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Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass

He rose from slavery in the South to international prominence as a writer, orator and anti-slavery activist. Frederick Douglass didn’t spend a day in school and only learned to read by a stroke of luck. That’s just one of the amazing facts about Frederick Douglass.

He was born in 1818 to a white father he never identified and to a black mother he barely knew.

Douglass escaped from slavery as a 20-year-old with the help of a free African-American, Anna Murray, whom he married as soon as he escaped.

After only a few years of freedom, abolitionists discovered the articulate young fugitive slave. But Frederick Douglass was far more than an abolitionist exhibit of a survivor of slavery. As an orator, he enraptured his audiences; as a polemicist, he caught the attention of presidents; and as a public intellectual, he influenced the debate about slavery, war, equality and opportunity.

Here then are seven fascinating facts about Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass

1. Why New Bedford

Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford in 1838 to get a job as a caulker, a trade he had learned as a slave in Baltimore.

When he escaped slavery and arrived in New York City, his rescuer, David Ruggles, advised him to go to New Bedford because he could get a job on the waterfront there. He could also fit into the large African-American community, which included both free blacks and fugitive slaves. He arrived penniless and with a new wife. Eventually he began to speak out against slavery at local abolitionist meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, heard him speak and decided to put him on the broader abolitionist circuit.

By the time Frederick Douglass left New Bedford, he was a rising star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, traveling as far as Michigan to speak against slavery.

He never did get a job as a caulker, though. White workers on the waterfront refused to work with him, so he had to earn a meager living doing common labor like hauling barrels of whale oil.

Nathan and Mary Johnson houses, where Frederick and Anna Douglass first stayed in New Bedford.

2. Columbian Orator

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln learned how to give speeches from the same book.

Published in 1797, the Columbian Orator sold 200,000 copies and went through 23 printings until 1860. The author, Caleb Bingham, was a radical egalitarian who believed the young United States needed educated citizens. He published the book to promote a dignified, classical style of speaking without any aristocratic pretensions.

Abraham Lincoln studied it as a young politician during a cold winter in Illinois. The Columbian Orator also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Frederick Douglass bought the book as a 13-year-old slave living and working in Fells Point, Baltimore.

His mistress taught him to read, which was unusual (and forbidden). The boy made friends with a gang of white boys in Baltimore, and they showed him their schoolbook, the Columbian Orator. The book captivated him, and he spent 50 cents to buy it with money he earned polishing boots. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he said.

The full name of the book: Columbian Orator, Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.

3. A Little-Known Fact About Frederick Douglass

One of the little-known facts about Frederick Douglass was that he took his name from a Scottish hero in a Sir Walter Scott poem.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he changed his name to Stanley, then Johnson, to evade capture when he fled Maryland.

But when he arrived in New Bedford, he and his wife Anna stayed with Nathan and Mary Johnson, black abolitionists. Nathan Johnson told him there were already too many Johnsons in New Bedford. He gave his houseguest the name ‘Douglass’ after the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake.

Frederick Douglass described what happened in one of his three autobiographies:

…unwilling to have another of his own name added to the community in this unauthorised way, after I spent a night and a day at his house, gave me my present name. He had been reading Lady of the Lake, and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous names.

In the poem, James Douglas feuded with King James V of Scotland, whom he had formerly mentored, and was himself a fugitive. He came from a line of aristocrats known as the black Douglases because of an ancestor’s dark complexion and ferocity on the battlefield.

Douglass later went on the abolitionist lecture circuit in Scotland, a country he loved. While there, he met a surviving relative of Sir Walter Scott.

4. Frederick Douglass Says No to John Brown

Three-and-a-half weeks before John Brown made his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass met with him in a stone quarry across the Virginia line in Pennsylvania. Brown, disguised as a fisherman, urged Douglass to join him in the attack.

Up until then Frederick Douglass encouraged and supported Brown, but he couldn’t go along with his plan to seize the federal armory. He tried to talk him out of the suicide mission.

