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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

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Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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The Tempestuous Life of Tobias Lear, George Washington’s In-Law

Col. Tobias Lear V, known as Toby to his friends, left his mark on the early history of the United States as an in-law and the personal secretary to George Washington. He also authored the only firsthand account of the death of the nation’s first president.

His journal is his legacy, but his story is one of determination, failure, upheaval, poor judgment and eventual self-destruction.

Young Tobias Lear

Tobias Lear

Tobias Lear was born on Sept. 19, 1762, to the respectable Portsmouth, N.H., couple of Capt. Tobias Lear IV and Mary Stillson Lear. As a young man, Toby attended the Dummer Charity School and then Harvard College.

Capt. Lear was a prosperous Portsmouth farmer and sea-trader until 1776, when the British Navy confiscated his ship, the Polly. Capt. Lear had paid for the Polly’s cargo, a consignment of New England goods and lumber bound for Antigua. The total loss of the Polly nearly bankrupted the Lears.

But despite their financial hardship, the captain and his wife made paying for Toby’s Harvard College tuition a priority. He graduated in 1779.

Tragic Figure

Historian P. Bradley Nutting, emeritus at Framingham State College, considered Tobias Lear a tragic figure. Wrote Nutting:

He had the natural inclinations of a diplomat, preferring negotiation to confrontation. While ambitious, Lear was also compassionate, deeply affected by human suffering.

Tobias Lear also liked being seen as a person of importance. For example, he used his title of colonel, one that he received when President John Adams appointed Washington as commander in chief of the army in preparation for war with France. Lear never saw combat nor did the nation go to war with France, yet Lear used the title the rest of his life.

Lear’s historic relationship with George Washington began when he came to Mount Vernon in 1785. The general, four years after the Revolutionary War ended, needed a new secretary. As an active citizen on the young nation’s stage, the future first president was flooded with correspondence and requests.

So Washington reached out to his friend Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln for help. Lincoln, who became the namesake of Lear’s son, recommended his 23-year-old friend Tobias Lear. Washington wrote in a letter to Gen. Lincoln:

I have at last found a Mr. Lear, who supports the character of a gentleman and a [Harvard] scholar. He was educated at Cambridge, Mass. He has been to Europe and in different parts of this continent. It is said he is a good master of languages. He reads French and writes exceedingly good letters.

Mount Vernon

Lear’s primary duties were letter writing, but he also helped Washington manage the day-to-day operations of Mount Vernon. According to author Stephen Decatur, in the Private Affairs of George Washington,

Besides handling all the financial details, supervising the instruction of the [Washington] children, and managing the household, he was in charge of correspondence, penning most of the personal and confidential letters that the President did not write himself, issuing invitations for the weekly dinners, and superintending the necessarily voluminous files.

In addition to Lear’s time at Mount Vernon as an employee, his second and third marriages brought him into the Washington family.

Tobias Lear’s first wife was his childhood sweetheart Mary “Polly” Long. They married in 1790. Together they had a son named Benjamin Lincoln Lear.

Washington Marriages

Polly went to work for the Washingtons when the family moved to Philadelphia. Sadly, she died in the 1793 yellow-fever epidemic.

Lear then married Frances Bassett Washington, a widow of George Washington’s nephew George Augustine Washington. She died in 1796 of tuberculosis.

His third marriage was to Francis Dandridge Henley, or Fanny, Martha Washington’s niece.

Lear’s second and third marriages transformed him from a key employee to a beloved member of the family. This new connection gave Lear nearly unlimited access to the Washingtons and the Mansion House Farm.

George Washington entertaining French generals at Mount Vernon.

The Death of Washington

When Lear was at Mount Vernon he was able to record in his journal Washington’s last words and his death on Dec. 14, 1799:

“Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” I bowed assent; for I could not speak. He then looked at me again and said, “Do you understand me? I replied yes! “Tis well” said he.

About ten minutes before he expired (which was between ten & eleven o’clk). he breathing became easier; he lay quietly; he withdrew his hand from mine, and felt his own pulse. I saw his countenance change, – I spoke to Dr. Craik, who sat by the fire; he came to the bedside. The general’s hand fell from his wrist I took it in mine and put it into my bosom. Dr. Craik put his hands over his Eyes and he expired without a struggle or a sigh!

