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Moses Davis, The Maine Cabinetmaker Who Built a Fort

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A wooden blockhouse that still stands by the Sheepscot River is the unlikely legacy of a cabinetmaker named Moses Davis who strongly disagreed with the purpose of the fort he helped build.

Davis was not just a cabinetmaker. He was a farmer, a lawmaker and a respected leader of the Town of Edgecomb, Maine. He also happened to own a piece of land that was perfect for a coastal fort.

Fort Edgecomb blockhouse

Fort Edgecomb blockhouse, 1936. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

He was a pious and hardworking 27-year-old when he and his wife Sarah moved from Newburyport, Mass., in 1770 to a settlement across from Wiscasset. After Edgecomb was incorporated in 1774, Moses Davis was selected to represent the town in the General Court. The state selected him to serve as a delegate to the Massachusetts conventions that led to the Articles of Confederation in 1781 and that ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1788 (he voted yes).

Moses Davis: Farmer

In between conventions, Moses Davis worked his farm, reared six children and made furniture. He was a town selectmen and justice of the peace who married 183 couples over his lifetime.

On Sept. 11, 1783, he wrote in his diary that he ‘workt in shop on Capt. Dunton chest.’ He also worked on making a ‘Great plow,’ finished a chest for John Place, built a ‘standing stool’ for Mrs. Decket and helped build a kitchen in Wiscasset.

Fast forward 25 years. Wiscasset grew to a busy port second only to Portland. Ships had carried timber from Wiscasset to Europe and the West Indies, while a fishing fleet and merchant vessels had sailed in and out of the harbor. But President Thomas Jefferson’s wildly unpopular Embargo of 1807 had strangled commerce along the Sheepscot River.

Five Moseses

War with Britain was looming on May 21, 1808. On that spring day, 65-year-old Moses Davis received two visitors, Maj. Moses Porter and Moses Carlton. Porter, an engineer, had served under Henry Knox and was charged with building batteries from Castine Harbor to the mouth of the Kennebec River. Carlton was a local ship owner and businessman hired to handle the project.

Porter wanted to buy land from Moses Davis to build a fort that would defend Wiscasset and enforce the hated embargo. Davis’ farm – on Davis Island – was right across from Wiscasset.

Fort Edgecomb

On June 13, 1808, Moses Davis formally deeded over three acres on Davis Island for $300.00 to the United States government. The next day, Moses Porter moved in with the Davis family and set out boundary stakes for the fort.

For the next six months, he supervised the work while Moses Davis helped build the fort along with still two other Moseses: his son, Moses Davis, Jr., and his hired hand, Moses Dodge. Ironically, Moses Davis was just then petitioning the General Court for help in redressing the Embargo Law.

The two younger Moseses and other workers did most of the heavy lifting: hauling planks for the gun platforms and rocks, brick, timber and sod for the battery.

Race to the Finish

Workers finished the fort in time to celebrate James Madison’s inauguration as president. On Feb. 23, 1809, Moses Dodge had a team of oxen haul cannons to the fort. It was said the only time the cannons at Fort Edgecomb were fired was in salute of James Madison – that is, the end of the embargo.

Thomas Jefferson actually lifted the embargo three days before leaving office. Moses Davis happily recorded in his diary that seven or eight vessels went downriver to European and other ports.

The octagonal, 34-foot-high blockhouse still stands. Fort Edgecomb is now a historic site with guided tours in the summer. It represents America’s best-preserved blockhouse of the period and has a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Fort Edgecomb (color) By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28677991.

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The Mayflower Love Children: Elinor, Jasper, Richard and Mary More

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For centuries, historians thought the four young More children who arrived on the Mayflower were homeless orphans. Not until 1959 did a document surface that revealed the truth. They were the Mayflower love children, landed gentry descended from King Edward III and banished by their cuckolded father.

What kind of person tears four little children from their mother and puts them in the hands of strangers? Then sends them on a difficult, dangerous 3,000-mile voyage, to a likely death in a forbidding wilderness? That person even had them indentured as servants – including little four-year-old Mary.

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The Mayflower

The short answer is an angry, bitter, self-righteous and well-connected Puritan. Samuel More, after banishing his children, would later cause the deaths of others in his charge.

The Mayflower Love Children

The story begins with Katherine More, the daughter of Jasper More, a Shropshire bailiff who built Larden Hall with his own hands.

Jane Small, Katherine More’s grandmother

Larden Hall sat on 1,000 acres of land, but Jasper More had no male heirs to inherit his property. His sons had died, and English law prohibited women from inheriting property. Jasper’s cousin, Richard More, was a respected parliamentarian who also owned an estate, Linley, in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. And Richard had an unmarried son.

