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Salem Mass.

Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Lawyer, Poet and a Black Man’s Drinking Buddy

When Nancy Hammond bought a house on Gates Street in Portsmouth, N.H., she had no idea it would inspire her to trace the life story of a good and interesting man. Tradition had it that Jonathan Mitchel Sewall had lived in the house during the time of George Washington. Washington, in fact, may have walked right past it on his visit to Portsmouth in 1789.

Hammond wanted to find out more.

Sewall’s house on Gates Street

She learned that Sewall recorded his observations about much of the world around him, from Salem to Spain, from slave to Superior Court chief justice. He felt things deeply, and, often depressed, he wrote popular poems about the world he knew. Hammond’s curiosity about him led her to dig up those old poems as well as fragments of his life.

Then, during the COVID pandemic, she wove them together into The Life and Times of Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, 1748-1808.

“Now I am cherishing him and hoping to make him better-known as best I can,” she wrote in her introduction.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Sewall’s life was his friendship with Primus Fowle, an enslaved printer with whom he probably shared “many a cheerful dram.”

Jonathan Sewall

Sewall was the great-nephew of Judge Samuel Sewall, a Puritan leader, Salem witch trial judge and opponent of slavery.

Samuel Sewall

Born in Salem, Mass., Jonathan was educated at Boston Public Latin School while living with his uncle Stephen Sewall, chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature. He then studied law with his cousin Jonathan Sewall, Massachusetts attorney general, before he moved to Portsmouth, N.H There he became a well-known and well-loved local character who wrote poetry and the New Hampshire Bill of Rights. He spoke at every local celebration during the rest of his life, and most likely helped the enslaved people of Portsmouth with their Black Petition of 1779.

Self Medication

Sewall came from a mercantile family, and he was apprenticed in the merchant business in Salem. Some time before his apprenticeship ended, he came down with a fever. It brought him so low that he decided to take a voyage to a milder climate for his health.

And so he sailed for Spain, probably Bilbao. New Hampshire historian Albert T. Batchellor wrote that the warm climate helped him. “[Y]et the violence of his fever and the strong medicines which the physicians administered to him when sick, afterwards subjected him to exquisite nervous affections and the keenest mental suffering approaching delirium,” Batchellor wrote.

Jonathan’s brother-in-law, William Pynchon, described in his diary on December 21, 1785, his visit to his house in Salem: “Bro. Mitchell comes in Portsmouth stage; a dark cloud over his visage, his eyes wild.“

Jonathan grew prone to hypochondria and nervous problems, which he medicated with “stimulating beverages.”

“But his friends loved him none the less and appear never to have lost respect for him,” wrote historian Charles Bell. “The lady who became his second wife, when remonstrated with on her engagement to a man of his habits, replied, ‘I would rather marry Mr. Sewall drunk than any other man sober’.”

Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Lawyer

His mercantile career over, Jonathan Mitchel Sewall turned to the law. He studied — and probably lived with — Judge John Pickering. His later work as a Portsmouth lawyer brought him into contact with people in trouble. He often helped them out without charging them.

According to an obituary Hammond found, “The widow, the fatherless, and the stranger, also found in his talents a never-failing resources, for without even the hope of reward, he devoted his great abilities to their service.”

Though no portraits of him exist, a contemporary noticed his striking resemblance to the British statesman, Edmund Burke.

Edmund Burke, from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, (1767-1769)

Hammond notes Sewall may also have helped draw up an eloquent petition demanding freedom for Portsmouth’s enslaved servants in 1780. The document, known as “the petition of Nero Brewster and others,” failed then to free them. In 2013, New Hampshire’s General Court posthumously granted them their freedom.

Nero Brewster worked for William Brewster, who ran a tavern on Pleasant and Court streets. Sewall may well have medicated himself with stimulating beverages at Brewster’s Tavern .

This map shows the proximity of Judge John Pickering’s house to Fowle’s printing shop.

“With Jonathan’s own propensity for drink, he must have shared quite a few “cheerful” drams with Primus,” wrote Hammond. “Primus may well have been the first enslaved person that Jonathan met in Portsmouth as they probably lived across the street from each other.”

Primus would have printed Jonathan’s poetry. He had come to New Hampshire with his owner, the printer Daniel Fowle. Fowle sometimes printed Jonathan’s public poetry in his weekly newspaper, The New Hampshire Gazette.

