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Easy Money: How New England Puritans Invented Our Currency

Easy money is perhaps New England’s least famous contribution to humanity. Around the world, currency is still mostly in the form of legal tender paper money. It’s a special type of paper money. Unlike numerous types of paper money in history, it is not convertible to gold upon demand. Nor is its quantity “backed” or restricted in any way by its issuer’s gold stock. In general, it is not forced on sellers in private spot transactions. It is just a pure legal tender money.

This means that creditors cannot reject payments of obligations in that object. Most critically, these creditors include the tax authority, and no other object has this status. Every taxpayer must obtain legal tender money in order to pay taxes. This legal status distinguishes the dollar from bitcoin, both of which have no intrinsic value and no relation to gold. It is a major reason why bitcoin hasn’t and probably couldn’t replace the dollar. And it is a major reason why governments can inflate their money at will. Taxpayers still have to obtain it, typically by selling goods and services for it. For the government, it is easy money.

This device, of flimsy appearance but enormous power, was invented in the colony of Massachusetts Bay in the period 1690-1692. From there it spread to other colonies. Because of the Revolutionary War, the idea spread to Europe. Monetary history would never be the same. No country ever again manipulated the content of its gold coins, as they had for two millennia, in order to finance a war. The printing press took over war finance.

Why Massachusetts Puritans?

Why and how did the Massachusetts Puritans invent this new type of money? They numbered 50,000 people at the edge of Western civilization, far less numerous and far less sophisticated than the great financial centers of Amsterdam and London. The first step to answering this question is to recognize that the innovative legal tender paper money was not born in a normal economy. Its invention did not simply replace precious metal coins. The items eligible for use as tax payments in 1690 Massachusetts, just before the invention of legal tender paper money, didn’t just include coins. They also included wheat, barley, barley malt, rye, maize, peas, oats, beef and pork.

It was a very odd monetary economy that saw its roots in the beginning of the English colonization of America. Let’s then take a journey further back in time – and space – all the way to Pocahontas.

An 1850s painting of John Rolfe and Pocahontas

Pocahontas’ husband, John Rolfe, started tobacco planting in Jamestown in the 1610s. Quickly everyone who could became a tobacco planter. The planters desperately needed European goods and food. And so when European ships came for their tobacco the planters exchanged all their tobacco – but also most of their coins – for European products. As a result, very few coins remained for domestic circulation. Tobacco quickly emerged as the alternative to coins. By 1624, even the colony’s budget was expressed in pounds of tobacco.

A Pattern of Easy Money

The pattern repeated itself in all the non-Iberian colonies: maize in Plymouth, sugar in Barbados, boards in Maine, beaver furs in Canada and whalebones in Long Island. Each colony adopted its main product as money. As a matter of course, in 1630 the young colony of Massachusetts Bay adopted three official currencies: English silver coins, grains and beaver furs.

But Massachusetts soon became different because its people were different. Relatively affluent, highly educated and commercially oriented, the Massachusetts Puritans were not content with using commodities as money. They also had the means and the expertise to try something better. An unusual period of experimentation began. In 1635, lead bullets were adopted as small change. Bullets served in their traditional role in the 1637 Pequot War, which gave Massachusetts access to Long Island shores. That was the production center of wampum – the seashell jewelry/money of Native Americans. So in 1637, Massachusetts made wampum legal tender for small debts.

Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton

In 1639, the colony legalized bullion brought by privateers for tax payments. In 1642, Massachusetts was the first colony to recognize foreign (Spanish and Dutch) coins and to encourage their imports. The abolition of monarchy in England annulled the royal minting prerogative, leading Massachusetts to be the only colony to open a mint (in 1652).

Charles II

But royalty returned in 1660, and in the late 1670s King Charles II pressed Massachusetts on the issue of the independent mint, which was seen as nothing short of treason. It was shut down in 1682. At the same time, a private bank started operations in Boston. It issued banknotes awkwardly backed by land titles rather than coins. The bank ceased operations shortly thereafter, perhaps because England threatened to abolish all land titles in Massachusetts.