So Jasper and Richard made an arrangement. Katherine, 25, would marry Richard’s 17-year-old son, Samuel. Richard also paid Jasper 600 pounds for Larden Hall. Thus the estates would remain in More family hands.

But Katharine already had a partner closer to her own age, a yeoman farmer at Larden Hall named Jacob Blakeway. They later claimed they had a betrothal agreement.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell

But on February 4, 1610 (O.S.), Katherine More married Samuel More. Over the next six years they had four children: Elinor, or Ellen, baptized on May 24, 1612; Jasper, baptized Aug. 8, 1613; Richard, baptized Nov. 13,1614; and Mary, baptized April 16, 1616.

Court Battles

Samuel spent a great deal of time in London as secretary to Lord Edward Zouche, a family friend. Zouche was a diplomat and an investor with the Virginia Company. While Samuel was away, Katherine and Jacob did play—or so Samuel concluded. By 1616, he decided the More children looked a lot more like Jacob Blakeway than they looked like him. He accused Katherine of adultery.

 

Lord Edward Zouche

Katherine didn’t deny the accusation. She said Jacob Blakeway was her husband. She then tried to get an annulment from Samuel. But unfortunately for Katherine, the witnesses to their betrothal contract had died. Had they survived and testified, the Blakeway family could have lived happily ever after.

Custody Fight

Samuel, with his father’s help, went to court to cut the four children out of his will. Then he hatched a plan to get rid of them.

First, he sent the children to live with a tenant on his estate, out of the reach of their mother. Katherine tried and tried to get them back. She discovered the tenants’ cottage where Samuel had stashed them and went there to see them. According to court documents, she then tried to take them away. “[I]n a hail of murderous oaths, [she] did teare the clothes from their backes,” the record stated. However, she failed.

Between December 1619 and July 8, 1620, Katherine and Samuel took their custody battle to court 12 times. Unfortunately for Katherine, the ultimate decision rested with the Privy Council – and Samuel’s friend and employer, Lord Zouche, served as a privy counselor. And so, unsurprisingly, the Privy Council denied Katherine’s final appeal on July 8, 1620.

Human Trafficking

When Katherine’s appeal failed, Samuel had a cousin take the four little children to London. From there they’d be delivered to the group of Puritans who intended to establish a colony in the New World. Not coincidentally, Zouche had invested £100 in the Virginia Company, which financed the Mayflower’s voyage to North America.

In London, the More children stayed with the disreputable Thomas Weston, a merchant who dealt with the Pilgrims. Someone described him as “eager to reap quick profits from the New World, and not very scrupulous about the means.”

Weston took the children to Philemon Powell, later convicted as a smuggler. Powell delivered them to the Pilgrims’ agents in London. They were then parceled out as indentured servants. Elinor, the oldest at eight, went to Edward Weston. Jasper, seven, belonged to John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth. Richard, six, and Mary, four, went to the household of William Brewster, the Pilgrims’ spiritual leader.

Pilgrims John Carver, William Bradford and Miles Standish at prayer during their voyage to North America. 1844 painting by Robert Walter Weir.

Unbeknownst to their mother, the Mayflower love children set sail on Sept. 16, 1620. To some, it seemed like a death sentence.

To Samuel, it seemed the right thing to do to what he called “a spurious brood.” He justified his cruelty by claiming “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them” at home.

Death Sentence

The voyage to the New World took a miserable nine-and-a-half weeks. The Mayflower, about 80 feet long, was grossly overcrowded with 102 passengers and 30 crew, along with pigs and chickens. The passengers subsisted on hardtack, salt pork, pickles, dried meat, oatmeal and beer—even the children.

On good days, the passengers could leave the cramped, fetid cabins below to get fresh air on deck. But October brought few good days, as North Atlantic storms tossed the little ship. Seasickness plagued the passengers, and the stench of vomit joined the stinking slop buckets below deck.

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Cabin of the Mayflower II.

The Mayflower anchored in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620. All the passengers had survived, except for William Butten, a servant who died three days before the Pilgrims sighted land.

But then others began to perish. It’s unclear exactly when the Mayflower love children began to succumb. Seven-year-old Jasper More probably died on Dec. 16 in Provincetown Harbor. Three others died during the weeks that the Mayflower lay anchored off Cape Cod.

Then in the terrible winter that followed, half the Mayflower voyagers perished. Scurvy had weakened many of them. That and other diseases carried them off, according to William Bradford.

Jasper’s older sister Elinor died in February. Mary, the youngest, died that winter as well, sometime before her fifth birthday.

Richard was the only one of the Mayflower love children to survive. He lived to a ripe old age, and his colorful life story is told in another post.

Why Those Two Girls?