Primus

“It has been said that Primus could not read,” wrote Hammond. “If he were the only person working with Fowle it seems unlikely that he would be unable to help with the typesetting.”

His main task, she wrote, “would have been setting the cases of print on to the press, setting the paper, and then inking the letters before the case went into the press. Then the lever was turned to pull the paper and the case of type into it and to press it down to make the print. When this was done, the lever was pulled back to take the case out and then, because the ink was oil based, the printed sheets had to be hung up to dry overnight. The type needed to be cleaned and returned to the letter cases.”

Hammond offers the kind of insight Jonathan Mitchel Sewall revealed in his poetry. She wondered,

“What must it have been like for Primus to print ads for the sale of “Indian, Negro, or Mulatto” people as slaves and information about returning escapees to their enslavers every week?” she wondered. Hammond includes examples, such as “A very likely NEGRO BOY, about 14 years of age, to be Sold, Enquire of the Printer.”

Primus died in 1791, and Jonathan wrote his obituary, which appeared in the newspaper.

Epitaph on the Death of Primus

Under these clods, old Primus lies

At rest and free from noise,

No longer seen by mortal eyes j

Or grieved by roguish boys;

The cheerful dram he lov’d ‘tis true

Which hastened on his end.

But some in paved-street well knew

He was a hearty friend,

And did possess a grateful mind

Though oft borne down with pain,

Yet where he found a neighbour kind

He surely went again;

Too often did the mirth of some

His innocence betray,

By giving larger draughts of rum

Than he could swill away,

But now he’s dead, we sure may say

Of him, as of all men,

That while in silent graves they lay

They’ll not be plagu’d again.

Not Fair

Writes Hammond, “The epitaph reads as though it was given at the graveside as it begins ‘Under these clods.’ It surely gives the impression that Jonathan knew Primus well even to the painfulness of his aging shoulders and knees.”

If Jonathan Mitchel Sewall was sensitive enough to understand that Primus suffered physical pain as well as humiliation, he may also have grasped the unfairness of his enslavement. Hammond noted that Sewall’s son Stephen, probably around 14, apprenticed to a printer, then an elite trade.

“The printing trade was a very good one to be in and a young boy could progress from his seven-year apprenticeship to become a journeyman and then a master printer himself,” Hammond wrote. “As a journeyman he would be able to get a job in almost any city. But at that time these steps would only be possible for a young white boy. Primus’ “apprenticeship” lasted for all of his long life. A printer would not only print the newspaper, but broadsides, pamphlets, books, and many types of forms especially for the state.”

In Silent Graves

Primus Fowle was buried in Portsmouth’s Negro Burying Ground, a segregated cemetery on the outskirts of the town. People eventually forgot about it until 2003, when a road crew unearthed coffins and skeletal remains. Today, a memorial park on the site memorializes those buried there.

Portsmouth African Burial Ground Memorial

Seventeen years later, Jonathan Mitchel Sewall went to his final resting place in Portsmouth’s North Cemetery. His gravestone reads,

Sacred to the Memory of Jonathan Mitchel Sewall, Esq.

Counsellor at Law who died March 29, 1808 Age 60

In vain shall worth or wisdom save

The dying victim from the destin’d grave,

Nor Charity, our helpless nature’s pride,

The friend to him who knows no friend beside,

Nor genius, science, eloquence have pow’r,

One moment to protract the appointed hour.

Could these united have his life repriev’d,

We should not weep for Sewall still had lived.

Portsmouth African Burying Ground Memorial Park By LibSEEE – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91322234.

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Giving the Devil Her Due: The Neglected History of Tituba, Salem’s First Witch

Posterity has treated few characters in the Salem witch trial drama as poorly as Tituba, a woman enslaved in the household of minister Samuel Parris. Tituba, the first to confess to witchcraft, played a decisive role in setting the trials in motion. Her agency, long underestimated by historians, must be acknowledged, if we wish to understand more fully the famous events she helped to instigate.

A racist caricature of Tituba by Alfred Fredericks in W.C. Bryant’s A Popular History of the United States. Despite the legend, there is no evidence that Tituba taught witch magic to the children of the Parris household.