After the attack failed disastrously, word got out that Douglass met with Brown just before the raid. The governor of Virginia ordered Frederick Douglass arrested, but he fled to Canada and then to Britain.

5. A Career Highlight With Abraham Lincoln

After the Civil War, Frederick Douglass criticized President Abraham Lincoln for his weak Reconstruction plan and failure to give black people the vote. Lincoln invited Douglass to visit him at the White House.

During their meeting – their second – the two men had a long and frank discussion while Connecticut Gov. William Buckingham waited at the door. Lincoln’s secretary interrupted Lincoln twice to tell him the governor waited for him, and Lincoln waved him off. He said, “I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass.”

Douglass often retold that story.

6. Jim Crow in Lynn

He moved to Lynn, Mass., in 1841, after his involvement in one of the most famous Jim Crow incidents in history. Still living in New Bedford, he had taken the train from Boston for a speaking engagement in Newburyport, Mass. He boarded the train in Lynn and sat with three white abolitionists.

Then the conductor grabbed him by the collar and demanded he move to the Jim Crow car. Douglass said he would if the conductor gave him a reason. Other passengers began to chant, “Give him a reason.”

The conductor finally replied, “Because you are black.” The passengers surrounded the conductor, but soon a half dozen company thugs arrived and began to beat Frederick Douglass. He clung to his seat, but they pulled it up by the bolts and threw him and the seat out of the railcar and onto the ground. They threw his luggage after him as well.

The outrage shown by the people of Lynn helped persuaded him to move to the city, which had a large abolitionist community. He and his growing family lived in a small frame house on Union Street.

His wife helped support them by working as a shoebinder, a common occupation then in Lynn. He wrote his first autobiography (he wrote three) in Lynn, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Anna Murray Douglass

7. White Women

His friendships with white abolitionist women provoked severe criticism. In 1847, he caused a scandal when he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson River to an abolitionist meeting. Newspapers discovered he slept in a stateroom next to Lydia or Lucretia Mott (it isn’t clear which). He finally had to explain that he had two choices: to sleep on the deck in the cold because black men couldn’t buy cabins, or to have Miss Mott book an adjoining room.

Later, he developed close relationships – possibly romantic – with British abolitionist Julia Griffiths and German radical Ottilie Assing. Both women spent time living in the Douglass household, inspiring speculation and rumor.

But it was his marriage to white abolitionist Helen Pitts that caused a real firestorm of criticism. A descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1859. In her 40s when they met, Douglass hired her as a clerk and married her two years after Anna died.

Fast and furious came the denunciations. “The Venerable Colored Orator Takes a White Wife” screamed one headline. A Washington, D.C., newspaper called it a ‘national calamity.’ Many in the black community called him a traitor to his race.

To the criticism, Frederick Douglass replied, “This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.”

One of the most surprising facts about Frederick Douglass is that he married a white woman. Here he is with his wife Helen Pitts (seated); her sister, Eva Pitts, is standing.

End Notes to Fact About Frederick Douglass

Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass owes much to Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Governor’s Son, a French Monster and the Murder of Schoolteacher Marietta Ball

On July 24, 1874, a Friday, schoolteacher Marietta Ball left her St. Albans, Vt., school at 3:30 in the afternoon. She planned to walk a wooded path to a friend’s house. She often spent the weekend and Sabbath with Foster Page before returning to Mrs. Abel’s boarding house for the week.

Illustration from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster.

So no one in St. Albans was alarmed when Marietta didn’t show up at her boarding house. And when she didn’t arrive at Foster Page’s house on Friday, he didn’t worry either. She often stayed in town and came later to attend Sunday services. But he made inquiries the next day and soon the people of St. Albans found out their school teacher had gone missing.

A search party set out to locate Marietta, and found her lifeless body in the woods along the path to Foster Page’s house. “Her head was mangled as if beaten with stones and the evidence of outrage to her person was unmistakable,” the newspaper reported.