Martyn Whittock, in Mayflower Lives, points out that 75 percent of the women, 36 percent of the boys and half the men died in Plymouth that winter. He notes that only two girls perished: Elinor and Mary, love children.

“That seems just too coincidental,” Whittock wrote. “One has a feeling that maybe, just maybe, one of the main reasons why Ellen and Mary More died was that they were not loved.”

Their mother in far-away England did love them. In 1622, Katherine More went to court again to find out what happened to her children. There she found out the terrible truth. Or at least part of it. She had no way of knowing that three of her children had died.

Of little Mary More, Whittock wrote,

[I]n the terrible upheavals and suffering that first disrupted, and then ended, the life of such a little girl we can see something of how a little innocent could get crushed between the turning iron wheels of legal and historical events; the determined actions of adults; and the cold ambitions of others.

Aftermath

In 1625, Samuel More married again. The next year, though, he had to get a royal pardon because, technically, he still had a living wife—Katherine.

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The keep at Hopton Castle.

After that, Katherine More and Jacob Blakeway disappear from the historical record.

Samuel More, however, reappears again causing the death of others. During the English Civil War, Samuel More held Hopton Castle for the Parliamentarians. A Royalist force 500 strong stormed the castle, held by only 30 men. The Royalists offered to let the garrison surrender, but More refused. The Royalists massacred the Parliamentarians—all except Samuel More.

Anthony Wagner

In 1959, Jasper More went looking in his attic for old documents. His friend, genealogist Anthony Wagner, had suggested the search. More was a descendent of Richard More, the only Mayflower love child to survive to adulthood. More found the document of the 1622 court proceedings that tells the tragic tale of the Mayflower love children. Historians had their answer.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Mayflower cabin By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57283684. Hopton Castle By Ostrich, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4360823. Mayflower plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation.  The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

cold-storm

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

cold-storm

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast.  People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month.  “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

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Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.


This story updated in 2022.

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Jackie and Rachel Robinson, A Love Story

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On Feb. 10, 1945, Jackie and Rachel Robinson got married in a big church wedding in Los Angeles. Two weeks later they boarded a plane to a hostile and unfamiliar place: the Jim Crow South. They were headed to Daytona Beach, where Jackie’s new baseball team, the Montreal Royals, held spring training.

When the plane stopped in Pensacola for a connecting flight, the airline bumped the newlyweds. Jackie and Rachel realized that white passengers had taken their seats. They then had to board an empty bus to Daytona Beach, 450 miles away. The driver made them sit in the back.

Rachel Robinson in 1997

Neither Jackie nor Rachel said anything. He’d made a promise. For two years, he would turn the other cheek.

Rachel wept.

Jackie played for the Royals throughout the 1946 season with Rachel at his side. She traveled with him on road trips, where they often couldn’t eat in restaurants with the team or stay in the same hotel. They were abused, isolated, insulted, threatened with death, alone. Alone, that is, except for each other.

How Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball has been told and retold, but there’s another side to the story – a love story.

Jackie and Rachel Robinson

Rachel Annetta Isum was born July 19, 1922 in South Los Angeles, to Charles and Zellee Issum. Charles, a disabled veteran, had worked as a bookbinder for the Los Angeles Times. Zellee had her own catering business. Rachel grew up in their strict Christian household, where she learned music, proper dress and good manners. From the age of 10 she worked for her mother. She also studied hard and took care of her father.

In the fall of 1940, Rachel entered UCLA, determined to finish a five-year nursing course.  One day Rachel was hanging out at Kerckhoff Hall, where the black students congregated between classes.  Then Jackie Robinson — football star, senior and big man on campus — walked in and created a stir.

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Jackie Robinson, UCLA track star

Jackie Robinson

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born just outside of Cairo, Ga., on Jan. 31, 1919, the youngest of Jerry and Mallie Robinson’s five children. Jerry, a sharecropper with little education, deserted the family before Jackie turned two. His mother took him and his siblings to live with family in Pasadena.

Jackie’s older brothers encouraged him in athletics. Mack had won a silver medal in the 1936 Summer Olympics, a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens in the 200 meter. Jackie took their advice and stood out in football, basketball, track and baseball at John Muir High School, then at Pasadena Junior College.

When his brother Frank died in a motorcycle accident, Jackie transferred to UCLA to be nearer Frank’s family. There he won varsity letters in four sports, starring on the football team.

White Shirts

That day at Kerckhoff Hall Rachel found him handsome, and she liked his smile and his quiet confidence. So she found out where he parked, and started parking her own car nearby and running into him.

Jackie began to notice the shy, pretty freshman. He kept talking about her to a friend. Finally the friend introduced them.