Scarcely a passage of American history has given birth to as many myths as the fateful events of 1692 in Salem, Mass. The witch hunt has entered national consciousness as a cautionary tale. But in the process, much of its true substance has been lost. When legend maligns, misrepresents or simply neglects its subjects, historians should intervene to set the record straight.

The Life of Tituba: Facts and Fabrications

Little is known about Tituba’s life before she arrived in Salem. Historians have almost universally claimed that Samuel Parris acquired her in Barbados. But as historian Bernard Rosenthal concedes, the evidence is “purely circumstantial.”[1] The sole, tantalizing clue is a 1676 document listing a child named “Tattuba” among those enslaved on the plantation of Samuel Thompson on Barbados. But without more substantial proof linking this Tattuba to Parris, we cannot be sure she is the same woman who lived in his household in Salem.

Because her early life is obscure, doubt persists about Tituba’s ethnicity. Various arguments have linked her to one group or another. But since slaveholders could and did rename the people they enslaved at will, such arguments lack support. We can only speculate about her native country and her people, elements essential to our modern understanding of ethnicity. Yet there is no ambiguity about how the society Tituba inhabited defined her race. Every extant source from Tituba’s lifetime describes her as an “Indian.”

One of the most striking peculiarities of Salem scholarship is that, on this aspect of Tituba’s story, the sources say one thing, and the historians say another.

Samuel Parris

Metamorphosis of Tituba

In the centuries since she lived, Tituba has undergone a racial metamorphosis. Her first transformation was effected not by a historian, but by a poet.

In 1832, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his verse-drama Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, and gave his Tituba an African father. Longfellow’s version seems to have been the right narrative at the right time. Perhaps the real, native Tituba held little appeal for 19th-century American intellectuals. To them the frontier seemed increasingly remote. Perhaps the intense struggle over slavery in their own lifetimes predisposed them to expect enslaved people in the nation’s past to have black faces.

The mixed-race Tituba of Giles Corey entered the history books and then remained there until the middle of the 20th century. Her metamorphosis was a sleight of hand performed by generations of historians who preferred, in her case, to deal in stereotypes rather than documentary evidence. Thus Tituba the Indian was recast, in the words of historian Marion L. Starkey, as Tituba the “trembling black woman.”[2]

In this version, Tituba is little more than a victim. And that story dominated the historiography of the trials until recent decades.

Granted, as suspicion began to circle around her in February 1692, Salem’s first witch was in a dangerous position. As a racial outsider and a slave in the Puritan community, she had very little protection under the law. She was also accused of a capital crime. So some historians have made the mistake of assuming Tituba acted weakly because her position was weak.

To the contrary, Tituba turned her weakness into strength, and acted decisively to save her own life.

Tituba’s Confession: Inventing the Conspiracy

Tituba held two cards in her hand as she faced magistrate John Hathorne across the interrogation table. The first was that she was alone in confessing. Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good, accused alongside her, kept their silence. That allowed Tituba to control the narrative of her alleged crime.

Her second advantage – and this may seem counterintuitive − was her race. Historian Elaine G. Breslaw has pointed out that, as a Native American, Tituba belonged to a group the Puritans “associated with demonic power.”[3] And so when Tituba spoke about witchcraft, they were prepared to listen.

After the witch panic had died down and the people of Salem began to come to terms with what they had done, Tituba appears to have recanted her testimony. Robert Calef, a contemporary critic of the trials, records that she claimed to have confessed under duress, after “her master did beat her.”[4] This may have been the truth; but it was not the whole truth. Had Tituba given her testimony strategically, she would hardly have admitted as much so soon after the trial. But close analysis of her testimony suggests she was thinking very strategically indeed.

Suggestive Manipulation

Tituba’s testimony reads like a case study in suggestive manipulation. The content of her confession seems crafted to play on the fears of her accusers. Though her native heritage was a source of her credibility, the images she evoked were distinctly English. She claimed the Devil appeared to her in animal forms – as a hog, as a “great dog.” as a bird, as “a red rat and a black rat.”[5] These creatures would have been immediately recognizable to the Puritans as familiars, demonic agents in the guise of household animals. They figured prominently in English witch beliefs.

