers and researchers.
When I started my fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I was motivated by Wheatley (Peters)’s long distance correspondence tactics, Tanner’s archival efforts, and I was skeptical of overly celebratory narratives of postal history. While my book-in-progress studies the United States Post Office Department rather than the colonial-era system, the mailbag’s mercantile allegiance endured throughout the nineteenth-century, as did the mail’s race and gender-based exclusions.
In the archive of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I encountered historical materials that further attuned my thinking about the allegiances and exclusions of the US Post Office Department. When I read the enormous 4-page broadside “Proposals for Carrying Mails in the United States” I was first struck by the sheer size of postal operations in 1824. The Postmaster General advertised contracts for mail carriers on nearly 400 routes throughout the country—each printed in small font covering every inch of the oversized pages. Each route paid a sizable sum: an amount the USPOD presumed would cover the operating expenses for a stagecoach line (which contractors would then supplement by selling passenger tickets and by carrying small freight). Each contract was an avenue into middle class life, geographically distributed throughout the length and breadth of the country. And yet, “no other than a free white person shall be employed to carry the mail,” the broadside advertises. Not only were these nearly 400 lucrative contracts awarded on a whites-only basis, the lower paid postrider and mailcoach driver positions were likewise closed off to Black Americans. The formal exclusion of Black labor from the postal system further extended to local postmasterships and clerkships. This racial exclusion existed until the end of the Civil War, and had a profound influence on the distribution of wealth along racial lines in the nineteenth century. In this period, the US Post Office Department was the largest employer in the country, and it only handed out jobs to white people. I was left with enduring questions about the broader social effects of this policy—would white postmasters serve Black correspondents? In what ways would a postmaster’s surveillance curtail textual expression, connection, and circulation?
Proposals for Carrying Mails in the United States, broadside, 1824
Later, when scouring every detail of the photo “Country Post Office,” I wondered about the locks and the highly-specialized leather portmanteau hanging on the wall behind the women reading their letters. The Post Office Department commissioned state-of-the-art locks and distributed the keys only to local postmasters. The leather portmanteaus worked in tandem with the locks to secure the mail and protect the contents from water. When read in tandem with the photo’s more central figures—the reading women—I’m reminded of the ways the post office in the nineteenth century worked on behalf of some Americans and worked to lock-out others. The post office delivered for these women—it offered a place of respite where they could read, warm themselves after their walk to the local office. At the same time, the locks are testaments to the exclusionary nature of the postal system in the nineteenth century—a network that both shaped and constrained communication.
Country Post Office, photograph by the Kilburn Brothers
These archival encounters helped me reframe my longstanding postal research to be better attuned to both the possibilities and prohibitions of the mail. Postal Hackers—the project’s new title—tells the stories of the nineteenth-century outsiders who laid claim to postal resources and sometimes broke the system that structured their exclusion. The project is motivated by the ingenuity of hackers like Henry “Box” Brown who used a private express company to mail himself out of enslavement; and by Harriet Jacobs whose letters conveyed by hand from a tiny attic crawlspace and put in the mail in Northern cities (thereby receiving location-based cancellation stamps) convinced her enslaver to seek her out in the North. Brown and Jacobs’s strategic use of the postal system allow them to find spaces of freedom and safety on their own terms. My book project also highlights the petition of Mary Katherine Goddard—Baltimore’s revolutionary era postmistress, who was fired for being a woman in 1790. Though she never got her job back, Goddard’s textual campaign—a petition signed by 250 men from Baltimore, a letter of support from George Washington, and her own newspaper writing on the matter—measure important changes in postal power in the early national period. Taken together, these stories help measure the particular nature of postal authority; the economic allegiances of the Post Office Department, as well as the social and literary effects of postal incorporation.
Thinking through the collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society was integral to this project. The collections helped refine and clarify my understanding of the nineteenth-century postal context. Just as powerful was the effect of drafting Postal Hackers from the same building that houses Phillis Wheatley’s writing desk and her unstamped, community-building letters. These materials testify to the limits of state postal systems—as well as the fortitude and creativity of Black letter writers who relied on their own networks for the exchange of letters.
Further Reading:
Bynum, Tara. Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. University of Illinois Press, 2023.
Bynum, Tara, Brigitte Fielder, Cassander L. Smith, eds. Special Issue “Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley’s Futures,” Early American Literature 57.3 (2022).
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Age of Phillis. Wesleyan University Press, 2022.