Charles II

In 1684, the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company was annulled in England, and in 1686 a new regime was imposed by the new king, James II. This Dominion of New England was a pure dictatorship, unlike the colony’s General Court, which was a democracy among male church members. Another attempt at a land bank was made, but it was aborted as soon as the English dictator, Sir Edmund Andros, invalidated all land titles.

With local coins gone and bank projects in ruin, in 1688 Massachusetts was not much better, in terms of its existing currency, than when it was founded in 1630. Some English coins and grains still facilitated daily transactions within the colony. But the monetary laboratory that operated there during these six decades was not entirely in vain. It was powered by English America’s largest merchants, concentrated in Boston, and by graduates of English America’s only college (Harvard). As a merchant republic, Massachusetts was similar to previous hubs of financial innovation – Venice and Amsterdam. The shocks of both the new environment and England’s constitutional upheavals caused Massachusetts to replicate humanity’s monetary history in 60 years: seashell jewelry, grains, uncoined precious metal, coins and banknotes.

Glorious Revolution

Then came the Glorious Revolution in England. It soon inspired a revolution in Boston, which dismantled the Dominion and restored the charter government de facto. The Glorious Revolution also dragged the English colonies into their first war with French Canada. The revolutionary Massachusetts government lobbied the monarchs William and Mary to restore their charter at the same time that they launched expensive attacks on distant Canada. In the fall of 1690, these two tasks collided on the beaches below Quebec City. Massachusetts tried to occupy the French colony, counting on God to provide a Puritan victory over Catholics. The expected plunder was supposed to pay the soldiers. But it was not to be. The soldiers returned defeated in November, ravaged by smallpox, frozen and hungry, and demanded pay for their horrible three-month journey.

The batteries of Quebec bombard the New England fleet

The government promptly increased taxes enormously, but it would have taken too much time to collect them (in coin, grains, and other goods). The soldiers were “mutinous,” reported Boston pastor Cotton Mather. Mather and the elite knew that the very same place they tried to occupy (Quebec) was in the habit of issuing paper money (manually, from playing cards!). The Canadian money was in the Old World style: It was forced on all sellers under penalty and the government committed to exchange it for incoming French silver coins. As the intellectual capital of English America, Massachusetts had printing presses and thus had the technical ability to easily pull off a paper money issue. The problem was a constitutional one: William and Mary, considering restoration of the colony’s charter, would not have been happy seeing Massachusetts once again violating the royal monopoly on money creation. What to do?

A Solution

The government, experienced in monetary innovation, figured out a solution: There will not be “paper money” but only “bills.” No private party will be forced to accept them – no sellers in the markets, not even the soldiers. The soldiers will be informed that they can receive the “bills” if they want, instead of waiting for tax proceeds to be collected, and taxpayers will be informed that they can discharge their enormous tax obligations with these “bills.” That is, only tax collectors will be forced to accept the bills.

In modern parlance, the bills were only legal tender for taxes. Officially, it was not money at all, and thus England should not care. I call it “easy money” because it was money that was easy to issue – no need for precious metal and a mint – and it was made in a dishonest way to fool England.

Easy Money

The bills were enacted into law on December 24, 1690. Printing soon began. The issue of the bills was handed to a committee of five bay merchants,. They included Elisha Hutchinson, grandson of the religious dissident, Anne, and grandfather of the governor and historian, Thomas; Treasurer John Phillips, Mather’s father-in-law; and Adam Winthrop – the first Harvard graduate of that famous name.

In January 1691, the bills were given to soldiers but the public was reluctant to accept the bills. Members of the elite rushed to save the new experiment. Among them were Cotton Mather, who wrote a fiery pamphlet, and the rich Sir William Phips (leader of the Quebec expedition). Phips reputedly exchanged some of his own coins for bills to establish their credit. It worked.