Lear’s Mysterious End

Lear’s life ended quite differently from Washington’s. He died neither in his bed nor surrounded by friends and family. Lear committed suicide.

Tobias Lear and his wife spent his last evening with their friends, Cmdre. and Mrs. Rogers, in the Federal City. The Rogers’ daughter later wrote:

My father and mother had been making a late visit to the Lears [sic] one evening, and, as they were bidding goodbye, Mr. Lear said, “I will walk with you, Commodore, a little way.” He accompanied them, slowly strolling and talking; at last they were home, he stopped and said, “Goodbye, Mrs. Rogers! Goodbye, Commodore!” Pressing my father’s hand warmly.

The next day after breakfast, on a warmer-than-normal morning, Tobias Lear walked into the garden of his home with a loaded pistol and shot himself in the head. He did not leave a note or will. Sometime later his body was discovered by his adult son Benjamin. The Rogers’ daughter added to her description of Lear’s death:

The very next morning my parents were sent for. Something terrible had happened at Mr. Lear’s. He had killed himself soon after leaving my father. My mother always fancied that he wished to say something to my father, which her presence prevented; and they both remembered his farewell to them had been more tender and lingering than usual, [sic] However he died and left no sign. There was not a conjecture even of the cause of his death. He seemed well and vigorous, quiet and self-contained, but not unhappy.

(Ms. Rogers seems to have been confused about the timing of Lear’s death. The Washington City Gazette wrote that Tobias Lear killed himself the following morning in his garden, not after he left her parents that evening.)

Why?

Today, more than 200 years after his tragic end, we do not know what led Tobias Lear to take his own life. But a series of questionable decisions at least offers context.

In an effort to make his own mark after Polly died in 1793, Lear tried to breathe financial life into his company. T. Lear & Co. invested in land and sold staples like flour even as the national economy was collapsing.

During Lear’s financial troubles, he continued to assist with rent collection on Washington’s properties. Yet, in a moment of desperation, Tobias Lear stole Washington’s rent money from an Alexandria property. On discovery of the theft, Washington was livid:

You will perceive buy [sic] the enclosed manner that I am disappointed in receiving the rent for my house in Alexandria. These things put you, the payer and myself in an awkward situation; for it must seem strange what has been paid. I must therefore, request, in explicit terms, that you will receive no more moneys due to me; and I should be glad to have a statement of the A/c [accounts] as it stands between us, since the last was rendered. … I have not the slightest doubt of my being credited for every farthing you receive on my A/c; but that does not remedy the evil. … [It] would be uncandid and inconsistent with the frankness of friendship, no to declare that I have not approved, no cannot approve, of having my money received and applied to uses not my own, without my consent.

Another Scandal

Luckily for Tobias Lear, Washington forgave him, which spoke to the friendship and love that Washington had toward him. Nevertheless, one wonders how this event might have lingered in Lear’s memory.

Another scandal might have contributed to his eventual self-destruction. It was associated with his mentors George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Washington and Jefferson regularly corresponded about a variety of subjects, including the appropriate balance of federal and state power.

Washington, who held the Continental Army together under the weak Articles of Confederation, saw the need for unified states under a federal umbrella. Jefferson, on the other hand, wanted a government resting on strong state and limited federal power.

Historians hypothesize that Jefferson rebuked Washington for his overly monarchical presidency, and Washington more than likely defended himself, but we do not know for certain. For some reason their letters after the summer of 1796 have not been found.

The Missing Letters

One clue about where the letters went came from Tobias Lear:

A few days since Colo Humphreys called upon me, and informed me that in a public company, dining at Mr Ames’ at Dedham, on Saturday, the Revd Mr. Krikland of Boston said he had been informed that I had suppressed certain papers belonging to the late Genl Washington, and [were] in my charge for some time after his decease, particularly some of the Genls’ Diaries, for the period when Mr Jefferson was Secy of State, and that those papers were essential to the History of the Generals’ Life now preparing for the press.