On July 141881, Sheriff Pat Garett shot notorious outlaw Billy the Kid. Those of us from the generation who watched the movie “Young Guns” know the story well and immediately begin hearing the twangy guitar chords from Jon Bon Jovi’s Blaze of Glory playing in our heads. Many are familiar with the story and legends surrounding Billy the Kid as well as the debate as to whether he was a ruthless killer or a folk hero who stood up to corruption the only way he knew how. To add another level to the depth of his character, one of the few existing photos of Billy the Kid, is well, not very outlaw-like at all; In fact, it is a photo of Henry McCarty, his sweetheart, and his friends, (‘the Regulators’), all playing a game of croquet. i
“Hold the tea sandwiches! Croquet?”
(Bon Jovi might have just dropped his guitar.)
Indeed, Croquet!
The rage sweeping the nation from 1860 to 1890 was croquet. It caught on like wildfire in the 1860s and anyone who could afford to buy the necessary equipment and possessed some form of a lawn, was found carrying a mallet whenever they could. Croquet was a game changer because it brought equality to outdoor games and sports. As well, women who had previously been resigned to parlor activities were able to play in open air with or against their male counterparts. ii
Frederick Tudor was known to have staked out the first croquet lawn in 1859 at Nahant, MA. Nahant went on to house many more croquet lawns. A post-war generation of young people were able to break away from their parents’ norms and embraced croquet as the latest fashion. Journalists and novelists alike helped spread its popularity, and the game appeared in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s My Wife and I (1871), both cases using the game to symbolize courtship and competing ideals. Outdoor exercise was a new way for men and women to interact and lead to further social recreation. By 1890 the zeal over croquet was replaced by tennis, bicycling and other lawn games, but croquet had thoroughly swept the nation. Winslow Homer beautifully documented the popularity of the game in his illustrations Harpers Magazine and in a series of oil paintings. The game spread with westward expansion and was played all the way from the East Coast to newly settled towns in California.
At the Massachusetts Historical Society, you can find photos, engravings and print material that feature croquet. Simply type the word “croquet” as a keyword search in our online catalog, Abigail, and explore the related titles. Below are a few examples.
Croquet Grounds, photograph by Heywood. Boston, Mass. : Frank Rowell, [187-] 2 photographic prints mounted on card : albumen, stereograph, black and white ; image 7.8 x 7.1 cm (each), mount 8.5 x 17.2 cm http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=221133[Trinity Park croquet players] [photograph] New Bedford : S.F. Adams, [18–] 2 photographic prints mounted on card : albumen, stereograph, black and white ; image 8.3 x 7.5 cm (each), mount 8.5 x 17.5 cm http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=219797Genl. Grant & his family [graphic] / painted from life by Wm. Cogswell, Washington, D.C. ; engraved by John Sartain, Phila. Philadelphia : Published by Bradley & Co., 66 Nth Fourtn St. ; Rochester, N.Y. : R.H. Curran, c1868. 1 print : engraving and mezzotint ; image 61.7 x 47.5 cm, on sheet 71 x 55.6 cm http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BBID=195801
This summer try your hand at croquet, a true American pastime since 1860!
For more on croquet and so much more please explore our online catalog, Abigail, our collection guides and our Digital Collections.
On 11 June, for the first time in four years, a team of 61 middle and high school students from across Massachusetts set out to the University of Maryland, College Park, for the 2023 NHD National Contest. There they joined a group of over 3,000 students representing all 50 United States, Washington, D.C., Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and international schools in China, Korea, and South Asia. Can you picture it? A sea of young people, on a college campus, excited about history and ready to take Nationals by storm!
Massachusetts students at NHD National Contest
Once at College Park, students spent the week presenting the documentaries, website, exhibits, performances, and papers they’ve worked on all year; traded state pins and stories with students from around the world; and shared in the incredible experience that is National History Day.
During their four-day stay in College Park, students experienced life on a college campus, staying in dorms and eating in the school dining halls with students from around the world. They viewed the exhibits and performances of other students and explained their own topics of research to new friends. They also participated in a variety of activities just for fun with their Massachusetts cohort, including a monument tour of D.C., a New England board game night, and an ice cream party. Finally, on the last day they participated in a massive parade and award ceremony in the UMD Stadium.
NHD parade in the UMD Stadium
We are incredibly proud to highlight the following achievements from our National History Day Massachusetts team:
Gold Medal and National Endowment for the Humanities Scholars
Special Prize: Outstanding Project in Discovery or Exploration in History
Sponsored by the Library of Congress, this prize is awarded in the junior and senior divisions for an outstanding project in any category on American or international discovery or exploration.
