Tag Archives: Massachusetts Historical Society

The Battle of the Roses

For this #salemsuffragesaturday, a look at the contest between Massachusetts suffragists and anti-suffragists at the turn of the last century, with particular reference to the Massachusetts suffrage referendum of 1915. Though Massachusetts had (and still has) a well-deserved reputation for progressiveness, it was (and still is) a very traditional state, and has the distinction of producing one of the earliest and strongest anti-suffrage organizations in the later nineteenth century: the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, founded in 1895 (on the foundation of an earlier association, established right after the notable school suffrage victories in 1880). Like their opposition, the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, the Anti-Suffragists had a central office in Boston, and branch committees throughout the state, including Salem. By 1915, their periodical, The Remonstrance against Woman Suffrage, claimed to represent the views of anti-suffragists around the country as well as the over 33, 000 Massachusetts members in 423 municipalities and 130 branch committees. They rallied all of their resources and members to defeat suffrage in the 1915 referendum, thus winning a significant battle but not, ultimately (and fortunately!) the war.

Remonstrance 1915 (3)

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One has to do some real historical reorientation to understand the anti-suffragist position, as it is contrary to everything we believe now. As professed by both men and even more stridently by women, it centers on the family within the home, the natural domain of women, and where they were empowered to make their most important contributions to society. In order for society to function in an effective way, separate spheres for men and women must be maintained: public affairs for men; domestic life for women—and domestic life was perceived as the “higher” sphere. Suffrage would impose civic responsibilities on women which they did not seek or need: as you can see from The Remonstrance above, the message was that the vote was being imposed on women by a radical minority of their gender. It gets a bit more complicated (and confusing!) when you consider that many Anti-Suffragists were active club and society members, striving for moral, educational, and social reforms outside the home: one would think that their various missions would be aided by suffrage, but somehow this was not the belief. When I look at the list of Salem women who were members of the city’s anti-suffrage committee, I recognize familiar names of active women: Mrs. Edward C. Battis, Miss Sarah E. Hunt, Mrs. S.E. Peabody, Mrs. John Pickering, Miss P.M. Waldo, Mrs. William Rantoul, Miss Anna L. Warren and Miss Ellen Laight. I also realize that these women who lived right next to women who were notable Suffragists, so there must have been some interesting neighborhood discussions! More specifically and alarmingly, the Anti-Suffragists expressed their fears that votes for women would lead to discord in the existing marriage relation, which would tend to the infinite detriment of children, and increase the alarming prevalence of divorce throughout the land, and made associations between suffrage and socialism, Mormonism, and pro-German sentiments during World War I.

AS Pro German (2)

AS Madonna (2)

The Anti-Suffragists wrote and distributed flyers and pledge cards, published their newspaper, and held rallies and other public events, just like the Suffragists, although their meetings were clearly less numerous and less open: the committee’s records, among the digital collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, reveal an apparent desire to control the interplay and messaging of public events. They adopted the red rose as their symbol from the beginning—a contrast with the suffragists’ yellow sunflowers and roses—but utilized it with increasing intensity from 1914 on, in their initiatives aimed at the defeat of the 1915 referendum. As Election Day of 1915 approached—and particularly the big Suffrage Parade planned for October 16— the efforts of the Anti-Suffragists became more focused and more public, with a big showdown on Parade Day, when over 100,000 red roses draped individuals and structures lining the street as the Suffragist marchers, wearing yellow banners and/or roses, walked by.

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Red Roses

AS Schlesinger

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And a few weeks later, a terrible defeat at the polls for Massachusetts Suffragists: with nearly 65% of Massachusetts men voting against universal suffrage. Salem’s return mirrored that of the Commonwealth. Both the Suffragists and the Anti-Suffragists continued their efforts, with the former focusing on the national campaign and a constitutional amendment. Massachusetts became the eighth state to ratify the 19th amendment in June of 1919, and it became law in August of 1920 when Tennessee’s legislature ratified it by one surprising vote: that of first-term representative Harry T. Burn, wearing a red rose on his lapel, who voted “aye” upon the very personal plea of his mother.

Suffrage Returns

Image sources: Ann Lewis Women’s Suffrage Collection; Library of Congress (The Anti-Suffrage Rose); Schlesinger Library, Harvard (Margaret Foley with “the RoseStands for Chivalry sign); Bryn Mawr College Suffrage Ephemera Collection(yellow banner and flower). Newspaper clippings:  Boston Globe, 1914-1915.