William Phips

England, as planned, did not care about this experiment. In October 1691, William and Mary granted a new charter to the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Upon the charter’s arrival in 1692, the new government understood that it no longer had to fear England’s reaction regarding its money-issuing activities. In the summer it decided that the “bills of credit” (as they came to be known) will be legal tender not only for taxes but for any monetary obligation. In this step, the bills became identical in legal status to England’s silver coins. However, since they were not made of precious metal, they were identical to our modern currency. Ironically, this time of brilliant innovation was also the summer of Salem witch trials.

The Expedient of Easy Money

Mather later summarized his people’s ingenuity.

“In this extremity they presently found out an expedient, which may serve as an example, for any people in other parts of the world, whose distresses may call for a sudden supply of money to carry them through any important expedition.”

Mather, the mad genius of Boston, was right. Founder John Winthrop did not think of paper money when he said in 1630: “We shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” But in the context of money that was what eventually happened.

Cotton Mather

Of course, silver and later gold made a comeback, again and again, to prevent inflation, only to be discarded during wars. Gold coins disappeared from American shops and homes in the Great Depression. Gold remained behind the scenes until 1971, loosely “backing” an ever-increasing amount of paper dollars. Only foreign central banks had the legal right to convert the dollars they held into U.S. gold. But the system came under pressure of increasing government expenditures: The Vietnam War, President Johnson’s War on Poverty and the war on gravity (the Space Program) cost so much money that the dollar’s relation to gold lost its credibility. In 1971 President Richard Nixon “suspended” the convertibility promise, and in fact, took the entire world off gold.

Massachusetts Money

Since then, our currency is Massachusetts currency. If and when it a digital version replaces it, its legal status will remain the same. Even if it disappears from shops in favor of electronic payments of various sorts, it still forms the foundation of the monetary and financial systems. These systems consist mostly of promises to pay “dollars” – the paper money and token coins issued by the federal government.

And it all started in a futile attempt of New Englanders to occupy Quebec.

Dror Goldberg is the author of Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2023.

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The New London Race Riots of 1919 Follow a Pandemic

The New London race riots broke out in 1919, a season of violence throughout the United States known as the Red Summer. White mobs killed somewhere between 180 and 300 black people during riots in just three places: Elaine, Ark., Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Elsewhere during the Red Summer, whites killed blacks by stoning, hanging and burning them alive.

Reasons given for the outbreak of violence vary. Historian Jan Voogd argues for two. One, the Great Northern Migration of poor black people to better-paying jobs in the defense industry. Northerners got competition from black workers and Southerners lost cheap labor on their plantations.

Two, World War I. Black soldiers and sailors not only had weapons, but they received better treatment in France than they did in the United States. They came home emboldened, and they fought back against their white persecutors. President Woodrow Wilson expressed his concern that black veterans would demand equal rights when he said “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.”

A Pandemic and Anarchy

Somehow, summer race riots and pandemics seem to go together. In 1919, the flu pandemic wound down, after wiping out as much as 20 percent of the young adult population.

Geoff Ward, a professor of African and African American studies at Washington University, explained how a pandemic inspires rioting: “These are moments of extreme precariousness, where people are suddenly uncertain about their fate, economic prospects and the social order,” he said.

White men looking for African Americans during the Chicago race riot of 1919.

Other factors led to the season of violence in New England. Two anarchist bombs went off in Boston on May Day, and in September the Boston Police went on strike. Immigrants from Europe and African Americans took the blame for the labor strikes and anarchist bombings that added to the turmoil.

Not every race riot that erupted in the summer of 1919 appeared in a newspaper. But Voogd believes at least 50 took place. One happened in Maine. The New London race riots numbered at least two.

An Attack in Orono, Maine

The Ku Klux Klan had all but disappeared in Maine in 1919, but within five years it would rise again. An ugly incident during the Red Summer foreshadowed the KKK’s regeneration.

Hamlin Hall

A Continental Press story reported on May 22, 1919, that a hazing party at the University of Maine turned into an angry mob. Roger and Samuel Cortney, the “only students of dark skin” attending the university, fought back against white intimidation.