English tradition held that a witch gave her familiar sustenance by allowing it to drink her blood. Sure enough, we find in Tituba’s confession the image of Sarah Good allowing her bird-familiar to “suck her between her fingers”.[6]

We cannot know whether Tituba shared her enslavers’ concept of witchcraft. It is unclear, therefore, whether the beliefs expressed in her testimony are her own, or simply what she thought her interrogators wanted to hear. What matters is that Salem believed her. For the Puritans, the explanation Tituba offered was familiar enough to be plausible – but also frightening enough to keep them from scrutinizing it too closely. This enabled Tituba to add a crucial element to her story.

On the first day of her interrogation, she testified that she saw four women hurting the children. Two she could identify as Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good. But the other two, she claimed, she did not recognize.[7] The implications were dramatic. Tituba had given the Puritans evidence of a Satanic conspiracy at work in their town. By leaving the identity of two of the conspirators open, she ensured that anyone could become a suspect.

witchcraft-salem-hangings

Ambition of Tituba

On the second day of interrogation, Tituba seems to have grown more ambitious. This time, she told Hathorne of a book in which the Devil, in the guise of a tall man, commanded her to sign her name. The book also contained nine other signatures. Two could be accounted for as belonging to Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good, but the remaining seven could not be identified. Tituba had widened the scope of the conspiracy.

Then, when asked to describe the unknown persons at the clandestine gathering, she complicated matters further. One of the women, she said, wore a “black silk hood with a white silk hood under it.” The tall man had white hair and wore black clothes.[8] Both descriptions suggested expensive outfits – these diabolic conspirators were people of status.

Historians of the witch hunts can use one tell-tale sign to determine the moment a witch panic reached critical mass and began to take on a life of its own. That sign is the presence of elite men among the accused. Once those nearest the levers of power began to be implicated, it became very difficult for anyone to control the spread of accusations. By conjuring two well-dressed gentlefolk from Boston, Tituba ensured that suspicion would climb freely up the social ladder.

Sure enough, in May 1692, the Salem witch trials claimed their first high-status victim: George Burroughs, the former minister of the village.

The Power of a Lie

What might have happened had Tituba given a more conventional confession, or held her tongue altogether? It is difficult to imagine that she would have escaped punishment. Nothing she might have said could change these facts. She had been close to the afflicted girls, and she was low enough in the social hierarchy of the village to be the perfect scapegoat for their suffering. If Samuel Parris really did beat her to coerce a confession, he had probably already decided on her guilt, and that she would take the blame.

Had Tituba simply admitted to bewitching the children, she would almost certainly have been tried and convicted. Perhaps she would have died in jail, like Sarah Osborne, or hanged, like Sarah Good. Though New England’s courts were generally more lenient in cases of witchcraft than their continental European counterparts, she likely would have received the death penalty. The whole drama might have ended there, with an unfortunate slave woman its sole, unmourned casualty.

But Tituba took action, and the outcome was entirely different. Over the course of nine months, denunciations spread through Salem like wildfire. They implicated some 200 people in the network of a vast imagined conspiracy. Nineteen were then hanged as witches, and one man crushed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea. As the village descended into suspicion and recrimination, the woman whose confession provided the impetus for the panic seems to have been overlooked.

Tituba languished in a jail cell for 13 months until her release after the end of the trials in May 1693. Thus she survived, sheltered by the chaos she helped to create.

mary-webster-examination

From History to Myth

Here Tituba disappears from the historical record and passes into American mythos. It has not treated her well. Reduced to a foil for the nation’s racial anxieties, she has suffered the distortion of the basic facts of her life. Preferring to project onto her rather than understand her, historians and dramatists alike have overlooked her agency in shaping those famous events in Salem. It is an error that has only recently begun to be corrected. Our understanding of the trials is all the better for it, because Tituba’s role was decisive.

Her confession turned an open-and-shut witchcraft trial into an open-ended witch panic. By manipulating the Puritans’ fears, Tituba did more than preserve her own life. She tore the community that had enslaved her apart.

End Notes

Emerson Hurley studies early modern history at the University of Melbourne, with an interest in the social history of the European witch hunts. He can be contacted at [email protected]

[1] Bernard Rosenthal, “Tituba’s Story,” The New England Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1998): 197.

[2] Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 43.

[3] Elaine G. Breslaw, “Tituba’s Confession: The Multicultural Dimensions of the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (1997): 546.

[4] Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, Display’d in Five Parts (London: Samuel Bridge, 1700), 91.

[5] Brian Levack, ed., The Witchcraft Sourcebook, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2015), 287.

[6] Levack, Sourcebook, 288.

