We know nothing about the groom except that he was reported to be “as fit and agreeable husband as the place would afford” (which, of course, was intended to be a little joke about the rough character of Bermuda planters). Surprisingly, we have slightly more information about the bride. We know that she was a Native woman from the Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia (or Tsenacomoco) who travelled to London in 1616 as part of Pocahontas’s retinue and that after her Christian baptism she took the name Elizabeth. No record of her prior name(s) exists. This marriage between a Powhatan woman and an English man is one of the few documented cases of its kind in the 17^th century-Atlantic world. Of course, Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe was the most famous union between a Native Virginian and an Englishmen.

In the first quarter of the 17^th century, the Virginia Company of London experimented with the potential of Anglo-Powhatan marriages to foster peace, spread Christianity, and increase English territorial claims. Intercultural marriage had long been employed by imperial powers in their attempts to establish peace and dependency among colonized people. In this way, marriage served as a technology of imperialism by creating kinship relations and obligations between colonizer and colonized. In the Spanish colonies to the south, for example, the mixed-race offspring of white men and Indigenous women sometimes became powerful leaders who helped to translate, both literally and figuratively, the cultural divide between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. For the VCOL, their support of the marriages of Pocahontas and later Elizabeth, demonstrates both the financial precarity of the company and its ambitions to “civilize,” pacify, and profit from Virginia.

Elizabeth and Mary

When Pocahontas arrived in London in 1616, she had at least two Powhatan women in her retinue who were referred to in English as Mary and Elizabeth. It is possible that there were other Native women in the entourage, including Matachanna (who was probably Pocahontas’s half-sister and Uttamatomakkin’s wife).

There is very little concrete information about Mary and Elizabeth, or indeed most of the Indigenous retinue aside from Pocahontas and her brother-in-law and chief priest Uttamatomakkin (Tomocomo). We know that the party stayed at the Belle Sauvage Inn for most of their time in London.

We don’t know their ages, although most assume that they were fairly young given that they seemed to have been unmarried. They were described as “maydes” and “virgins” in VCOL sources which implies that they were young and unwed. It is possible that they could have been previously married, as indeed Pocahontas was before her marriage to Rolfe. But it served VCOL interests to describe them as young and pure so that they might attract husbands quickly. We don’t know Mary and Elizabeth’s relationship to Pocahontas or why they were chosen to accompany her. English records suggest that Mary and Elizabeth were well connected to powerful people in Tsenacomoco, but we also know that colonial powers often strategically exaggerated or misunderstood power dynamics and kinship relations among Indigenous people. We also don’t know if the pair had learned any English before sailing across the Atlantic.

Let me briefly sum up what we do know for certain: When the Rolfes began the journey back to Virginia in 1617, Pocahontas was very ill and died before the ship made it to the open sea. She was buried in a small church in Gravesend, a little less than thirty miles east of central London. At least four Indigenous people, including the Rolfes’ son Thomas, were also sick and stayed behind in London. One of them was likely a young man who was christened Georgius Thorpe after then Virginia Company of London representative, George Thorpe, who had taken in the lad. Georgius was baptized in 1619 and died shortly thereafter. In 1620, George Thorpe was put in charge of a project to build a school and college for Native Americans in Henricus. The other two Native Virginians who stayed behind were Mary and Elizabeth. 

Mary was sent to live with a textile merchant on Cheapside St. in London and likely worked as a servant. Elizabeth lived with a man called Captain Maddison, likely the early Jamestown resident and VCOL loyalist Isaac Maddison, although the timing of his arrival in London is a little difficult to pin down. Mary became too ill to continue in her role as a servant and in the spring of 1620 she relocated to the home of the Reverend William Gouge in Blackfriars. The Virginia Company of London paid for the upkeep of both women, although they were not always timely in issuing their payments. Sir William Throckmorton, cousin to George Thorpe, covered Mary’s medical expenses when the company money failed to show.

By the autumn of 1620, the Virginia Company attempted to secure apprenticeships for both women. They hoped that by spending a bit of extra money to pay for their training now, the women would soon be set up to support themselves. It doesn’t seem that this apprenticeship scheme worked out as the company made a different decision to ease the burden of paying for their upkeep in the summer of 1621–sending them to Bermuda to be married off to white planters there. By this time, Mary and Elizabeth had been in London for five years. They surely spoke English and there is evidence that they could also read and write in the language.

At first glance this seems like a strange decision. These two women had no ties to Bermuda, which was a land without a pre-existing indigenous population. But if we consider the actions of the company in light of their desire to send marriageable women to their colonies, then it makes a certain kind of sense. Why continue to pay for their upkeep in London, when the financial responsibility for their well-being could be shifted onto their English husbands? Additionally, just as the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe was used as propaganda to garner support for their overseas ventures, the company may have wanted the marriages of Mary and Elizabeth to fill in the void left by Pocahontas’s death.

Mary and Elizabeth sailed to Bermuda in July of 1621 aboard the 120-tonne ship the James along with seventy-eight other passengers. They were outfitted quite handsomely with clothing, bedding, toiletries, food and drink plus a Bible and a psalter to share. The company also set aside funds to provide each woman with one servant boy apiece. Curiously, when they set sail, they each had two servant boys instead of the one promised in company documents. These four servant boys are never named or referred to again. One of the women, likely Mary, died during the crossing; What became of her goods and servants is not noted. The cost of transporting and outfitting the women came to roughly seventy-one pounds, which did not include the amount that the VCOL had paid for their upkeep from 1617-1621.

In other contexts, the company was not particularly interested in fostering marriages between white men and Indigenous women. While the company did support the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas, there were strategic and political reasons for doing so, particularly given Pocahontas’s close relationship with Powhatan and the desire to secure a lasting peace in the region. Prior to the Rolfes’ marriage, the VCOL was invested in a strategy of kidnapping or acquiring Indigenous youths who could later serve as translators and representatives for company interests in Indian country. With the marriage of Pocahontas and Rolfe, the company was able to pursue a long-term goal of building a school and a college to educate Powhatan people in English ways. Before they set sail to return to Virginia, Sir Edwin Sandys gave the Rolfes one hundred pounds of the company’s money to lay the groundwork for the school.

Unfortunately, Pocahontas’s untimely death put the whole scheme in jeopardy. There was fear in the VCOL that Pocahontas’s death might have catastrophic ripple effects in Virginia and erode the very precarious peace that predominated until March of 1622. So, one possible explanation for the company’s decision to send Mary and Elizabeth to Bermuda was the hope that they would eventually return to Virginia and help to strengthen English-Powhatan relations and promote the school and college. This is borne out by Bermuda Governor Nathaniel Butler’s insistence that he hoped the wedding guests would “carry a good testimony with them of the welfare and plenty” of the Bermuda plantations, but also that

the kindred and freindes of the Virginian brides, who wer prime commandours and not lesse than Viceroyes among the nearest neighbouringe Indians to the English colony ther, might receiue a certaine knowledge of the well being of their kinds woman, and by the good respect and kind vsage showed vnto her among the English, be encouraged both to continue to augment the former freindshyp, and to become Christians themselues: to which ende also, the Gouernour wrote letters of aduice to the Gouernour in Virginia, and caused the mayde herselfe likelwise to doe as much to her brother, who, by her fathers late death, had succeeded in all his royalties and commande

This is the only evidence we have of Elizabeth’s literacy. Butler also seems to imply that Elizabeth and/or Mary were from locally powerful families in Virginia. In another passage, Butler indicates that the hope is for the women and their husbands to eventually be transported “home to their sauvage parents in Virginia (who wer ther no less that petie kings), and so be happely a means of their conuersion.” It seems likely, then, that Elizabeth and Mary were related to local werowances or village chiefs who served under Powhatan, making them something akin to aristocrats, but not a “princess” like Pocahontas. Given that they worked in trades during their time in London, something that Pocahontas would never have been expected to do, they were clearly of lesser status than her.  

The pragmatic reason that the Virginia Company of London sent these women to Bermuda was, of course, financial. The company was losing money and could no longer afford to pay for Mary and Elizabeth’s upkeep. However, given the extent of the dowries provided for the women by the Virginia Company, they were willing to shell out a substantial sum at the outset to get these women off their payroll. A company document from June 11, 1621, demonstrates that William Webb, who was paying for Mary’s upkeep, asked the company if “some course might be taken that the two Indian Maydes might be disposed of to free the company of the weeklie charge that now they are at for the keeping of them.” The company decided to send them to Bermuda but pushed off the details until the next meeting.  

On June 13 of 1621, about a month before the ship left for Bermuda, a VCOL court issued a directive authorizing their transfer to Bermuda. It read:

Itt being referred to this Courte to direct some course for the dispose of two Indian maydes having byne a long time verie chargeable to ye company itt is now ordered that they shalbe furnished and sent to the Summer Ilands [Bermuda] whether they were willing to go wiervantervante apeec towards there preferm[en]t in marriage with such as shall accept of them with that means—with especiall dyreccon to the Gou’nor & Counsell there for the carefull bestoyinge of them.

The phrase “whether they were willing to go with one servante apeec” appears to indicate that Mary and Elizabeth had a say in their destiny, but it could just as easily mean the opposite. From this brief passage, we cannot be sure if they were consulted or if they agreed to go.

The Politics of Gender and Marriage in Virginia

Women’s roles in Tsenacomoco were complex and varied heavily depending upon the relative status of the woman and her maternal family line in addition to localized traditions. Women and men had parallel responsibilities with women taking the lead on household and most agricultural labor. Men were expected to hunt and participate in war parties. Powhatan society was not patriarchal in the modern sense: women were able to inherit chieftainships, but they did so rarely. The matrilineality of most Virginia tribes meant that power was inherited through the maternal line, but maternal male relatives were prioritized first before female relatives. So, for example, when a male werowance died, the position would typically be inherited by the closest male relative on the mother’s side. Englishmen often failed to understand these nuances of Indigenous power structures.

Most marriages in the Powhatan Confederacy were entered into voluntarily by both parties, but marrying for political reasons was quite common among the powerful. Powhatan himself had multiple wives, but this seems to have been uncommon outside of the highest status individuals. His polygamist household was always changing and growing; as the Confederacy acquired new allies and influence, Powhatan would marry a woman from these new communities. She would live among his household until she became pregnant and returned to her natal village. The child stayed with the mother for the first few years of their life but then moved to Powhatan’s household for their formative years. The mother was free to remarry after this point. Unlike English marriages, there was more flexibility, both in terms of permanency and sexual fidelity, among Viginia Native peoples. Women were eligible for marriage soon after puberty. Perhaps Elizabeth viewed her marriage to an Englishman in Bermuda as political and thus temporary.

Although men were in charge of formal diplomacy, women played key roles in local hospitality when English visitors arrived. It was quite common for English visitors to be offered a female bedfellow. This would not have been considered shameful, as sex was understood to be a key experience in developing stable friendships and alliances with other communities. As the daughters of werowances, Mary and Elizabeth likely would have been expected to marry for the benefit of their community.

We do not know what happened to Elizabeth after her marriage in Bermuda. There is simply no evidence to reveal if she ever returned to Virginia or if her marriage lasted. From the perspective of the VCOL these attempts to promote Powhatan-English marriages to solidify their power in Tsenacomoco came to naught. Pocahontas and Elizabeth were expected to birth a new generation of imperial citizens who would sing the praises of English power and culture but they failed to do so. Marriages between English men and elite Native women had the potential to advance English territorial claims, to grow their influence among Indigenous leaders, and to help spread Christianity. By employing marriage as a technology of imperialism, the Virginia Company hoped to turn its struggling overseas colonies into stable, productive English communities. When the promised peace didn’t come, the VCOL quickly pivoted in 1621 to sending willing white women to Jamestown as potential brides. This plan came with a greater likelihood of growing a stable, and decidedly English and Christian, population, in the Chesapeake.

Further reading:

Butler, Nathaniel. The Historye of the Bermudaes or Summer Isles, Edited by General Sir J. Henry Lefoy. London: Hakluyt Society, 1882.

Clausen, Christopher. “Between Two Worlds: The Familiar Story of Pocahontas Was Mirrored by That of a Young Englishman given as a Hostage to Her Father.” The American Scholar 76, no. 3 (2007): 80-90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41221734.

Kingsbury, Susan Myra ed. The Records of the Virginia Company of London, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019.

Potter, Jennifer. The Jamestown Brides: The Story of England’s ‘Maids for Virginia.’ New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Rountree, Helen. Powhatan, Pocahontas, and Opechancanough. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Townsend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Vaughn, Alden T, “Powhatans Abroad: Virginia Indians in England,” in Envisioning and English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

 

This article originally appeared in July 2026. 

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Kelly L. Watson, PhD is the Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at West Virginia University. Her research focuses on the historical intersections of gender, indigeneity, and colonialism in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Her book Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World was published by NYU Press in 2015.

As students of early American life preparing to commemorate America’s 250th year of independence, what should we know and what might we do? This essay looks closely at two examples–one from public history and one from public education–of this administration’s revanchist executive orders in action as well as efforts to blunt their force. Channeling the spirit of previous generations, citizens are showing up and pushing back in big and small ways, sometimes with success. We will conclude by sharing resources on teaching and organizing wherever you find yourselves on July 4, 2026.

“Under absolute Despotism”: History by Executive Order

In just sixteen months in office, Trump has issued a flood of 258 distinct executive orders. To put this number in perspective, according to the data collected by The American Presidency Project this number already exceeds Trump’s total in his first term (by thirty-eight), the total number issued by Biden during his entire presidency (by ninety-six), and almost matches the sum issued by both Obama (276) and George W. Bush (291) across each of their eight years in office. Court challenges to Trump’s executive orders have already overturned at least nine of his missives, and ongoing litigations have either temporarily or permanently blocked over one hundred more.  

The sheer volume of Trump’s executive orders exceeds the capacity to close read them, which may be part of the aim of their frequency. Many of these orders have their origins rooted in the agenda of Project 2025 and work hand in glove to advance the aims of that revisionist schema. One executive order in particular has far reaching implications for both the teaching of American history at any educational level and for how publicly-funded sites and museums are allowed to convey information about America’s past to the public. This order, issued on March 27, 2025, is, perhaps, more familiar to us by its insidious title: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It moves to essentially outlaw what it frames as “woke” history, taking aim at public memory, nationally-funded museums, and historic sites. From its very opening line, Exec. Order 14253 syntactically excludes anyone who disagrees with everything from its definition of truth to its definition of “Americans.” It reads, “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Full of far-right dog whistles, Exec. Order 14253 sets public trusts in its crosshairs, as the directive attacks the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the pending Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. The same order also calls for the restitution of Confederate memorials. As David Waldstreicher has poignantly observed, “Erasing history at the Smithsonian and the National Parks has become a bureaucratic priority” and the weaponization of DOGE cuts and executive orders are helping to achieve it. Similarly, Vincent Brown has argued that not only has “this administration shown a commitment to rolling back generations of halting progress towards racial equality,” but it increasingly moves to silence any and all “perspectives that emerge out of a history of enslavement, impoverishment, and racial violence.” The crisis we face at the moment is not the second coming of the culture wars of the late twentieth century, but a uniquely twenty-first century war on public culture, one that seeks to codify the injunction “You Will Not Replace Us,” repugnantly chanted in front of a Jefferson statue at the University of Virginia campus in 2017.