Rewards and a Manhunt

Marrietta Ball from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

The murder of 20-year-old Miss Ball incensed the town of St. Albans. Immediately a $3,000 reward was offered to anyone who could identify the murderer.

Suspicion fell on a burglar from Boston who robbed a jewelry store in Richmond, Vt., but nothing connected him to the crime.

The town was also reeling from a second murder. Two strangers had accosted and stabbed Joseph Minard, a young man passing through from Holyoke, Mass., to his home in Canada.

Two detectives worked to find out the truth. But as the weeks passed, the case grew colder. The detectives’ bills mounted, approaching $300 by November, and still they hadn’t identified the murderer.

Two hundred days after Marietta Ball’s murder, a St. Albans minister led his congregation to the site where her body was found. And with the winter wind blowing he preached his sermon surrounded by trees draped in black crepe. He urged his congregation to look after their fellow citizens. By May, the reward had been upped to $6000.

A Governor’s Son

Soon gossip began pointing to one young man in town, George Gregory Smith. George Smith’s powerful father, J. Gregory Smith, had served as a senator and governor of the state. His family holdings included a rail car manufacturing factory and he was president of a railroad. He had the means to cover up a murder committed by his son.

J. Gregory Smith

Stories began circulating: George Smith had attended a dance at the hotel in Bakersfield, and he had insulted Marietta Ball there. People had seen him visiting at her boarding house. Someone had seen a coach and team of horses on the night of Marietta’s murder near the crime scene, and could identify it as George Smith’s. One of the detectives in the case had supposedly mentioned his certainty that George Gregory Smith was involved in the murder of Marietta Ball.

The rumors infuriated Smith. In July of 1875, almost exactly one year after the murder, he demanded a public hearing. Witness after witness was called. All had heard the stories about George Smith, but one by one witnesses refuted them. He had not insulted Marietta Ball at a dance (he hadn’t even attended). He had not visited her boarding house. And the person who reported seeing the coach and team of horses said she could not identify who it belonged to. Finally, the detectives in the case told the packed town hall hearing that they had never said they believed George Gregory Smith murdered Marietta Ball.

Another Murder and a Clever Detective

Josie Langmaid from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

With George Smith’s name cleared, at least for the time being, the detectives went back to work on their case. Still, the murder of Marietta Ball might have gone unsolved but for a gruesome discovery on Oct. 4, 1875. That morning, the body of Josie Langmaid was discovered in the woods of Pembroke, N.H.

Josie Longmaid, 17, lived in Pembroke and attended Pembroke Academy. She had left her home at about 8:30 a.m. and headed off on her regular path to school. But she never got there. Along the way, someone attacked her ferociously. When the townspeople found her, they were stunned. She was assaulted and beaten badly, her head cut off. And her face bore the marks of what doctors thought was a heel strike from a boot. The town erected a memorial to Josie that still stands today.

At first, the town suspected a neighbor of attacking Josie. Bill Drew was a layabout. A story circulated that Josie had told her teacher that Bill Drew had “grossly insulted” her. He threatened to kill her and cut her into pieces if she told her father. Bill Drew was arrested, for fear he would flee. But a sharp-eyed detective had a hunch. The attack on Josie Langmaid struck him as suspiciously similar to the attack on Marietta Ball. He began piecing together evidence.

Link to the Marietta Ball Murder

Sure enough, he found that a man linked to the Marietta Ball case named Joseph Lapage now lived in Suncook, N.H. Detectives had detained and questioned Lapage in the Ball murder. He had lived in St. Albans at the time, but they could make no case against him.

In Suncook, Lapage “was known as a sort of wandering crazy person, yet he knew many persons there and frequently chased young girls.”

Joseph Lapage from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

Police arrested Lapage and searched his home. The search turned up an ax and a razor. Doctors identified human blood on some of his belongings.