It started when three freshmen tried to break into their room in Hamlin Hall while a student mob waited outside. The brothers knocked the freshmen unconscious. When the three young men didn’t return, the mob went to the Cortneys’ room, where they found them unconscious. The Cortney brothers had escaped.

The student mob divided into three groups to search for them, according to the paper. Some went off campus in Orono, some went to Oldtown, a Penobscot reservation. They found the Cortney brothers at Oldtown. The white students then brought them back to campus and formed a ring around them. First they made them explain why they attacked the freshmen. Then the mob forced the brothers to pour two jugs of molasses on each other and threw feathers on them, according to the news report. The Cortneys, it said, had been “exceedingly popular” among the students up until then.

Returning Home From War

New London, Conn., has always had a large military presence, and it led to trouble in 1919. Fort Trumbull, which dates to the American Revolution, hosted a Coast Guard installation. The U.S. Navy had a submarine base on the Thames River, with offices and housing in New London. The Groton shipyard lay just across the river and military fortifications dotted Long Island Sound.

African-American soldiers in World War I. Images courtesy Library of Congress.

Black and white sailors, home from World War I, mixed uneasily on the streets of New London. African-American servicemen had experienced a much different treatment in France than they had in the United States. They could move freely throughout French society, wrote Voogd. They could go to any business and associate with anyone they wanted, including white women.

African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that, when the black servicemen returned, the reaction of white people in 1919 was ‘almost unbelievable.’

“During that year 77 Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive…That year there were race riots large and small in 26 American cities.”

Du Bois probably counted only half the number of incidents and missed the New London race riots.

New London Race Riots

According to a local newspaper report, bad blood had existed between black and white seamen for some time. The story, typically, blames the African Americans for the trouble. Ward has argued the news media’s complicity in blaming the victim prolonged the summer of violence.

Fort Trumbull

On May 29, the headline screamed, “Negro Sailors Attack White at New London. Worst Riot in Years–U.S. Marines, with Loaded Rifles, Press Crowd Back.”

“Between 15 and 20 sailors and soldiers connected with the New London naval base were arrested by local police,” the newspaper reported. Police called it the ‘worst riot in years. ‘

“The trouble began when negro sailors went into the Coast Guard Academy and attacked white sailors,” according to the story. Six or seven colored sailors went to the Coast Guard Academy at Fort Trumbull and beat a white sailor, the newspaper reported.

Bank Street today

A number of white sailors pursued them through Bank Street, and they took refuge in the Hotel Bristol. The riot call sounded on the fire department whistle. Five thousand civilians “watched” the melee, and the marines came to quell the riot.

The Hotel Bristol

But other versions of the story found in the Visualizing the Red Summer archive tell a more sordid tale.

Twelve days after the riot, the Associated Negro Press reported black sailors complained white sailors attacked them. The white seamen charged the black sailors lay in wait for them at night when they walked over Long Cove Bridge. Then, police arrested two white sailors for fighting. That arrest inspired their white friends to raid the Hotel Bristol, a popular spot for African-American sailors. The whites grabbed the blacks, threw them into the street and beat them severely.

The U.S. Coast Guard Academy

Sailors on both sides, as many as 5,000, then showed up on Bank Street and fought for several hours. The police and fire departments armed with hoses couldn’t stop the melee, so armed marines rushed to the scene. In the end they arrested 15 people, though the news reports don’t identify them by skin color.

According to another news story, “much property was damaged and dozens of negroes were mobbed and severely beaten.”

And Yet Another

But Voogd said another New London race riot went largely unreported. That suggests even more violence occurred in New London, though the military suppressed the information.

A Navy memo revealed that marine guards from the base answered another riot call on June 29. A truck full of marines sped down Smith Street and hit a fire hydrant. The city billed the Navy for the fire hydrant, and the disagreement over that supplied the only paper trail of the incident.