Jackie often wore a very white shirt to school, and Rachel wondered about it. Why would someone with such dark skin wear such white shirts?  “He wore his color with such dignity and pride and confidence that after a little while I didn’t even think about it,” she later said. “He was never, ever ashamed of his color.”

Rachel brought Jackie home to meet the family. Her father didn’t like anyone who’d take away his little girl. Her mother, though, welcomed the young man who went to church, didn’t drink or smoke and had no other girlfriend. Jackie’s family liked Rachel, too.

Jackie made their status official when he took Rachel to a homecoming dance at the Los Angeles Biltmore. Rachel recalled it as uncomfortable, partly because they were black, partly because they were unfamiliar with each other, partly because Jackie wasn’t a very good dancer. He took her home and pecked her on the cheek. She had hoped for a real kiss.

Engagement

She got more than a kiss from him that year – she got an engagement ring. But Rachel wanted to finish school and Jackie had uncertain job prospects. Professional athletics were closed to him, and he didn’t believe a college degree would help a black man’s career. So when a job opened as assistant athletic director with the National Youth Administration, he dropped out from UCLA in his last semester and took it.

He then played semipro football in Hawaii until he received a draft notice from the U.S Army. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he was sent to Fort Hood — named after a Confederate general. And there his military career derailed.

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Lt. Jackie Robinson getting a salute from his nephew on a visit home in 1943.

One day Jackie boarded a military bus and the driver ordered him to the back. Jackie refused. At the end of the bus trip the driver had Jackie arrested. He was court-martialed on charges that included public drunkenness. The military court acquitted him on all counts.

The Course of True Love….

Because of the court martial, Jackie saw no combat. It also looked like he’d see no Rachel. Every Friday, he’d sent chocolates to her in San Francisco, where she pusued her clinical studies.  But then somehow he thought she intended to join the Army, where other men would surround her. He told her not to. In response, she sent him back his engagement ring.

After his honorable discharge, Jackie went home to Pasadena. His mother told him to stop moping and call Rachel. He did. After their conversation he rushed to San Francisco with the ring.

Jackie still didn’t have much in the way of job prospects. He started playing baseball with the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League. That meant filthy hotels, grueling bus trips and no contract.

Branch Rickey

The historic, three-hour meeting between Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey took place on August 28, 1945 in Rickey’s office. Rickey had been scouting black players for the Dodgers. He saw in Jackie a college-educated military veteran, a churchgoer and an outstanding ballplayer. Someone who could break the color line.

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Branch Rickey

Jackie, for his part, thought Rickey wanted to sign him to a fictional all-black team called the Brooklyn Brown Bombers. Rickey had used the Brown Bombers as a pretense to find a black player for the Dodgers, someone like Jackie Robinson.

He stunned Jackie by asking him to sign a contract with the Dodgers, but under one condition. He’d have to passively accept the inevitable racist abuse for two years.

Jackie said, “Are you looking for a negro who is afraid to fight back?”

“I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back,” Rickey replied. “We can’t fight our way through this. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, virtually no newspapermen.”

Jackie agreed to Rickey’s conditions.

Then Rickey asked Jackie if he had a woman in his life. Jackie said he did. “Well, you’ll need her,” said Rickey.

Jackie went home to California where he and Rachel began to plan their wedding.

The New Rachel Robinson

After 18 days of marriage, Jackie went to work as an infielder for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers AAA farm team.

It was Jackie and Rachel Robinson against the world. Jackie couldn’t stay at the team hotels during spring training in the Deep South, or eat with the team in restaurants. So Rachel, the only wife with the team, traveled with him.  There was no one else for him. There was no one for her, either. They only had each other.

In Daytona Beach, they couldn’t stay at the team hotel so they stayed in the home of a black family. When the team went to play Jacksonville, they found the ballpark locked. During the second inning of a game in Sanford, Police Chief Roy G. Williams walked onto the field and threatened to arrest Jackie if he didn’t leave.

Jackie Robinson, then No. 30, playing fo the Royals.

Rachel came to all Jackie’s games. She watched pitchers throw at Jackie’s head, infielders spit in his face, opposing ballplayers taunt him from the dugout. She had to hear the death threats and read the hate mail.

“We moved to and from the ball park to home almost as one,” she told Sports Illustrated years later. ”We shared the work, the feelings, the stress and the irrationality of our seemingly defenseless position.”

Jackie thought of themselves as a team, so much so that when he talked about his play on the field he used the pronoun “we.”

Home as a Haven

They agreed to treat their home as a haven and to leave their anger and frustration at the door. Sometimes when Jackie left the ballpark angry, he went to the driving range and hit golf balls before coming home.

When spring training ended, they moved with the team to Montreal. The city turned out to be a blessed respite. When Rachel, then pregnant, went to look for apartments she expected rejection. Instead, landlords treated her like anyone else. Montreal’s baseball fans welcomed Jackie, who had a stellar season batting .349 with 66 RBIs and 40 stolen bases.