The French-speaking community in New Hampshire took issue with the arrest. No one witnessed the crime, and some suspected police targeted Lapage because of his French Canadian origins. Coverage of the crime was coarse and xenophobic, with the media branding him “The French Monster.” Some may have even tried to clumsily cover for him.

But over the course of a nine-day trial in a packed Concord, N.H. city hall, an ugly story spilled out. Lapage originally came from Joliette, Quebec. There he had a troubling history. He had departed Canada shortly after his sister-in-law accused him of raping her. He had attacked and raped a cousin in Vermont, and even tried to attack his daughter, but his wife intervened.

His behavior patterns in Pembroke eerily resembled those in St. Albans. He stalked girls, asking where they lived, how they traveled to school and whether they had boyfriends. He carefully observed their movements so he would know just when to strike.

The Trial

After some legal wrangling over how much of his history prosecutors could use against him, a jury convicted Lapage of murder.

One observer of the trial came all the say from St. Albans. He noted: “We wanted to lynch him and sure it would have been a lucky thing for this other unfortunate girl, Josie Langmaid, if we had only hung him up on a tree to feed the crows and buzzards.”

Joseph Lapage had no more victims after Josie Langmaid. The State of New Hampshire hanged him in 1878.

Thanks to: The Trial of Joseph Lapage, the French Monster. This story was updated in 2022.

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Frederick Tuckerman, the Man Who Would Be Emily Dickinson

If Frederick Tuckerman had been born a woman, you might think he was Emily Dickinson’s twin.

Frederick Tuckerman

Like Emily, Frederick Tuckerman came from a well-to-do, public-spirited, intellectual family. He became a recluse in western Massachusetts, as did Emily. Frederick attended college (Harvard) only briefly, as did she (Mount Holyoke), and he wrote poetry. Like Emily, he published only a few of his many poems during his lifetime.

Unlike Emily, he didn’t have an adulterous neighbor who published his poetry posthumously and made him famous.

Frederick Tuckerman

He was born Feb. 4, 1821 in Boston (Emily, Dec. 10, 1830) into the illustrious Tuckerman family. His brother Samuel Parkman Tuckerman composed sacred music for the Episcopal Church. His cousin Henry Theodore Tuckerman was a well-known critic and essayist.

Another brother, Edward Tuckerman, taught botany at Amherst College. He spent decades collecting lichens in the White Mountains, and Tuckerman Ravine is named for him. He and his wife also befriended the Dickinson family, and letters from Emily to Edward’s wife Sarah survive.

Frederick Tuckerman went to Harvard in 1841, but eye problems sent him home. He then returned to Harvard Law, graduated and gained entry to the Suffolk Bar. He found the law distasteful, though, and spent the rest of his time studying literature, botany and astronomy.

Bird’s-eye view of Greenfield, 1917

In 1847, then only in his mid-twenties, Frederick Tuckerman moved to Greenfield, Mass., just 20 miles north of Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst. He married the gentle Hannah Lucinda Jones that same year.

Frederick Tuckerman spent his days walking the countryside around Greenfield and nights gazing at stars through a telescope. He made herbariums and read English literature, which he loved.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Unlike Emily Dickinson, though, he traveled. In 1851 he went to England and met and befriended Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson invited him to come back and stay with him, which he did three years later.

Final Retreat

In 1857, Hannah died while giving birth to their third child. Frederick deeply mourned her loss and turned further inward. He wrote poem after poem to work out his guilt and his grief. One sonnet begins,

I leave the town; I climb the mountain-side, / Striving from stumps and stones to wring relief; / And in the senseless anger of my grief, / I rave and weep; I roar to the unmoved skies; / But the wild tempest carries away my cries!

Hawthorne

Three years after his wife died, Frederick Tuckerman self-published his one and only book of poetry, called Poems. He then sent copies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They replied politely. Only Hawthorne seemed to appreciate his work.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Emily Dickinson, too, had poems published during her lifetime, though probably without her authorization.)