[7] Levack, Sourcebook, 286.

[8] Benjamin Ray, “Salem Witchcraft No. 125: Tituba,” Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, published 2018, accessed December 26, 2021.

Images: Memorial stone to Sarah Good, By Tim1965 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8485227.

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Six Iconic Summer Paintings of New England

New England has no shortage of summer paintings. For centuries, artists have fled cities in summer for the cool air by the seashore or in the mountains. Or perhaps they just took a short train ride from New York or Boston.

They first ventured forth to the White Mountains in the early 19^th century. They explored almost as much as they painted. Later their paintings promoted tourism.

Then summer art colonies began burgeoning throughout New England. In addition to the White Mountain painters, New Hampshire had Cornish and Dublin. Connecticut had Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Massachusetts had Provincetown, the Berkshires, Gloucester and the Lynn Beach Art Colony. Maine had Ogunquit, Monhegan and Skowhegan – as well as every other island and coastal community.

Even tiny Rhode Island and Vermont had their own artist colonies. Vermont had the Dorset painters, and painters favored the South Kingstown hamlet of Matunuck.

So here are six summer paintings, one for each New England state.

The Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but in summertime he ventured to various artist colonies. Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Miss Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.

Hassam, observed the New York Times, was a priest high in the councils of the increasing tribe of American Impressionsts.

Hassam painted The Couch on the Porch in 1914 in Cos Cob. The art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.

One critic wrote that Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s.

Instead of historical scenes or famous people, the impressionsts painted landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life. They relied on natural light, quick brush strokes and a bright palette.

A short train ride took Twachtman’s friends from New York City to Greenwich. Some stayed at his home or boarded at the Holley House, now known as the Bush-Holley House. The colonists included such artists as J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid and Theodore Robinson, as well as writers Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather.

Summer, North Haven

The American Impressionists just loved to paint young women in white dresses outside in bright sunshine. Frank Weston Benson mastered the theme in many of his summer paintings.

Frank Weston Benson, was born in Salem, Mass., and he grew up with a love of the outdoors. As a boy he spent many hours duck hunting in the marshes around Salem.

In 1882, when he turned 21, his parents gave him $2,000 for a trip to Europe. He studied the old masters as well as the work of Claude Monet. When he returned, he established himself as an artist, married and had four chldren, which he frequently painted.

“I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes,” he once said.

He enjoyed success as an artist, winning many medals for his work. During the summer, Frank Weston Benson painted on the Maine island of North Haven, as well as in the New Hampshire towns of New Castle and Dublin. He painted Summer in 1909 using his wife and three daughters as models.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photos-frank-weston-benson-painter-light/

Eventually, critics derided his paintings as “too pretty,” so he returned to his first love. Benson mastered waterfowl etchings, and even designed the second Federal Duck Stamp.

Cape Cod Morning, Truro

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death at 85 in 1967.

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod, creating a number of summer paintings. He explained why he chose the Cape in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous – perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

He loved to suggest the inner life of human beings, something he called “a vast realm.” He also once said all he wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Cape Cod Morning, painted in 1950, is quintessential Hopper. He captures a feeling of tension and isolation, as well as sunlight on the side of a house.

Saco River, White Mountains

In the 19^th century, hundreds of artists traveled to the White Mountains to paint the splendor of what was then wilderness.

White Mountain art started in 1826, when a widely reported tragedy began to attract people to the region. Nine members of the Willey household perished in a landslide.

Then Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, born in 1837 in Portsmouth, N.H., started out as a businessman in Boston. However, he switched to landscape painting full-time, which turned out to be a good career move. A member of the Hudson River School of Art, he specialized in marinescapes. However, he did make painting forays into the White Mountains, including Summer on the Saco (Mount Chocorua).

Second Beach, Newport

There was nothing middle-class about this scene of Second Beach in Newport, R.I. Worthington Whittredge, a late-Hudson River School painter, painted it in 1878-1880. Newport then ruled as a fashionable summer resort for the Gilded Age elite.

Southern planters had begun coming to Newport to escape the summer heat in the mid-19^th century. Northerners then started to arrive and to build lavish summer cottages. When Whittredge painted Second Beach, Newport was still on the way up. The Vanderbilts, for example, had yet to build two of the most opulent “cottages,” the Breakers and Marble House.

