by Owen J. Hurd
I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
The only other official change to the holiday came in 1941, when Congress moved the observance day from the last Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday in November, thereby lengthening the Christmas shopping season.
LOOSE ENDS
As governor, William Bradford subsequently managed the relations with Indians and oversaw the financial, military, and legal management of the settlement. He wrote a detailed account of his life and times called Of Plymouth Plantation.
As one of the leaders in the Plymouth community, Edward Winslow held various offices, including governor. Winslow returned to England on several occasions to represent the colony’s interests. Later in life, on an expedition to the West Indies, he died of some unknown disease and was buried at sea.
Miles Standish continued to provide his military services to the colony. He later led a military expedition to Penobscot, but failed to reclaim a trading post from the French.
John Billington was one of Plymouth’s more persistent troublemakers, often siding with the colony’s disaffected rabble-rousers. He later killed a man in a dispute over hunting rights and was executed by order of Governor Bradford.
Though not one of the religious Separatists, John Alden was one of the sailors aboard the Mayflower who decided to stay on at Plymouth colony. He was also one of the signatories of the Mayflower Compact. Alden’s son, also named John, would later be accused in the Salem witch trials. Awaiting trial, he escaped from jail and fled; he returned after the fervor died down and was acquitted.
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials stand as one of our nation’s most dramatic examples of the power of fear and paranoia. The witch hunt, started in January 1692 by two adolescent girls, Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Parris, swiftly turned neighbors and friends against each other. Before the year was over, nineteen men and women were hung at the public gallows. Another man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under a pile of heavy rocks, a procedure intended to elicit a plea.
Finally, growing doubts about the quality of the evidence against the defendants caused authorities to cancel future executions and ultimately free all remaining prisoners. Over the following five years, many involved in the proceedings began to entertain serious misgivings about what had taken place. One particularly guilt-stricken individual was Samuel Sewall, one of the magistrates who served on the special court presiding over the witch trials. Clearly susceptible to the influence of portents and omens, Sewall and his family suffered a number of personal tragedies in the years after the trials. Two of his young children died—one after suffering “fits” eerily reminiscent of the ones experienced by the young accusers. A third child was delivered stillborn. Sewall’s house caught fire on one occasion and was bombarded by a violent hailstorm another.
The wife of Cotton Mather, a minister whose writings had stoked witchcraft paranoia, gave birth to a baby mysteriously unendowed with an anus. The deformed child died within days. A former colleague on the witch trial court dropped dead one afternoon for no apparent reason. An outbreak of contagious disease claimed thousands of lives. Indians massacred ninety people in New Hampshire.
If the Puritans were beginning to suspect that God might be punishing them for the witch trials, the clincher came in the form of a plague of locusts, or some sort of insect infestation that devastated the season’s pea crop.
Clearly something had to be done. The general court of Massachusetts issued an order for a day of fasting on January 14, 1697. Citizens were implored to reflect on “the late tragedy raised amongst us by Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of God.” Sewall, judging himself acutely responsible for the tragedy, issued the following public apology, read aloud at his church:
Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the guilt contracted, upon the opening of the late Commission of Oyer & Terminer at Salem…he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame & shame of it, asking pardon of men, and especially desiring prayers that God who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin, and all other his sins.
It was an astoundingly bold act of contrition. Unlike others who begged forgiveness for their roles in the tragedy, Sewall did not offer any excuses or seek to assign blame to supernatural forces. A statement signed by members of the jury, by contrast, suggested that it wasn’t all their fault.
“We fear we have been instrumental,” they said, “with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this people of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood.” In other words, the devil made me do it. In light of this exculpatory evidence, they went on, “we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living sufferers, as being then under a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with, and not experienced in, matters of that nature.”
Abigail Williams, one of the original child accusers, finally came clean nine years after the trials. Her apology suggested that her guilt should be mitigated by her youth, which made it easier to make her “an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons.”
Perhaps Sewall’s forthrightness and honesty foreshadowed his future acts of courage. From this point on, Sewall never shrunk from his pursuit of justice, no matter how unpopular the cause. His commitment to justice is best illustrated by his support of two downtrodden peoples: the Indians and blacks.
Despite all that had transpired regarding the witch trials, Sewall foresaw an exalted future for America, and he was convinced that the quality of that future depended on how the colonists treated the Native Americans. Stealing their land and exterminating them would merely invite God’s wrath. Sewall sought to Christianize and educate the Indians (donating land and money to build schools and pay for their education), but he also wanted to help them preserve their unique culture on their own lands. He was instrumental in establishing an Indian settlement on Martha’s Vineyard.