Frederick Tuckerman spent the rest of his life in dignified privacy, dying at the age of 52 on May 9, 1873.

Emily died May 15, 1886 at age 56. Her late brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published her poems to wide acclaim.

Higginson, by the way, had attended Harvard with Frederick Tuckerman. As an old man, Higginson recalled Tuckerman, ‘as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but I did not then know him as a poet.’

Rediscovery

Poets Seat Tower

It would take decades for Frederick Tuckerman to win acclaim for his poetry.

In 1909, a wealthy poet named Louis How put together an anthology of American poems that included two sonnets by Tuckerman. Though the anthology never went to press, an article about it caught the attention of the poet and scholar Witter Bynner. He got in touch with Tuckerman’s grandchild, obtained a cache of his poems and published a new anthology of them in 1931. Another critic, N. Scott Momaday, brought out an edition of Tuckerman’s poetry in 1965.

Poets Seat Tower plaque

However, a different kind of homage to Frederick Tuckerman took shape in 1912. Then, a sandstone observation tower called Poets Seat Tower was built in Greenfield to commemorate the spot loved by poets, especially Tuckerman.

Tuckerman’s biographer Eugene England noted another similarity between Frederick Tuckerman and Emily Dickinson:

Allen Tate’s comment on Emily Dickinson can be adapted to Tuckerman. All pity for his starved life is misdirected; his life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.

Images: Plaque By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/miscellaneous/massachusetts/greenfield-ma/greenfieldpoetsseat-1.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7119511. This story was updated in 2022.

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River Gods of the Connecticut River Valley Create A World of Their Own

During the 150 years before the American Revolution, a series of aristocrats known as the River Gods ruled the Connecticut River Valley.

Their domain had its own economy and culture, which eventually resembled England more than settlements to the east or the west. The River Gods owned vast farms and shipyards, traded with the West Indies and fed the coastal cities with their produce and meat.

They supported a large class of artisans who fed their thirst for status by building large houses with elaborate doorways. The craftsmen filled the River Gods’ houses with fine furniture, paintings, textiles and ceramics. When they died, elaborate headstones marked their graves to show their prominence in life.

John Adams, on a visit to Middletown, Conn., in 1771, rhapsodized about Connecticut River Valley. “When I first opened into the Town which was upon the Top of a Hill, there opened before me the most beautiful Prospect of the River, and the intervals and Improvements on each Side of it,” he wrote. “…[A]nd on the right Hand is a fine level Tract of Land as rich as the Soil of Egypt.”

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas ColeView from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole

The River Gods

Many of the River Gods already had standing and wealth when they arrived in the Connecticut River Valley. William Pynchon, the first of the River Gods, came to Massachusetts in 1630 as a prominent member of John Winthrop’s party. He owned a plantation in Roxbury, Mass., originally ‘Rocksbury’ because of the stony soil.

Pynchon didn’t like farming among rocks, so in 1636 he moved west and founded Springfield on the boulder-free meadows on the Connecticut River banks.

He started a naming trend that described the grassy meadows that attracted more settlers: Enfield, Bloomfield, Longmeadow, Hatfield and Greenfield.

Pynchon probably heard about the River Valley’s fertile open lands from Edward Winslow of Plimoth Plantation. Indians had come to Plimoth and Boston in 1631 to hype the Connecticut River to the Puritans. The Indians wanted to trade with the English settlers, and they viewed the English as potential allies against the Pequots.

Edward Winslow

Intrigued, Edward Winslow visited in 1632 to check out the Indians’ claims, and wrote a report about the Valley.

Other families followed William Pynchon to the lower part of the Connecticut River. When the new settlers divided up land, they did it according to status and wealth. The wealthiest 10 percent along the Connecticut River got between 30 and 40 percent of the land. The poorest 50 percent got 10 to 20 percent of the land. (By today’s standards, that level of equality is remarkable).