Witness to the Massacre

This week is filled with events in commemoration of the Sestercentennial  (or Semiquincentennial?) of the Boston Massacre on March 5: the usual reenactment, and much more. For a full calendar check out this post on Boston 1775, one of my very favorite history blogs. For my commemoration, I am focusing on a Salem witness for the prosecution in the ensuing trial of Captain Thomas Preston of the 29th Regiment of Foot, the commander of the soldiers who fired on the crowd on that dark, cold night, killing five colonists. William Wyatt, a Salem coaster, happened to be on the scene, and was consequently called to provide testimony on several occasions. He is one of two notable Salem people connected to the Massacre and its aftermath: the other, Judge Benjamin Lynde, is arguably more “notable”, but I’d like to experience the event through the eyes of an average bystander, and Lynde was neither average nor a bystander.

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A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March 1770, by Soldiers of the XXIXth Regiment, Which, with the XIVth Regiment, were then Quartered There, with some Observations of the State of Things Prior to that Catastrophe. Printed by Order of the Town of Boston: London: Re-printed for E. and C. Dilly, and J. Almon, London, 1770.

Though their separate trials did not take place until seven months later (so that tempers might simmer down), Captain Preston and the eight soldiers under his command were taken into custody and indicted immediately, as the Town of Boston put together a committee to investigate, gather evidence and depositions, and get the narrative (and the Pelham/Revere image) out there. Wyatt’s deposition is included among many in the appendix of A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, perpetuated in the Evening of Fifth Day of March 1770. It is quite detailed, and he is firm in his conviction that Captain Preston, referred to as the said officer below, ordered his men to load and fire: damn your bloods, fire, be the consequence what it will. And then, after the “consequences” were all too apparent, the said officer waved his sword in front of his men and said damn ye, rascals, what did ye fire for? This characterization of Captain Preston’s character, or lack thereof, caused John Adams, the defense attorney for the accused soldier, to challenge Wyatt in court several months later, asserting that his “diabolically malicious” portrayal of the Captain was in contradiction to all of the other testimony presented.

Wyatt Testimony Horrid (2)

William Wyatt testimony 2 Horrid (2)

William Wyatt testimory 3 Horrid (3)

Wyatt Testimony Horrid 4 (3)

I am always fascinated to find instances of regular people going about their business and then bumping into HISTORY: this seems to be the case with Wyatt. He was not a dashing Salem sea captain or wealthy merchant, but rather a “coaster”, plying his trade along the coast between Salem and Boston in his sloop Boston Packet. He seems to have supported himself and his family doing this quite well: he had a house on lower Essex Street as well as some land in Northfields that he sold a year after the Massacre. But there’s not much more to tell than that.

Wyatt Boston Harbor (3)

Wyatt 1775 Intrenchments Map 1775 (3)

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William-Wyatt-Salem_Gazette_1796-12-13 A coaster’s approach to Boston Harbor and its wharves: John Hills, Boston Harbor and Surroundings, c. 1770-79 & A plan of the town of Boston with the intrenchments &ca. of His Majesty’s forces in 1775 : from the observations of Lieut. Page of His Majesty’s Corps of Engineers, and from those of other gentlemen, Boston Public Library Leventhal Map Center; Essex Gazette, 1771-1774; Salem Gazette, 1796

Given the importance of the Massacre and the remembrance which was almost immediately assigned to it, this must have been a huge event in William Wyatt’s life. I wonder if he was disappointed—or angry—that Captain Preston was acquitted. I wonder if he felt that he bore some responsibility for this acquittal, given the fact that Adams made such a point about his contradictory characterization of Preston as well as his display of some confusion about the color of the Captain’s “surtout” in his trial testimony:

I heard the Bell, coming up Cornhill, saw People running several ways. The largest part went down to the North of the Townhouse. I went the South side, saw an officer leading out 8 or 10 Men. Somebody met the officer and said, Capt. Preston for Gods sake mind what you are about and take care of your Men. He went down to the Centinel, drew up his Men, bid them face about, Prime and load. I saw about 100 People in the Street huzzaing, crying fire, damn you fire. In about 10 minutes I heard the Officer say fire. The Soldiers took no notice. His back was to me. I heard the same voice say fire. The Soldiers did not fire. The Officer then stamped and said Damn your bloods fire be the consequences what it will. Immediately the first Gun was fired. I have no doubt the Officer was the same person the Man spoke to when coming down with the Guard. His back was to me when the last order was given. I was then about 5 or 6 yards off and within 2 yards at the first. He stood in the rear when the Guns were fired. Just before I heard a Stick, which I took to be upon a Gun. I did not see it. The Officer had to the best of my knowledge a cloth coloured Surtout on. After the firing the Captain stepd forward before the Men and struck up their Guns. One was loading again and he damn’d ’em for firing and severely reprimanded ’em. I did not mean the Capt. had the Surtout but the Man who spoke to him when coming with the Guard. 

