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elbridge gerry

The Book that Taught Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln How To Speak

In 1830 and 1831, a 12-year-old Maryland slave and a 22-year-old backwoods store clerk picked up the same book – the Columbian Orator. Published by a New England school teacher, it taught Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln how to become two of the greatest speakers of their century.

Both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln lived very different lives from Caleb Bingham, the Dartmouth-educated publisher of the Columbian Orator. However they shared his thirst for knowledge and adopted the ideals expressed in the book: liberty, freedom, anti-slavery, patriotism and religious faith. Those ideals got the book banned in the South during the 1850s.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln both learned a lot from this book.

The actor Ossie Davis, who recorded several of Douglass’s speeches, credits the Columbian Orator with more than teaching oratory.

“Frederick Douglass validated his manhood by giving Edward Covey, his surrogate slave master, a good whipping,” wrote Davis. “What inspired his fists was not only manly rage, but liberating knowledge–knowledge gained in part from his reading of the Columbian Orator. I read it now and the words still inspire and inflame.”

Caleb Bingham

Caleb Bingham was born in Salisbury, Conn. on April 15, 1757, a descendant of Roger Conant, the Puritan leader who founded Salem, Mass. Salisbury was a primitive town, with a log cabin for a church and no real school. The local minister tutored young Caleb Bingham.

“I well remember, when I was a boy, how ardently I longed for the opportunity of reading, but had no access to a library,” Bingham wrote in 1803.

Eleazar Wheelock

He attended Dartmouth College rather than Yale because he was related to its founder, Eleazar Wheelock. Bingham graduated as class valedictorian in 1782 and went to work as master of Moor’s Charity School for Native Americans, which Wheelock also ran. He moved to Boston in 1784 to start the town’s first school for girls, located on State Street. He and his wife had two daughters.

After Boston officials decided to reform its schools, Bingham ran a co-ed public school.

State Street, Boston 1800.

Moral Courage

He was a ‘modest and sometimes even timid man but there were at least, two occasions on which he showed that there was no lack of moral courage, when his course was clearly indicated by duty,” wrote his friend and biographer, William Fowle. In one case, he stood up at a town meeting at Faneuil Hall and demanded the town pay his salary.

In the second, he faced down a mob attacking a constable who arrested people who ran whorehouses and gambling dens. Caleb Bingham let the frightened constable into his house and then opened the door to the angry rioters. He said, “Fellow citizens, you are breaking the laws, and I command you in the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to disperse. I am a magistrate.” The mob vanished.

He stood six feet tall, with light blue eyes and hair in the style of George Washington. Until his death he dressed in the style of the revolutionary generation: cocked hat, black coat, knee breeches and shoes with silver buckles.

Publishing

Caleb Bingham published the first textbook of English grammar used in the Boston schools, the second in America. Bingham’s rival, Noah Webster, wrote the first. Bingham gave it the title, “The Young Lady’s Accidence, or a short and cozy Introduction to English Grammar; designed principally for the use of Young Learners, more especially those of the Fair Sex, though proper for either.”

Noah Webster

Webster’s spelling book sold more than Bingham’s, but Bingham’s readers outsold Webster’s.

Fowle described Bingham as cheerful and lively, traits reflected in Columbian Orator and The American Preceptor. The Orator remained in print until late in the 20^th century. It included essays, speeches, poems and dialogues that dealt with moral education and citizenship.

Bingham retired from teaching in 1796 and opened a one-room bookstore at 44 Cornhill Street.

Elbridge Gerry

Gov. Elbridge Gerry appointed him director o the state prison, and he ran for state senate a number of times. However, he affiliated with the Republican Party and never got elected, though his bookstore served as the headquarters for local Republicans.

He died on April 6, 1817 and was buried on Copp’s Hill in Boston’s North End.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

Like Caleb Bingham, both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had scant access to books in their youth.

Frederick Douglass learned about the Columbian Orator when he worked in a Baltimore shipyard, turning over his earnings to Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia had tried to teach him to read and write, but Hugh told her to stop. “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” Auld told his wife.

Frederick Douglass in 1848.

Douglass, then known as Frederick Bailey, wanted knowledge. Some white boys he knew on the Baltimore streets told him they were studying the Columbian Orator. Douglass saved up 50 cents from surreptitiously shining boots, and one day he walked into Mr. Knight’s bookstore and bought the book.

He then devoured its contents, calling it his “rich treasure.”

“Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he wrote in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. He especially liked a dialogue between a master and a slave and one of Richard Sheridan’s speeches on Catholic emancipation.