Winner(s): Ruthanna Kern School: Somerville High School, Somerville Teacher: Adda Santos Senior Individual Performance: “Broken: The Treaties of Fort Laramie and the Myth of the Frontier”
Outstanding Affiliate Awards: Massachusetts
Junior Division Winner(s): Cora Dutton, Nadia Hackbarth-Davis, Jiwan Ryu, and Elena Zaganjori School: Ottoson Middle School, Arlington Teacher: Jason Levy Junior Group Documentary: “Now I’ve Got The Pill: Oral Contraceptives and How They Changed The Lives of American Women”
Senior Division Winner(s): Jake Bassinger and Sofia Brown School: Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School, Wenham Teacher: Anne Page Senior Group Performance: “CURIE: a radioactive frontier in science”
We’d also like to extend a special shoutout to our Patricia Behring Teacher of the Year Nominees Gail Buckley of Willow Hill School in Sudbury and Barbara Sturtevant of Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington. Congratulations to them and to all of our student historians and the teachers, families, friends, and communities who supported them.
If you are interested in learning more about NHD or joining us as a teacher, student, or judge for National History Day in Massachusetts 2024, please visit our website at www.masshist.org/masshistoryday.
This is the fourth installment in a series. Click here to read Part I, Part II, and Part III.
In my last post about the Civil War journal of Howard J. Ford, I described his experiences in the Battle of Kinston, North Carolina, the first of three he would fight in quick succession during the Goldsboro Expedition of December 1862. Though his regiment, the 43rd Massachusetts Infantry, never engaged directly with the enemy at Kinston, I think you can tell from his journal that he was shaken.
He was also very tired. He and the other Union troops had already slogged through about 35 miles of difficult terrain, more than half the distance between New Bern and Goldsboro. The day after the battle, they ate a quick breakfast, shouldered their packs, and continued the march. Harold’s staccato sentences really convey the exhaustion.
The boys say that they had rather fight and run the risk of being killed than march. It is indeed severe. No one who has not tried it knows anything about it. Marching is not walking. O, how the load cuts in and draws down. Never mind. On, on. The roadside lined with the weak. Misery depicted on their faces.
When doing historical research, I always like to try to orient myself geographically. I found this very helpful manuscript map of the Goldsboro Expedition drawn by a member of the 27th Massachusetts Infantry and digitized by the UNC Special Collections Library.
Diary commencing Oct. 14 1861 – ending Sept. 20th, 1863 / Newton Wallace, VCC970.742 W19d, from the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill
The location of the Battle of Kinston is indicated by the star to the left of the middle fold. The Battle of Whitehall took place a little further west, close to Goldsboro, on 16 December 1862.
I’d like to quote at length from Howard’s powerful description of the Battle of Whitehall because I couldn’t possibly do it better. I love his use of sound in this passage to evoke the chaos.
We marched till about 9 o’clock when boom, boom went the cannon in front. We halted in the road. We could hear now volleys of musketry which sound something [like] a boy pulling a stick along a fence. Then there would be a cannon fire followed in 2 or 3 seconds by the explosion of a shell. Boom, bang. Boom, bang. Lively. Crack (rifle) 4 or 5 Booms at once. &c &c ad infinitum. The artillery firing was the heaviest I had yet heard. […] We advanced a few hundred rods and halted. What we were here for is more than I know. We were placed between the fires of the opposing artillerists. We all fell flat on our faces. We laid closer to the ground than ever before. We all crawled into the gutters as low as possible, – colonel and all. Here we laid for 2 hours I should think expecting every moment would be our last. […] A perfect torrent of shells screeched and whizzed by us within a few feet of our backs. Some of the rifled shells sound like this. Whir-r-r-bang. […] You can hardly imagine the sensation while spread out there. I can never describe it.
Once again, Howard illustrated the battle in his journal, including features of the landscape and the relative positions of the batteries. The letter “H” in this drawing indicates Harold’s location on the road right between the Union and Confederate firing lines.
Illustration of Battle of Goldsboro by Howard J. Ford
As I mentioned in a previous post, Howard was sending his journal home to Cambridge, Mass. in installments. I wonder what it must have been like for his parents, his siblings, and his wife Mary to receive these dispatches. I imagine them passing the pages around or reading them aloud to each other.
Join me in a few weeks for more on Howard J. Ford!