This summer painting shows fashionable people dipping their toes in the water and a horse-drawn carriage at the other end of the beach.

Swimming Hole, Arlington

Though born in New York City suburb, Norman Rockwell created the iconography of 20^th century small town New England.

Rockwell’s career followed the Golden Age of Illustration a period of brilliant book and magazine illustration. It ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. Rockwell began his studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1911. Inspired by such Golden Age illustrators as Howard Pyle, Rockwell decided to devote himself to illustration.

For 20 years he worked for Boys Life magazine, living in New Rochelle with his wife and three sons. But by 1938, he needed a restart, so he bought a farmhouse in Arlington. Rural Vermont inspired him to develop into the teller of fictional stories about small town America.

He had no interest in the natural beauty around him. Instead, he sought out diners, dentists offices and schoolhouses.

In 1945, he decided to paint a salesman who takes a dip into a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

Rockwell painted his neighbor George Zimmer, who posed as the salesman. It made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, one of seven for which Zimmer modeled. Many of Rockwell’s summer paintings appeared on Post covers.

Rockwell paid close attention to details. In Swimming Hole, he tells the story of the salesman making a long drive and stopping at a swimming hole. He parks his car and methodically takes off his shirt and tie, hangs it up, lays his glasses on a newspaper and then his cigar on a shoe.

“George Zimmer, my model,” Rockwell said, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.”

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Stephen Higginson Tells Fish Stories To Parliament In 1771 and Gets Arrested For It

In 1771, the British government desperately needed to know how American colonists felt about fishing policies. Stephen Higginson filled them in, and almost got jailed as a traitor because of it.

Stephen Higginson served in many capacities during the American Revolution and the formative years of the country – military leader, representative to Congress and political intriguer.

Higginson was born in Salem, Mass., in 1743 into a family of politicians and clergymen. Well-connected, his single act of rebellion against his place in society seems to be his decision to marry Susannah Cleveland, his second cousin from Connecticut. As their families opposed the marriage (probably because of their youth), the couple ran away to New Hampshire to marry in 1764.

After returning to Salem, Higginson took up his position as a merchant trader, same as his father. He set up a home near East India Square in Salem across from the Lafayette Coffee House. Armed with introductions from his well-connected father, he sailed to England in 1771.

Stephen Higginson in London

Stephen Higginson

In England, Higginson had his first critical brush with politics. Higginson, on his travels in England to introduce himself to his trading partners, found himself summoned before Parliament to answer to an investigation about New England’s fisheries.

Higginson’s testimony gave a picture of how large and vital cod fishing was to the New England economy.

Seven hundred fishing vessels, most between 40 and 70 tons, worked the waters off New England fishing for cod. It took more than 4,000 people to man those vessels, Higginson estimated. Another 2,000 worked on shore, curing and preparing the catch for sale. And another 350 vessels, employing another 3,000 people, transported the fish to market.

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all New England exports by value. But the interests of the English and their American colonies often diverged when it came to codfish.

Fishing schooners

American fish fed slaves in the West Indies and Catholics in Europe. This resulted in New England fishermen trading with the French, importing French sugar, rum and molasses, as well as trading directly with the French in Newfoundland. Britain implemented a series of tariffs to limit New England fishermen’s ability to trade with the French, preferring to keep such trade for Englishmen.

By 1771, the arguing over the New England fishery had gone on for 40 years, and Britain’s Navy actively seized American fishing vessels caught trading with the French. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament who sympathized with the colonists and their position, summoned Higginson to testify.

Stephen Higginson Testifies

The British, as usual, were concerned that New England was trading too much with Spain and France, rather than England.

Higginson explained that Britain remained New England’s primary trading partner. He suggested that restricting New England trade would result in the region being unable to pay its debts to English companies.

In particular, the Parliament questioned what New England fishermen would do if the government closed the fishery entirely.

A partial transcript of his testimony:

Under Questioning

Q. What would these people do if the Fishery was stopped?

A. I can’t readily resolve that question. I suppose they would remain where they are as long as they could subsist in hopes of being engaged in their old employment.

Q. But when that hope failed and they could no longer subsist?

A. Then they will probably go elsewhere?

Q. Whether they would settle at Halifax?

A. In general I think not … the Fishermen in Salem and other Towns are a very quiet and steady set of men They esteem the people of Halifax to be dissolute and of a quite contrary turn. I think therefore they would not sit down among a people so different in their manners. Another reason is that they think the Government of Halifax is arbitrary and have a terrible notion of it. Another, those who have been there have disliked the country very much as being inhospitable.