“These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest,” wrote Douglass. ”

They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.”

Backwoods Boy

Abraham Lincoln read it in the winter of his 22^nd year. He had little formal education, as his family lived far from schools and his father hired him out as a farmhand. He read what books he could.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Lincoln was working as a boatman and a general store clerk in New Salem, Ill., in 1831. But he had political ambitions and would run for the General Assembly the next year. Caleb Bingham, through the book, taught him how to speak. Not like a backwoods hick, but like a gentleman with ‘a proper attention to accent, emphasis and cadence.’

Lincoln lost that first bid for the General Assembly. Later, he would succeed, all the way to the presidency of the United States.

Both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, despite their lack of formal schooling, delivered some of the greatest speeches in American history. Douglass’s best speech is remembered as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and Lincoln’s as the Gettysburg Address.

With thanks to Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln by John Stauffer and Caleb Bingham by William Fowle in Educational Biography: Memoirs of Teachers, Educators, and Promoters and Benefactors of Education, Literature, and Science ed. By Henry Barnard.

Image of Columbian Orator By Bjoertvedt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73782814. This story was updated in 2022.

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How the Codfish Started the American Revolution

The American Revolution was to some extent a fight over the big, stupid, slow-moving codfish.

Codfish were by far colonial New England’s biggest export. The codfish was so important to New England that John Adams made sure the British allowed U.S. fishermen access to the Grand Banks and other banks off Newfoundland as part of the Treaty of Paris.

Adams believed the fledgling country needed a thriving fishery in order to have trained mariners who could serve in the navy. The U.S. Congress agreed with him, and in 1792 decided to pay fishermen a bounty for catching codfish.

The codfish had special importance to Massachusetts, where to this day the wooden Sacred Cod hangs above the chambers of the commonwealth’s House of Representatives.

The Sacred Codfish

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all the money New England made overseas. Livestock came in a poor second, at 20 percent.

When the American Revolution broke out, 10,000 New Englanders worked as fishermen, or eight percent of the adult male working population.

In Massachusetts, Marblehead and Gloucester ranked as the top fishing ports, with Salem, Beverly, Cape Cod, Ipswich and Plymouth heavily engaged in fishing.

The fisheries had a multiplier effect, generating income for people engaged in overseas trade, timbering, shipbuilding, ship rigging, sail making and other waterfront industries.

But powerful British plantation owners and fish merchants viewed the colonial fishing fleets as a threat to their own business. In 1733, they began to pressure Parliament to crack down on their colonial competitors. Their increasing success inhibited the New England economy and fomented much of the anger that led to revolution.

Dried Codfish

In the early 17^th century, New England fishermen didn’t venture far from home. They fished in small boats near the shore.

But later in the 1600s they began to fish offshore in two-masted schooners with crews of seven or eight men. The skipper recruited the crews, chose where to fish, navigated and counted the fish. Sharesmen handlined for cod and processed the catch. The cuttails – inexperienced boys and young men – cut bait, baited the hooks and processed the catch.

Fishing schooner L. A. Dunton at Mystic Seaport.

By the time they reached 30, most fishermen retired from the trade or died from drowning, fishing accidents or fever caught in the West Indies. It was a physically demanding job in a profane work environment.

Nor was it always pleasant, as the fishermen cut up and salted the fish on board ship.

But as historian Christopher Paul Magra pointed out, “the nature of work in the commercial cod fishing industry uniquely prepared fishermen and fish merchants to play leading roles in securing American independence.”

The French

In the 18^th century the market expanded for dried codfish, which contained 80 percent protein. New England fish merchants began to ship dried codfish to the Catholic countries of Europe, where the Pope was declaring more and more meatless feast days. Dried codfish also fed the burgeoning slave populations on West Indian sugar plantations.

By the middle of the 18^th century, New Englanders shipped most of their dried codfish to the West Indies and exchanged it for sugar, molasses and rum. They found the French island plantations sold sugar cheaper, and the French slave populations grew faster, than the British. Plus, the New England fish merchants had so much fish to sell they couldn’t unload it all on British customers.

Slaves planting sugar cane in Antigua.

So the New Englanders began to trade with the French. But the powerful British plantation owners did not appreciate the British colonists buying from their French competitors. So they persuaded Parliament in 1733 to pass the Molasses Act. It imposed duties on imported – that is, French – sugar, molasses and rum. Parliament reenacted the law every five years, but rarely made sure it was enforced.