Exec. Order 14243 is but one salvo out of many aimed at defunding and dismantling public institutions and erecting white nationalist monoliths—both literal and figurative. In Exec. Order 14190, for example, Trump delivered on a campaign promise to “end radical indoctrination” in American schools, claiming that “identity politics” had infected the teaching of history and was hurting (white) children’s feelings. He also reinstated two first-term executive orders focused on criminalizing the vandalism of monuments and rolling back the renaming and removal efforts that followed the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. As part of America 250, the “National Garden of American Heroes” will be built with money partially seized from the illegal mass cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants and programs caught in the AI-driven dragnet of “woke” keywords. This administration knows that federal control over certain narratives and icons of American history makes other measures—like the assault on citizenship status—all the easier to justify. Patriotism is a mighty cudgel in the hands of a despot.

This administration also created Freedom250 which it charged with “the delivery of the President’s national signature events” for the semiquincentennial. This task force works independently of America250 (a bipartisan commission established by Congress in 2016) which had previously been in charge of federal plans for the anniversary. Understanding their fiduciary control of historic sites as carte blanche permission to dictate the content of public history, the Trump administration has moved to install celebratory narratives which align with its narrow vision of the Revolution. The accomplishments of the Revolution are not up for debate, they insist; discussing the limits of enfranchisement and the narrow definition of American liberty are literally labeled “insane.” The administration slouches towards the semiquincentennial anniversary as if their powers of taxation liberate them from accountability. In place of participatory debate and contestation, they conceive of the public sphere as governable by authoritarian fiat.

“A History of repeated injuries”: Slavery at the President’s House

Ground zero for the battle over public history has been a somewhat minor portion of Independence National Park in Philadelphia. Commonly referred to as the President’s House, this site sits a block north of Independence Hall and mere footsteps from the entrance to the modern building housing the Liberty Bell. Composed of several free-standing brick walls, the modern version of the President’s House was erected in 2010 to recreate the footprint of the dwelling in which George Washington resided from 1790 to 1797 while serving as the first U.S. President. This skeletal structure was originally intended to solemnize Washington’s time in Philadelphia. Yet, almost immediately after its design was announced local activists began lobbying for recognition of the nine enslaved people that Washington brought from Mount Vernon to run what was essentially the first White House. The work of these activists resulted in a reconceptualization of the design plans to include the emplacement of thirty-four historical markers detailing the lives of Oney Judge (also known as Ona), Moll, Austin, Hercules Poesy, Richmond, Giles, Paris, Christopher Sheels, and Joe Richardson, all of whom were held in bondage (against the intentions, if not the absolute letter, of Pennsylvania’s 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery ).

The disinterring of the histories of enslavement at the President’s House was a public good, a long overdue acknowledgment of a willfully suppressed facet of the history of the early American Republic. No one living in Philadelphia in the 1790s, no one who visited Washington’s residence during his tenure as President, would have been surprised that he was an enslaver. The willful neglect of this history has its own history, one the efforts of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in the middle of the nineteenth century to transform Washington into a yeoman farmer in order to promote him as a symbol of national unity. Disassociating Washington from connections to enslavement in the popular imagination was a way to cast him as a figure of national cohesion, especially as the divisions leading to the Civil War compounded. The early twenty-first century efforts to install memorials to the lives of Oney Judge, Moll, Austin, Hercules Poesy, Richmond, Giles, Paris, Christopher Sheels, and Joe Richardson were not speculative enterprises; rather, they were a return to a commonplace public knowledge of the Revolutionary Era. The creation of this commemoration offered the public a chance to move past obscuring mythic sentiments and return to the realities of Washington’s actual public and personal histories.

In the words of Philadelphia journalist David Topel, the signs crafted in 2010 to acknowledge the lives of these nine people “did not speculate or editorialize;” rather they “documented” and “named,” effectively recognizing that enslavement resided “at the heart of the nation’s founding contradictions” without moving to condemn or seek restitution. These signs noted the existence of enslavement but stopped short of condemning enslavers or from pointing out the hypocrisy of Washington or the other Founders. Yet even this anodyne formation proved too complex and threatening to the overtly white supremacist versions of American origins held fast by the Trump administration. So, under the authority conjured by Executive Order 14253, the National Parks Service removed these historical markers from the President’s House  on January 22, 2026. Even the soberest, most whiggish form of reckoning with slavery was deemed too “revisionist” for an administration fully committed to only allowing a one-dimensional whitewashed history to be displayed for the semiquincentennial.  

These subversive deletions quickly spurred a renewed public activism, most notably by the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which was heavily involved in the original fight to publicly memorialize the lives of the nine Black people once forced to live and work at this site. Outraged at this desecration, they took their battle to the social media and to the streets, organizing countless rallies and press conferences. In cooperation with Avenging the Ancestors, the City of Philadelphia sued the Secretary of the Interior (as the head of the National Parks Service) and pressed for the immediate restoration of the commemorative panels. In a scorching decision, released on President’s Day, Judge Cynthia Rufe condemned these baseless removals and ordered an immediate restitution of the vacated panels. Comparing the Trump administration to George Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth,” Rufe opened her decision by noting that “this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.” Federally-funded public history should not, according to Rufe, have Big Brother’s motto “Ignorance is Strength” as its telos.

More insurgent responses included efforts by anonymous groups and individuals who ventured–even on the most frigid of January and February 2026 mornings–to the President’s House to decry the expunged memorials with a fulsome history from below. Many of these handwritten or printed-at-home signs foreshadowed Rufe’s scathing condemnation. More than one sign sought to resurface the personal histories of the nine enslaved people while others implored the public to “fight truth decay.” Still others more boldly sought to mark the white supremacy of these removals by posting signs adorned with such phrases as “white mischief.” Under pressure from the White House to keep these display boards empty, workers would seemingly remove these protest signs in the dead of night. In response, more than a few publicly-minded preservationists used sharpies to inscribe the history directly onto the derelict bulletin boards (until these, too, were removed), in effect to turn these now blanketed walls into sites of continuous political dissent.

One startling intervention took the form of an improvised political cartoon which fabulated Washington himself weighing in on this contemporary effacement. This satirical injunction plays off a mythic commonplace about Washington to stress the dishonesty of Trump’s attempts at whitewashing. Using Parson Weems’s famous fabrication of Washington’s unimpeachable honesty, the cartoon Washington confesses his role as enslaver to admonish the contemporary president for wanting Americans to ignore foundational realities. The irony of the second speech balloon further emphasizes how the invocation to “Make America Great Again” relies on a blatant embrace of historical amnesia. A powerful indictment of this executive order’s ambitions of erasure, this sharpie protest resurrects the most famous occupant of the President’s House as demanding that the public know about the lives of all the house’s residents because he cannot tell a lie.

While the plundering at the President’s House was not the first public rescripting ordered under the auspices of Exec. Order 14253, it has been (so far) the most overtly public. From attempting to remove the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Memorial to asserting more control over wall placards and installation themes in federally-funded museums, this administration has waged a war on public memory. And this is noteworthy because of how public heritage sites and museums have been slow (at best) to admit the violences and dehumanizing racial hierarchies so central to American foundations. Yet as Shevaun E. Watson and Cathy Rex demonstrate, “the American public claims to learn more about U.S. history” from “popular culture and leisure travel” than from academic research. And this fact should concern anyone interested in the realities of the past. Minor historical sites are, for Watson and Rex, often the grounds on which “the social construction of memory” about the meaning of such things as declaring independence are formed. As such, “the political stakes” of the “negotiated meanings of cultural inheritance” function as bellwethers of public memory, so even the most rudimentary recognitions of enslavement have a profound impact on public understandings of American formations.

The struggle to fully restore the desecrated historical markers at the President’s House continues, as the Trump administration has appealed Rufe’s decision and launched a new President’s House website which marginalizes the history of the nine people Washington enslaved while also seeking to cast Washington as a reluctant enslaver by comparing his personal beliefs on the issue to those of John Adams (who not only never enslaved anyone but was also among the most prominent opponents of enslavement among the Founders).  While this fight to preserve truth continues, we should also be moving to preserve this resistance to erasure as an ongoing inscription of public history. Such conservation could exhibit how the struggle over the meaning of declaring Independence—then and now—remains a matter of intense public interest and contestation.  

“Let facts be submitted”: Revisionist Civics in the Classroom

One great irony of right-wing activists’ incursions into Revolutionary history is that even while they insist on their reverence for the founding documents of deliberative democracy, they cannot stomach it in practice. The NAS and its offshoot, the Civics Alliance, push cut-and-paste educational reforms through state legislatures. Their “model legislation” empowers lawmakers to sign on to something they have not crafted and likely have not read. These bills, often introduced in gerrymandered chambers, aren’t deliberated, they’re simply adopted and signed. Legislators can then run on something as apparently innocuous as “civics education” or “teaching founding documents.” But Civics Alliance makes their policy goals clear in their online toolkit; they seek to erase BIPOC representation in curricula and eliminate service-learning, characterized in their sample citizen letters as “radical community organizing.” The cognitive dissonance one must embrace to celebrate the Declaration of Independence while condemning community organizing is a feature, not a bug. That is to say, not reading the founding documents—just like not reading the bills—is the model of civic literacy most aligned with white nationalist comfort-seeking around history. In turn, white citizens to whom this curriculum is tailored are, in James Baldwin’s words to his nephew, “Still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

The “1776 Report” illustrates Baldwin’s point in a strange rhetorical gambit related to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s contradictory principles. The report reads, “The foundation of our Republic planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America. The Declaration’s unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along with the Constitution’s compromises understood in light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition. Indeed, the movement to abolish slavery that first began in the United States led the way in bringing about the end of legal slavery” (emphasis original). Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which contained the power to send her home all along, the Constitution was just missing the requisite heal clicks. Nevermind the mortal danger that makes up the arc of Dorothy’s story and ours. America’s capability to eventually enact its stated principles is pitched here as strength; its lack of will to do so is, predictably, unacknowledged. “Trapped in a history” that insists on American exceptionalism, the commission’s celebration of America’s founding documents is pitched as ideologically neutral. That is, the right wing positions their civics education in line with the exegetical practices of strict constructionism; they are not just assigning a body of required texts, but a method of interpretation. It is crucial that this method be rhetorically positioned as “anti-woke” in their advocacy literature.

The Civics Alliance curriculum package requires instruction and credentialing in “Western and American Heritage” at the collegiate level. Among other actions, their suggested bills include creating a 6-credit “Western Heritage Certificate Program” in publicly-funded institutions; establishing a “School of Intellectual Freedom” embedded within colleges of arts and sciences; and enacting a “College Credit Act” that would deny students the ability to receive transfer or testing credits for courses featuring red-flagged topics like the persistence of racial discrimination in America. No agency could comb through the millions of transcripts and course descriptions that state governments will require under these acts. AI will surely do that work with the same care and precision recently exposed in the National Endowment for the Humanities case brought against DOGE employees.

 Ohio legislators have been trailblazers in this arena, passing, along with the state budget, Section 3345.382. This bill requires state institutions of higher education to develop a 3-credit civic literacy course. Course curriculum must include the following texts:

(1) The entire Constitution of the United States;

(2) The entire Declaration of Independence;

(3) A minimum of five essays in their entirety from the Federalist Papers. The essays shall be selected by the department chair.

(4) The entire Emancipation Proclamation;

(5) The entire Gettysburg Address;

(6) The entire Letter from Birmingham Jail written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr;

(7) The writings of Adam Smith, including a study of the principles written in The Wealth of Nations.

The conviction that undergirds this curriculum is that these texts are true, enduring, and exemplary; the pedagogical approach that undergirds their teaching is, in the Civics Alliance’s language, “the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals.” The syllabus for a course that includes these documents is subject to scrutiny under the Section’s additional provisions. Educators must submit their course syllabi in a format that is public, easily found on the department’s webpage, and keyword searchable. In addition, this legislation requires that courses “Demonstrate intellectual diversity for course approval, approval of courses to satisfy general education requirements, student course evaluations, common reading programs, annual reviews, strategic goals for each department, and student learning outcomes.” The trumpeting of “intellectual diversity” is uncomplicatedly positioned alongside the requirement that civics instruction focus on the same seven texts. The expressed purpose of the Civics Alliance curriculum is to cultivate patriotic devotion to the version of American life and history captured by fewer than a dozen writings. The manifold paradoxes that mark the mission to protect “founding” documents, values, and ideas bring to mind the words of Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell who wrote in The Crisis’s September, 1912 issue:

The founders of this republic called heaven and earth to witness that it should be called a government of the people, for the people and by the people; and yet the elective franchise is withheld from one-half of its citizens . . . because by an unparalleled exhibition of lexicographical acrobatics the word “people” has been turned and twisted to mean all who were shrewd and wise enough to have themselves born boys instead of girls, and white instead of black.

Terrell makes strange the tangled work of racial discrimination when thrown against the plain language of liberation. The principles of strict construction are suddenly abandoned when, as Terrell shows, the words “we” or “our” or “people” are interpreted literally.

This historic rhetorical reality is why teaching founding documents has always been a double-edged sword for right-wing Christian nationalist organizations. The Declaration of Independence in particular, has provided fodder for Black historians, organizers, and creators to adapt and ironize. David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World invokes the language of the Declaration of Independence with typographical flourish. Marcy Dinius argues that Walker’s setting of the phrase “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!!” in all and small caps, preceded by a manicule for emphasis, allowed Walker to “effectively rewrite the Declaration according to his interpretation, even as he quotes its language word for word.” Indeed, Walker alienated himself from these words in the preceding rhetorical question: “Do you understand your own language?” Making it strange makes his point more potent.

Frederick Douglass famously invoked the “scorching irony” of his invitation to speak before a largely white Rochester, New York audience on Independence Day in 1852. In “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass seized the occasion to expose its fraudulence, meditating on how the founding documents are proof of an ongoing charade. “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie,” he declared on the seventy-sixth anniversary of 1776. That same year, Douglass’ collaborator and co-organizer for abolition, William C. Nell prepared a pamphlet entitled Services of Colored Americans, designed to tell the stories of Black servicepeople in the American Revolution, stories “veiled from the public eye” and official record. Nell likewise sought to organize celebrations in Boston of Crispus Attucks Day, marking the death of the Afro-Indigenous sailor killed on March 5, 1770, in the Boston Massacre. Nell believed that Attucks’s martyrdom in 1770 had been intentionally supplanted in collective memory writing, “When the authorities of the town of Boston voted to merge the 5th of March celebration into the 4th of July, it would have been very well had the people not so entirely, from that day to this, forgotten that the colored man was one of the ‘all men created free and equal.” Founding documents—fetishized for their presumed authorizing of “American heritage”—have never been neutral ground nor dead letters; indeed, they have always been rich texts on which marginalized Americans could ground their presence, protest their exclusion, insist on accountability, and thwart erasure.

The state of South Carolina passed a similar set of bills to Ohio, requiring “one or more documents that are foundational to the African American Freedom struggle” in its compulsory civics curriculum. Could that be David Walker’s Appeal? Or, could one develop a course that teaches The Declaration of Independence alongside Tracy K. Smith’s powerful erasure poem “Declaration”? This piece eliminates large sections of the original Declaration to create a poem about the middle passage, the monarchical “He” made to signify a tyrannical America. Can an educator treat these vaunted texts as living documents, worthy of our careful critique?

“We Mutually Pledge”: Resources for Teaching and Organizing

To conclude, we have assembled some resources grouped by category that may be useful to you across your roles and regions. Recognizing that readers may not be able to engage in organizing efforts, incorporate particular reading materials, or openly discuss institutional mandates, we hope that those working under greater protection will extend aid to those who are not. If you are interested in contributing to this list and/or developing ideas for syllabus sharing, especially around new compulsory courses, please email dicuirci@umbc.edu and duncan.faherty@qc.cuny.edu.