This is confusing and apparently Adams made the most of it, as Preston’s blazing crimson overcoat was universally acknowledged. But Wyatt corrected his statement—as you can see above— and was in good company in his descriptions of the unruly crowd and the general confusion over competing cries of fire. Perhaps he did see the Captain in back of his men at one point, while others saw him in front at another, indicating that he would not have given such an order in the interest of self-preservation. At the very least, I hope that William Wyatt felt heard and the records of the Boston Massacre and its aftermath indicate that he was.

For more views and sources, check out the Massachusetts Historical Society’s online exhibition Perspectives on the Boston Massacre.


1918

I like to run through Salem’s larger cemeteries because I’m not the best runner so I really don’t want a (live) audience. Last weekend I did something to my back, so instead of jogging yesterday morning, I was walking around Greenlawn Cemetery rather awkwardly. I would not call this exercise, as I had to stop and read nearly every gravestone I passed by, and at one point, I found myself right in the midst of a collection of graves of people who had all died in 1918. They were not related; the only thing they had in common was the year of their death. None were very old, and most were quite young. Almost immediately—as I looked all around in this one little section of a large urban cemetery and saw that year everywhere I turned—I realized that this was a special moment, during which I could grasp just a semblance of how horrible that early fall was exactly 100 years ago, when young men were far away fighting a terrible war while also falling victim to a plague of influenza that was attacking the home front at the same time. I’m not sure that all the markers with 1918 inscribed on them testify to deaths by war or flu (although I will find out), but just for that moment, I could feel the magnitude of the loss–and assault—by both forces.

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The city of Salem has a “Veterans’ Squares” program through which intersections across the city are named after veterans who lived nearby. I happen to live near “Trask Square”, named in honor of Private George C. Trask, who died of pneumonia (often the end game of the flu) in Angers, France; his fellow Salemite Wallace C. Upton also died of disease much closer to home, in the Chelsea Naval Hospital. At precisely this time a century ago, influenza was raging in Boston and schools, churches, theatres, and even bars had been closed. The Massachusetts Historical Society has a great blog post featuring the diary of a young Salem wife and mother named Edith Coffin Colby Mahoney whose life changed quickly from late summer outings to the Willows to notices of deaths and “epidemics everywhere” from August to September 1918. She was right: as least 50 million* people died of the “Spanish Influenza” worldwide and perhaps 5000 people in Boston, which was the third hardest-hit American city after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In a report issued on this very date in 1918, the U.S. Public Health Service records the number of Salem flu cases at 1500, confirming Miss Colby’s impressions recording in her diary on September 26: “Torrential rain for 24 hours beginning at 3am today, some thunder in the P.M.. Most depressing day after bad news from Eugene. He died at 6:40am. Several thousand cases in the city with a great shortage of nurses and doctors. Theatres, churches, gatherings of every kind stopped. Even 4th Liberty Loan drivers parade postponed.”

And the city was still bearing the scars of the great fire just four years before……BUT the Red Sox won the World Series that year.

*I’m going with the CDC estimate; some are much higher. (https://www.cdc.gov/features/1918-flu-pandemic/index.html)

 


A Revolutionary Apothecary in Salem

Most of the students in my summer Research & Writing Seminar are pursuing local history topics related to the Revolutionary War and just after: conscription, taxation, the disruption to business, the involvement of African-Americans, Tories. This bunch seems to be drawn to that era like moths to a flame, and with the lack of local resources, we have had to be resourceful. Fortunately we have some good databases at Salem State, they are bound for repositories in Boston and elsewhere, and we’ve all enjoyed the wonderful Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. site at the Massachusetts Historical Society. But once again, this foraging illustrates how hurtful the withdrawal of the Salem sources in the Phillips Library has been to our local academic and educational community. Supposedly the Library in Rowley will be open next week, and perhaps professional historians will journey up to explore its resources, but I fear it will remain inaccessible to most of my students. The lack of digitization still rankles, especially when compared to the wonderful Dorr site. I promised I wouldn’t post on PEM and the Phillips until we had some course-changing event, but obviously I can’t help myself. Still, enough: let’s move on to more responsible repositories.