Late in the season, Dodgers executive Buzzie Bavasi watched a Royals’ game from a seat near Rachel Robinson. He told Branch Rickey, “If Jackie was smart enough to pick her as his wife, he’s the guy you want.”

The Dodgers

Seven days before the 1947 season began, the Dodgers called up Jackie. The team had a number of Southern players who threatened to strike, until manager Leo Durocher threatened to trade them.

Though Jackie played second base, the Dodgers put him at first base in 1947 because opposing players couldn’t spike him as easily there. During an early-season game, Phillies Manager Ben Chapman led the team in hurling racist epithets at Jackie from the dugout.

Jackie as a Dodger

Rachel Robinson attended every home game she could. “There was such an incredible amount of pressure, it might have driven two people apart,” she said. “But it had the opposite effect on us, it pushed us together.”

The abuse during the 1946 season started to take a toll. Jackie’s hair began to turn gray, his stomach troubled him and he couldn’t eat or sleep. Rachel understood. It “came from his not being able to fight back,” she said.

He overcame anxiety early in the season and played well, earning Rookie of the Year honors. The abuse began to draw the sympathy of his teammates. And he had the support of thousands of black fans in the stands.

Pee Wee Reese

Things started to change in 1948. Jackie wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had it Made, that something happened in Boston when the heckling seemed unbearable. Some of the players began taunting Pee Wee Reese, a Southerner playing with a black man.

“Pee Wee didn’t answer them. Without a glance in their direction, he left his position and walked over to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and began talking to me.… The jeering stopped, and a close and lasting friendship began between Reese and me.”

Sparkle

“[He] began to experience the presence of real teammates, fans and community support,” wrote Rachel for the New York Times decades later. They bought a home in Queens, made friends and shared in the growth of their children, Jack, Sharon and David.

“Our relationship had reached a satisfying level of interdependence that promised higher ground of maturity,” Rachel wrote. “Our larger world began to sparkle. Blacks were entering opening doors, and in 1955 our underdog team became the champs.”

Not everything came up roses for the Robinsons, though. Their oldest child, Jack, Jr., had emotional problems and needed special education. They tried to buy a house in suburban Connecticut, but properties suddenly came off the market when the Robinsons made an offer. And Jackie suffered from diabetes.

They didn’t have a storybook marriage. But, wrote Jackie, “each of us has stood at the center of the other’s existence.” They had honored and loved each other and they never broke their marriage contract. “We wouldn’t trade a day of it — not the sorrows or joys — for all the gold in the world.”

In 1956, Branch Rickey traded Jackie Robinson to the New York Giants. He had been a World Series champion and a six-time All-Star. He would win entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. But Jackie, at 38, decided to retire.

Connecticut

In 1955, Jackie and Rachel Robinson built a house in the white Connecticut suburb of Stamford. One white family moved away, but Martin Luther King, Jr., came to visit. So did many other civil rights leaders, as Jack had gotten deeply involved in the movement. The Robinsons hosted annual concerts to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Jackie also started the Freedom National Bank in Harlem and a construction company to build low-income housing.

Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

Rachel embarked on a new career as well – at first over Jackie’s objections. She got her master’s degree in psychiatric nursing at New York University, worked in mental institutions and taught at the Yale School of Nursing.

Her interest in psychiatric nursing probably stemmed from difficulties with their oldest child, Jack, Jr. Always suffering emotional problems, he dropped out of high school in his senior year. He enlisted in the Army, went to Vietnam and suffered shrapnel wounds in battle. Then he came home a drug addict.

Jackie blamed himself. “I was constantly going and coming home late in the evenings basically tired and feeling that my home and my family was basically secure,” he said in an interview. “And I think we probably neglected the needs of our own children.”

Jack, Jr., however, overcame his addiction and became a drug counselor. But at the age of 24 he died in a car accident on the Merritt Parkway, speeding on his way to his parents’ home. He had been planning a concert on their lawn to raise money for Daytop, the Seymour, Conn., rehabilitation center where he worked. David, the Robinsons’ youngest son, identified his brother’s body.

Rachel was attending a conference in Massachusetts. Jackie went to pick her up and take her home.

By then, diabetes had left Jackie nearly blind and with a heart condition. Sixteen months after his son’s death, he died of a heart attack, on Oct. 24, 1972. The Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke at his funeral service in Riverside Church before 2,500 people.

Rachel Robinson After Jackie

Rachel soldiered on afterward, guarding the legacy of her late husband. Soon after his death, she started the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which offers scholarships and mentoring to minority students.