Organizations and Advocacy Groups:

Monument Lab

Avenging the Ancestors Coalition

For Freedoms

Freedom to Read Foundation

Save Our Signs

Everylibrary

SPLC’s Learning for Justice

Teaching Resources:

‘76 Objects

250 to 250 YouTube series

Founding Feminists (Ms. Magazine)

Indigenous America250

Wheatley Peters Project

National Monument Audit

The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook

American Association for State and Local History 250th Anniversary Resources

The Smithsonian’s website Teaching the 250th

Artwork of Titus Kaphar

Readings:

David Waldstreicher, “On the Responsibility of Historians,” Boston Review, September 2025.

J.S. Allen, “The Dismantling of Black Studies,” Nation 2026, volume 322, no. 6, pp. 62–67.

Paul Chan, “The Arts at Risk: A Timeline,” October, Summer 2025, no. 193, pp. 29–36.

Jelani Cobb, “Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Complicated Commemorations,” New Yorker, May 4, 2026.

Further Reading:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963).

Marcy J. Dinius, The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal”: Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

William C. Nell, Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (Robert F. Wallcut, 1852).

Cathy Rex & Shevaun E. Watson eds., Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America (Routledge, 2021).

Tracy K. Smith, “Declaration,” in Wade in the Water: Poems (Greywolf Press, 2018).

Mary Church Terrell, “The Justice of Woman Suffrage,” The Crisis 4, number 5 (September, 1912).

David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with A Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World (Boston, 1830).

 

This article originally appeared in July 2026. 

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Lindsay DiCuirci is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the author of Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018). She is currently writing a book about Spiritualism and social reform in the U.S.

Duncan Faherty is Professor of English & American Studies at Queens College & The Graduate Center, CUNY and the author most recently of The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers (2024). He is currently working on a book which explores contemporary artistic reconfigurations of early American histories. 

By the 1920s, a new generation of historians, many of them the products of recently established history Ph.D. programs, and more inclined to delve into archival records and other original sources, presented deeper, more complex interpretations of the Revolution.

Their work was timely. There was rising professional and public interest around the sesquicentennial and 150^th anniversary commemorations in many states and communities. Congress created a commission early in 1926 to encourage sesquicentennial activities around the country. Over six million people attended the grand Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. President Calvin Coolidge gave an oration there about the Declaration of Independence on July 5. There was in the same period spirited public discussion over whether school history texts were too lenient on the British and too critical of patriots for bringing on the war.

The works of several historians are presented below, selected because they were leading-edge and influential at the time and articulated new perspectives, some of which are still useful. Some of the authors boosted this leavening effect along by their additional writings and through the many students they educated. Their leadership in the profession helped, too., e.g., Charles M. Andrews, Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Howard McIlwain and Arthur M. Schlesinger all served as presidents of the American Historical Association.

These historians based their work on extensive research and solid evidence. They conveyed their own interpretations—but explained those interpretations and backed them up with citations to original documents and other primary sources. Furthermore, they were practitioners of “history with a purpose,” to use the term of a later historian C. Vann Woodward in his book Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986).  Historian James Harvey Robinson, a contemporary of the Sesquicentennial Era writers, put it this way in his 1912 book  The New History: Essays Demonstrating the Modern Historical Outlook: “History is…. ever-changing, and it will, if we will permit it, illuminate and explain our lives as nothing else can do. For our lives are made up almost altogether of the past and each age should feel free to select from the annals of the past those matters which have a bearing on the matters it has specially at heart.”

To understand the Revolution, we must first understand British colonial policies

Charles M. Andrews, a professor at Bryn Mawr College, and Herbert L. Osgood, who taught at Columbia University, opened a new chapter in the discussion with papers at the 1898 meeting of the American Historical Association. Both had studied archival documents in the United States and in Britain, and they were both leaders in the emerging campaign to preserve, copy, publish, and study primary documents. Both argued that Americans needed to know more about British colonial policies and administration and, in effect, see things from both sides of the Atlantic. 

Andrews’ presentation, on “American Colonial History, 1690-1750”, made the case for studying British colonial administration policies. Osgood went further in his paper on “The Study of American Colonial History”:

We must look at the period under consideration not only from the colonial but from the British standpoint; full justice must be done to both sides. To that end we need to understand better than we do what the old British colonial system actually was; how and from what policy and under the influence of what ideas the affairs of the colonies were administered; what was the scope of the rights which the home government had over them; how far these rights were exercised and to what extent they were allowed to lie dormant.

The Revolution was a dispute over economics

University of Iowa historian Arthur M. Schlesinger nudged the debate in a new direction with a 1919 essay in the Political Science Quarterly on “The American Revolution Reconsidered.”  The  Revolution, he insisted, was mostly about economics.

Americans were content until 1763, said Schlesinger, when London began imposing new colonial regulations and taxes to pay for the just-completed war against France. “[T]he new imperial policy involved additional tax burdens, loss of trading profits and limitation of self-government, liberties,” Schlesinger explained. At heart, it was “the problem of the reconciliation of centralized imperial control with colonial home rule.”

Schlesinger soon moved to Harvard and published his essay as a chapter in his influential book New Viewpoints in American History in 1922, which emphasized class tensions and economic conflict and gave his views on the Revolution heightened attention.

We should focus on the Declaration of Independence, a brilliant polemic document alongside a natural rights philosophy

Cornell University Professor Carl L. Becker moved the spotlight to the Declaration itself in his book The Declaration of Independence: A Study of Political Ideas in 1922. Becker sidestepped both the constitutional and economic interpretations to concentrate on the document itself. He argued that the Declaration was a brilliant piece of work, leading with eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas, especially natural rights and consent of the governed, and then laying out twenty-seven accusations against King George III as justification for independence.

The document was persuasive in inspiring the Revolution and setting forth a new set of ideas about governing.

“In the Declaration the foundation of the United States is indissolubly associated with a theory of politics, a philosophy of human rights which is valid…. not for Americans only, but for all men.”  The Revolution’s success “conferred upon the Declaration a distinction, a fame, which could not be ignored, and gave to its philosophy of human rights the support of a concrete historical example.”

It began as a demand for English liberty

University of Michigan historian Claude H. Van Tyne published The Causes of the War of Independence in 1922. This book added a new twist; the war resulted from a demand for traditional English liberties.

“English liberty was second to none in all the world,” he noted. Through long years of struggle, the principles had been established that there were limits on royal power and that the consent of the governed was required, which Englishmen had secured, more or less, through Parliament.

English authorities should have realized that the empire would be “brought to that disaster by the insistent demand of Englishmen in America for the full enjoyment of those liberties which England had fostered beyond any other country in the world.” The Revolution’s success meant that “Americans had outstripped Englishmen in the race for political freedom.”

It began as a defense of longstanding English rights

Harvard professor Charles Howard McIlwain, in his 1923 book The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1924, offered a similar but somewhat different take on the theme that the Revolution stemmed from a denial of English liberties.

The colonists were defending what they believed were their rights as Englishmen under the British constitution (the Magna Carta of 1215, Petition of Rights of 1628, and English Bill of Rights of 1689 and an unwritten, evolving system of laws and customs, which the book explained) and precedents from English history (including policy toward Ireland).

Americans were alarmed at what they regarded as parliamentary overreach undermining those rights. By 1774, the patriots’ position had hardened: only their elected representative assemblies could tax and regulate them, and Parliament, where they were not represented, really had no rights over them.

“In this indictment which the Americans brought against the British Parliament, there are several counts, an infringement of colonial charters, a violation of the law of nature which is part of English law, and a breach of the constitution of the British Empire. Of these counts, the last is the essential one and the most far-reaching…”

It boiled down to a divergence of visions and aspirations

Charles M. Andrews, who had moved from Bryn Mawr to Yale, in 1924 published The Colonial Background of the American Revolution. It drew heavily on both American and English primary sources. Andrews presented the conflict as the inevitable confrontation between Britain, determined to enforce longstanding imperial governance and trade regulations, and America, where the people had grown used to governing through their own representative assemblies.  

The second-rate British statesmen of the pre-Revolutionary era lacked imagination and flexibility. They were unaware of growing American sentiment that only their own elected representatives could govern them. The colonials formed a political identity and system that no longer fit with Britain’s imperial vision.

Andrews served as acting president of the American Historical Association in 1924 when the elected president, former U.S. President (and historian) Woodrow Wilson died before taking office. His presidential address, on “These Forty Years”, explored the professionalization of the field since the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.

Elected president in his own right in 1925, Andrews had a second shot at an AHA presidential address on the verge of the nation’s sesquicentennial commemoration. This time, he spoke on “The American Revolution: An Interpretation.” In the speech, he went beyond the points in his book. Historical scholars needed to steer clear of simplistic interpretations, he said, and approach the subject with “a full recognition of the complexity of the problems involved.”

He explained that the basic problem was the difference in “mental attitudes and convictions” between England and its American colonists. Complacent English statesmen, caught in “a state of immobility” were “not true statesmen: they had no policies, no future hopes, no spirit of advance, no gifts of foresight or prophecy.” They were unwilling or unable to accommodate changing attitudes in America or their growing reliance on—and  confidence in—their  own assemblies.

“Primarily, the American Revolution was a political and constitutional movement and only secondarily one that was either financial, commercial or social,” he concluded.

The Revolution was a clash between two competing economic systems

Charles and Mary Beard’s 1927 book The Rise of American Civilization, Volume I, The Agricultural Era was a comprehensive history of American social and economic history from colonial times to the Civil War. The Beards emphasized the impact of social and economic forces, the influence of various groups, the rise of the middle class, and the role of women.   

In this book, they explained that the Revolution was the result of a struggle between two competing, and diverging, economic system—the Americans’ maturing, self-reliant mercantile and agrarian interests and the British imperial mercantile system, which aimed to control them. There were tensions over trade restrictions, taxation, and westward expansion.

“Out of the interest of English landlords and merchants, illuminated no doubt by visions of empire not foreign to their advantage, flowed acts of Parliament controlling the economic undertakings of American colonists and measures of administration directed to the same end,” the Beards wrote. They continued that “in the thousands of complaints, appeals, petitions, memorials, vetoes, decisions and instructions recorded in the papers of the Crown agencies for controlling American trade and industry disclosed the continuous conflict of English and American forces which hammered and welded thirteen jealous colonies into a society ready for revolution. The subjects of the controversy were definite and mainly economic in character.”

The Revolution was a social movement

J. Franklin Jameson altered the discussion in a 1926 book entitled The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. Jameson was serving as Director of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution in Washington at the time, after teaching stints at Johns Hopkins, Brown, and the University of Chicago. We need to consider the Revolution “in broader aspects than simply the political or the military,” he began. Those subjects had had plenty of coverage, he explained.

Rather, we need to look at the Revolution’s wellsprings, which Jameson placed with “the plain people…the peasantry…small farmers and frontiersmen.” It was at heart a struggle between aristocratic groups and common people.

Jameson’s main point was that the Revolution had substantial social consequences. Civic engagement and political participation increased. Colonial elites and aristocrats lost status; the era of “the common man” ensued. Industry and commerce, freed from British restrictions, flourished. Loyalist estates were distributed to small farmers. English-style land practices, including primogeniture and entail, were abolished, helping to democratize land ownership.

From the America 150 to America 250

One message from the historians of a century ago is that we need to keep revisiting and refreshing our interpretation of the Revolution. That is a helpful insight for us today; many of the issues so earnestly debated by our predecessors are still being debated.  

That makes historians’ mission all the more important.

Carl Becker, in a paper entitled “What Are Historical Facts?” at the 1926 American Historical Association meeting, emphasized that it is up to historians to select, interpret, and present history. That is a very serious obligation. “The historian has to judge the significance of…events,” being as objective as possible, but acknowledging that while “the present is the product of the past,” the opposite is also true, “the past (our imagined picture of it) is the product of…the present. We build our conceptions of history partly out of our present needs and purposes.”

In the last chapter of his book The Colonial Background of the American Revolution, Charles M. Andrews also conveyed another message that reverberates today. He warned about “propogandists [who] find in our revolutionary movements precedents and parallels available for their arguments” even if that means “twisting, warping and perverting history.” He also cautioned about people who “study but part of the evidence and fail to see that there are two sides to the story; or else prefer the kind of history which glorifies their country’s past and deem it less than one hundred percent Americanism to dim in any way their country’s achievements.”

And he reminded us of why it is so important to keep studying the Revolution—and history generally.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul and the men and women of such a nation cannot be expected to meet the great obligations of the present if they refuse to exhibit honesty, charity, open-mindedness, and a free and growing intelligence toward the past that has made them what they are.

Many years later, in 2002, historian John Lewis Gaddis in his book The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, put it differently: “We know the future only by the past we project into it. History, in this sense, is…the only data base that we have.”

Those are good sentiments to keep in mind as we head into “America 250.” There is some apprehension in the history community that President Donald Trump may put his own interpretation on American history, including the Revolution, without much concern for historical scholarship and objectivity.

Historians today may have varying interpretations of what caused the Revolution, just as their predecessors did a century ago. But in these of the “America 250” commemorations, historians need to make sure that the public, in considering the meaning of the Revolution, draws on interpretations reflecting historical research and evidence and not interpretations designed to buttress current political positions.

 

Further Reading:

Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 1924).

Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization: Volume I, The Agricultural Era (Macmillan Company, 1927).

Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1922).

Carl Becker, “What are Historical Facts?,” Western Political Quarterly 8, number 3 (September, 1955), 327-340.

John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford University Press, 2004).

J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton University Press, 1926).

Charles Howard McIlwain, The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (Macmillan, 1923).

James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook (Macmillan Company, 1912).

Arthur Schlesinger, “The American Revolution Reconsidered,” Political Science Quarterly 34, number 1 (March, 1919), 61-78.

Arthur Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (Macmillan Company, 1922).

Claude H. Van Tyne, The Causes of the War of Independence (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922).

C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing (LSU Press, 1987).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2026. 

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Bruce W. Dearstyne is a historian in Albany, New York. He holds a PhD in History from Syracuse University.  He has taught history at SUNY Albany, SUNY Potsdam, and Russell Sage College and was a professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies. He is the author of several books on history, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History (2022) and the editor of Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change  (2026).

Closer inspection complicates that impression. The page does not preserve a single moment or source, but instead assembles multiple elements into a new narrative. The images appear to have been cut from an earlier printed publication, while the accompanying verse can be traced to late eighteenth-century literary culture. What emerges is not a direct record of Indigenous life, but a constructed representation shaped by Watson’s antiquarian practice. 

Watson (1779–1860), a Philadelphia-based collector and compiler of historical materials, worked at a moment when early Americans were increasingly concerned with preserving the remnants of a rapidly receding past. His Annals and manuscript scrapbooks reflect a broader culture of antiquarianism in the early republic, in which fragments of text, image, and memory were gathered and reassembled to produce narratives of origin and identity. Within that process, Indigenous peoples, particularly the Lenape, often referred to in earlier sources as the Delaware, the Indigenous peoples native to colonial Pennsylvania, were frequently recast not as contemporary communities, but as figures of a vanishing past.

This transformation did not occur in a vacuum, but rather was shaped by the long history of colonial violence on the Pennsylvania frontier and by the cultural memory of those conflicts in the early nineteenth century. Accounts of warfare, captivity, and dispossession circulated widely in print, forming what Peter Silver has described as a shared language of fear on the frontier. At the same time, representations of Indigenous peoples were increasingly abstracted into symbolic types, figures of nobility, savagery, or loss, rather than specific individuals. As Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., has argued, such images functioned as contextualized representations, shaped less by Indigenous realities than by the cultural and intellectual frameworks of Euro-American society. 

The scrapbook page examined here sits squarely within that world. It does not simply preserve historical material; it actively constructs meaning through the selection, arrangement, and reinterpretation of visual and textual fragments. By examining this page closely, we can see not only how Watson worked, but how Indigenous imagery itself was reshaped within early American historical imagination. 