Prosperity

Agriculture flourished in the red sandstone-based soil, unique to New England. The River Gods produced more than enough for themselves, so they sold the surplus to Boston at a high profit. They came to dominate local business and politics, ran the local militias and chose the ministers.

Pynchon, for example, owned a quarter of the land, a grist mill and the town’s store. He chose the town’s minister, traded furs and shipped surplus produce and livestock down the river. He and his son ran what became Hampshire County like a colony within a colony.

William Pynchon

In addition to the Pynchons, the River Gods who came to dominate the Massachusetts river towns in Hampshire County included Ashleys, Dwights, Partridges, Porters and Williamses. Some of the more prominent River Gods in Massachusetts:

Oliver Partridge, born in Hatfield (1712-1792). Military commander, congressman and patriot.
Timothy (1752-1817) and Theodore Dwight (1764-1846). Both born in Northampton. Timothy IV was a minister, author and president of Yale. Theodore was a journalist, editor of the Hartford Mirror and the New York Daily Advertiser.
Ephraim Williams, Jr., born in Newton (1715-1755). Later moved to Stockbridge. Soldier and benefactor of Williams College.

Springfield originally belonged to Connecticut, but Pynchon managed to move it to Massachusetts after a dispute with Connecticut’s leaders. In his absence, River Gods in Connecticut emerged as families of merchants and ministers that intermarried. They included Allyns, Chesters, Hamlins, Pitkins, Talcotts, Welleses and Wolcotts. A few of the best known Connecticut River Gods:

Oliver Wolcott (1726-1797), born in Windsor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, congressman, governor and general under George Washington.
Joseph Talcott (1669-1741), born in Hartford, governor of the Connecticut Colony.
Thomas Welles (1594-1660), born in England, moved to Wethersfield, governor, deputy governor, treasurer and secretary of the Connecticut Colony.

Peace

Wars between the French and Indians limited the settlement of Connecticut River towns in parts of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and even in Connecticut.

Between 1675 and 1678, for example, King Philip’s War wiped out Deerfield and Northfield in Massachusetts, and Suffield and Simsbury in Connecticut. After that, Indians frequently raided many of the surviving Massachusetts river towns.

It wasn’t until the French and Indian wars ended in 1763 that settlers established towns in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Once they did, the towns grew quickly.

The Industrial Revolution was underway, and waterpower became an important reason to settle. The River Gods prospered from the Caribbean trade and shipbuilding. In fact, Connecticut River shipyards built more than 4,000 vessels in the 19^th century.

The farmers began to specialize. Wethersfield, Conn., for example, specialized in onions. Hadley, Hatfield and Deerfield concentrated on livestock. The River Gods of Glastonbury, Hartford and Windsor grew tobacco. And Enfield, Suffield, Longmeadow and Northampton grew so much wheat they earned the designation of New England’s first wheat belt.

More Like England

Lady Williams and Child, by Ralph Earl, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By 1771, the road from Windsor, Conn., to Hartford was settled like one continuous street, noted John Adams. A traveler named Samuel Davis wrote in 1789 that the churches in Suffield had steeples, unlike the ones between the coast and the Connecticut River. He noted the larger houses – the ones belonging to the River Gods – had been painted.

After the American Revolution, travelers noted the valley resembled England more than any other part of the country.

But the River Gods created their own unique culture, filling their houses with clocks and paintings, richly hung beds, upholstered chairs, mirrors and silver. They hired artisans to produce elaborate doorways, vine-and-leaf carved chests (known as Hadley chests), decorated board chests, baroque-style iron door latches and portraits in the style of Ralph Earl.

The River Gods, though, didn’t take on an identity the way the Boston Brahmins did. Part of that had to do with the political division of the Connecticut River Valley. To the south, the boundary between Connecticut and Massachusetts divided the River Gods. To the north, the river itself divided New Hampshire and Vermont.

A Common Character?