No Riots Here

Meanwhile in Hartford on August 4, “colored clergy yesterday deplored the race riots in Washington and Chicago,” while Hartford police assured the public “there was no likelihood of a dispute between white and colored residents here.” News of a disturbance in Windsor reached police, who dismissed it as ‘phoney.’

With thanks to Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 by Jan Voogd and Visualizing the Red Summer archive by Karen Sieber.

Images: Hamlin Hall CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898. Fort Trumbull By JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26599988. Bank Street By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34773845. This story was updated in 2023.

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Samuel Smedley, Fairfield’s Boy Commander of the Connecticut Navy

Samuel Smedley captured a dozen British vessels during the American Revolution, but the biggest obstacle to greater glory was the stinginess of Gov. Jonathan Trumbull.

Smedley, the baby-faced captain of the Connecticut Navy brig Defence, had a glorious but brief career in the Connecticut State Navy.

An English brig with captured American ships

Over three years, the Defence captured 12 vessels and brought $500,000 into the treasury of Connecticut. Much of that went to the war effort. But Smedley must have chafed at Trumbull’s refusal to share prize money with the crew the same way it was shared with crews of privateers and the Continental Navy.

And perhaps the Defence wouldn’t have run up on a reef and bilged in Long Island Sound if Trumbull had had a more generous spirit.

Samuel Smedley

He was born March 5, 1753 in Fairfield, Conn., into a prosperous family. Fairfield mariners traded frequently with the West Indies, and Smedley likely grew up on boats.

He married Esther Rowland and had two daughters, Esther and Elizabeth, both of whom died in infancy. The one image of him known to survive shows a baby-faced sailor. When the Defence captured the Admiral Keppel, the captain upon seeing Smedley supposedly uttered an exclamation. ’There is little hope of conquering an enemy whose very schoolboys are capable of valor equaling that of trained veterans of naval warfare.”

Samuel Smedley

When the American Revolution broke out, Connecticut made an easy target for British soldiers and sailors.

The British army encamped directly across the Long Island Sound, and the British fleet tried to control the Sound. So the Connecticut Assembly decided to build a two-ship navy. It bought the Defence and fitted her out for war, and built the warship Oliver Cromwell.

In February 1776, Defence was commissioned in New Haven with Seth Harding as captain, Ebenezer Bartram as first lieutenant and young Samuel Smedley as second lieutenant. Bartram and Smedley had recruited much of the 100-man crew from Fairfield and Stratford.

Four months later, Defence sailed into Boston Harbor with two captured ships and a brig with 330 officers and men from a Highland Regiment. “This event was perhaps about as daring a piece of work that ever happened in the naval history of the Atlantic Seaboard,” wrote Louis F. Middlebrook.

They took the booty to the Admiralty Court, which had to judge whether they’d captured a legitimate prize or committed an act of piracy. The Court ruled the former, and the naval agent sent the supplies for the troops to George Washington’s army, then in New York. The men of the Defence got no reward for their valor, except perhaps bragging rights.

Private vs. Public

Warships had to compete with privateers for crews, which wasn’t easy. Life onboard for the common sailor was disagreeable at best. On top of brutally hard work, danger, foul accommodations and lousy food, he risked violent whippings with the lash. To attract able-bodied mariners, ship captains had to award them with a portion of any prize they captured. Privateers kept nearly all the prize they captured, and typically the crew got half.

But the Continental Congress decided that the crews of the Navy would only get one-third of a prize. They’d get half for warships or English privateers.

A Bermuda sloop engaged as a privateer

That didn’t work—everyone wanted to work on a privateer. So Congress changed the rules. The crews of the Continental Navy would get half of the proceeds from a merchant ship, and 100 percent for a warship.

Connecticut, however, stuck to the original rule – crews only got a third of a prize. And so its Navy – the Defence and the Oliver Cromwell – couldn’t find enough sailors.

By 1777, 23-year-old Samuel Smedley had risen to captain of the Defence after Harding and Bartram took ill. He found a way to recruit enough men: a rather big lie. He promised them half of any prizes they captured.