Accounts of John F. Watson’s reputation as a collector of early Philadelphia history have often emphasized preservation. Yet his manuscript materials reveal a more active role. Watson regularly cut, rearranged, annotated, and recombined textual and visual fragments. His scrapbooks are therefore not neutral repositories, but sites of interpretation. 

The page examined here reflects that process clearly. Rather than preserving an intact printed image or text, Watson assembled a composition: two engraved images, a handwritten poem, and a framing note. Each component originates elsewhere, but together they create the appearance of a unified historical scene centered on a Lenape subject. 

The upper image presents a standing Native figure addressing three seated listeners. The figure’s posture–upright, composed, and gestural–suggests authority. The arrangement is formal and balanced, evoking a council or oration. The scene reads less as observation than as a constructed type: a Native leader presented in a manner that is almost regal.

The lower image offers a striking contrast. Here, a Native figure kneels, wounded, with visible blood on his face and torso. He retains a weapon, suggesting resistance, yet his posture conveys exhaustion and vulnerability. A small but crucial detail appears in the background: a distant battle vignette, indicating that the scene represents the aftermath of conflict rather than an isolated moment. 

Taken together, the images form a deliberate pairing. This juxtaposition creates a narrative arc of authority, conflict, and decline. Such pairings were common in late eighteenth-century visual culture, where Indigenous figures were often framed through a dual lens of nobility and loss.

Above the upper image, Watson included a handwritten note that reads, in full:

“I know this one of the best Indian physiognomy’s I have ever seen It was sketched from life …”

This statement is critical. By emphasizing “Indian physiognomy” and asserting that the figure was “sketched from life,” Watson attempts to establish the image as an authentic representation derived from direct observation. Such language reflects a broader early American and European interest in physiognomy, the belief that character and identity could be read through facial features.

Yet the visual evidence complicates this claim. The image’s composition, balance, and engraving style strongly suggest that it derives from a printed source rather than a firsthand sketch. The assertion of authenticity, therefore, appears less as documentation and more as a rhetorical device, one that reinforces the authority of the constructed scene. The accompanying imagery appears alongside a narrative passage describing frontier violence and its aftermath. Here is a transcription of the relevant text, as it appears on the page:

 “The unfortunate victim was pursued with great violence, and after making every exertion to escape, he fell, pierced with many wounds, and expired on the spot. The savage who had inflicted the mortal blow, after giving a horrid yell, rushed forward, and tearing off the scalp, held it up in savage triumph.

The body was then stripped of its clothing, and left exposed upon the ground. His companions, who had fled at the first onset, soon returned, and finding him lifeless, gave vent to their grief in loud lamentations.

The Indians, having secured their prisoners and collected what plunder they could obtain, set fire to the buildings, and retired with their captives into the wilderness.

Such were the scenes which were frequently exhibited upon the frontiers, during the early settlement of the country, when the inhabitants were constantly exposed to the incursions of hostile tribes, and when every man was compelled to rely upon his own courage and vigilance for protection…”

This passage reinforces the interpretive framework constructed by Watson. The text presents a familiar frontier narrative of violence, captivity, and loss, consistent with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century representations of Native Americans in Anglo-American print culture. When read alongside the images, the text strengthens the narrative arc already established visually (i.e. authority, conflict, and decline), further embedding the figures within a moralized and constructed historical imagination rather than a documented Indigenous perspective.

The physical characteristics of the images, such as small-scale, engraved line work, and later hand-coloring, indicate that they were cut from a printed source rather than drawn by Watson. Their style aligns with late eighteenth-century engraving traditions, in which small vignette scenes circulated widely in books and periodicals.

Although the precise source of these engravings remains unidentified, they likely derive from British or early American print culture. Publications such as The Columbian Magazine and The American Museum frequently included engraved illustrations and often reprinted or adapted European imagery. Within such contexts, Native American figures were typically presented as symbolic or moral types rather than as ethnographically specific individuals.

The images on Watson’s page conform to this pattern. They do not display detailed cultural specificity, but instead rely on established visual formulas: the “Indian council scene” and the “fallen warrior.”

Between the two images, Watson inserted a handwritten poem:

So! once in triumph on his boundless plain,
The revered Chief of Lenni loved to reign!
He bleeds, his Country’s weal to gain!

This verse corresponds closely to a passage in The Pleasures of Hope by Thomas Campbell, which describes an African “chief of Congo” who moves from power to suffering. Watson’s version replaces Campbell’s African subject with a “Chief of Lenni,” adapting the poem’s emotional structure to a Native American context.

This transformation illustrates the fluidity of late eighteenth-century literary material. Texts circulated widely, often detached from their original contexts and repurposed to fit new narratives.

The term “Lenni” is central to Watson’s construction. The images themselves do not identify their subjects as Lenape; that association is introduced through Watson’s handwritten verse and reinforced by his note. In effect, Watson assigns a specific cultural identity to otherwise generic figures.

By combining engraved images from an unidentified source, an adapted literary passage, and finally, an assertion of authenticity, Watson creates the impression of historical specificity. Yet this specificity is constructed, not inherent.

Watson’s work must be situated within the cultural context of Philadelphia, where Native American imagery, particularly imagery associated with the Delaware (Lenape), held symbolic significance. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such imagery was frequently employed to evoke ideas of origin, virtue, and loss.

The scrapbook page reflects this broader cultural framework. It does not document Indigenous perspectives but instead reveals how Indigenous imagery was appropriated and reshaped within Anglo-American historical imagination.

The Watson scrapbook page demonstrates how historical meaning could be constructed through the combination of disparate materials. The images likely originated in late eighteenth-century print culture, while the poem derives from The Pleasures of Hope by Thomas Campbell. Watson’s intervention brings these elements together, transforming them into a cohesive Lenape-centered narrative

Rather than preserving a direct record of Native life, the page reveals the processes by which early American antiquarians assembled and interpreted the past. In doing so, it offers valuable insight into the creation of historical memory itself.

Further Reading:

The American Museum (Philadelphia, 1787–1792).

Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979).

Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 145–172.

Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope (Edinburgh, 1799), Part I.

The Columbian Magazine (Philadelphia, 1786–1792).

Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–70.

David D. Hall, “Antiquarianism and the Uses of the Past in Early America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 111, no. 2 (2001): 279–318.

Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 85–120.

Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).

John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time (Philadelphia: Uriah Hunt, 1830), Preface.

 

This article originally appeared in June 2026. 

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James Blake is a researcher, artisan, and museum professional focused on the material culture and visual history of the Eastern Woodlands and early American frontier. He serves as a docent for the Washington County Historical Society in Pennsylvania and has contributed historical interpretation and material culture expertise to PBS documentary projects, including Opening the Door West and The War That Made America. His research and writing have appeared in numerous publications.

John Garrison Marks, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory UNC (April 7) 2026.

1. Why do you think George Washington is such a subject of intense focus for Americans?

Washington was the most famous, most important American when he was alive, and he’s basically held that spot ever since. Because of this place in our national psyche, Americans have long struggled to see Washington as an actual human being, probably more so than for any other historical figure. Instead, Washington long ago became a symbol of the nation itself. For a huge number of people—both today and historically—George Washington essentially is the United States. Even people who didn’t hold Washington in particularly high regard have recognized the potency of using Washington in their rhetoric.

Most of the time, our arguments about Washington aren’t really about Washington at all. They’re about democracy, or equality, or what it means to be an American. People have continually drawn on Washington’s image or words to wage the political and cultural battles of the day. They leverage his immense symbolic power to serve arguments about contemporary issues. In my book, the people citing Washington’s history with slavery are rarely doing so to promote a better understanding of the past. Rather, they’re wielding history as a cudgel to make points in the present. Simply put, no one serves that purpose better than Washington.

       2. How has that focus changed over time, and what makes his role as an enslaver important to understanding change– and continuity? 

What most stood out to me while I was researching the book was how much continuity I saw in the ways people referenced Washington’s involvement with slavery. Over the past several years, there’s been a new wave of intense controversy over how we should publicly acknowledge Washington and his legacy. A growing number of Americans in recent years have highlighted Washington’s hypocrisy, making the case that his role as an enslaver should lead us to remove him from places of public honor. Others have demanded we continue to revere Washington; obviously the most notable recent example is the White House’s insistence on celebratory narratives and the removal of the slavery exhibit from the Presidents House site in Philadelphia. Still others, in social studies curriculum and at some historic sites, argue that Washington’s eventual emancipation of the people he enslaved redeemed his lifetime of involvement in the institution, and that this is what we should remember.

What was really fascinating in researching the book was how early and consistently all three of these perspectives appeared in the record. In 1797, British abolitionist Edward Rushton wrote directly to Washington, criticizing him for being a “proprietor in human flesh and blood.” Shortly after Washington’s death in 1799, Black Philadelphia minister Richard Allen told his congregation they should mourn Washington because he had set an example by freeing his slaves, and in so doing managed to “wipe off the only stain” from his legacy. A few weeks later, Henry Lee’s famous eulogy of Washington ignored slavery entirely, calling Washington “the most illustrious and most beloved personage this country has ever produced.” You see people making nearly these exact same points still today.

What changes over time is the specific contexts in which people are wielding this history, how different generations of Americans try to bring the past to bear on the present. Because issues of race are so persistent in our history—and because Washington’s legacy of slavery is so complicated—people selectively cite evidence and bring him into the conversation more often than I ever would have imagined.

     3. How do you see your work intersecting with other histories of founders and slavery but also of histories of American memory?

I’ll admit that I still have trouble thinking of myself as a scholar of George Washington or the founders, though I suppose I should get used to it. I certainly didn’t come to the project interested in political or presidential history. Instead, my work in public history over the last decade made me much more interested in how people of the present and past related to history, remembered history, and put it to work in their lives. It turns out looking at Washington’s history with slavery offers a great lens to understand those dynamics.

This book builds on decades of incredible work other scholars have done to help us understand Washington’s involvement with slavery. Because so many Americans have twisted and manipulated Washington’s history with slavery over the past two centuries, I thought it was important that the book set a strong historical foundation at the beginning to make sure readers were all on the same page for understanding all the historical cherry-picking that followed. I drew heavily on a mountain of great scholarship on the subject: former Mount Vernon historian Mary V. Thompson’s work on the enslaved community at Mount Vernon; Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s excellent book on Ona Judge; other biographies or books about Washington and his family by Alexis Coe, Cassandra Good, Bruce Ragsdale, and so many others; and so many primary source collections that provided easy access to Washington’s writings, especially Founders Online. All of that work made it possible to tell the story I wanted to tell without first spending decades researching the particulars of Washington’s involvement with slavery.

Ultimately though, in my mind my book isn’t really about Washington at all. He dies in the very first chapter! Mostly this is a book about how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated our memory of Washington over the course of our history. So I definitely think of the book as being in conversation with other books about historical memory—of Washington, of slavery, or of both. Work by Scott Casper, Matthew Costello, Annette Gordon Reed, Clint Smith, and many others I’m probably forgetting right now all helped me think through the questions I wanted to ask and provided a framework for answering them in ways that were really helpful. I hope readers will appreciate my approach—grounding us in the history before a pretty sweeping look at how our memory of that history has evolved (and not) over time.

   4. What prompted you to write the book?

My very first thoughts about this book focused on the people Washington freed from slavery in his will. It struck me that historians seemed to always treat this decision as the end of a story about Washington and slavery; I wanted to see what it would look like to instead place it at the beginning of a story about Black freedom in early-nineteenth-century Virginia. My first book explored the worlds of free Black people before the end of slavery in the urban Americas, so I felt like I had the research chops and grounding in the relevant literature to tell that story really well. As I began researching, though, I was immediately confronted by how little that emancipation was discussed immediately after Washington’s death—and how much it got brought into the discourse decades and centuries later. That provided a really deep well to draw from.

More broadly, my early thinking about the book was informed by two parallel developments over the last several years. The first was the demonstrations for racial justice in the summer of 2020 and the historical reckoning that went with it. Seeing people so fervently contesting the ways we discuss and display the history of slavery and enslavers prompted me to think more deeply than I had previously about my role in these conversations as a historian, and about what I might contribute to this growing debate. Second, by 2020 I had already been working as a public historian for several years, with most of my work focused on helping history museums prepare for the U.S. 250th anniversary. I recognized then that these debates about how to understand the founders’ relationship to slavery would become even more salient in 2026, and I thought I could research and write a book in time to meet the moment. With the book coming out just a few months before the peak of the semiquincentennial commemoration, I feel like I landed a plane on an aircraft carrier, but it has proved to be relevant subject matter in ways I never could have anticipated.

     5. What was your most remarkable experience doing research for the book? 

Speaking with members of the descendant community. I’m incredibly honored that five people descended from ancestors enslaved by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon met with me to share their stories and their perspective on how we remember George Washington. As a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century America, I have never had that kind of direct link to the past in my research. It was incredibly powerful to listen to their stories and perspectives, not only to hear their perspective on how the story of slavery gets told at Mount Vernon today, but to hear first-hand how they think about their personal connections to an incredibly important history. Engaging with descendants has become an important part of how museums and historic sites—including Mount Vernon—interpret the history of slavery, so I knew getting that perspective was going to be an essential part of the book. But the fact that they invited me into their homes and workplaces, that they trusted me with their stories, was an incredible experience and helped me tell a much richer story.

What else to read:

Scott Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon:  The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (2009)

Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First:  A Biography of George Washington (2020)

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught:  The Washingtons Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2018)

Matthew R. Costello, The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President (2019)

Cassandra A. Good, First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America (2023)

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009)

Bruce A. Ragsdale, Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery (2021)

Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (2021)

Mary V. Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret” George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon (2019)

 

This article originally appeared in April 2026.

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Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of gender, family, and politics in British America, her most recent book is Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

Why are these burial sites so elusive? Unfortunately, the documentary paper trail is faint and fragmented. In reviewing town records, I found only a few scattered receipts showing that church sextons handled most burials before 1855. Unfortunately, there are no known church records recording who was buried where in the two oldest graveyards. A major reason for the missing information is a devastating church fire in 1901, which destroyed the building and countless records contained within. Despite years of digging through archives, the burial places of many marginalized Concord residents, regardless of race, remain unknown. With official records lost, I had to look elsewhere.

Faced with the need for alternate sources, I turned to memoirs and personal recollections, hoping that anecdotal evidence might fill in gaps. Indeed, I found a significant clue in Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord, Volume 2. In a memoir of Abiel Heywood written in March 1853, Francis R. Gourgas noted, “…we continue to observe in the burial of the two races, the blacks being consigned by themselves to a far corner of the graveyard.” Gourgas did not specify which burying ground he was referring to: Old Hill, Main Street, or New Hill. However, his words echo in the landscape of Concord’s oldest burying ground, Old Hill. In Old Hill, one tombstone belonging to a Black individual, John Jack, stands apart from most other graves in a far corner, as Gourgas described.

John Jack’s gravestone is a rare marker for a known burial of a Black community member from colonial Concord and is notable for the story it represents. After emancipating himself in the 1750s, John Jack purchased land in the 1760s, becoming Concord’s first documented Black landowner. When he died in 1773, he left his estate to Violet, another formerly enslaved resident, making her Concord’s second documented Black landowner.

Among the approximately 800 gravestones in Concord’s two oldest burial grounds, John Jack’s is the sole marker for a Black resident. Over time, New Hill Burying Ground became the primary cemetery. Initially, New Hill was laid out with 160 lots, with additional lots added in subsequent years. The first internment took place there on July 13, 1823.