Rachel Robinson receiving the Congressional Gold Medal for her husband from President Bush in 2005.

She has received many awards, including a dozen doctorates. She was there in 1997 when Major League Baseball announced the retirement of Jackie’s number 42 throughout the entire league. In 2005, Rachel attended the dedication of the sculpture of Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Jackie. In 2013, she came to the premier of the film 42 in Los Angeles, a biopic about Jackie’s life.

Brian Helgeland, the film’s writer and director, asked her what she thought of the film.

“I loved how much we kissed,” she said.

She now lives in Salem, Conn.

Image of Rachel Robinson By Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA – RACHELLE ROBINSON, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74749818. This story updated in 2023. 

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Six Stops From the People’s Guide to Greater Boston

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One of our favorite books is the People’s Guide to Greater Boston, a tour guide that goes beyond the usual listing of tourist attractions.

The authors — Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis — take readers to sites of “oppression, resistance, organization or transformation.” Stops include the homes of wealthy opium smugglers, slaveowners, mill owners and imperialists.

People’s Guide

Published by University of California Press People’s Guides series, it also presents themed tours, such as a One Percent Tour of Greater Boston, a Malcolm and Martin Tour and a Sacco and Vanzetti Tour.

derby-house

The Elias Hasket Derby House.

The One Percent Tour, for example, features the home of the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, the home of 18th-century millionaire Elias Hasket Derby in Salem and Elmwood, where British lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver lived in Cambridge.

To give you an idea of the places to which the book takes the reader, we bring you six stops from the People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

1. Noah Worcester House, Brighton

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Marker for Noah Worcester house between these triple-deckers. image courtesy @ 2021 Google

The U.S. Postal Department erected a small monument between 437 and 439 Washington St. in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. It looks like a headstone, but it marks the home of Noah Worcester, Brighton’s first postmaster.

Worcester was more than a postmaster, however. He worked as a writer, a minister and a pioneer in the American peace movement.

Born in Hollis, N.H., in 1758, he marched to Boston with his father’s militia company at 16. He narrowly escaped imprisonment during the Battle of Bunker Hill. He later fought in the Battle of Bennington. The carnage he saw on the battlefield helped persuade him to give peace a chance.

Worcester married, had children and entered the Unitarian ministry in New Hampshire. He published arguments defending the Unitarian creed, which brought him to the attention of prominent clergymen William Ellery Channing and John Lowell. They invited him to come to Boston to edit a new publication, The Christian Disciple. He accepted, and then he started the Massachusetts Peace Society.

In 1814, he wrote a treatise, A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, considered a classic of antiwar writing. He also received an appointment as Brighton’s postmaster, but his daughter Sally apparently did all the work.

Channing, in a tribute to him, wrote,

He was struck, as no other man within my acquaintance has been, with the monstrous incongruity between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of Christian communities; between Christ’s teaching of peace, mercy, forgiveness, and the wars which divide and desolate the church and the world.

437-439 Washington St., Brighton

2. Parmenter Street Chapel, North End, Boston

parmenter

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be here. Image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be across from the North End branch of the Boston Public Library. In its courtyard was a sand garden. Not just any sand garden (we’d call it a sand box) but the sand garden that launched a thousand playgrounds across the country.

It began with a doctor who saw children playing in sand gardens in Berlin’s public parks. She brought the idea back in 1885 to the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, a reformist group of upper-class women. Poor immigrants had flooded into Boston, and the ladies didn’t think the children had enough open space for play. They believed structured, supervised play in and around sand gardens would teach working-class, immigrant children morality and manners. It would also improve health and hygiene and turn the children into good U.S. citizens.

Neighborhood mothers supervised the children at first, but then MEHA hired “matrons” to take over. Within five years they supervised 21 sand gardens in Boston, augmenting the sandbox play by leading singing and dancing. Ten years after the first pile of sand was dumped on Parmenter Street, 39 cities had at least one playground.

The Parmenter Street Chapel is gone, replaced by a large brick building that houses a theater and apartments.

20 Parmenter Street, North End

3. United Fruit Co. Headquarters, Boston

United Fruit’s staff in Jamaica at a time when the company was promoting tourism.

You know it as Chiquita Brands International, now in North Carolina, but it started out on Long Wharf as the Boston Fruit Company in 1870. In 1899, the company merged with its rival, the Tropical Trading and Transport Company. They named themselves the United Fruit Company. From about 1900 to 1903, the multinational also known as ‘the Octopus’ had its headquarters at 60 State St. A plaque marks the site, now a skyscraper.