Parliament

By 1764, the British planters convinced Parliament to pass the Sugar Act, which put a tariff on sugar and banned the import of non-British rum.

Parliament did something else to harm New England fishing interests: It banned trade with the French in North America. British fish merchants in the West Country did not like the colonists trading with fishermen in Newfoundland – they wanted to do it themselves.

Edmund Burke

This time, Parliament ordered the Royal Navy to enforce the Sugar Act. British ships from Halifax began to seize New England’s fishing vessels. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman, condemned the Sugar Act. He described it as corrupt heads of state creating a monopoly to generate revenue and to use the military to enforce that monopoly.

The Sugar Act

The Sugar Act meant most of the dried fish processed in New England could not be sold. New Englanders retaliated by boycotting British goods. At the same time, fishing vessels lay idle in Massachusetts harbors and fishermen looked for work.

As tensions mounted between Britain and the colonies, some members of Parliament proposed a moratorium on the New England fishing industry. On March 30, 1775 – less than two weeks before the shot heard round the world – Parliament passed a law that limited New England’s trade to Britain and the British West Indies. It also banned New England ships from the fisheries off Canada. Under the law, ships couldn’t even carry fishing tackle unless granted special permission.

Revolution

Unsurprisingly, New England’s cod fishermen played a disproportionate role in combating the British. Their role in the war led leaders like Adams to argue the fisheries served as nurseries for fighting men.

They helped lay siege to British forces at Boston, and they converted their fishing vessels into warships. The fishing fleets turned into privateers or became part of state navies, the Continental Navy or the coast guard.

Glover’s Regiment crossing the Delaware with Gen. Washington

Fish merchants like Marblehead’s Elbridge Gerry and Jeremiah Lee used their commercial contacts in Spain and the West Indies to buy military supplies for the patriots.

And a former fish merchant played a key role in one of the most famous actions of the American Revolution. John Glover and his men ferried George Washington and the Continental Army over the Delaware River on Christmas Eve, 1776.

With thanks to The New England Cod Fishing Industry and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution by Christopher Paul Magra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: L.A. Dunton By Ad Meskens – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20754268.

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The Faulkner Murals Come to Life in the National Archives

In 1933, a government building boom was on to lift the nation out of the Great Depression. The new National Archives building in Washington D.C. was to house the nation’s founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Today they’re known as the Faulkner Murals.

Barry Faulkner of Keene, N.H., had been selected to create two great murals that would become known as the Faulkner Murals. They would tell the story of the preparation of the two documents. But how to begin?

Barry Faulkner

Faulkner, born in 1881, owed much of his skill to working with Dublin, N.H., artist Abbott H. Thayer and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Later in life, Faulkner learned a trick that served him well when creating murals about historic figures: find a children’s book about the topic.

Children’s books were written in simple language, focusing on the grand strokes of a story, not the minute details. But at this stage in his career – he was only in his early 40s – he hadn’t discovered that shortcut. So Faulkner immersed himself into reading the history of the founding fathers, trying to focus on the most prominent to bring the stories to life. But he was hopelessly lost. Biographers all tended to exaggerate the traits of their chosen subject and it became nearly impossible to select the characters for his murals.

Who’s Who

Faulkner then consulted John Franklin Jameson, a Massachusetts scholar in charge of collecting manuscripts for the Library of Congress. Jameson had thoroughly studied of the formation of United States. He had particularly emphasized the struggle to control the governance of the new nation and who would profit most.

Jameson quickly helped clear away the mountain of information Faulkner had amassed, giving him thumbnail sketches of the most important players. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as senior statesmen were critical, as was Thomas Jefferson. But he also offered details on the founding fathers from each state. Who operated behind the scenes, and who was outspoken. Who used their positions as record keepers and report writers to direct discussion. And who shaped the great compromises necessary to reach a final consensus.

A section of the Faulkner murals depicting the creation of the Constitution.

Jameson also gave Faulkner one final piece of advice: Make sure he represented every colony. With this new framework, Faulkner set about gathering portraits of the men. Ideally, he wanted four portraits or busts to work from for each character. But some subjects fell far short.

For Josiah Bartlett, who hailed from Faulkner’s own home state, he had only one pencil drawing from which to work. For others, he had only a woodcut. They were “so crude I’m sure the mothers of the men would not have recognized them,” he said.

Moody Founding Fathers

In depicting the crafting of the Declaration of Independence, Faulkner painted Jefferson handing over the finished document. He depicted the other founding fathers to show their likely mood. The more hotheaded seem ready for a fight and the calmer, compromise-minded men posed less enthusiastically.