Blood in his Eye

The Defence cruised down to the Caribbean and captured four merchant ships between March 12 and April 20, a spectacular success. But when the men learned they’d only get a third of the booty, they mobbed the office of the agent responsible for processing the prizes. The agent had to divide 1,200 pounds among the crew to make them go away.

Smedley returned home to find British soldiers had burned his house during William Tryon’s raid on Danbury. No doubt he had blood in his eye as he tried to assemble a crew.

This time he didn’t try to trick the sailors. Instead, he won a concession from Gov. Jonathan Trumbull: He and his crew would get half the proceeds from a captured vessel for just that one cruise. So they sailed to the Caribbean in the spring and summer of 1778 and took three prizes – another wildly successful voyage.

Smedley pleaded with Trumbull to let him offer his mariners half the proceeds if they captured a merchant vessel on the next cruise. Trumbull refused.

Too Late

The captain of the state navy’s other ship, the Oliver Cromwell, also had problems recruiting sailors. Why would a sailor sign on with the Connecticut Navy, which only offered one-third of a prize, when the Continental Navy and privateers would give them half? Still Trumbull refused to change the rule. Finally, the Connecticut Assembly intervened and voted to give its navy crews half the booty from a prize ship.

But by then it was too late. The Continental Navy and privateers had taken all the sailors. So Smedley sailed the Defence to New London, where Continental Army soldiers manned the ship. The outcome was perhaps predictable. The incompetent pilot wrecked the ship on a reef. Four or five men drowned.

Map of the Long Island Sound. Courtesy Library of Congress..

“I never Emplored my pen in writing more Disagreeable News than at this time,” wrote Samuel Smedley, in a letter breaking the bad news to Trumbull in March 1779.

Revenge — Not

Samuel Smedley’s luck had definitely turned. Still vowing revenge for the devastation wrought by Tryon’s troops, he arranged for command and part ownership of a privateer, the Recovery. Ready to weigh anchor in January 1780, the frozen New London harbor delayed his departure. When the Recovery finally sailed in mid-February, she was overtaken by the British warship Galatea after a seven-hour chase. The British took Smedley and all his men prisoner and incarcerated them in a prison ship in New York—probably more dangerous than combat at sea.

The Americans traded him for a British prisoner, and he and his men found another privateer, the Hibernia. Again Smedley had part ownership. It didn’t do him any good, as the British again captured his vessel 14 days after leaving New York Harbor. He ended up in the Old Mill Prison in Portsmouth, England.

Smedley wrote from prison to his wife on May 25, 1781, describing his condition as ‘cruelly treated, half starved and half naked.’

He managed to escape, probably because his friends bribed a guard to look the other way. Then he made his way to France, where he got a loan from Benjamin Franklin. He also had his portrait painted in miniature.

The American legation needed to find a friendly vessel to carry military supplies for the war effort, and found one, the Heer Adams. They engaged Smedley as master of the ship, and he had an uneventful – for once — voyage to Philadelphia.

Smedley in Fairfield

Smedley went back to Fairfield to rebuild his house. In 1789, he wrote a letter to President George Washington, asking him to nominate him as Collector of the Port of Fairfield. He noted that he had ‘sufferd the Loss of the greater part of his Paternal Inheritance by the Ravages of A Cruel Enemy.’

The Old Burying Ground in Fairfield. Image courtesy Google maps.

He got the job, which proved more lucrative – and, apparently, more memorable– than his swashbuckling career at sea. His gravestone in the Old Burying Ground reads:

Samuel Smedley Esqr.

late Collector of Customs

for the District of Fairfield

Died June 13, 1812

Aged 59.

With thanks to Exploits of the Connecticut ship “Defence,” commanded by Captain Samuel Smedley of Fairfield, Ct. by Louis F. Middlebrook and Samuel Smedley and Prize Division by Jackson Kuhl for the Journal of the American Revolution. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Wicked Blue Lights of New London Give Connecticut a Bad Name

On the moonless night of Dec. 18, 1813, a pair of mysterious blue lights at the mouth of the Thames River thwarted Stephen Decatur’s attempt to sneak through a British blockade.