Q. Would they go to Miguelon and St Pierre and fish for France?

A. Don t think they would generally. From Marblehead some perhaps would.

Q. Why would they from thence?

A. Because the people there are of various nations Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, but the others are born in the towns where they live, have tenements and freeholds there and would not leave their place of abode, I conceive.

Return of the Traitor

News of Higginson’s appearance before Parliament spread, and upon his return to Marblehead, the colonial authorities arrested him on suspicion of traitorous conduct. Higginson had walked a fine line in Parliament, both continuing to state the American case for greater freedom in operating the fishery while defending the loyalty of the colonists.

Fortunately for his sake, Higginson had brought a detailed account of his testimony home with him. When he presented what he had said, the colonial authorities reversed themselves and praised him for his poise and presentation.

Into the History Books

During the American Revolution, Higginson ran his ships as privateers, and in 1783 Massachusetts elected him to the Continental Congress. Following the war, he participated in the military force that put down Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 and 1787.

Higginson’s most well-known legacy involves his opposition to John Hancock, during Hancock’s term as governor of Massachusetts. Higginson was a firm Federalist, along with John Adams and many others. The Federalists wanted a strong central government, and they were opposed by the Anti-Federalists who wanted the states to retain more power in the new country that they were forming.

John Hancock, meanwhile, had become something of a political chameleon. He managed to win support from enough Federalists and Anti-Federalists to serve as governor.

Stephen Higginson led probably the harshest attack on Hancock, though there were many. He published the “Laco Papers” in a newspaper, castigating Hancock for a weak military record during the Revolution. He called into question Hancock’s fitness to serve, as well as the alliances he had struck with his opponents, including Samuel Adams. In addition to printing the letters in a newspaper, under the pseudonym Laco, he also had them bound and distributed.

The Laco Papers had a remarkable effect, though not the one Higginson intended. Historians agree that the publication most likely generated sympathy for Hancock and helped extend his political reign.

Thanks to: Life and Times of Stephen Higginson, Member of the Continental Congress (1783)

Images: Stephen Higginson, Delegate to Continental Congress, New York Public Library, Max Rosenthal(Etcher)

Postcard of fishing vessels at the Portland Dock, Maine, c. 1908.

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Six Paintings of New England Spring

Artists have probably created far fewer New England spring paintings than of any of the three other seasons. After all, New England has so little spring. The cold gray months morph into mud season and then black fly season. And then, suddenly, it’s the Fourth of July and summer.

And yet New England’s artists have managed to capture what is appealing about the brief New England spring. Maple sugaring. Apple blossoms. Bird’s nests. Brilliant, clear light on sunny days. Romantic moonlit nights.

So here are six paintings of New England spring, one in each state.

New England Spring by Moonlight

May Night by Willard Metcalf. National Gallery of Art.

Willard Metcalf painted May Night, one of his best works, while at the Old Lyme artist colony in Connecticut.

Metcalf was born into a working class family in Lowell, Mass., in 1858. He began painting at 16 and opened a studio in Boston at 18. Early success allowed him to study in Europe for five years.

He then moved around the Northeast, teaching and painting portraits and illustrations. Then he moved to Gloucester, Mass., and devoted himself to landscape painting. His friend Childe Hassam encouraged him to join the Old Lyme artist colony, where he could find high thinking and low living.

May Night depicts the home of Miss Florence Griswold, who founded the Old Lyme colony. In 1907, Metcalf won the Corcoran gold medal for it, along with a $3,000 purchase price. But Old Lyme probably lost its charm for him when his wife ran off with one of his students that year. The painting now belongs to the National Gallery of Art.

Metcalf then spent time at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, where he painted many landscapes of the changing seasons. One critic called him “the poet laureate of the New England hills.”

The Corcoran Gallery held a major exhibition of his work in 1925, the year he died of a heart attack at age 66.

Spring on a Farm

Spring, by Winslow Homer. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Winslow Homer, born in Boston, Mass., in 1837, learned watercolor at his mother’s knee. He apprenticed to a lithographer for a few years, but hated it. For the next 20 years he illustrated life in Boston and rural New England as well as battlefield scenes during the Civil War.