Sewall was also very sympathetic to black slaves living in New England, far in advance of any organized abolitionist movement. He published a pamphlet arguing for the outlawing of slavery, even if he believed that “they can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly families, to the peopling of the land.” Sewall criticized the act of “taking Negros out of Africa, and selling of them here,” thereby separating “men from their country, husbands from their wives, parents from their children.”
Sewall once persuaded two reluctant slave owners to permit a marriage between their respective slaves, negotiating the terms and presiding over the ceremony. In a separate court dispute, Sewall granted another slave his freedom from a master who had promised to liberate him after an agreed-upon term of servitude but later reneged on the deal. The farsighted Puritan judge even opposed a law prohibiting miscegenation and submitted an amicus brief in support of a slave murdered by his master, arguing:
The poorest boys and girls within this province, such as are of the lowest condition; whether they be English, or Indians, or Ethiopians, they have the same right to religion and life, that the richest heirs have. And they who go about attempting to deprive them of this right, they attempt the bombarding of HEAVEN: and the shells they throw, will fall down upon their own heads.
Not all of Sewall’s moral crusades were as dignified. He once lobbied to replace the names of the days of the week—because of their “pagan” origins—with numbers. He also never missed an opportunity to speak out against the wearing of periwigs, presumably because they were a sign of vanity.
One of the judges who flatly r
efused to admit error or apologize for his role in the Salem witch trials was John Hathorne. As chief justice of the court in charge of these trials, Hathorne took on the role of chief judge and prosecutor, berating defendants and passing harsh sentences despite flimsy evidence. His grandson Nathaniel Hawthorne (some say he added the W to distinguish himself from his repulsive ancestor) of course wrote several short stories and a novel, The Scarlet Letter, denigrating the puritanical excesses of earlier generations.
Ironically, one of the real-life sources for the story of Hester Prynne may have come from a court case heard by Samuel Sewall in 1721. A woman named Jemima Colefix apparently committed adultery. Found guilty, Colefix was sentenced to a public display of shame, followed by a whipping. Finally, she was obligated to “forever hereafter wear a capital A of two inches long and proportional bigness cut out in cloth of contrary color to her clothes and sewed upon her upper garment on her back in open view.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
OUR nation’s most significant historical figures often seem to hang suspended in time, especially when their fame is so closely associated with a single event. Paul Revere is one such figure, known almost exclusively for his famous midnight ride. Some may know that he was also a noted silversmith, but few are aware of his role in the Boston Tea Party (before his ride) or about his subsequently disappointing military career. The same goes for many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—other than the marquee names, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. It turns out that this bold act of defiance had real and sometimes tragic consequences for many of the signers.
Paul Revere, After the Midnight Ride
Everybody knows the story of Paul Revere and his famous midnight ride: the lanterns in the church steeple (one if by land, two if by sea), Revere dashing horseback across the New England countryside shouting, “The British are coming!” Never mind that much of this story is the product of folklore and poetic license. More about that later.
But what happened to Paul Revere after the midnight ride?
Did he distinguish himself on the battlefield during the American Revolution? Did he sign the Declaration of Independence or help write the Constitution? Not exactly, no, and no.
It was three o’clock in the morning on April 19, 1775, and Paul Revere had been up all night—a harrowing night in which he had ridden from Charlestown, just across the river from Boston, to Lexington, where he warned John Hancock and Sam Adams that British soldiers were on their way to arrest them. Dodging British patrols he also made it halfway to Concord, where he was supposed to deliver the message that Redcoats were on their way to seize hidden caches of arms and ammunition. Unfortunately, he and two other riders, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott, were captured by patrols on the road to Concord. Dawes and Prescott made a daring escape, leaving Revere behind with his captors. Prescott made it to Concord, fulfilling Revere’s mission for him. Stranded in the countryside by the Brits—who also took his horse—Revere walked back to Lexington.
Several hours later, when the shot heard round the world rang out in Lexington, Revere was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was occupied with hiding a trunk containing John Hancock’s personal papers and correspondence. As the Redcoats arrived in town, Revere was helping Hancock’s secretary drag the cumbersome trunk into the surrounding woods. Upon his return to Lexington Common, he would have found eight of his comrades mortally wounded. There’s no record that Revere participated in any of the revolution’s initial battles. Maybe he finally gave in to exhaustion and slept through it all.
Although many of Revere’s Boston patriots participated in the Battle of Bunker Hill two months later, there’s no indication that Revere fought alongside them. As the siege of Boston wore on for the better part of a year, Revere jockeyed for a military commission in the Continental Army, but he was passed over time and again. Instead he was relegated to a series of noncombat duties. He was hired to print currency to help finance the Revolution. Next Revere was recruited to design and oversee the construction of a gunpowder mill in Acton, Massachusetts. After the British ultimately evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, General George Washington prevailed upon Revere to repair cannons disabled by the retreating British and to salvage cannons from an enemy ship wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod.