Within the expanded lots at New Hill Burying Ground, two gravestones commemorate Black residents. The first is that of Elsea Catharine Dugan, daughter of Thomas Dugan. She was a free Black single woman who died in 1882 and was buried in Lot 39 East. Her probate indicates payments of $59.50 for her funeral expenses and $25.00 for a headstone inscribed with her name and the word “Faithful.”

The other belongs to William Lloyd Garrison Wright, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War and died on March 19, 1890. His grave in Lot 76, owned by the Grand Army Post, is marked with a military headstone.

Clearly, these few gravestones cannot account for the many generations of Concord’s Black community who lived, worked, and died in the town from its founding in 1635 through the end of the 19^th century. To address this discrepancy and identify additional individuals, I consulted a vital record book.

Although a vital record book may seem like dry reading, it actually holds part of the rich history of Concord’s Black community, which makes it an exciting resource. The Concord, Massachusetts Births, Marriages, Deaths, 1635 – 1850 vital records book, painstakingly compiled and published in the late 1800s, contains birth, marriage, and death information from multiple sources. As such, this tome serves as an important starting point for research on past residents. Although the volume documents the deaths of sixty Black individuals, of those, only John Jack’s burial location is known and marked.

My search for additional clues continued in the Town of Concord Archives. In these records, I found that from 1757 to 1823, at least sixty-three individuals classified as “town poor,” including five Black residents, were buried in Concord. However, no receipt specified which burying ground contained the remains of any of the town’s poor. It seems that, after the poor were buried, these individuals and their burial locations were lost to time.

In the early 2000s, a breakthrough occurred in the ongoing search for missing burial information. Historians found, thanks to a rediscovered lot card, that Lot 159, one of the original 160 lots in New Hill Burying Ground, was the plot of the family of Peter Hutchinson Jr., a free Black man who lived in a house known as the Robbins House. The cemetery record indicated that his grandson, William Bisbee, was buried in Lot 159 in 1910. Based on Hutchinson’s ownership of the lot, historians inferred that he and his family were also interred there.

In 2013, Lot 159 received long overdue recognition. The Friends of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, together with the Robbins House, a museum dedicated to Concord’s Black history, installed a marker at the site for Peter Hutchinson, Jr. More than a century after the third gravestone was erected in Concord, a fourth was added to commemorate the legacy of part of Concord’s Black community in the burying grounds, with the hope that the final resting places of all Black community members will eventually be identified.

The belief that many Black residents were buried in Lot 159 or the nearby town lot prompted me to conduct further research. In the summer of 2025, while combing through archival records, Nathanial Smith, the Town of Concord Archivist, shared with me a rediscovered book containing records from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, including its oldest section, New Hill Burying Ground. As I flipped the pages, the book fell open to a list of surnames: Garrison, Robbins, Oliver, and others from Concord’s Black community. The names were grouped together. They were buried in the same lot. This finding mirrors that of New York City’s Black burying ground and echoes Gourgas’s finding, finally confirming a pattern of communal burial for Concord’s Black population separate from others.

To continue the search for missing burial information, I expanded my research to include additional sources in the Town of Concord Archive. Among the files, I found a Certificate of Deaths submitted by the Pastor of the Second Parish church, listing fifteen funerals he attended in 1841 and 1842. Eight of these burials, including those of two Black residents, Nathaniel Oliver and Susan Garrison, were not recorded in the recently rediscovered Sleepy Hollow book. Since other internments were documented, the certificate was likely unavailable to the individual who copied the information in the late 1800s. The repeated discovery of scattered documents containing information not included in official records made it abundantly clear that no single source would reveal the full story.

Further examination of town documents included the Town Books. Town Book VII had an entry in its index under “Burying Grounds” stating: ““Persons of colour” to be interred in the rear.” On the corresponding page, the Cemetery Committee’s report from the Town Meeting on November 1, 1824, described the layout of a new burying ground. The report specified burial locations for strangers and tomb construction, and stated, “The NorthEast corner of said burying ground within the stakes to be appropriated for burying people of colour.” This means the location of burials for the Black population was always recorded in the Town Books, corroborating the anecdotal information from the Social Circle Memoirs, the recently found book, and other official documents. The Black population was assigned to the NorthEast Corner Lot in New Hill Burying Ground. Based on this, Susan Garrison and Nathaniel Oliver were buried in the NorthEast Corner Lot with other members of their families, as it was the designated area for Black burials.

Official records are only part of the story. Local memory also played a role in preserving Concord’s Black history. A review of local newspapers supported my discovery of a separate lot for Concord’s Black community, albeit in a different way. The May 26, 1881, edition of The Concord Freeman, which had a section that served as a sort of gossip column, reporting who visited whom and other goings-on in town, reported: “Abby Robertson, the colored lady whose death is elsewhere reported, was brought here on Saturday for burial in the lot of John Garrison, her brother-in-law, with whom she used to live not far from where the burial took place.” Although the official record identified her resting place as the Northeast Corner, this newspaper account revealed that townspeople referred to it as John Garrison Jr.’s lot. This local knowledge further strengthens the conclusion that the lot was used by the town to bury the Garrison family and the broader Black community.

For generations, the story of Concord’s Black community focused mainly on the grave of John Jack. The later recognition of the graves of Elsea Dugan and William Lloyd Garrison Wright, and most recently, the dedication of Peter Hutchinson Jr.’s family lot, have broadened the narrative and brought long-overdue visibility to Black Concordians. The recently rediscovered Sleepy Hollow book is helping identify additional members of Concord’s Black community in their final resting places. While my efforts have not uncovered a lost cemetery like New York City’s “Negroes Buriel Ground,” they have revealed the names and burial sites of many individuals previously absent from the historical record.

Ultimately, the search for Concord’s lost graves is not solely about stones and names; it is about restoring individuals to history, one clue at a time. This progress results from my persistent efforts to piece together information from scattered references, town reports, and rediscovered books to determine where members of Concord’s Black community were laid to rest. However, the story remains incomplete; gaps persist, and the rediscovered book represents only a fragment of a much larger history. The ongoing challenge is to continue searching so that every member of Concord’s Black community may be remembered, honored, and restored to the Town’s collective memory as their burial sites are uncovered.

Further Reading:

On Black History in Concord, Massachusetts: Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Picador, 2022), Robert A. Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), and Elise Lemire, Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2026

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Beth van Duzer is an independent historian based in Concord, Massachusetts, and the owner of Historian for Hire, LLC, which provides historical research services and walking tours. She is co-chair and clerk of the Concord250 History & Education Subcommittee and serves on the Town’s Cemetery Committee. Beth also works as an educator and research assistant at the Concord Museum. She is the author of the forthcoming book Patriots of the Revolution: Early Members of the Social Circle in Concord who Served in the American Revolution and is currently researching a new book on Concord’s Black community.

From roughly 1872 until his compulsory retirement from crime some forty years later, Kelly cut a swath through the maritime underworld of the Pacific Northwest. Local lore has it that he knew every inlet and back channel between Olympia, Washington, and Vancouver Island. Accounts pair him with the equally infamous Ben Ure, who is alleged to have combined cunning seamanship with outright brutality. Kelly’s story intersects also with the turbulent transformation of the region. That transformation contributed to the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the boomtown rise of Seattle, the tightening web of U.S. and Canadian law enforcement, and the cross-border networks of Chinese labor migration and the narcotics trade.

Separating fact from folklore in Kelly’s life is no easy task. Secondhand reminiscences and nautical gossip layer much of the available information. Aged and sensational newspaper accounts deepen the difficulty. Records are so sketchy that one can’t be sure whether he served two sentences in federal prison or seven. Nor is the historical record clear about whether he kept the Chinese people safe when smuggling them or tossed them overboard if Customs officials threatened. Sifting the verifiable from the embellished is therefore all but impossible. What I aim to do is share the claims and evidence that others have presented and let readers here decide.

His story is worth rehearsing for its relevance today. A trade war that was ongoing at that time continues. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Canadian border as porous as Mexico’s presently is. The U.S. was assessing duties on Canadian goods. To avoid paying them to his government, Kelly often dodged legal obligation to share his ship manifests. His story is pertinent also with the tariffs on Canada by the current U.S. presidential administration and the detainment and deportation of immigrants to the U.S. whom the government deems to be illegal. As in Kelly’s time, too, immigrants still face perceptions that they rob jobs and strip resources. Yet another point of convergence is fentanyl today and opium then, both substances opioids and both deriving from China, though the deadly fentanyl derives from precursor products in China.

Hazy Origins

Born in Britain in 1845, according to his genealogy in Family Search, Kelly served in the British Army, after which he sailed the high seas and gained the skills he deployed in his future work. It is said he landed in New Orleans during the Civil War on September 2, 1861, and joined an infantry named the Louisiana Tigers. If so, he was only sixteen. Both his names were common enough among Irish immigrants that mistaken identities are likely. Angry after the South lost the Civil War, he vowed that he would “never earn an honest living under the stars and stripes.” And so, he smuggled what goods he could. Products from Canada were being assessed steep customs duties, much like U.S. tariffs in 2025, and there Kelly saw an opportunity. Arrested in 1872 while smuggling silk from Canada and fined, he readily paid it to jump back in the game. The Tacoma Times and other newspapers place his birthdate between 1837 and 1839.

Physically he was 5’5,” his great-great-grandson Tom Day tells me, and he likely died in Los Angeles, not Louisiana. His dark hair receded in the decades that he plied the Salish Sea. Some fellow residents viewed him as “a tough customer. He had a round head, thick brown hair, tousled and uncombed, and a bushy beard grown up high on his cheek bones, so stiff and wiry it thrust forward at a truculent angle from his chin.” Bowlegged when these words were written, he also had bloodshot eyes and “wore a thin shirt and overalls—both dirty—and apparently nothing else. His feet were bare and so browned that evidently this was their usual state.” Those overalls became a signature. A mural in Anacortes, Washington, displays his image in overalls today.

Later photos show him shaven and shorn for appearances in court or—when he failed to offer legal alibi for his behavior—clad in prison stripes. His biggest boats were the Alert and the Katy Thomas, the Katy a 38-foot sloop that sported four sails, a steering wheel, and a broad beam of 12 feet. His sailing skills tilted that big boat over to its gunwale in rough seas. Built in 1894 on Waldron Island, it served him well till 1907. The Salish Sea, as the map here shows, is an inland water body shared by British Columbia and Washington state. Arrested innumerable times, Kelly paid thousands of dollars in fines. He lost a Whitehall rowboat and the Alert to confiscation, and he wore prison garb for many years in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. By some accounts he served seven terms in that prison and was in his seventies when he emerged the final time.

His domestic life was equally chaotic. “He married Lizzie Kotz in 1877 when she was sixteen and he was thirty-two. They had nine children in quick succession,” McDonald wrote, though Family Search gives their marriage date as 1878. Lizzie was an Indigenous woman of the Musqueam Tribe in British Columbia; Tom Day told me. In 1878, the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people were a Coast Salish nation living primarily at the mouth of the Fraser River in what is now Vancouver, maintaining deep cultural ties to their traditional lands while facing increasing displacement and restriction following British colonial land seizures and the Indian Act. A Canadian federal statute passed in 1876 by the Parliament of Canada, formally titled “An Act to amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians,” the Indian Act governed (and still governs, in amended form) the legal status and the rights of First Nations peoples in Canada.

The couple built a cabin on the southwest corner of Guemes Island, a site thereafter dubbed Kelly’s Point. In time, they bought a 360-acre parcel on Sinclair Island, whose title was placed in her name to thwart confiscation because of his crimes. That title transfer confirms he never planned to earn his living within the limits of the law. One son drowned by tumbling down a well on the Sinclair property, leaving them eight kids to raise. Kelly was so often arrested and incarcerated that he depleted Lizzie’s patience and the funds his illicit pursuits had accrued. In October 1883, their Guemes Island property was auctioned publicly, “to satisfy the judgment against said defendant.” Unable to maintain the home and kids, Lizzie sold parts of that property first in 1884 and again in 1886 to discharge legal judgements. The Skagit Land Trust now owns the Kelly’s Point Conservation Area, a 27-acre property that includes 2,100 feet of shoreline.

Asian Trade

In the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants were benefiting the U.S. economy. Many communities in the West welcomed them, regardless of their legal status. They provided labor for agriculture, logging, mining, and manufacturing; dug quarries by hand and helped build the transcontinental railroad; and contributed to the growth of towns and cities through service industries such as laundries and restaurants. At the same time, Chinese immigrants were forced to endure discrimination and lower wages than their white counterparts. They faced hostility and prejudice due to the perception that they robbed locals of jobs. Fueled by economic anxieties and racial prejudice in the 1880s, white agricultural laborers in present-day Issaquah, Washington, murdered Chinese laborers. The perpetrators, brought to trial, were acquitted of their charges.

Lawrence Kelly capitalized on the Asian exchange. “The Vancouver–Puget Sound area was widely known as a ‘smugglers’ paradise’ in the opium trade, and Chinese and their American or Canadian guides used the same boats and routes to make the journey to the United States.” Men like Kelly, already active in the cross-border smuggling of products such as opium and wool, found a lucrative new niche by smuggling Chinese people, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which curtailed lawful Chinese immigration to the U.S. (British Columbia would later impose the same curtailment.) Victoria became a hub for such immigrants, who could arrive legally in Canada in pursuit of job opportunities. Some chose to pay contract smugglers who conducted them across the U.S. border. Kelly and a cohort trafficked Chinese expats by weaving throughout the San Juan islands into safe and secret harbors on U.S. shores.

His sometime-partner Ben Ure, like Kelly, married an Indigenous woman. Ure lived at the north end of Whidbey Island on an eleven-acre island that took his name. There the couple ran a dance hall and saloon. Ure’s wife aided his hide-and-seek smuggling operation. Local lore says he camped her on nearby Strawberry Island in Deception Pass, for its view to the west, to deploy a signal fire after dark to bring ashore the Chinese that the men had loaded in Victoria. The same lore claims Ure devised the nasty practice of tying up the Chinese in weighted burlap bags. If Customs agents approached, the story goes, he flung them overboard. Immigrants had to be reckless and desperate to agree to be bagged up like corpses at the outset of their trip to the promised land.         

Another telling story with compelling detail has come down. An acquaintance conversing with Kelly, after seeing his sloop at Square Bay on the corner of Guemes Island, reported, “The two men chatted awhile, then Kelly shouted, ‘Come out, John, he’s O.K,’ whereupon the tall grass erupted Chinese. One seemed to have been hiding behind every bush around the bay.” “John” was a generic nickname imposed by white Americans. In newspapers, court records, and police logs of the time, Chinese men were often referred to generically as “John Chinaman” or simply “John,” regardless of their actual names. The name became a kind of racial shorthand, like “Pat” for Irish immigrants or “Ike” for Jewish immigrants. They paid Kelly to connect them with other Chinese. Whether Kelly succeeded always in uniting them with comrades is unknown, likewise whether he always saw to their safety after he had conducted them across the international line. Certainly, though, he needed to have some respectable intercultural communication skills to pacify his customers and to stymie potential mutinies en route.

Kelly was a coyote and a trickster. In immigrant circles, principally on the U.S.-Mexico border today, a coyote smuggles immigrants for a fee. A loanword from Mexican Spanish, it refers obliquely to the wild canine known for its cunning nature. This dual meaning reflects the perception of human coyotes as tricksters, as people who know how to navigate border landscapes and authorities with resourcefulness. Kelly admitted he sometimes lied to his human cargo and dumped them back on Vancouver Island if or when “officials threatened.”