Timothy Dwight, one of the Massachusetts River Gods

In 1806, Yale president Timothy Dwight visited the Connecticut River Valley on horseback. “The inhabitants of this valley … possess a common character, and in all the different states resemble each other more than their fellow citizens who live on the coast resemble them,” he wrote.

At the time, however, the local culture was on the wane, wrote William Hosley, Jr., in his introduction to The Great River, Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, published in 1985 to commemorate the 350^th anniversary of the settlement of the Connecticut River Valley.

“Regional culture may have been more apparent in its decline than while it flourished,” wrote Hosley.

Images: Dwight House By Historic-Deerfield – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17941799

With thanks to The Great River, Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, published by the Wadsworth Athenaeum. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Land Rush that Started the Hartford Riot of 1722

In 1721, the Connecticut General Assembly ordered Jeremiah Fitch to begin paying rent to John Clark for land he lived on near Coventry, Conn. Or to leave. Fitch, however, felt he didn’t need to pay rent because he already owned the land. And with that he set the stage for the Hartford riot of 1722.

The Ox-Bow by Thomas Cole

Give Me Land

By the 1720s, Connecticut was running out of open land desirable for farming. Hartford and New Haven had plenty of people, and the state experienced a population explosion.

For many decades, Connecticut didn’t have too many people, but too few. As that changed, land grew more valuable and settlers looked for areas away from the population centers to start farms.

The appeal of Eastern Connecticut near the Rhode Island border began growing. With good farm land, it had few settlers. But who owned it?

The state had claimed ownership, though it had trouble enforcing the claim. The Mohegan Indians claimed to own it. Though Indians had “sold” land to early colonizers, the tribe insisted the sale only represented their allegiance to the new English government. Though that placed the land under English jurisdiction, the actual right to live on the land stayed with the Mohegans. Unless, of course, they chose to sell it.

Map of Pioneer Hartford

This set up conflict between the proponents of state rights and native rights. Caught between these two sides were those people who bought property from the Mohegans, only to be told that they didn’t own it at all. In Canterbury, some lamented that to buy a piece of land settlers had to pay for it over and over again.

James Fitch

None of the ownership issues slowed land speculator James Fitch from aggressively selling and leasing farms in the area, based upon his claims that he had obtained the land by virtue of its sale by the Mohegan Tribe.

Into the early 1700s Fitch was held somewhat in check by the government, run by the powerful Winthrop family. But Fitch still amassed a fortune (and paid a fortune in legal bills) from land speculation.

By 1722, the area of eastern Connecticut was awash with disputed land that had multiple ownership claims. In 1721 the legislature had made its fateful order that Jeremiah Fitch’s claim to his land was invalid. (Jeremiah was a distant cousin of James Fitch.) It ruled he must vacate the property, declaring John Clark owned it by virtue of a government grant. Fitch refused to leave, and Sheriff James Whiting arrested and jailed him in Hartford.

The Hartford Riot

Seeing that Fitch’s future was their own if they didn’t act, his supporters from the towns east of Hartford crossed the Connecticut River and went to the Hartford jail. They declared their intentions, broke down the door and released Fitch (along with other prisoners).

All in all it was a remarkably civil riot. Sheriff John Whiting caught up with the rioters as they boarded a boat to cross the Connecticut and return home. As the ferryman was loading his boat with the rioters, Whiting struck one man, John Smith, with his cane. Smith cautioned the sheriff: “Colonel, don’t strike hard. If you do, I’ll turn on you.” With that, the ferry departed with the rioters.

For the next several months a state of lawlessness pervaded Eastern Connecticut as the sheriff attempted to bring justice and arrest the rioters. The Assembly had given sheriffs greater authority and made it a crime for more than three people to congregate without government approval. Yet the native rights mob ran the countryside.

Branded

The native rights protesters repeatedly ran off the sheriff and grand jury members who attempted to come into the towns east of Hartford. The dispute then culminated in an armed standoff in March of 1723 at the church in Coventry. A party of sheriff’s deputies faced off against Jeremiah Fitch’s son and others.