Firestorm

Historian Ray Brighton believes Tobias Lear destroyed multiple letters in order to protect Washington’s and Jefferson’s reputations. A letter from Lear to Alexander Hamilton supports this hypothesis. He wrote, “There are, as you well know, among the sev[eral] letters and papers many which every public and private consideration should withhold from further inspection.”

When Washington’s papers were found to be missing, Lear was accused of theft. The scandal—an early American version of a relentless social media attack—seemed endless. Massachusetts state Sen. Timothy Pickering, a fanatic Federalist and secretary of state to both Washington and Adams, wanted to destroy Tobias Lear,

…as part of the bitter rearguard action the Federalists were fighting against the march of Jeffersonism; that he was still persisting as late as 1829….”

In order to protect and help Lear, President Jefferson appointed him to be the US envoy to Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti. Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison also appointed him to be the nation’s peace envoy to North Africa during the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s.

No Pinnacle

Tobias Lear should have reached the pinnacle of his diplomatic career after negotiating and signing the Tripoli peace treaty with the country’s ruler, Bashaw Yousef Caramanli. The treaty ended the Barbary War—but again Lear set himself up for scandal.

Lear agreed to a secret protocol left out of the final June 4, 1805, draft giving Yousef four years to comply. Nutting notes:

Writing to Madison on July 5, Lear made no mention of the gentleman’s agreement, only commenting ambiguously that it was a “condition that time be allowed for the delivery of the family [American hostages].” … Regardless of Lear’s motives, which he never explained, this clandestine understanding when combined with the agreement to lay ransom [for the American prisoners] would ultimately demolish his reputation in the United States.

Man Without A Party

When the provision was discovered, the Federalists branded him a turncoat and the Democratic Republican Party disowned him. Tobias Lear was then a scandalous—and partyless—man with little chance for a lucrative political appointment or high-profile diplomatic post.

The Tobias Lear house in Portsmouth, N.H.

As a result, he could only get a job with the War Department as an accountant, a position beneath his experience and talents. Lear’s awareness that his professional career would never be what it once was must have contributed to his death.

In the end, historians have a handful of unanswered questions that, if known, would tell us why Tobias Lear committed suicide.

Why did Lear think that stealing from Washington was prudent, and why did he destroy Washington’s and Jefferson’s letters? Why did Lear keep a key part of his North African treaty a secret? And how did he feel about his menial job?

Taken individually, these are difficult issues and powerful experiences for anyone to live with. Throughout his life, Tobias Lear tried to muster his talents to make his name in finance and public service, despite his failures. He tried to build a fortune, maintain a respectable reputation and grasp fame, though he never succeeded.

Conceivably, these might have been factors in his death, but historians can only speculate. Nevertheless, on that September morning in 1816, Tobias Lear gave in and in a time of emotional and mental confinement chose not to embrace the new day.

End Notes

The author of this story about Tobias Lear, Cameron L. Kline is an educator, lecturer, and communications professional living in Philadelphia, PA. In partnership with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, he was the first scholar to annotate the complete Tobias Lear Journal.

Note: The material about the death of Washington is from The Tobias Lear Journal, housed in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It was first fully annotated by the author of this essay. The 70-pages detail the death of Washington, the president’s final wishes, perpetrations and funeral, entombment, plan to reanimate his corpse, the possible publishing of his papers, love for his family, his appointment and voyage to be Council to St. Domingo.

Thanks also to “Colonel Tobias Lear and the Tripolitan Hostage Crisis,” by Bradley P. Nutting in the New England Journal of History and “Private Affairs of George Washington,” by Stephen J. Decatur.

Image of Tobias Lear House: By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15203288.

This story last updated in 2022.

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A Vermont Moose Visits Paris in 1787

In 1784, a Vermont moose went to Paris to settle an argument between a French natural historian and Thomas Jefferson.

The historian, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count Buffon, attacked the character of the new American nation. He believed in the theory of degeneration, and he boosted it in Histoire Naturelle, a 44-volume exploration of the natural world.