Payment for passage could be substantial. “The cost of a border crossing along this route ranged from twenty-three to sixty dollars in the 1890s. One decade later, entry through Washington State could cost up to three hundred dollars.” That $300 equates to $10,000 in 2025 purchasing power. Multiply it by a boatload of Chinese people, all of them looking for a new life in the U.S., and it’s no wonder Kelly was willing to flout fines, jail, and prison time.

The depressant opium had close ties to Chinese immigration. That product derives from the same species of poppy used today to make codeine, morphine, and heroin. Even before the Exclusion Act, opium was heavily taxed in the U.S., arriving from Canada in inexpensive and plentiful quantities. Chinese immigrant communities in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland smoked a lot of it. Many Anglos— stereotypically sailors, laborers, and gamblers—indulged in opium as well. Kelly could transport the stuff from Victoria into towns in Puget Sound at a high markup, often right alongside compatible human cargo. Chinese wine and silks also often made the trip.

Little is known about the exact economics of his operations, but he might have leveraged legal cover to conduct his business. Smugglers like him sometimes operated fishing boats or freight schooners as disguises. His skills with sail and oar were so adept that Kelly could outrun slower steam-powered Customs boats in his sloops. His work also necessitated firearms. Kelly’s sloop the Alert held an arsenal. That boat was confiscated along with a load of opium, after which U.S. marshals sold it for $3,221.83. In other crimes he also chose to brandish weapons.

Opium smuggling at that time is comparable to fentanyl smuggling today. Both sedatives are made from raw materials manufactured in China and exported to U.S. markets. The British East India Company first grew opium in Bengal and sent it to China to address a trade imbalance. The British were buying large quantities of Chinese goods—porcelain, silk, and tea—but Britain sold too little stuff to China. Such an imbalance led to Britain using opium as a trade commodity with China to balance the national books, eventually causing widespread addiction.

Lawrence Kelly scored his opium from Chinese factories in Victoria. “Crude opium from India and China was cooked and made into round chunks as big as a bowling ball,” Calkins wrote in 1952. Chinese cooks simmered the gum and sap of the poppy over a charcoal fire, stirring and skimming as it simmered. The Ly Yuen factory in Victoria provided a steady supply, as did a half-dozen other thriving factories on Vancouver Island. It made its way to U.S. markets both as a smoking-grade and a pharmaceutical-grade product. Some 100,000 of the Chinese immigrants in the western U.S. used it. Many of them were addicted. White smokers also were known to have frequented opium dens in Seattle. Middle-class Americans ingested opium in the tincture called laudanum and in patent medicines that required no prescription. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton used opium orally to treat their ills. Edgar Allan Poe and Louisa May Alcott were reportedly addicted.

Opium for smoking was packed in small tins, each weighing about half a pound. To avoid the U.S. tariffs and inspections imposed in the 1880s, some tins were left unstamped—that is, missing the adhesive seal that showed the duty had been paid. “One of the more macabre methods was to send opium across the border in coffins.” Kelly sometimes hid the weighted opium tins by tying a line to an underwater ringbolt on his hull and dragging them, as if trolling for fish. On land the tins were toted in satchels or in greatcoats with yawning inner pockets. He also sometimes squirrelled the tins on beaches for retrieval later, a process known as relaying.

Like rumrunners a short time later, Kelly would have called himself an honest man and denounced the laws as wrong. Opium laws were never overturned like Prohibition was, though. Kelly paid his debts, raised a family, and served on the Sinclair Island school board. In 1886 in Tacoma, Washington, he was arrested with a load of “567 tins of opium, equivalent to 364 pounds. He was held on a bail of $3,000. In the end, he was fined only $100, but the seizure of his boat threatened to end his career.” Worse, he was sentenced to another term at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. At that point in their marriage, Lizzie had to sell the last of their Sinclair Island acreage. Twenty-three years later, in 1909, the Opium Exclusion Act in Canada barred the export of opium, putting even more clamps on Kelly’s illicit career. By then, too, his legal and domestic failures had begun to grind him down.

His brutality is broadly alleged. “When danger threatened and his boat was trying to outrun the law, he is said to have bound his passengers and dumped them overboard to drown.” Moreover, “Dead Man’s Bay off San Juan Island came by its name because the tide often washed the bodies ashore at that location.” Others say he disguised the Chinese as vegetables in wool or burlap sacks. So certain was R.H. Calkins that the Chinese were thrown overboard in the heat of pursuit that he illustrated the practice in his 1952 book, captioning it “Evidence of Smuggling Destroyed.” Recent research also shows that some Chinese immigrant women and girls brought to the U.S. in the late nineteenth century were trafficked and forced into prostitution. Historians and other scholars today characterize their condition as a form of sexual slavery.

Illustrious scuffles

Another anecdote finds Kelly in Olympia, the capital of Washington state, in 1891. Docking and walking the fifteen miles from the water to Tenino, he boarded a southbound train carrying a satchel that held sixty-five half-pound tins of opium. Whether his movements had been tracked beforehand, or agent Charles Mulkey of Tacoma just happened to identify Kelly on the spot, he seized the satchel, discovered its contents, and arrested him. Mulkey then demanded that a witness on the train accompany the pair back to court in Tacoma. How Kelly emerged from that scuffle is not known, but he often paid his fine to keep his business active. Kelly would have had to offer up real estate as surety in lieu of a bondsman, which explains why Lizzie had to sell off the Sinclair Island property on his behalf in 1884 and 1886.

As the most active singlehanded smuggler on the Salish Sea, Kelly “pursued his chosen occupation with an obstinacy that seems almost admirable” Richardson wrote. In January 1904, agent Fred F. Strickling boarded a train in Sumas, Washington, and had Kelly dead to rights. Ordered to open his fresh new valise, Kelly resisted and fled down the aisle. He “leaped from the train, while it was moving at full speed, to escape capture.” Inside the valise that Kelly had abandoned, Strickling found sixty-five tins of unstamped opium. He pulled the emergency cord, the train backed up, and Kelly was found barely conscious, wounded badly from the tumble, wearing a pistol. In Bellingham he was arraigned, posted bail, and disappeared, making him a fugitive of the law. Kelly’s trades were small compared to competing commercial steamers, which could transport up to 3,000 pounds of unstamped opium in a single outing.

Busted smuggling alcohol, furs, opium, woolens, and humans, Kelly spent as much time in the calaboose as running contraband. He was also a thief. He grew desperate late in life, no longer able to support a family or afford a mortgage. In 1896 he swiped a toolbox a carpenter left on an Anacortes wharf. A search party, discovering him asleep in a cabin, clapped him into cuffs. “While their boat was docked, Kelly jumped overboard and disappeared into the water. He somehow swam away, even though he was handcuffed.” The thefts continued. “Because Kelly was known to be in debt due to his fines, he was suspected of the thefts, but no proof of his guilt ever surfaced.” Mothers and their children trembled at mere mention of his name. By this time, Lizzie was pulling far and fast away from her deadbeat husband.

A smuggler and a thief, Kelly also became a desperado as his fortunes declined. Afraid of risking prison once again, he buried opium on islands as stash. He treated his red-hot contraband like cash, awaiting a future that might be safer to distribute it. Islanders reported seeing him grubbing about for tins whose exact locations he had forgotten. He maintained a gruff interest in the Sinclair Island acreage after Lizzie had to sell it off. He threatened the new owners when they cleared a patch of ground above a spot where he had cached the drugs. Burnt and demolished tins that once contained the opium were discovered on the same site later.

His desperation reached a fever peak in 1898 when Lizzie moved to Anacortes and took away the kids. She moved there for a paid job as housekeeper for a man whose wife lay in the hospital. Furious that she was cohabiting with another man—no matter that his crimes had made her destitute—Kelly showed up drunk at the house armed with a pistol and threatened to murder her. She fled to a neighbor’s house. He dodged the marshal and came again the next day, whereupon Lizzie filed a formal complaint against him to protect herself and the children. In 1884 he had been charged with a deadly-weapon assault, unspecified “crimes against the laws of nature,” and “charges that would show him to be a brutal wretch in his own home.” In other words, he turned his desperation and his anger on his family and physically abused them.

Kelly has a reputation as a colorful character, despite all his grave misbehavior. That reputation traces to “a certain romantic aura connected with the intrepid smuggler who plied rough waters in an open craft, cached merchandise on secluded beaches, transmitted coded messages by lantern light, and rendezvoused with compatriots late at night—all the while remaining beyond the dogged pursuit of ‘revenuers,’” Moore wrote in 2014. The Frederic Remington painting Dying of Thirst in the Desert captures that period more realistically. Issued in Harper’s Monthly for March 1891, it shows a Chinese man abandoned by his smuggler. In the Salish Sea, islands stood in for barren desert sand. A group of Chinese people, deserted when a customs boat drew near, survived only by eating clams they dug by hand. Eventually a minister rescued them from “China Rock.” The grimmer details of his smuggling operation, impossible to confirm, have perhaps been calculatingly expunged from the historical record by his admirers.

Summing up
By the time he was in his seventies, Kelly found odds stacked high against him. His wife was gone, his property sold off, his rocky legal record tough to overcome. Then, too, “the customs office obtained better boats with more skilled crew including, in 1903, the 85-foot revenue cutter Arcata, a converted steam tug equipped with powerful searchlights, machine guns, and even a one-pound cannon accurate to 500 yards (and a captain eager to use it).” James McCurdy could already foresee Kelly’s end, when he wrote in 1910 that “the picturesque contraband ferry-man of the Northwest seems fated to soon become extinct.” The reports of Kelly’s final years disagree about his eventual end. Many claim he contacted the Louisiana chapter of Daughters of the Confederacy and went to a soldiers’ home to spend his final years, though Family Search reports him dying in Los Angeles at an unspecified time, which is also where his third child, daughter Patricia, lived with her husband, according to his great-great-grandson Tom Day.

Lawrence Kelly’s life straddled the blurred line between folklore and fact, between cunning seafarer and ruthless criminal. He was at once a family man and a fugitive, a neighbor on Guemes and Sinclair Islands and a menace to the authorities who dogged him. His story, pieced together from rumor, court records, and sensational newsprint, needs to be invented anew. He was a species of phantom. Smuggling linked him to global trade wars, immigrant struggles, and narcotics routes that foreshadow today’s debates over tariffs and borders. Similar struggles devastate U.S. families today. Whether Kelly is remembered as a “picturesque contraband ferry-man” or a brutal desperado, he embodied the contradictions of a region and an era in transition, his career fading with the age of sail and the tightening grasp of modern law enforcement.

Further Reading:

R.H. Calkins, High Tide, Marine Digest Publishing, 1952; Helen Troy Elmore, This Isle of Guemes, Caxton Printers, 1973; David Richardson, Pig War Islands, Eastsound, WA, 1990; Lucille McDonald, Making History: The People Who Shaped the San Juan Islands, Harbor Press, 1990; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Priscilla Long, “White and Native American Hop Pickers Attack Chinese Workers in Squak (Issaquah) on September 7, 1885, HistoryLink, July 1, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2746. Stephen T. Moore, Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland, University of Nebraska Press, 2014; Farris, Megan S. North of Gold Mountain: Chinese Women in the Pacific Northwest During the Exclusion Era. Master’s thesis, Western Washington University, 2025. Western CEDAR. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet/2420. David Lai, “Chinese Opium Trade and Manufacture in British Columbia, 1858-1908, Journal of the West 38, no. 3 (1999): 21-26; Lynn Weber-Roochvarg, “San Juan Islands: Smugglers’ Haven,” HistoryLink, June 7, 2025, https://www.historylink.org/File/23319; Elizabeth Gibson, Outlaw Tales of Washington, TwoDot Books, 2011. “Colorful Characters and Local Lore,” Smuggler Kelly and his legend. Mural no. 041 in Bill Mitchell Mural Project. Anacortes, WA. “Smuggler Kelly and his legend,” Colorful Characters and Local Lore exhibit, Anacortes Museum, 2008. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.billmitchellmuralproject.org/murals/041; “Execution Sale of Real Estate,” Puget Sound Mail, 11.11 (Sept. 8, 1883), p. 2; “At 73, ‘Larry the Dope Smuggler’ After 7 Times in Prison, Is Free,” Tacoma Times 7.106 (April 22, 1910), p. 6; “County News,” Northwest Enterprise, 1.43 (Jan. 13, 1883), p. 3; “Smuggler Kelly’s Troubles,” Anacortes American, 4.36 (Jan. 18, 1884), p. 1; James G. McCurdy, “Criss-Cross Over the Boundary: The Romance of Smuggling Across the Northwest Frontier,” Pacific Monthly, 23.2 (Feb. 1910): 182-93; Marge Davenport, Afloat and Awash in the Old Northwest, Paddlewheel Press, 1988; Holden, Brad. 2023. “Seattle’s First War on Drugs (1880–1925).” HistoryLink.org Essay 22666. https://www.historylink.org/File/22666; John Nowels, “Cartel-fueled Fentanyl Crisis Flooding Washington through Northern Border.” Spokesman-Review, August 10, 2025, 3; “At 73, ‘Larry the Dope Smuggler’ After 7 Times in Prison, Is Free,” Tacoma Times, April 22, 1910, 6; “History of Smuggling in the American San Juan Islands.” Heroes, Heroines, and History, February 20, 2019, accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.hhhistory.com/2019/02/history-of-smuggling-san-juan-islands.html; Karen L. Borell, Bowman Bay, Deception Pass State Park: A Cascadia Marine Trail Site History. WWTWA, June 21, 2017, accessed August 27, 2025; https://www.wwta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/BowmanBDecPass_KarenBorel6_21_17.pdf;  “FamilySearch Person Profile, ID K262-3YC,” FamilySearch, accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/about/K262-3YC; Tom Day, telephone interview, Sept. 3, 2025; Dying of Thirst in the Desert. ca. 1890. Catalogue number 01144. In Remington Catalogue, Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://centerofthewest.org/catalogs/remington/?view_id=1156.

 

This article originally appeared in February 2026

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Paul Lindholdt received his PhD from Penn State and has collaborated on or authored ten books. This article is part of his book-in-progress with the working title “Rogues and Renegades in the Evergreen State.” Find his professional website here.

Hale’s account implies that the other doctors involved not only examined the children but also attempted to treat their afflictions, and perhaps Griggs did as well. The doctors likely consulted their medical books for symptoms that aligned with what they saw. Griggs himself owned nine medical books and a grinding stone used to mix herbal remedies. Seventeenth-century medical books offered herbal treatments and tinctures for symptoms such as paralysis, apoplexy, and hysteria, which might have appeared to resemble those of the afflicted children. The Reverend Cotton Mather’s book, The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay Upon the Common Maladies of Mankind (1724), presents the following remedy for female fits and hysterical convulsions: “Take the Seeds of Parsnip in Wine, or in proper Water. Take twelve Drops of the Spirit Soot; (or, of [dried human] Blood, or of Harts-horn,) twice a day in an Appropriate Vehicle. This [is] also proposed as, An Excellent Tincture for Hysteric Convulsions. Take of Assa-foetida, or Galbanum, two Ounces; Dissolve them in Spirit of Wine, till a Red Tincture is Extracted. A Scruple of this, is to be taken in two or three Spoonfuls of Mugwort-Water.”

 

Most baffling for the doctors was the fact that the children’s symptoms were intermittent; they behaved normally and would suddenly fall into their fits and later recover and act normally. The medical books contained many remedies for paralysis or hysteria caused by unbalanced humors. But the books did not offer remedies for the effects of witchcraft or sorcery, which the girls’ untreatable symptoms seemed to indicate. As Cotton Mather put it, in cases like this, the doctors could not “go to the Devil to fight the Devil.” After the doctors’ failed remedies, the children “still grew worse,” and Griggs made his diagnosis.