In May of 1723 the major players in the native rights movement had finally been rounded up for trial over their part in the riot and its aftermath. More than 10 men were eventually convicted. They received punishments that ranged from fines of 10 shillings and a stern lecture to being branded on the forehead with the letter “B.”

With that, the native rights protests largely ended and the government began to assert its ownership rights over the lands of Eastern Connecticut. Jeremiah Fitch, meanwhile, was convicted of no crimes related to the riot. He had not participated in the break-in at the jail as he was already locked inside it.

Thanks to Unrest in the “Land of Steady Habits”: The Hartford Riot of 1722, James M. Poteet and A Complete History of Connecticut by By Benjamin Trumbull. Illustration: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, Thomas Cole (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Map of Pioneer Hartford Goldie, J. & Goldie, R. (1927) Map of pioneer Hartford: founded , incorporated 1784, showing early landmarks and the locations of historical events. [S.l.: s.n] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007630431/.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Quick Facts About the Valentine in History

The Valentine has pleased and perturbed people since Charles, Duke of Orleans, sent one to his wife from the Tower of London in 1415. (He’d been captured at the Battle of Agincourt.)

European colonists brought Valentine’s Day with them to New England in the 1700s, and New Englanders have celebrated — and profited from — the holiday.

An Esther Howland Valentine

Here are six quick facts about Valentine’s Day, Valentine greetings and Valentine events:

Perhaps the most notorious Valentine ever was sent by John Wilkes Booth to Lucy Lambert Hale, the daughter of John Parker Hale, U.S. senator from New Hampshire. Lincoln’s assassin sent the Valentine to Lucy anonymously in 1862. “To see you has indeed afforded me a melancholy pleasure,” he wrote. They flirted, they courted and then they got engaged. According to some accounts, Lucy dined with Booth two hours before he killed President Lincoln. A picture of Lucy Lambert Hale was found on his body. Lucy left the country after the assassination and married a New Hampshire lawyer nine years later.
Worcester, Mass., once reigned as the Valentine Capital of the United States. Esther Howland, born in Worcester in 1828, went into the Valentine business in her home town after graduating from Mount Holyoke. It grew into the largest greeting card factory in the world, until World War II caused paper shortages that put an end to the business.
Lucy Lambert Hale

After the Civil War, the vinegar Valentine came into fashion. They were cheap cards that insulted the recipient. George Whitney, who carried on Esther Howland’s Valentine empire, refused to make them. Typical of a vinegar valentine was this:

You’ve got more curves than a roller-coaster
Your clothes fit like a glove
There’s one thing wrong – Glamorpuss
You’ve a face—
Only a mother could love!
A vinegar Valentine from the Civil War era

Conversation hearts are still made the way they were in 1901, when the New England Confectionary Co. began to print witty sayings on heart-shaped candies. People loved them. Only eight years after they were introduced, they appeared in the novel Anne of Green Gables as a pink sweetheart saying “You are sweet.” Starting in 1927, the conversation hearts were made in the world’s largest candy factory in Cambridge, Mass. Today a factory in Revere, Mass., churns 8 billion of them every year.
One of the most memorable storms in New England history barreled into the region just 15 months after the The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. The Valentine’s Day Storm of 1940 struck Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts without warning. It killed 31, paralyzed travel and stranded thousands for days. Two thousand people who came to see Sonja Henie perform at the Boston Gardenwere stuck in the city overnight. It took 17,000 men with shovels to dig Boston out.
Louis May Alcott found a way to enjoy Valentine’s Day in 1868. She was 35, unmarried, in poor health and trying to support herself while living in a small room in Boston. In three months she would start to write Little Women. On that Valentine’s Day, she wrote an essay about old maids like herself called Happy Women. She listed busy, useful, independent spinsters like herself, and commented, ‘liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.’

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