Scientific Racism

Degeneration held that all natural elements began in one location (presumably Europe), where they existed in their purest form. As people, plants and animals spread out to other parts of the world, they degenerated into inferior versions of their species.

The theory, of course, provides one of many examples of scientific racism throughout history.

It held that Europeans were superior to their counterparts in other parts of the world. As humans moved farther from their European roots, living conditions and traditions, they degenerated. The same held true for animals.

Inset: Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale in 1800.

Leclerc’s theory played well with the European aristocracy since it described Americans, with democratic ideals, as inferior beings. And he didn’t stop there. He castigated American Indians as physically weak people with small genitals and a limited drive to procreate.

Jefferson Pushes Back

Thomas Jefferson, American minister to France and himself an avid student of natural history, confronted LeClerc over his theories.

Indians, Jefferson noted, were as fertile as any people when afforded healthy surroundings.

LeClerc also held the lack of facial hair on many Indians was a sign of inferiority. Jefferson retorted that it was actually a product of Indian grooming traditions, which held that hair was unmanly. They plucked it. LeClerc agreed to correct his research in future editions.

Next Jefferson tried to challenge LeClerc on his assertions that European deer were much larger than their American counterparts. He told LeClerc of deer and elk with large antlers, to say nothing of the moose. Jefferson claimed the American moose were so tall a a European reindeer could walk underneath one without touching the moose’s stomach.

To prove his point, Jefferson shipped from his home an enormous set of deer antlers. And LeClerc said he would stand corrected if Jefferson could prove his point about the moose.

The Vermont Moose

To defend the moose’s honor, Jefferson badgered New Hampshire Gov. John Sullivan, as he knew moose abounded in Northern New England. He asked Sullivan to procure the bones and hide of a moose and ship them to France.

In 1786, Jefferson continued pressing Sullivan on the matter. In a letter he wrote:

“The readiness with which you undertook to endeavor to get for me the skin, the skeleton, and the horns of the Moose, the Caribou, . . . and the Elk, emboldens me to renew my application to you for those objects, which would be an acquisition here, more precious than you can imagine.

“Whatever expense you incur in procuring or sending these things, I will immediately repay either here or in Boston as you please.”

After years of Jefferson’s pestering, Sullivan finally rounded up a team of hunters who went moose chasing. They got their specimen, most likely in the town of Brookfield, Vt. The dead moose then began a long journey to France, via Durham and Portsmouth, N.H., where it was packed, along with an assortment of other animal specimens, and shipped to France.

An Expensive Trip

Sullivan didn’t show his dismay with the request, but he did note the trouble to get the moose. When submitting his bill to Jefferson, he said, “from motives of friendship for you I only Charge for the expenses I have paid in Cash without any thing for my own Trouble which has been very considerable.”

All in all, shipping the moose cost over 46 pounds. The bill included:

Paid to Capt. Robert Colburn for the Skeleton of a moose and Transporting to Durham.
moose horns and expence of procuring them.
a pair of Elks horns & expence of procuring.
a pair of Deers horns & expence of procuring.
pair of Caribous Horns & expense of procuring.
expense of cleansing the Skeleton from flesh and salting and tending the same to prevent putrefaction.
Expense of Dressing the Skins to preserve it with the hair on, free from worms & with expense of Alum brick Dust & Tobacco.
a Tanner for fleshing the Skins.
Expense of a Box and putting up the skeleton.
expense of sending the Box to Portsmouth.
horns of the Spike horned Buck.
Expense of 3 times sending to Effingham Connecticut River and the province of Main, to procure the skeleton
Truckage and Storage paid at Durham and Portsmouth

Though the moose skin and skeleton arrived somewhat worse for wear, they did persuade LeClerc he was incorrect in his assessment of the size of American moose. He promised to correct the error in a future edition of his work. He died, however, before he could publish.

Thanks to Jefferson, Buffon and the Moose by Keith Stewart Thomson in American Scientist; Antlers for Jefferson, New England Quarterly. This story about the Vermont moose that went to Paris was updated in 2022.

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How Mount Mitten Got Its Name

New Hampshire’s White Mountains carry many household names. But tucked among the familiar sounding Jefferson Notch and Mount Dartmouth is the oddly named Mount Mitten. You might think it’s so named because it’s shaped like a mitten. But you’d be wrong.