The other doctors who were called in by Parris likely came from neighboring towns. The Salem records refer to several, including Dr. William Crosby of Rowley and Dr. John Barton of Salem. As for Dr. Griggs, Samuel Parris was already acquainted with him when both were living in Boston. They each attended the First Church of Boston, where Parris’s uncle had been the minister. Parris was in the process of preparing for the parish ministry under the direction of ministers of the First Church. Griggs and his wife, Rachel, attended the First Church and Rachel was also a church member, and their children were baptized in this church.

Hale’s account gives a detailed description of the puzzling symptoms the doctors faced in Salem Village: “These Children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect. . . . Sometimes they were taken dumb their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone, to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them . . . they were in all things afflicted as bad as John Goodwin’s Children at Boston, in the year 1688.”

In the case of the Goodwin children, several doctors were consulted, according to Cotton Mather’s account in his Late Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. Mather’s friend, the locally esteemed Dr. Thomas Oakes, concluded that “nothing but an hellish Witchcraft” was the cause of the children’s afflictions. An Irish washerwoman named Goody Glover was judged to be the culprit. She was arrested, tried, and executed, and the children recovered afterwards.

Hale’s account goes on to explain the immediate effect that Griggs’s diagnosis had on the village community: “This the Neighbours quickly took up, and concluded they [the afflicted girls] were bewitched.” The neighbors’ reaction was significant because a conflict had recently arisen over Samuel Parris’s ministry. The conflict led the village council to attempt to dismiss Parris from the village by cutting off his supply of firewood, stopping the payment of his salary, and questioning his ownership of the village parsonage. Parris’s neighbors likely suspected that the girls’ afflictions were caused by a witchcraft attack upon the Parris family. Parris had already preached a series of dark sermons about the devil operating in the village. In early January 1692, shortly before Griggs’s diagnosis, Parris declared from the pulpit that “Christ having begun a new work, it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.” Attacking the girls in Parris’s house seemed part of Satan’s plan.

Following Griggs’s diagnosis, Parris summoned the local magistrates and religious authorities for their support. Hale reports that the local clergy who had “enquired diligently into the Sufferings of the Afflicted, concluded they were preternatural, and feared the hand of Satan was in them.” Griggs’s pronouncement of the “Evil Hand” triggered a three-part process that required physicians, magistrates, and the clergy to become involved. Griggs’s diagnosis was a necessary first step, but it alone was not a sufficient cause for the trials. Had the court found no one guilty, the process would have stopped. When the court of Oyer and Terminer made its first conviction, which was followed by an execution, the governor asked the leading Boston ministers to give their authorization. As the representative of the Boston clergy, Cotton Mather, though he cautioned against some of the unreliable “specter” evidence involved in the accusations, forwarded the church’s endorsement for a “speedy and vigorous Prosecution.”

Soon after the attack on the girls in Parris’s house, two other village girls became afflicted: twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, daughter of Thomas Putnam of the influential Putnam clan, and seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, grandniece of Dr. Griggs’s wife, Rachel Hubbard Griggs. The attack on Dr. Griggs’s niece Elizabeth was possibly caused by her fear that her uncle had attracted the devil’s revenge by naming the devil as the cause of the girls’ afflictions. The attack on young Hubbard no doubt greatly strengthened the doctor’s conviction.

Today’s historians have little to say about Griggs beyond a few basic facts, the most important being the likely acquaintance between Parris and Griggs in Boston—hence Parris’s choice of Griggs to give the diagnosis. Given the scant information about Griggs, contemporary historians have avoided making moral judgments and assessments of his professional competency. But earlier historians were free with their opinions. Charles Upham, writing in 1867, suggested that Griggs’s generation of doctors offered witchcraft diagnoses to cover up their failed remedies: “They gave countenance and currency to the idea of witchcraft in the public mind, and were very generally in the habit, when a patient did not do well under their prescriptions, of getting rid of all difficulty by saying that an ‘evil hand’ was upon him.” In other words, a witchcraft diagnosis was a coverup for a doctor’s incompetence. But all professions have legitimate limits to their explanatory powers, and for the medical profession in seventeenth-century New England, that limit was perceived to be the difference between the “natural” and the “unnatural” or unknown.

In 1916, Andover historian Harriet Tapley wrote that Griggs was a weak-minded man who, she hoped, felt remorse in his old age: “For how much of this [tragedy] Dr. Griggs was responsible, it is not unjust to state that a large share of the subsequent heartaches might with propriety be laid at his door.” Moreover, “It is quite probable . . . after the trouble had blown over, perhaps his [Griggs’s] conscience may have been awakened to a sense of the part he had taken in the affair, and remorse may have attacked this weak old man.”

Did Griggs feel remorse? We do not know. Did the government or the courts express remorse when the trials were over? Governor William Phips closed the trial court in late 1692 and reported to his overseers in London that the whole tragedy was due to the great “delusion of ye Devil.” Remorse was not involved. The elderly, church-going Griggs might well have approved.

In 1949, freelance writer Marion Starkey pointed out in The Devil in Massachusetts that Samuel Parris owned a copy of Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, an account of witchcraft among the Goodwin children in Boston in 1688. Starkey also states that “the Parrises may have also had first-hand experience of the case, since they appear to have been living in Boston at the time.” She suggests that “the little girls might even have been taken [by Parris] to see the hanging.” No professional historian would make such a speculation today, but it is possible that the children in the Parris household overheard the adults talking about witchcraft and the hanging. The execution of Goody Glover on Boston Common in 1688 was the first witchcraft hanging in Boston in over thirty years. Griggs and his family were also in Boston when Dr. Oakes made his “hellish Witchcraft” diagnosis, and Griggs might have become interested. We do not know whether Griggs or Parris attended the hanging, but just knowing about such a remarkable event taking place in the town where they were living may have influenced Parris’s choice of Griggs to make the key diagnosis.

In 1998, Dr. Anthony S. Patton, who was Chief of Thoracic and Vascular Surgery in Salem Hospital for many years, wrote an important biographical sketch of Griggs containing new information about his grand jury work and the state of the medical profession in seventeenth-century New England. As a practicing physician, Patton became interested in Griggs’s medical competence and moral character. He asked the question: Did Griggs simply give a conventional medical diagnosis of the Evil Hand? Or should he have known better and followed the lead of more educated doctors in Boston, such as Thomas Thacher, whose treatments for smallpox and measles were based on the scientific work of the English doctor Thomas Sydenham.

Patton concluded that Griggs was clearly a doctor of his time, practicing like most other New England doctors. Patton also asked whether Griggs “had to know of the possible consequences of his diagnosis.” This question, like those of Upham and Tapley, relies on the benefit of historical hindsight, which Griggs did not have. John Hale emphasizes that Griggs and the other doctors were called in at the first stage of the Salem episode, which concerned only the two girls in Parris’s house: “[The] beginning of which [the Salem case] was very small, and looked on at first as an ordinary case which had fallen out before at several times in other places, and would be quickly over.” It seems clear that Hale saw the outbreak in the Parris house as similar to the small-scale Goodwin case.

On the other hand, Patton notes that Griggs “could have protested or halted his niece’s damaging and continuing testimony against innocent people.” This seems plausible. If Griggs had any misgivings at all, he might have controlled his young grandniece, Elizabeth Hubbard, and stopped her from making dozens of accusations. But the fact that Hubbard often became afflicted in Griggs’s house and, according to the records, at least once in her uncle’s presence, likely strengthened the doctor’s conviction.

Curiously, Griggs played no further role once the legal process began. A search of all 950 digitized court records does not turn up his name in any of the examinations, depositions, or grand jury hearings. But as the new doctor in Salem Village and an acquaintance of Samuel Parris, Griggs may have considered it both responsible and beneficial to assist Parris in this critical moment. Two years later, it is also clear that Griggs had firmly aligned himself with the pro-Parris, pro-witch-hunt faction in the village. He helped Parris’s friend and supporter, Thomas Putnam Jr., in his attempt to contest his stepmother’s will, which gave her large fortune to her son, Putnam’s stepbrother, who was aligned with the anti-Parris, anti-witch-hunt faction.

In placing judgment upon Griggs, it is also useful to consider, as Patton does, the state of the medical profession in New England at the time. There were no medical schools, training programs, or qualifying exams. Training was informal, and men apprenticed themselves to an established doctor and became acquainted with the medical books that described hundreds of herbal treatments for common illnesses. Although Griggs was literate and read medical books, Patton noticed in the documents that he was unable to write and signed his name with a mark.

In 1697, the Massachusetts government decided to accept responsibility for the Salem tragedy and issue a formal apology. A recent series of setbacks in the province—crop failures, a large outbreak of smallpox, and repeated losses in battles against the Native Americans—were believed to have been God’s punishments for the injustice of the Salem trials. The government’s apology, however, was perfunctory and mainly blamed Satan. Samuel Sewall, one of the trial judges, was asked to write it. His statement referred to “Mistakes” that were “fallen into” regarding the “late Tragedie” caused by “Satan and his Instruments, through the awful Judgment of God; He would humble us therefore and pardon all the Errors of his Servants and People that desire to Love his Name.”

Yet Sewall himself delivered one of the most outstanding personal apologies in early American history. He stood up in his pew and bowed his head before the congregation while his minister, the Reverend Samuel Willard, read his apology and confession of guilt. Referring to himself, Sewall said in part: “Samuel Sewall being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted . . .  he is, upon many accounts more concerned than any he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and the Shame of it.” It is difficult to imagine Dr. Griggs doing the same.

The foreman of the Salem jury, which handed down all the convictions, waffled about the jury’s taking full responsibility, saying that the jury had lacked the “knowledge in ourselves to deal with this sort of evidence” and that it was “sadly deluded and mistaken.” Mistakes were admitted, but taking moral responsibility was not in the mindset at the time. Again, Griggs might well have concurred. Sewall, however, showed that taking “the Blame and the Shame” for his role in the horrendous tragedy could be done. His courageous act is celebrated today in a large mural in the Massachusetts State House.

Patton also draws attention to a major change that was taking place in the English medical world in the mid-1600s due to the work of the prominent doctor Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham’s medical principles were those of observation, diagnosis, and experiential treatment. Could Griggs have read any of Sydenham’s books in Massachusetts in 1692? The books were originally published in Latin, which the unschooled Griggs could not read, and were first translated into English at the end of the century, after Griggs had died. In Sydenham’s Enlightenment medical environment, there was no place for the occult or witchcraft diagnoses. The “preternatural” was no longer a diagnostic category. As Patton points out, there was “a clear contrast between the training and thinking of the time in Europe and the lack of training and apparent lack of support in New England for scientific medical training.”

In the 1996 film version of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, Dr. Griggs examines Ann Putnam Jr., who cannot be wakened from her sleep. He tells her parents, “I fear there be no medicine for this; I have seen nothing like it before. There be no fever nor wound . . . and yet she sleeps.” Ann’s mother asks if the devil is to blame, and Griggs replies cautiously, “I shall do all I can Goody Putnam . . . but this may be a sickness beyond my art.” Thomas Putnam intervenes, declaring that there are “evil spirits about the village,” and urges Parris to tell the people the truth. Parris responds: “Not yet! I need time; I must think; I must pray.” Griggs agrees with Parris and decides not to reveal his diagnosis to anyone in order to give Parris time to gain control of the situation. After leaving the Putnam house, Griggs tells a crowd of onlookers that there is no witchcraft involved. Miller portrays Griggs as a weak-minded figure, willing to compromise his profession for Parris’s purposes.

Similarly, the historical Griggs accommodated Samuel Parris with the diagnosis he wanted, but unforeseeably the diagnosis turned the village conflict over his ministry into a witch-hunt against people who were supposedly Christ’s enemies in the village. Griggs, however, remains an obscure figure, despite his consequential role which helped to propel a divided community into a tragic conflict that is still remembered, studied, and dramatized today.

Further Reading: Anthony S. Patton, M.D., A Doctor’s Dilemma: William Griggs & the Salem Witch Trials. (Salem: The Salem Witch Museum, 1998.); Katherine Knight, Secrets of the 17^th Century Medicine Cabinet (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2024).

 

This article originally appeared in February 2026

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Benjamin Ray is the Daniels Family, NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Emeritus, University of Virginia. He is the author of Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), an associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, gen. ed. Bernard Rosenthal  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Director of The Salem Witch Trials Digital Archive.

Billings was a self-taught composer, a lifelong member of Boston’s South End working class, and an active associate of the Whigs who spearheaded the American Revolution. He was a companion of Samuel Adams, with whom he often sang psalms. Paul Revere engraved the frontispiece for his first tunebook. And he tanned leather for most of his life.

Not surprisingly, he’s been the subject of scholarly work, including at least three monographs written by music historians, though their focus is musicological. These studies make some passing connections between Billings’s music and his life and times, but provide little linear narrative and granular detail of the sort expected in biography. We learn almost nothing about his personal life and private thoughts.

I’ve been writing about the quirky composer since my second book, How Sweet the Sound (2004) and always find more to say about him. “Lamentation over Boston,” his colorful adaptation of a Hebrew psalm to the American revolutionary cause, helped fuel my interest in what became Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016).

Existing scholarship leaves much work to be done reconstructing Billings’ family life and situating him in the political and cultural events of revolutionary Boston. Personal information on him is in short supply: Billings left behind no journals and only one letter. As Louis Benson wrote in 1915, “The personality and work of this one-eyed, illtaught, and enthusiastic natural genius, form an engaging theme, from whatever view-point it be approached. The only adequate materials for studying him are the music, treatises, prefaces, &c., contained in the series of his tune books.”

So what sources are available to historians and biographers? First of all, his musical output. The Complete Works of William Billings were published in four large volumes between 1977 and 1990. They run to more than 1500 pages, mainly musical transcriptions of his pieces but also prefaces and other miscellaneous writings included in his tunebooks, along with extensive commentary by the editors.

Several of his pieces have found their way into hymnals and other collections, including “Jordan,” “Creation,” and “When Jesus Wept.” Billings is especially beloved of shape-note singers, who regularly sing his pieces. Also called “fasola,” shape-note singing is an American heritage music, sung around the country by devotees every weekend. It is almost never performed for an audience; everyone who comes to a “lesson” is expect to participate. This entails sitting along one of the four sides—comprising treble voices, altos, tenors, and basses—of the distinctive “hollow square,” the rotating song leader standing in the middle. Shape-note singers use music first compiled in the 19^th century, and notated in four distinctive shapes: ovals, squares, triangles, and diamonds. The most widely used shape-note collection, The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, includes fourteen of Billings’ works.

From the beginning Billings was publishing prose along with music, starting in 1770 with his first tunebook, the New-England Psalm-Singer. His second, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), features Billings’ writing at its most ebullient. It includes a lengthy letter “To the several Teachers of Music,” “A Musical Dictionary,” a letter “To the Goddess of Discord,” “An Encomium on Music,” “A Musical Creed; In Imitation of St Athanasius,” and an odd piece titled “Jargon”:

 

Let horrid Jargon split the Air,

And rive the Nerves asunder,

Let hateful Discord greet the Ear,

As terrible as Thunder

Arguably, the highwater mark of Billings’ literary career came in 1783, when he served as editor of Boston Magazine—for only one issue before being removed, apparently for his uncouth taste. Billings was drawn to lurid tales and animal allegories. The best known of these, titled “The porcupine, alias the hedge-hog; or, The fox turned preacher,” was published by Benjamin Edes, a Son of Liberty who also printed the staunchly Whig Boston Gazette.