For this blog post, I thought I would return to my more science-y roots. I mentioned in a previous blog post that I was raised in a family with a lot of focus on science. One of the ways we did that was rocket launching. As a child, I used to launch all kinds of rockets. While explosives are not my preferred experimental matter, I do have very fond memories of building and launching these (air-pressurized and non-explosive) rockets hundreds of feet into the air. With July Fourth approaching, I thought it would be the perfect time to explore some MHS materials on fireworks and rockets while reminiscing about my own experiences. Our collections have quite a few fireworks-related material, but one of the most interesting is a how-to book called Artificial fireworks : improved to the modern practice, from the minutest to the highest branches which includes recipes and illustrations so that you too can make big, colorful 1776 fireworks.
I elected not to create any of these fireworks myself, not least because I don’t think I can just roll up and purchase a lot of these ingredients without ending up on a government watchlist. But it was a very interesting read nonetheless! The author was an officer in the British Army and his writing style reflects the terse, clipped language I associate with military efficiency. Brisk, but clear and easy to read once you get past the ſ, or long s, in place of our modern round s. I learned that if you add the right kind of minerals, you can make virtually any color in a variety of shapes and showers. Different materials alter the color of flames, a fun experiment if you have a fireplace and a penchant for risk-taking. To make white fireworks, use saltpeter, sulfur, meal powder (also called black powder), and camphor. To make blue, the ingredients are saltpeter, sulfur, and meal powder. To make red, add saltpeter, sulfur, antimony, and Greek pitch (aka rosin). And voila! Everything you need to make your own fireworks–except measurements. While some of the recipes do have measurements, they are not nearly as precise as I would expect explosive recipes to be.
Unclear measurements and temperatures are a chronic problem in old cookbooks and one that has been well documented in other Beehive blog posts, such as this one about bread pudding. So in many ways, this is just like so many recipe books in our collection, despite not being nearly as delicious. Do not worry, though—if you want to make a case, aka the rocket body to hold the fireworks, those come with detailed mechanical instructions and illustrations! I actually feel pretty good about my ability to put a case together, assuming I had the pieces and did not have to learn how to cut steel. I am confident that I could learn, but a girl needs some limits, even in her imagination.
Personally, I would recommend sticking to modern fireworks over making your own 18th century ones. Though if you do feel so inclined, feel free to head on down to the MHS and examine the book yourself! In the meantime, enjoy those Fourth of July fireworks and festivities knowing it’s a little safer than in 1776.
There’s something quite special about the month of June, is there not? The month invites us to officially welcome in the Summer season, get excited about vacations and beach days, and everything feels inevitably brighter! June also makes way for cultural and historical celebrations across the nation, namely, LGBTQIA+ Pride month and Juneteenth, both of which honor the voices, legacies, and stories of community members far and wide.
In the past few weeks, the MHS and our greater Massachusetts community have celebrated our National History Day students in a number of ways! While students from across the Commonwealth traveled to participate in the first in-person National competition since 2019, seventeen of our students said “yes!” to having their NHD projects featured in a virtual exhibit at the Massachusetts Historical Society to commemorate the history and legacy of Juneteenth.
Though it has long been celebrated among African American and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities, Juneteenth is a major part of American history that still remains largely unknown to the wider public. Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) celebrates the date in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to take control of the state, and enforce the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which legally freed all enslaved people, including those in Texas who had still been in bondage until union troops arrived. Since then, Juneteenth celebrations have annually created spaces for the storytelling of our country’s second independence day and recognized the ongoing fight for human rights and equality.
In 2020, Juneteenth was declared a state holiday in Massachusetts, and the following year was recognized as a federal holiday.
The Massachusetts Historical Society began an annual NHD Massachusetts Juneteenth exhibition in 2020 with three goals in mind:
to promote an understanding of and engagement with the Juneteenth holiday;
to highlight select NHD student projects whose work explores topics related to Black/ African American history, culture, achievement, and freedom;
and to spread awareness of these often marginalized historical narratives.
This year’s NHD projects approached history through the theme of “Frontiers in History: People, Places, Ideas.” Our virtual exhibit features students who researched leaders in history such as Dr. Anna Cooper, Marsha P. Johnson, and Katherine Johnson; and explored topics including the history of Hip-Hop, the Children’s March of 1963, and Black Wall Street.
When John Adams became president of the United States, he inherited George Washington’s cabinet, including Secretary of War James McHenry. Adams has been criticized for not replacing immediately the inept McHenry with someone competent and loyal. But shortly after Adams took the oath of office, McHenry sent the new commander-in-chief a brief letter and a huge bundle of papers.