For the mural about the Constitution, Faulkner became more literal. He depicts Massachusetts’ delegate Nathaniel Gorham with an ungainly sheaf of papers under his arm – probably the makings of his reports that helped create the final document. Elbridge Gerry, meanwhile, is shown in the background.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut brandishes a walking stick, highlighting his demeanor. Faulkner also chose to add a little foreshadowing. The clouds in the Declaration hide a profile of Abraham Lincoln, a nod to the problem of slavery and the Civil War. In his Constitution, Alexander Hamilton carries a sword, a hint of the coming War of 1812.

Faulkner went out of his way to costume the characters appropriately. John Hancock’s attire reflected his great wealth. Southerners with Cavalier origins had fancy dress, but northern Puritans dressed more simply.

The Faulkner murals in the Rotunda of the National Archives.

The Finished Faulkner Murals

Years of work finally reached their conclusion in 1936 when Faulkner took the two murals from his studio and brought them (each 14 feet by 37.5 feet) to the Archives. Inside the rotunda, workers were plastering two large framed locations on the wall in preparation for the installation.

Faulkner recalled the day: “Washington sweltered in the humidity of early October and even the interior of the Archives, whose marble walls are massive as a Roman tomb, was oppressive…they unrolled the pictures on the floor and compared them with the dimensions of the wall spaces. To my horror and dismay each picture lacked a foot and a half in length. “

But the artist’s assistant quickly calmed him, and he simply extended the background to cover the gap.

You can see Faulkner’s work across the country in other murals, including the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. He also created murals at the RCA building at Rockefeller Center in New York City, the Hancock Building in Boston and the Senate chamber in the New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord.

Thanks to: The Faulkner Murals: Depicting the Creation of a Nation, which includes detailed research on Faulkner’s processes and the obstacles encountered in creating the murals.

This story about the Faulkner murals was updated in 2022. Image of National Archives By Kelvin Kay – Photo taken by Kelvin Kay. w:en:Image:NationalArchives2.jpg, which is modified from w:en:Image:Archives.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1346058.

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The 1730 and 1774 Marblehead Riots Against Smallpox Inoculation

In 1730, the fishing village of Marblehead, Mass., did everything it could to ward off the dread and loathsome smallpox disease then raging in Boston – everything, that is, except smallpox inoculation.

Marblehead a century or so after the riots

Marblehead a century or so after the smallpox inoculation riots

Instead, they rioted against the practice. And then they did it again 43 years later.

A prominent Salem minister named Edward Holyoke was indirectly responsible for the first riot by proselytizing for smallpox inoculation. Decades later, his son, Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke, began the successful inoculation of hundreds of patients in nearby Salem. But not before the Marbleheaders had another riot.

The Speckled Monster

Smallpox was the most feared disease in the American colonies. ‘The Speckled Monster’ killed as many as 30 percent of its victims, and often blinded and scarred survivors.

Cotton Mather

Boston’s smallpox epidemic of 1721 created the worst public health crisis of the 18^th century. It caused three-fourths of all deaths in the town that year.

Rev. Cotton Mather believed smallpox inoculation was the way to prevent the disease. He practiced it, and he argued passionately for it. A physician, William Douglass, argued just as passionately against it. Douglass and most of the public believed inoculation would make the disease spread faster.

Inoculation involved deliberately infecting a person with smallpox in his bloodstream. That way he or she could suffer a mild form of the disease, which would stimulate the immune system to avoid infection later.

Edward Holyoke served as president of Harvard College and pastor of the Second Church of Marblehead. He submitted to inoculation in 1721 and survived.

Fearful Ravages

Edward Holyoke

In May of 1730, word reached Marblehead that smallpox raged in Boston. The news agitated the townspeople almost to the point of frenzy. Citizens voted to build a fence with a locked gate across the road into town, and four men were stationed there with orders to restrain all strangers from Boston. The watch stayed on 24 hours a day for two months. African-Americans, Indians and slaves had a nine o’clock curfew.

In October, a young Marblehead woman named Hannah Waters came down with smallpox.

Edward Holyoke advocated for smallpox inoculation, as did his influential parishioners: Richard Dana, Justice of the Peace Stephen Minot, merchant John Tasker and trader Joseph Blaney.

Smallpox Inoculation

The townspeople were skeptical. They believed God, not man, should decide who lived and died. They also knew there wasn’t enough money to inoculate everyone, only the wealthiest citizens. At Town Meeting on Oct. 12, 1720, they voted to ban the practice unless everyone in town received a smallpox inoculation.