Stephen Decatur.

A British squadron had chased Decatur’s three warships up the river from Long Island Sound in June, a year after the War of 1812 broke out. For six months, Decatur and his men remained stuck five miles upriver, unable to do more than nurse a hearty distaste for New London.

So when Decatur saw those blue lights, he immediately understood them as signals to warn the British of his attempted escape.

War of 1812

New England as a whole objected to the War of 1812, which brought hard times to the region. Banks failed, poorhouses overflowed and unemployment approached 50 percent of the workforce. New London faced the additional menace of a British invasion because of Decatur’s presence on the Thames River.

No one ever found out whether a British spy or an American traitor lit the mysterious blue lights. But the publicity surrounding the affair tarnished New England’s dominant political party, the Federalists, who implacably opposed the War of 1812.

Decatur vs. New London

U.S. Navy Commodore Stephen Decatur in 1813 was fresh off a military triumph. In 1812, his frigate United States captured the HMS Macedonian off the Canary Islands. Decatur had the ship repaired and refitted, and hauled his prize back to New York for wartime duty on the American side.

In June, a British squadron spotted Decatur’s three warships in Long Island Sound off Montauk Point. Decatur, with no room to maneuver, ordered his ships to flee up the Thames River. Two Revolutionary-era forts could protect the river from either side: Fort Trumbull in New London and Fort Griswold in Groton.

But New London, a hotbed of Federalism, resented both the war and Decatur. New Londoners treated Decatur not as a hero, but with “scathing remarks implying cowardice, duplicity, and other invectives.”

New London, 1813

The New Londoners exasperated Decatur. He tried to order Connecticut’s militia commander, Jorah Isham, to reinforce the old forts. Isham refused. Then when a U.S. Army general arrived to oversee New London’s defense, Isham disbanded the militia.

Decatur ended up building his own fort upriver and thoroughly disliking New Londoners.

Blue Lights

The USS United States

So on the night of December 18, the tide was right and so was the moon. Stephen Decatur planned to slip through the British blockaders. In total darkness, several guard boats cautiously guided his warships out of New London Harbor.

Just then a lookout whispered to an officer that he saw one of the blue lights burning near Fort Trumbull. Another of the blue lights burned near Fort Griswold on the Groton side of the river.

Decatur, furious, turned back. His warships never escaped. In April 1814, his men dismantled the vessels and Decatur returned to New York by land.

A Gross Libel

But days after the blue lights incident, he told his story to the editor of the New London Gazette and to the Navy Secretary. He believed treasonous New London Federalists had burned the blue lights to foil his escape.

The Gazette condemned the “traitorous wretches who dare thus to give the enemy over those great and gallant men.” The Gazette asked who had lit “these wicked lights, these torches of treason.”

The USS United States capturing HMS Macedonia

Indignant, New Londoners responded. They said the blue lights probably came from innocent fishermen or British spies. Maybe Decatur even made them up to excuse his failure to run the blockade.

The town’s Federalist congressman, Lyman Law, demanded an inquiry to clear up the matter. Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut excoriated the Gazette for its “foul misrepresentation” and its “gross libel on the People of that patriotic state.”

Nonetheless, the incident tainted the Federalist Party – the party of Washington, Adams and Hamilton. “Blue light Federalist” stuck as an insult until 1833.

Blue Lights and a Convention

A year after the mysterious blue lights infuriated Stephen Decatur, New England Federalists met secretly in Hartford. They wanted to air their grievances with the war and with the Democratic-Republic administration of James Madison.

The so-called Hartford Convention included some Federalists who probably wanted New England to secede from the United States. The convention, however, didn’t recommend secession. The Federalists’ enemies promoted the fiction that it had.

The convention in Hartford and the blue lights in New London consequently gave Connecticut a reputation for disloyalty.

The Federalist Party fared even worse. Shortly after the Hartford Convention ended, so did the War of 1812. The Federalists fell from public favor, except in New England, and never regained power.