Revere’s first military commission finally came in April, but he was given the relatively lowly rank of major, in the Massachusetts militia—a notch down from the Continental Army. Revere was later promoted to lieutenant colonel and placed in command of Fort William on nearby Castle Island. Without any threat of British attack, he had only a few occasions to fire his cannons, usually in salute to allied ships passing in or out of Boston Harbor or to mark annual Fourth of July celebrations. The only ships he ever fired his cannons at belonged to the American Navy—in an effort to retrieve deserters who were attempting to escape on privateers.
Then, on June 26, 1779, Revere got the chance he’d been waiting for. British ships had recently deposited seven hundred soldiers on a peninsula in Penobscot Bay (modern-day Castine, Maine). A month later, the Americans countered with about one thousand ground troops, including an artillery regiment under Revere’s command. Nothing really happened for several weeks as American Navy Commodore Dudley Saltonstall and Army General Solomon Lovell bickered over which military branch should lead the attack.
Meanwhile, a reinforcement of British warships arrived in Penobscot Bay and chased Saltonstall’s flotilla up the Penobscot River, where several American ships ran aground and were besieged by the enemy or set afire by retreating American forces. In the confusion, Revere’s men scrambled onto different boats heading upstream or sought safety in the nearby woods. By the time Revere tracked down the majority of his men four days later, the entire naval fleet was lost and the American forces were captured, killed, or scattered. The Americans lost nearly five hundred soldiers—the British only seventy.
Revere’s behavior during the hectic retreat was oddly unheroic. At one point Brigadier General Peleg Wadsworth had attempted to commandeer a small boat from Lieutenant Colonel Revere in order to evacuate the crew of an imperiled ship. Despite being outranked, Revere refused to turn over the vessel, as it contained “all his private baggage.”
Next, Revere ignored Lovell’s orders to retrieve several cannons from a nearby island. The way he saw it, the Penobscot expedition was essentially over, so Revere no longer considered himself under Lovell’s command.
Saltonstall absorbed most of the blame for the fiasco, but Revere also found himself in hot water. Wadsworth formally charged Revere with disobeying the orders of a superior officer. Revere was also accused of “unsoldier-like behavior tending to cowardice.” In February 1782, several months after Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, a military court acquitted Revere of all charges, deeming that he stood “with equal honor as the other officers in the same expedition”—a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.
As Boston returned to postwar normalcy, Paul Revere resumed his silversmith business, specializing in tableware, bowls, tankards, serving trays, and pitchers. To this day many private collectors and public institutions covet silverworks bearing the Revere touchmark—some valued at upward of $750,000.
Eventually, Revere branched into other metals. By the 1790s he was New England’s most sought-after manufacturer of iron and copper church bells. Revere’s foundry provided bells to more than three hundred customers and also produced sheets of copper used to clad military ships, such as the Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides.”
Reaching the age of eighty-three, Revere outlived two wives and eleven of his sixteen children. He also outlasted the other two riders who joined him on the midnight ride. William Dawes, who fought at Bunker Hill and worked as a commissary in the Continental Army, died in 1799 at the age of fifty-three. Dr. Samuel Prescott fared worse. A sailor in the American Revolution, he was captured by the British and died a wretch
ed prisoner of war in 1777.
Curiously, when Paul Revere died, on May 10, 1818, none of his obituaries even mentioned the midnight ride. So why does nearly every American remember it now? And why is much of what we remember about it wrong? Forty-three years after Revere’s death and eighty-five years after the famous ride, Paul Revere was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—incidentally, a grandson of Revere’s nemesis, General Peleg Wadsworth.
Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” first published in the Atlantic in January 1861, famously begins:
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
A Northern poet sympathetic to the Union cause, Longfellow had sought a subject with which he could draw parallels between the country’s Founding Fathers and the cause of preserving the Union. He found it in Colonel Revere, who provided Longfellow with a symbol of courage and action. Another factor in Revere’s favor: unlike other more prominent revolutionaries, he had never owned slaves.
Longfellow’s imaginative account of these events may have provided the Union cause with a rousing call to arms. But it also succeeded in coating the Boston patriot in a mythical patina that, to this day, obscures Revere’s true historical significance. Scholars have thoroughly debunked many of the inaccuracies over the years, pointing out that Revere was not the solitary rider, that the lanterns in the Old North Church steeple were signals not to him but from him to other messengers, and that Revere failed to carry the alarm all the way from Boston to Lexington to Concord.
It didn’t matter to Longfellow that he got so many details wrong. Faced with the urgent and real threat of secession, the poet blithely sacrificed historical accuracy on the altar of national preservation.