Rumors spread that some people – like Stephen Minot – planned to openly defy the ban. Emotions ran high. A mob formed, and 50 armed men threatened to tear down the homes of Dana and Minot.

“A great mob raised in this town,” wrote Holyoke in his diary on December 10^th.

The rioters had public sympathy on their side, and town officials charged only a handful with rioting.

But the disease spread from house to house, afflicting nearly every family in town. Businesses closed, the ferry to Salem stopped running and people fled Marblehead. All loose dogs were killed.

“The disease continued its fearful ravages till late in the summer of 1731, and gathered its victims with an unsparing hand,” wrote Samuel Roads in 1881. “Rich and poor, old and young, the learned and the unlettered were alike afflicted by this impartial agent of death.”

History Repeats Itself

Years later, Edward Holyoke’s son, Edward Augustus Holyoke, became a physician and an advocate of smallpox inoculation. He, too, went to Boston for inoculation and took careful notes on the procedure.

In June 1773, a smallpox epidemic again struck Marblehead. Two months later the town debated building a public inoculation hospital on one of the islands in the harbor.

The proposal failed, but the town did permit four prominent citizens to build a private hospital on Cat Island. They were John Glover, his brother Jonathan Glover, Azor Orne and Elbridge Gerry. They bought Cat Island on Sept. 2, 1773 and began building the hospital. Doctors inoculated three groups of patients during the last three months of the year. Most survived, but a few died.

Cat Island today (now called Childrens Island)

The furious townspeople began rioting for several days. They blackened their faces, burned a small boat that brought supplies to the hospital and broke the windows of the proprietors’ homes.

In January, four Marbleheaders were caught stealing contaminated clothing from Cat Island, presumably to spread the epidemic and discredit the hospital.

The next day they were tarred and feathered, placed in a cart and exhibited through all the main streets of Marblehead. Then they were taken to Salem, followed by a procession of men and boys marching to the music of five drums and a fife.

Twenty-two cases of smallpox broke out, and the inflamed Marbleheaders threatened to lynch the hospital proprietors. John Glover, whose regiment later ferried George Washington across the Delaware, supposedly placed two small artillery pieces in the front rooms of his house.

The Riot Against Smallpox Inoculation

Edward Augustus Holyoke, a believer in smallpox inoculation.

The owners agreed to close the hospital. But on Jan. 25, 1774, about 20 heavily disguised Marbleheaders sneaked onto the island and burned it down. Town officials arrested two suspects February 25 on a fishing vessel in Marblehead Harbor, and taken to Salem jail.

“Jail Broke open,” noted Edward Augustus Holyoke’s wife in her diary.

A large number of Marbleheaders marched to Salem and surrounded the jail. At the signal they broke open the doors, overpowered the jailers, freed the prisoners and carried them home in triumph. Several days later the sheriff gathered 500 citizens to march to Marblehead and recapture his prisoners. The Marblheaders organized a mob equally as large. At that point, the hospital owners decided to abandon the prosecution and the sheriff disbanded his posse.

A few years later, Edward Augustus Holyoke took charge of the a smallpox hospital in Salem. Six hundred patients received the smallpox inoculation, and the disease never took hold in the town.

With thanks to The History and Traditions of Marblehead by Samuel Roads. This story about smallpox inoculation was updated in 2022.

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How the Longfellow Bridge Got its Name

Elbridge Gerry was the first person allowed to walk over the new West Boston Bridge connecting Boston and Cambridge 220 years ago today. A private company had built the toll bridge for $76,700. Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a wealthy merchant and Cambridge resident. His name is the source of the word ‘gerrymandering.’ The bridge, which replaced a ferry service, was described as ‘a magnificent structure.’ ‘For length, elegance and grandeur not exceeded by any in the United States, if in any part of the world,’ reported the Independent Chronicle. Its opening created a building boom along Main Street in Cambridge. Two rows of lamps lit the bridge for its mile-and-a-quarter length, presenting sweeping nighttime views. Years later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow frequently crossed the West Boston Bridge to court Fanny Appleton, the daughter of industrialist Nathan Appleton. She rejected him for seven years, then finally gave in and married him. Longfellow published a poem called ‘The Bridge’ in 1845, which made the West Boston Bridge famous. It has been interpreted as describing his misery at Fanny’s rejection of him contrasted with his later happiness. The bridge was replaced in 1906 with – you guessed it – The Longfellow Bridge.

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