Within a decade of the merger, United Fruit grew into a banana empire, the largest agricultural enterprise in the world. At its height in the mid-1950s it had 100,000 employees, a fleet of merchant ships and 1,500 miles of railroad in Latin America. It also had few scruples.

skyscraper

60 State St., former home of United Fruit, according to the People’s Guide.

In 1954, United Fruit worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Arbenz had had the temerity to redistribute land to the people of Guatemala. United Fruit owned 70 percent of Guatemala’s private land in 1942, according to the People’s Guide. Arbenz’ overthrow led to three decades of military dictatorship and war in which U.S.-backed forces killed 200,000 Guatemalans.

Another legacy of the United Fruit Company: the many Afro-Caribbean immigrants who came to Boston on United Fruit ships.

The company then moved to 131 State Street in 1903, then to 1 Federal Street and finally to 80 Federal Street.

60 State Street, Boston

4. Walter E. Fernald State School, Waltham

fernald

The Fernald School, now closed.

Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward’s husband, founded the school in Boston in 1848 to care for people with developmental disabilities. Political correctness hadn’t entered the lexicon yet, so Howe called it the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children.

The school moved to Waltham in 1887 under the leadership of Walter E. Fernald, a proponent of eugenics. Later it took his name. The school began to conduct scientific experiments, and to take children who had no developmental disabilities. They just came from poor families.

In 1946, the school started The Science Club, run by scientists from MIT. They enticed boys to join the club with promises of trips to the beach, Red Sox games and gifts. The boys ate a special diet that included cereal with milk. They didn’t know, nor did their parents, that the scientists had laced their food with radioactive tracers.

Quaker Oats Co. sponsored the experiment on the boys – without their parents’ knowledge or permission. The National Institutes of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission also paid for the project.

In 1993, former Fernald students sued Quaker Oats and MIT. They settled out of court for $1.85 million in 1998.  The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported the studies were morally troubling though the doses involved were low and the children probably weren’t harmed. It also questioned the fairness of selecting institutionalized children.

The Fernald School closed in 2014.

200 Trapelo Rd., Waltham

5. Wamesit, Lowell

mcc

The former site of Wamesit, according to the People’s Guide

Middlesex Community College sits at the place where the Merrimack and Concord rivers meet. The land, once called Wamesit, belonged to a village of praying Indians from the Pennacook tribe. The Pennacook came to Wamesit to gather and to trade before English missionaries converted them to Christianity in the 1640s.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook leader, may have agreed to let missionaries establish the praying village as a way to curtail land grabs by the English. It didn’t work, of course. During King Philip’s War, neighbors murdered several of the Indians despite their peaceful and friendly attitudes toward the English. Wamesit disappeared after the war, its people either killed, captured or fled.

33 Walkway, Middlesex Community College, Lowell

6. Maypole Hill Park, Quincy

Maypole HIll. image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

A marker on Maypole Hill memorializes Thomas Morton, an English colonist who infuriated the Puritans who lived nearby at Plimoth Plantation. Morton, a lawyer, established a trading post and settlement he called Merrymount and invited his friends, including Native Americans, to party there. Morton had no problem with same sex relationships, which also angered the Puritans.

On May 1, 1627, Morton and his pals put up an 80-foot maypole, which the Puritans viewed as pagan. When he did it again a year later, they marched over, chopped it down and sent Morton back to England.

He returned, and they arrested him again, seized his property and deported him a second time to England.

Morton returned again 10 years later. The Puritans imprisoned him again, and he died in 1647.

A marker indicates where Morton’s Maypole once stood, and the seal of the City of Quincy marks the site of his trading post.

90 Samoset Ave., Quincy

End Notes to the People’s Guide


Images: Middlesex Community College, By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16292989; 60 State St. By Frankg – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2542027. Derby House By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002977.

This story last updated in 2023.

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John Adams Skipped the Inauguration of His Successor

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At 4 AM on a warm spring day, a stagecoach rumbled from the White House carrying the outgoing president of the United States. It was March 4, 1801, the day Thomas Jefferson would take the oath of office. But John Adams skipped the inauguration.  Twenty-eight years later, his son would do the same thing.

white-house

Drawing of the White House, 1793.

In 231 years, only one other president voluntarily skipped the inauguration of the man who took his place. Though the peaceful transfer of power has been a hallmark of American democracy, “peaceful” doesn’t necessarily mean “cheerful.” And neither of the famously irascible Adams presidents felt particularly upbeat on the day he left office.

No law requires a president to show up for his successor’s inauguration. But the Adamses, Andrew Johnson and, in 2021, Donald Trump chose to absent themselves from the festivities.

The 2021 departure of Donald Trump from the presidency mirrors in some ways the events surrounding John Quincy Adams’ leave-taking. A mob broke through security at the Capitol and damaged a venerable symbol of the United States of America. But in 1829, the rabble rousers wanted to celebrate, not to disrupt.