He then moved to New York, but traveled frequently, painting all the way. In the spring of 1878 he produced 50 watercolors, admired for their fluidity and sparkle. Spring, painted on a farm, is one of them.

Homer eventually grew reclusive around 1880. His family owned an estate on Prout’s Neck in Maine, and Homer moved into the carriage house. He painted the sea in Maine, traveling to the Caribbean during the winter and sometimes to the Adirondacks.

Though he also painted in oil, Winslow Homer knew he’d done something transcendent with his watercolors.

“You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors,” Homer once said. He hung some of his exquisite watercolors on the walls of the rental cottages. Now they’re in museums or private collections. His 1878 watercolor Spring belongs to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

‘As if the year were all springtime’

Still Life with Robin’s Nest by Fidelia Bridges. Private Collection.

Fidelia Bridges, born in 1834, was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. She only painted birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility.

She ‘paints as if the year were all springtime,’ wrote one critic.

Bridges was often lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.

Fidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Her parents’ death when she was 15 impoverished her family, but wealthy patrons allowed her to study art in Philadelphia and Europe.

She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., along the Housatonic River. She also sold her work to Louis Prang, who invented the American Christmas card in Boston. For a time she worked as governess for Mark Twain’s children.

Girl on Rock

Spring by Maxfield Parrish. Illustration for Life magazine, 1922 Easter edition

The landscape of Vermont and New Hampshire inspired Maxfield Parrish in 1922 to create lush, romantic paintings like Spring.

Parrish belonged to the Cornish Art Colony from 1898, when he and his wife built a house in Plainfield, N.H. He downplayed his own abilities, calling himself “commonplace” and “a mechanic.”

He used an ancient technique to paint, starting with a monochrome underpainting and then layering transparent glazes. It made him rich and famous. His 1922 painting Daybreak was the most popular art print of the 20^th century, appearing in one out of every four households.

His painting Spring appeared as the Easter cover art for Life magazine April 6, 1922. Parrish then got sick of painting lissome nymphs in outdoor settings. No more girls on rocks, he told the Associated Press in 1931. From then until his death in 1960 he abandoned illustration and painted landscapes.

Apple Trees in a Meadow

Apple Trees in a Meadow by Edward Bannister. High Museum

Edward Bannister stunned the judges of the art competition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. When he came to receive his gold medal, they were astonished to discover they’d awarded it to an African American.

After winning the prize he prospered as an artist, working out of his studio in Providence, R.I.

Bannister credited his wife, Christiana, with everything he accomplished. She ran several hair salons and told him to devote himself to his painting. Once his paintings started to sell, they spent summers in a cottage on Narragansett Bay. He often painted en plein air.

In 1890, Bannister painted Apple Trees in a Meadow, a familiar sight during the New England spring.

Bannister died in 1901, and his work fell into obscurity. He has since been rediscovered. Apple Trees in a Meadow now belongs to the High Museum in Atlanta.

New England Spring, Vermont Style

American Forest Scene–Maple Sugaring by Arthur Tait

You may well recognize this lithograph as a Currier and Ives, originally sold as a cheap and popular print but now quite collectible.

Nathaniel Currier started off in Boston but eventually moved to New York. Once he hit on the formula of dramatic scenes of newsworthy events, he was on his way. He teamed up with James Merritt Ives and they expanded into scenes of city life, portraits, politics, boats and landscapes.

The firm made prints from the work of the most celebrated artists of the day: Eastman Johnson, George Inness and Thomas Nast. It also employed its own artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who specialized in sporting scenes.

New England winter scenes proved especially popular. Snow, however, is not unknown during a New England spring.

Arthur Tait, a British-American artist, painted American Forest Scene—Maple Sugaring. Though he lived in New York, we’re choosing to call this a Vermont scene, as it produces more maple syrup than any other state.

Currier and Ives lasted 72 years before going out of business.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Spring by Parrish, Plum Leaves via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0; Robin’s Nest (1863, private collection) public domain PD-US.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

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

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

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

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

December Start

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

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

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

January Storms

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

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

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

Fire and Ice

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

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

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

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

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

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

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

10 Days in January

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect Tempest

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

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

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

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

Drifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Freeze

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frozen

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

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

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

Freshets

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

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

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

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

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

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

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

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

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

This story updated in 2022.

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