James McHenry to John Adams, 13 April 1797
“Conceiving it proper that you should be informed of the arrangements, regulations and instructions, relative to the most important objects in the department of War, I have caused the same to be copied, and herewith respectfully submit them,” wrote McHenry.
On his own initiative, McHenry surveyed the holdings of his department, made judgments about what was most important, and despite the heavy workload he and his clerks faced, had copies made for John Adams.
To help the new president navigate over 150 pages of documents, McHenry included a 2-page table of contents, a handy overview listing the letters to former president George Washington; instructions and negotiations with Native Americans, including the Cherokees and the Creek Nation; information on fortifications; and regulations governing salutes. Because there was not yet a separate department for the navy, McHenry also included the status of the frigates that were being constructed at Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, as well as that of one for the Dey of Algiers.
Table of Contents created by James McHenry, 1797
Although we do not have a letter John Adams wrote thanking McHenry for his industriousness, or commenting on these documents, we do know he received them, for they are part of the Adams Papers archive at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In fact, because of a disastrous fire in the offices of the War Department in 1800, McHenry’s initiative gives historians a treasure trove of what would have otherwise been destroyed. Perhaps historians should be asking, not why didn’t John Adams replace James McHenry in 1797, but why would he?
The upcoming volumes of The Papers of John Adams are an exciting opportunity for a fresh look at the Adams Presidency.
This is the third installment in a series. Click here to read Part I and Part II.
Since my last I have seen experiences which are new and and [sic] startling. Only by the blessing of God have I got through unharmed. I think that all have seen marching and fighting enough to last them a lifetime. Our best boys begin to wish they were at home. Some of the best and most patriotic are discouraged and willing to end the war on any terms.
These are the words Pvt. Howard J. Ford wrote in his Civil War journal after seeing combat for the first time. What follows are several pages describing his experiences during what came to be known as the Goldsboro (or Goldsborough) Expedition, including the battles of Kinston, Whitehall, and Goldsboro Bridge, N.C.
In two previous Beehive posts, I wrote about Howard’s life prior to his service with the 43rd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, as well as his enlistment and training. But it was his descriptions of battle that really drew me to this collection in the first place. I’ve rarely seen personal accounts from this time that paint such a vivid picture of what war actually feels like.
Just three weeks after his arrival in the South (specifically New Bern, N.C.), Howard was already hearing rumors that his regiment would be deployed. He prayed most of all for “perfect calmness” in battle, writing on 7 December 1862, “I want to be ready with nothing to do but to attend to my business.” Sure enough, his readiness would soon be tested by three battles in quick succession.
On 11 December at 5:30am, the 43rd Mass. Infantry and other regiments set out from New Bern as part of Brig. Gen. John G. Foster’s big push to Goldsboro, N.C. Goldsboro played a vital role in the Confederate supply chain. It was a major junction on the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, which brought troops and supplies up from the port of Wilmington. Foster was on a mission to disrupt that supply chain by destroying the Goldsboro Bridge. Along the way was the town of Kinston.
The march from New Bern was grueling. Surrounded by “dismal & gloomy” pine woods, the troops had to ford streams, trudge through mud, and climb over large tree trunks that the Confederates had placed across the road to slow them down. Rations were low, and packs were heavy.
Early in the march, Howard saw signs of recent fighting, including dead and wounded Confederate soldiers and shell damage to trees. On the third day, he heard nearby shelling for the first time, and the danger suddenly felt very real. He wrote, “Of course we pricked up our ears somewhat. Some began to turn pale and fret. I tried to think it was nothing of consequence.” His regiment set up camp in an open field surrounded by trees, out of which, Harold feared, the enemy might fire at any minute. An army doctor demonstrated how to make a tourniquet with a handkerchief.
The Battle of Kinston was fought the next day, 14 December 1862. Although the 43rd Mass. Infantry was present, it was held in reserve, and Howard never engaged directly with the enemy. He wrote, “I suppose an old soldier would laugh at the dangers to which our regiment was exposed but for green troops it was something.” His descriptions of the battle are very detailed, cover more than six pages, and include maps and illustrations.
Illustration of Battle of Kinston by Howard J. FordIllustration of Battle of Kinston by Howard J. Ford
But when it comes to the chaos of war, words and pictures fall short, even Howard’s. He noted, “It is very difficult to give a distinct idea of this or any battle. The few things I have referred to were occurring with great rappidity [sic] and several at the same time in some cases. We forgot our danger in the excitement of the occasion.”
Just two days later, Howard would face more fighting, and this time he’d be in the thick of it. Stay tuned for the next installment.