Take care if you delve into the MHS’s Dorr database: hours will be devoured. The combination of Dorr’s own annotations and the quality and navigability of the images is addictive. My students are drawn to the news, the opinion, and the “big” topics, but I love the advertisements towards the end of the papers. If I were in their place, I think I’d write my paper on the Salem apothecary Jonathan Waldo, whose conspicuous advertisements crowd out everything for me, even the imminent war.

Waldo 1

Assize of Bread

Waldo 2The Essex Gazette of April 18, 1775, via the Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Jonathan Waldo (1756-1817) was a major Salem apothecary in the later 18th century, at one time in partnership with William Stearns and later on his own. His particular business mandated a large quantity of imports among his stock, as most British patent medicines were just that: British patent medicines. In the next (April 25) edition of the Essex Gazette, Waldo advertised goods imported in the last Ships from London: was that it for his business?

Waldo 8

Apparently not. Nearly all of his account books are in the Phillips Library, of course, but fortunately a classic secondary text, George Griffenhagen’s and James Harvey Young’s Old English Patent Medicines in America (1959) mined them to establish that Waldo’s business survived through the Revolution through a dual strategy of continuing to import apparently-contraband British medicine and concocting his own American substitutions. Waldo’s business endured even as he served as a Major of the Salem Militia during the Revolution and the major administrator of the restoration of the renamed Fort Pickering (previously Fort William) on Winter Island after. His post-revolutionary account book, digitized by Harvard University for its Countway Library of Medicine, confirms his thriving—and diversified—business. Indeed, the Revolution seems to have inspired “innovation” and reaped more profits for Waldo, who notes that the popular British elixir Turlington’s Balsam of Life was very dear even after the war was over, but “his own” recipe was increasingly popular with his customers due to its lower price.

Waldo Harvard

Waldo collage

Waldo Turlington's Balsam textWaldo, Jonathan, 1756-1817. Account book of Jonathan Waldo, 1788-1794 (inclusive). B MS b265.1, Countway Library of Medicine; Waldo managed to import a large supply of the popular Female Pills by Dr. John Hooper from London in 1777–along with a supply of Turlington’s Balsam of Life, Duke Digital Repository, History of Medicine Collections.


One Woman’s War

As part of the World War I centennial commemorations which are slowly taking shape in the US and in full flight over there in Europe, the Massachusetts Historical Society has assembled an exhibition entitled Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country: Massachusetts Women in the First World War, the centerpiece of which are the nearly 250 photographs taken by Newton textile heiress Margaret Hall, who left her comfortable life in the summer of 1918 to take up work at a Red Cross canteen in France. Hall was 42 at the time, but she had been a history major at Bryn Mawr, and it is very clear to me–from both her photographs and their captions and the letters assembled in the accompanying book Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country: the World War I Memoir of Margaret Hall (ed. by Margaret R. Higonnet with Susan Solomon)– that she felt honor-bound to record the devastation of the Great War. And that she did. Her photographs, which have all been digitized on the MHS website, fall into roughly three categories: life at the canteen, troop movements, and the ravages of war–the latter images include the French countryside, leveled cities (Ypres!!!! Verdun), and the battlefields, which look like wasteland and are labeled as such. She takes us (literally) into the trenches and shows us all the captured German ammunition: my favorite image is of a celebratory Paris at war’s end where a pile of German guns is topped by a triumphant French rooster. Hall takes care to show both life and death in the closing months of the war, and from her American perspective she clearly grasps the fact that this was the first world war, bringing men (and women) from all over the globe to live (and die) in France.

Just a few of Margaret Hall’s photographs:

One woman's War I

French troops on the march.

One woman's War 2

“Miss Mitchell in her Garden”: Hall’s colleagues at the Red Cross canteen in Châlons-sur-Marne.

One woman's war 3 Six Nationalities

“Six Nationalities” at the Canteen.

One Woman's War 4 Our Sausage Balloon

“Our Sausage Balloon”

One Woman's War 5 Reims Cathedral

Reims Cathedral, “France triumphant rising out of her ruins”

One Woman's War 7 Verdun

Outside Verdun.

One Womans War 5 Americans

Americans.

One Woman's War 8 Cemetery

“U.S.A. National Cemetery, Romagne–Argonne, June 1919”.

One Woman's War 9 Cock

 “Cock crowing for Victory“, Paris 1919.


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