The editor leaves the reader with no moral or conclusion to take away from the gruesome tale. And maybe that was part of the problem for customers. “A Boston Magazine…& who is the director? Mr. Billings, the psalm singer,” wrote an indignant reader named John Eliot. “I send you a subscription paper put into my hands. It is one way of getting rid of it.” His taste for gore might also have accounted, according to historian Michael Broyles, for Billings helping to publish The American Bloody Register in 1784. Modeled on so-called “execution sheets,” cheap tabloids popular on the streets of English cities, The Bloody Register offers “a true and complete history of the lives, last words, and dying confession of three of the most noted criminals…together with the dying confession of Alexander White, a murderer and pirate.”

That’s pretty much it for Billings’ writings. No journals or diaries. Only a handful of letters sent or received. The paucity of sources on Billings stands in striking contrast to the immense archive and historiography on revolutionary Boston, in which he is almost never mentioned. Even Stacy Schiff’s recent biography of Samuel Adams, which describes his singing, includes not a single reference to Billings. (Though Kenneth Silverman, in his massive study of art of the Revolution, credits Billings with being “one of the liveliest prose writers in eighteenth-century America.”)

The archives seem to have been well combed over by the authors of William Billings of Boston (1980), the eminent American music historian Richard Crawford and his co-author, David McKay, who did most of the archival digging. Significant spadework was also conducted by editors of the four-volume Collected Works, one of whom was Crawford.

My own search of family records, death notices, and wills in the New England Historic Genealogical Society turned up previously unreported discoveries. I found details about William Billings’ wife Lucy Swan’s family, based in Stoughton, Massachusetts, as well as about their eldest daughter, Abigail, her husband Amos Penniman, and their descendants. For years I’ve harbored a fantasy that a trove of personal papers might surface in someone’s attic, or mis-catalogued in a dusty archive. At this point that seems highly unlikely. There are many aspects of Billings’ experience, including some of the most important ones, researchers may never have access to.

But his life was too rich and interesting to leave alone. Billings seemed to me a bona fide Boston working-class hero and Renaissance man: he composed music, he wrote hymns and fanciful stories, he tanned leather. Could I write Billings into a historical novel, based on extensive research into his life and times, but filling out the many details of his personal life absent from the archive? That would solve the problem of the dearth of sources. When historical details are nonexistent, make them up. Not usually considered sound advice to historians, granted, but possibly warranted under these circumstances.

There were some other and possibly better reasons to attempt fiction. One had to do with audience. I thought historical fiction might be a way to reach a broader readership than a standard biography would, especially for a less familiar name like Billings. The challenge of writing in a different genre also appealed. During the pandemic I published my first novel, Learning from Loons, and mostly enjoyed the process of fictional invention.

Billings’ life certainly had a novelistic quality. It followed a kind of fall, rise, and fall—not quite rags to riches and back, but close. He began life with some advantages. He apparently received some early schooling. But at age 14, Billings’ father died, leaving his wife and children nothing from his estate. He was apprenticed to a tanner and began learning the trade, while also picking up sufficient knowledge of music to become a singing school instructor. Soon he began composing his own music, and at age 24 published his first tunebook.

Four years later, in 1774, Billings married Lucy Swan, a few months after meeting her at a singing school he taught in Stoughton, Mass. They had six children that survived childhood. He continued composing and teaching prolifically during the 1770s and 1780s, allowing him to buy a house on fashionable Newbury Street. And then, in Renaissance-man fashion, Billings turned his attention to literature.

After that, Billings’ fortunes declined. In the 1790s, he was required to take work as a scavenger and streetcleaner. His last musical work was an anthem, now lost, performed after the death of George Washington. Billings himself died in 1800 and was buried in an unmarked grave on Boston Common, where his devotees commemorate his death each year.

Some other facts about Billings: he had a voracious appetite for snuff and his appearance was unforgettable. “Billings was somewhat deformed in person,” wrote Nathaniel Gould in 1853, “blind with one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a mind as eccentric as his person was deformed.” (Given that Gould was born in 1781, and Billings wasn’t teaching many singing schools in the 1790s, it’s unclear whether they actually met.) It is intriguing to speculate how Billings’ career might have been shaped by these disabilities, and what produced them. Judging from his occupations, they failed to constrain him much. He was apparently a successful tanner, a job that required considerable strength and dexterity. He traveled around New England to teach singing schools, which required considerable stamina and working as a Boston street clearer cannot have been easy.

In order to capture a variety of perspectives on Billings, I decided to structure my novel in three parts, each with a different narrator. Part One is narrated by Billings’ wife, Lucy. It begins with their meeting at the singing school in Stoughton in 1774. It relates their courtship, marriage, early years in Boston as fighting broke out, the privations of living in Boston under siege, and the birth of their first daughter, Abigail. Billings himself narrates Part Two. It recounts his childhood, coming of age and apprenticeship to a tanner, and increasing involvement in Whig politics and Boston’s music scene. It ends with the publication of his landmark tunebook, The New-England Psalm-Singer, in 1770. Part Three, narrated by the Billings’ eldest daughter, Abigail (nicknamed  Nabby), takes place in William’s final days. It consists of flashbacks and stream of consciousness that take place in her father’s final days, and at his visitation and burial. These events prompt Nabby to recall surprising conversations she had with her mother, Lucy, on her deathbed. Her account gives us a glimpse into the hidden underside of her strange, driven father.

As I worked on the novel I took inspiration from some recent historical fiction: Hilary Mantel’s superb trio of Cromwell novels, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. Of course, the illustrious example of Johnny Tremain also came to mind. Rereading it, I learned something remarkable about its author, Esther Forbes, who pulled off a publishing coup amid World War II. She managed to win a Pulitzer in 1943 for a biography of Paul Revere and a Newbery Medal the following year for Tremain, which she wrote in roughly eight months. Even Jill Lepore hasn’t done that.

These and many others have shored up my sense that fictionalizing Billings is not out of line for an historian of American music. My guiding principle was same as Margaret Atwood’s: Respect the facts as far as possible but extrapolate when the story called for it. As an academic historian, I felt some tension between adhering strictly to the known facts and the desire to tell a compelling story. One illustrative challenge was imagining William’s early life. For some reason I imagined him as a first-born or only child. That would have simplified the fictional task. But judging from his parents’ marriage date, he must have had older siblings. Then I discovered some notes I’d taken earlier but overlooked. According to Frank Metcalf, he was the fourth child born to William and Elizabeth Billings. Later archival research confirmed that Billings had a younger sister; I found a 1756 reference to a Mary Billings in the records of the New South Church, where William’s parents were members. 

I was sorely tempted to play around with what I knew about Billings’ birth family. But having hewed to the facts until then, why change course over a handful of siblings? I decided that elaboration where the facts were lacking was one thing, indeed necessary to creating a novel; adding or eliminating family members whole cloth was another matter. Of course, in the case of Billings, many of the “facts” come from sources written long after the fact and are far from unimpeachable, with later writers reiterating without verifying the work of earlier writers; some of the tales told about him are likely apocryphal.

That said, one of the most enjoyable parts of writing the novel was recreating encounters with historical figures: Samuel Adams, which several sources indicate did take place, and with Phillis Wheatley, which doesn’t exist in the historical record but seemed plausible, given the small circle of creatives in Revolutionary-era Boston. A somewhat lesser-known person, a shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes, also wanders into my narrative.

The Musical Tanner is now complete. But even with an accelerated schedule, a novel would take much longer to get through the editorial and publication process than I had, if I wanted to reach readers during the year when many people will be thinking, however briefly, about the American Revolution. So I decided to publish it on Substack in serial form. Every Friday appears a new chapter, free of charge, scheduled to finish up sometime before July 2026.

All of us are about to be barraged with information about the nation’s founding. It’s time this unique and prolific early American got some of the recognition he deserves. I continue to work on a more conventional biography of Billings, taking a deeper dive into his rich published corpus. A colleague from Tulane, Dr. Leonard Raybon, founder of the Sacred Nine Project on early American religious music, has composed a one-act musical program that captures through musical pieces Billings’ life; we hope to stage it in venues around the country over the next year. But for now I’m happy to have my research represented by historical fiction. And that elusive trove of personal papers may yet surface. I’d be thrilled if this article encourages the scholar who eventually discovers them.

Further Reading:

Atwood, Margaret, et.al., AHR Forum: Histories and Historical Fictions. American Historical Review, Dec. 1998.

Barbour, J. Murray, The Church Music of William Billings. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960.

Barrett, Andrea, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. New York, Norton, 2024.

Benson, Louis F., “The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship. New York: Hodden & Stoughton, 1915.

Billings, William, The Complete Works of William Billings, edited by Hans Nathan, Karl Kroeger, and Richard Crawford. Boston: American Musicological Society & The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1977-1990.

Brewer, Charles E. Singing Sedition: Piety and Politics in the Music of William Billings. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2017.

Broyles, Michael, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Cook, Nym, “William Billings in the District of Maine, 1780.” American Music 9:3,

Autumn 1991.

Gould, Nathaniel D., Church Music in America. Boston: A. N. Johnson, 1853.

Lepore, Jill, “What Was the American Revolution For?” The New Yorker, 10 November 2025.

McKay, David P., and Richard Crawford. William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-century Composer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Metcalf, Frank J., American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music. New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925.

Schiff, Stacy. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2022.

Silverman, Kenneth, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976.

Young, Alfred F., and Harvey J. Kaye. Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

 

This article originally appeared in January 2026

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David Stowe teaches religious studies at Michigan State University. A musician and historian, he has published several works of non-fiction, most recently Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016) in addition to short fiction, poems, and a novel.

These questions are at the core of Chervinsky’s new monograph Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, where she details how Adams refined the still fragile template left behind by Washington. She writes that Adams “was tasked with navigating the presidency without that unique prestige” (2). This claim is not only descriptive but interpretive. It suggests that Adams’s choices were effectively arguments about the nature of executive power. Chervinsky argues that the difference between Washington and Adams is what makes the presidency so revealing. The navigation of the republic after Washington is the central focus of her book, and she is persuasive when she shows that Adams faced not only the responsibilities of the office, but also the responsibility of defining what the office was. Chervinsky treats Adams not simply as a statesman, but as a political thinker whose writings show how he reasoned through constitutional uncertainty. It is not a hagiographic portrait but rather examines how Adams’s own ideals shaped his decisions, sometimes constructively and sometimes problematically. This makes her work different from biographies that focus on Adams as a personality, such as David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning John Adams (2001) or Joseph Ellis’s Passionate Sage (1993). Instead, she follows the development of Adams’s political thought during a moment when the office itself was still under construction.

John Adams the man and the president appear as two distinct figures. Some historians, like John Ferling, Page Smith, and Bernard Weisberger, argue that the United States may not have achieved independence without Adams’s fierce defense of civil liberties and his ability to articulate Revolutionary purpose. As president, however, Adams confronted political realities that pressured him to define how his principles applied within the new constitutional framework. This tension interests Chervinsky, who shows Adams wrestling with the same ideas of virtue, order, and republican survival that guided him in earlier decades. Her treatment invites readers to consider whether Adams successfully adapted his Revolutionary ideals to a partisan republic or whether those ideals sometimes misled him in the new environment.

While president, Adams tackled a trade and naval conflict with France. He attempted to keep the United States out of full-scale war, but the resulting Quasi-War did not help his position. At the same time, he grew increasingly fearful of French spies and domestic dissent. This fear shaped his support for the Alien and Sedition Acts which allowed him to “order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Sedition Act criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government. These acts plagued his legacy, and many historians have tried to explain why he signed them. Chervinsky pays special attention not just to the war and the acts themselves, but to Adams’s thought process.

Through letters and diaries, Chervinsky analyzes what Adams believed the presidency demanded of him and how he explained it to himself and others. Chervinsky expertly keeps Adams at the center of her narrative but also uses his words to demonstrate how he understood executive responsibility. In a letter from John Adams to Judge Benjamin Chadbourne, Adams warned that “the fate of our republic is at hand” and that most republics fail when “the virtues are gone a free and equal constitution of government has rarely existed among men and requires constant vigilance to protect” (130). When Chervinsky writes that President Adams had not asked for the Sedition Act and had not lobbied for it, she explains that, per Adams’s own words, he believed that he was preserving the republic. She also leaves space for the reader to question whether his reasoning truly aligned with republican principles or whether his fear of disorder overwhelmed his commitment to liberty. Chervinsky does not suggest that the Acts were defensible. Instead, she shows how Adams explained them to himself. This is a valuable distinction because it reveals the internal logic of a president who believed that the preservation of the republic could at times require actions that strained the meaning of freedom. Yet it also raises significant questions. Does understanding his fear make his decision more acceptable? Does it reveal a consistent theory of the presidency, or does it show how easily an executive can interpret a crisis in ways that lead to an expansion of federal authority?

Chervinsky’s work nonetheless gestures toward a broader argument about the nature of executive power. Making the Presidency shows that Adams believed the office required a steady guardian who would act decisively when republican stability seemed threatened. Yet the book also reveals the profound limitations of Adams’s approach. His attempt to balance fears of French subversion with what he viewed as equitable solutions to the problem of a volatile press led to choices that were undeniably wrong. The evidence for this appears most clearly in Adams’s own letters and justifications, where he repeatedly warned that the republic stood on the brink of collapse and insisted that measures like the Sedition Act would safeguard national stability. These documents reveal a leader who conflated criticism with danger and believed that extraordinary action was necessary to avert disaster.

Chervinsky illuminates the internal logic behind those decisions, but the narrative also underscores the hazards of allowing executive anxiety to shape national policy. Rather than offering a coherent model of presidential authority, the book demonstrates how urgent concerns can distort judgment and invite expansive interpretations of federal power. In this sense, it encourages readers to consider whether the origins of the executive branch contain tensions that resist easy resolution and whether Adams’s example serves as a warning about the fragility of republican liberty when fear becomes a guiding force.

Writing history is a time-consuming process. Formulating cohesive sentences and nuanced paragraphs that are readable is an art. Chervinsky makes this process appear effortless, not because she avoids complexity, but because she interprets her sources with care. Her earlier book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, examined how Washington built a structure for executive advice. In Making the Presidency, she shows how Adams made decisions when no structure or precedent offered guidance. Both books demonstrate how institutions grow through interpretation and misinterpretation, success and error.

Chervinsky’s treatment of the Election of 1800 continues in this same nuanced vein . When Adams lost, he ensured that the fundamental attribute of the nation, a peaceful transfer of power, was respected. Chervinsky argues that Adams did not attend Jefferson’s inauguration, not because of personal spite, but because no precedent existed and no invitation was given (332). This interpretation encourages readers to consider the moment not as a failure of character but as a moment of constitutional uncertainty. Yet it also raises a question that Chervinsky acknowledges but does not fully settle: Was Adams consciously shaping a tradition, or did the tradition emerge from circumstances that neither he nor Jefferson fully controlled? That ambiguity strengthens the book, because it reflects the uncertainty that defined the early presidency.

Further Reading:

Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).

John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (The University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

David McCullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (The University of North Carolina Press, 1976).

David Waldstreicher, In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Bernard Weisberger, America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the First Contested Election (Harper Collins, 2000).

Gordon Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Penguin Press, 2017). 

 

This article originally appeared in January 2025

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Ethan Healey is a historian specializing in Early American History with particular emphasis on 18^th– and 19th-century New England. Ethan’s most recent research was an analysis of second American President John Adams and why he stayed retired. The work primarily focused on Adams’s relationship with the press, as well as friends and rivals of his era. Ethan earned his bachelor’s degree in history from New England College, and he currently attends Gettysburg College, where he is pursuing a master’s degree in history. Ethan has published a few academic papers across various online outlets, appeared on several historical podcasts, and has even published poetry in a small local publication known as The Henniker Review. His debut fiction novella, Petition for Return, was released in 2025. He is a high school History Teacher in New Hampshire.