This story about the blue lights of New London was updated in 2023.

Image: Map of New London (cropped) By DigbyDalton – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30432617.

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The SS Lexington Disaster, Worst in Long Island Sound History

Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1834 commissioned a paddlewheel steamboat called the SS Lexington to be the fastest and most luxurious in operation. She turned out to be the most lethal.

Steamboat Lexington before the tragedy

Vanderbilt wanted a vessel to serve the route from New York City to Providence, R.I. When finished, the SS Lexington featured ornate teak woodwork throughout, an elegant lounge, a dining saloon and a furnished deck.

Her engine was one of the most efficient on the water, and in June 1835 she made the 180 miles between New York and Providence in 12 hours, 14 minutes.

The SS Lexington often had exciting races with another Sound steamer, the John W. Richmond. “Great liberties were taken with boiler presures, so that when races occurred, which were not infrequent events, steamboat traveling in the United States was as risky as it was exciting,” reported International Marine Engineering in 1912.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

SS Lexington

The SS Lexington wasn’t racing during the cold, windy night of Jan. 13, 1840, on the run between New York and Stonington, Conn. She was catching a train. Vanderbilt had switched the route in 1837 to meet the terminus of a new railroad. He had also sold the vessel to the New Jersey Steamship and Navigation Company, which converted the boilers to burn coal instead of wood.

Steamboats had a tendency to catch fire, and in 1838 the U.S. Congress created the Steamboat Inspection Service. It couldn’t handle the task. The SIS didn’t discover the improper conversion of the SS Lexington’s boiler, or that it burned too hot for the smokestack’s casing.

A steamboat historian wrote that ‘“when she was pressed hard, the roar of the fires could be heard all over the boat and at each revolution of the wheels she trembled from stem to stern.”

The crew of the SS Lexington shoveled extra coal into the boiler that night because of the rough seas. She was carrying 150 bales of cotton along with the passengers and crew. She left the dock at 4 p.m. Halfway to Stonington, the casings on the overheated smokestack ignited, and the fire spread to the cotton. Instead of putting out the fire immediately, crewmen went to check the engine first.

Awful Conflagration

The rope that controlled the rudder burned through and the engine stopped. The steamer drifted away from land. Tragically, the sloop Improvement was less than 5 miles away and never came to the SS Lexington’s aid. The captain later explained that he was on a schedule and didn’t want to be late.

Only about 20 passengers could find lifeboats. The first lifeboat was sucked into the paddlewheel, killing all aboard. The remaining two lifeboats were lowered into the water stern first, and they were swamped immediately.

By 8 p.m. the center of the main deck collapsed. Passengers threw baggage containers and cotton bales into the water to use as rafts. Those who couldn’t find anything to cling to quickly died of hypothermia or drowned. The steamship still burned when it sank at 3 a.m.

Three who survived had climbed onto floating bales of cotton. David Crowley, the second mate, drifted for 43 hours on a cotton bale before coming ashore and staggering a mile to a private home. Charles Smith, a fireman, climbed onto a section of the paddlewheel before rescuers got to him.

Steamboat Lexington tragedy by Nathaniel Currier

Aftermath

An investigation revealed the boiler had been improperly converted, the crew violated fire safety procedures and the captain of the Improvement should have come to the rescue. Nothing was done until 1852, after an unusual number of steamboats exploded, caught fire or collided. Congress passed another law, the Steamboat Act of May 30, 1852. It required testing of boilers, safety valves and licensing of pilots.

Nathaniel Currier printed Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat Lexington and sold thousands of copies.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was said to have a ticket for the fatal voyage, but missed it because he was discussing his poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, with a publisher.

The SS Lexington was brought to the surface in 1842 and 30 lbs. of melted silver were recovered. But then the chains supporting her snapped and she fell back to the bottom of the Sound, breaking into three pieces. Though there is supposedly gold and silver in her hull, she has never been recovered.

This story was updated in 2023.

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