Mount Mitten’s name is intertwined with the very earliest history of American colonists’ exploration and development of the White Mountains. It was named by two pioneers, Timothy Nash and Benjamin Sawyer.

In the White Mountains, New Hampshire, by William Louis Sonntag

The Sawyer and Nash names appear on many geographic features in Northern New Hampshire, Sawyer’s Rock, Nash Stream, Sawyer Pond, and the settlement they established, Nash & Sawyer Location.

But Mount Mitten got its name because Nash, hunting in the area, lost a mitten there. And why was that mitten so significant? Because in losing it he became a very wealthy man.

Nash was hunting in the mountains in 1771, tracking a moose, when he got disoriented. To get his bearings he climbed high up in a tree. In the process, he lost his mitten. But up in that tree he also caught sight of Crawford Notch, the passage that would allow for easier access to northern lands in Coos County.

The notch was known to settlers, since Indians had spoken of it. But no one could find it until Nash.

Mount Mitten

The young pioneer traveled to Portsmouth for a meeting with royal Governor John Wentworth. The governor was skeptical, but he made a deal with Nash. If the young man could get a horse through the forest from Lancaster, N.H. Wentworth would give him a large parcel of land at the top of the notch.

Nash and his friend Benjamin Sawyer accepted the challenge. They obtained a horse in Lancaster and brought him to the governor, but not without some difficulty. At some points the horse had to be loaded into a sling and lowered over boulders as the pair made their way through Crawford Notch.

Nevertheless, the governor kept his deal and gave Nash his land. But he included a provision that he construct a road through the north and bring families to live in the area. Nash did just that. And because of his good fortune he gave Mount Mitten, the 3058-foot peak in the Dartmouth Range, its name.

Thanks to The History of the White Mountains by Lucy Crawford, Henry Wheelock Ripley. This story updated in 2022.

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Jacataqua, the Indian Sachem Who Bore Aaron Burr’s Love Child

Jacataqua, the story goes, fell in love with Aaron Burr when she first laid eyes on him in 1775. She was the young Franco-American sachem of a small Abenaki tribe on Swan Island in the Kennebec River. Not only was she beautiful, but she possessed unusual intelligence, self-reliance and winsomeness.

Aaron Burr, 19, had volunteered for duty during Benedict Arnold’s disastrous march through the Maine wilderness and failed capture of Quebec. As Arnold’s forces made their way up the Kennebec River, they halted at Fort Western, where most of the citizens sided with the patriots. They held a lively feast, and Burr met, and fell, for Jacataqua. Or at least he got her pregnant, and she followed Arnold’s men to Quebec.

An Abenaki couple

To what extent the story of Jacataqua is true and to what extent is myth will probably never be known.

A feast did take place at Fort Western during Arnold’s expedition to Quebec. And Aaron Burr, described as one of history’s ‘great wench lovers,’ sired several illegitimate children he never acknowledged.

So falling in love with an Indian sachem wouldn’t be out of character for the man who served as Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and then raised an army of mercenaries to conquer Mexico.

Jacataqua

Before everything went terribly wrong on the expedition, Arnold’s expedition held an al fresco banquet at Fort Western. The revelers enjoyed barbecued bear, green corn and rum. According to one version of the Jacataqua story, a young Continental Army officer had captured her at Swan Island. Burr then paid her captor for her release.

According to another version of the story, Burr and Jacataqua shot the bears for the barbecue and brought a cub back to the fort on a leash.

A third version has Burr and his party stopping by a Kennebec Indian party. Burr’s men carried plenty of rum, and they partied with the Indians. There, Jacataqua was instantly attracted to young Burr.

The March

Aaron Burr

However they met, the stories agree that Burr got Jacataqua pregnant. They also agree she followed Burr to Quebec, where her knowledge of the woods and hunting skill endeared her to the soldiers. When the soldiers no longer had food, they began to shoot their dogs. But Burr’s regiment liked Jacataqua so much they spared her pooch.