Who Else Skipped the Inauguration

Only one other president refused to attend the president-elect’s inauguration: Andrew Johnson. His successor, Ulysses S. Grant, wouldn’t ride in a carriage with him to the Capitol. So Johnson stayed in the White House, signing legislation and presumably sulking.

grant-inauguration

The inauguration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. His predecessor did not show up.

Richard Nixon didn’t attend Gerald Ford’s inauguration ceremony because he didn’t have one scheduled. Ford simply took the oath of office in the East Room of the White House after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation.

Eight presidents couldn’t attend their successors’ inauguration because they died: (If you’re counting, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.)

John Adams Skipped the Inauguration of Jefferson

John Adams’ spirits were low on March 4, 1801.

Just 13 weeks earlier, his alcoholic son, Charles, died of cirrhosis of the liver. Abigail had returned to Quincy already. And he still smarted from the nasty campaign waged against him by Jefferson, his former friend, ally and vice president.

abigail-adams-attacked-thoas-jefferson

John Adams

Jefferson had hired a sleazy journalist, James Callendar, to write a hit piece on Adams. Callendar called him a half-mad warmonger who wanted to crown himself king. He also described Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Despite all that, Abigail had insisted on inviting Jefferson to the White House for tea and cake several weeks before the inauguration. Jefferson apparently went, but the conversation is lost to history.

When Adams skipped the inauguration of Jefferson, it didn’t go over well with the Massachusetts Spy. “Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor,” reported the Spy. “It certainly would have had good effect.”

Jefferson’s Inauguration

Adams’ own inauguration had taken place in Philadelphia. During his presidency, he and Abigail had moved into the just-completed White House. Thomas Jefferson therefore became the first president inaugurated in Washington, D.C. More importantly, Jefferson’s inauguration marked the first time in U.S. history that one political party transferred power to another.

capitol

The U.S. Capitol around 1801, when Thomas Jefferson was first inaugurated as president.

Around noon, long after Adams’ departure, Jefferson walked to the Capitol accompanied by congressmen, marshals and military officers. He delivered a short speech in the U.S. Senate chamber and then took the oath of office from Chief Justice John Marshall, who he hated. The subject of his speech: reconciliation.

jefferson

President Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

He and Adams didn’t communicate for 12 years.

Three months after Jefferson took office, Abigail spied her husband in the fields, “swinging his sickle and muttering obscenities at his political opponents,” as Joseph Ellis put it in Founding Brothers.

JQA: Like Father, Like Son

John Quincy Adams skipped the inauguration of Andrew Jackson for much the same reason as his father skipped Jefferson’s. His own alcoholic son would die two months later.

john-quincy-adams-president

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

Andrew Jackson had waged a malicious campaign, accusing Adams of wearing silk panties. In response, Adams called Jackson a drunk adulterer married to a bigamist. That backfired when Rachel Jackson died a month before the election.

Jackson won and arrived in Washington on Feb. 11, 1829. He didn’t call on Adams, and Adams didn’t call on him.

But Jackson had invited the Adamses to stay in the White House as long as they needed, even up to a month. He then realized his rooms at Gadsby’s Tavern couldn’t accommodate the large crowds coming to his inauguration. So Adams sent a federal marshal with the message that he could move into the White House on inauguration day. He then put a notice in the newspaper asking his friends not to visit him that day.

gadsbys-tavern

Gadsby’s Tavern in Alexandria, Va.

Adams moved out of the White House the night before the inauguration. Then he and his wife, Louisa, moved into a private home on Meridian Hill. During Jackson’s inaugural festivities, John Quincy Adams went horseback riding.

White House Mobbed

Ten thousand people came to Washington to see their hero take the oath of office.  An estimated 21,000 people watched as Chief Justice John Marshall swore in Andrew Jackson on the East Portico of the Capitol. A ship’s cable held the crowd back from the steps.

jackson-inauguration

Andrew Jackson was the first president sworn in on the Capitol steps. John Quincy Adams skipped the inauguration.

After taking the oath of office, Jackson left by a basement door on the west side of the Capitol. He rode a white horse to the White House as his admirers surged forward on the Capitol steps, breaking the ship’s cable.

Jackson had insisted on opening the White House to the public for a simple reception. He had ice cream and punch laced with whiskey served, the latter probably a mistake. His people crawled through the White House windows to get in before Jackson even arrived.

The party got out of hand, and the revelers smashed china and damaged furniture. The staff took the punch out to serve on the front lawn. “The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant,” said Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Jackson sneaked out of the White House and returned to Gadsby’s Tavern.

With thanks also to John Adams by David McCullough and Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’ Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress by Joseph Wheelan.

Images: Gadsby’s Tavern By Dmadeo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4781573.

This story updated in 2022. 

 

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