Before the Americans began their ill-fated siege on Quebec, the story goes, Burr roamed the woods near camp. He saw a brook and realized he was thirsty, so he kneeled down and started to drink water from a brook. Coincidentally, across the brook stood an enemy British officer. The two men saluted each other and the British officer loaned Burr his cup.

Burr and the officer met up a few times before the Siege of Quebec, and the British officer pledged to take care of Jacataqua and her child if the Americans lost at Quebec.

The British easily defeated the Americans, and the British officer placed Jacataqua in a convent to have her child.

Chestnutiana

One version of the story has Jacataqua giving birth to a baby girl named Chestnutiana. Her name came from Jacataqua’s toast to Burr at the Fort Western feast: “A Burr full of chestnuts.”

The soldier took the baby with him to Scotland, adopted her and gave her a good education. She married a well-to-do man named Webb, who squandered his fortune.

Burr took Jacataqua back to New York, where she lived in a cabin on Long Island for several years. He married Theodosia Bartow Prevost, a widow with five children. After she died he married Eliza Jumel, a rich widow who divorced him.

The story of Jacataqua picks up again at the close of Aaron Burr’s life. He suffered a stroke, which left him paralyzed, and lived out his days in a Staten Island boardinghouse. Chestnutiana Webb, who had emigrated to New York, appeared and took care of him until he died.

Jacataqua inspired a character in Kenneth Roberts’ novel Arundel, and the essay Jacataqua by William Carlos Williams.

This story was updated in 2023.

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When Calling Someone a New Englander Was an Insult

In November 1852, newspapers in Pennsylvania gave over 650 words to assailing the flaws of the New Englander. In a wide-ranging screed they attacked the region as full of dis-unionists, atheists and abolitionists.

New England, they wrote, “Began its career by burning and hanging Baptists and Quakers, anyone who differed from its Puritanical notions of Religion.”

1860 political cartoon deriding the New Englander, Dividing the National Map (From the Library of Congress).

And it goes downhill from there. The tirade then recounted Massachusetts’ expulsion of Roger Williams and John Adams’ Alien and Sedition acts. It also attacked the region’s opposition to westward expansion and to the War of 1812.

Latest Outrage

In 1852, the region foisted its latest outrage on the new territory of Kansas. New England abolitionists began settling there to create an anti-slavery voting bloc.

Across the country, the expression “New Englandism” gained popularity. Supporters used the term to describe New England’s can-do attitude, its bustling economy and strict religious beliefs. But detractors used it far more often. They said New Englandism meant the anti-slavery sentiments taking root in the Republican Party.

The New Englander, said critics, sought to deprive the nation of slavery. But New England states had, in fact,”‘grown rich by importing slaves from Africa.” Further, they said, the region lives “now in luxury upon the blood and bones of the human beings it thus trafficked in.”

In July of 1858, the Cincinnati Enquirer supported President James Buchanan. The newspaper attacked New England congressmen and senators for voting against Buchanan. This, the newspaper suggested, represented the latest in a long string of New England bad judgment calls.

The region’s flaws included its failure to give even a single electoral vote to Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson when they first ran for president.

In 1859 abolitionist John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry. Newspapers then denounced New England for providing funds for his attack. One southern newspaper noted: “. . . he went back to New England, traveling through its several villages, and collecting money, which was freely contributed.”

By 1863, newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana lashed out full strength against New England. Through the West and Midwest, newspapers reported, the feeling against New Englandism, “is every day growing more bitter.”

The Entitled New Englander

An Illinois newspaper noted the New Englander from the beginning demanded tribute from the rest of the country. They made others pay homage, “first by commerce, then by protective tariffs, and now, in the abolition of slavery.”

The newspaper then warned New Englanders will try to impose their ‘Unitarianism, Congregationalism, or Independentism,’ as the national religion.

And a newspaper in Indiana applauded the other states considering breaking away from New England. The editors also predicted New England would be left out in the col’ to survive on her “bleak and barren hills.” The region, they said, would be “cast off from the protection and commercial advantages” that it enjoyed from the other U.S. states.

This story about calling someone a New Englander was updated in 2023.

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