Tag Archives: Salem History

January 4, 2026

Salem’s Centuries

By daseger

Yesterday I received three copies of Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, and Tuesday is publication day, so I thought I’d provide an introductory post. The crucible of this book is definitely this blog, so I want to thank all of its followers, readers, and commenters: I truly am grateful for your support and inspiration! I can’t believe that I’ve been writing in this space for fifteen years: that’s a long time in internet years. It started out as just a vehicle to satisfy my own curiosity about Salem’s history and showcase Salem’s architecture, though I definitely thought I would move on to more worldly topics, despite its title. But the Salem posts were always the most popular, by far (except for anything to do with maps!) And so a more sustained focus on Salem led to the book, but a book is different than a blog. What I share here are mostly stories, but Salem’s Centuries is all about the history of this storied place.

 

I “posed” the books all over the house!

Salem is indeed a storied place. You (or I) can’t walk down the street without seeing a structure that conjures up some story or inspires the search for one. Stories are part of history, but history is more: layers, context, perspectives. After Covid and the publication of The Practical Renaissance I knew I wanted to write something about Salem for its 400th anniversary in 2026, but I wasn’t sure what—or how. The easiest thing to produce would be a compilation of the Salem stories I have posted here, but I wanted more and I thought Salem deserved more, and so the thought of a proper Salem history emerged. It was an intimidating thought for me, as Salem is an important American city and as I have asserted here time and time again, I am not an American historian. I think I’ve acquired some knowledge and expertise in Salem’s history over these fifteen years, but not enough to sustain a volume that attempts to cover 400 years. So I turned to my colleagues at Salem State, and the result is a collection of essays which explore Salem’s history from different scholarly perspectives across time but centered in place. The key moment in this turn was definitely that in which Brad Austin, our Department chair, 20th century American historian and experienced editor, agreed to be my co-editor. And the rest is history!

Here’s an overview of the book, which will be released everywhere on Tuesday and showcased in a series of events, beginning with a presentation (and hopefully discussion) at Hamilton Hall on January 25. Brad and I are incredibly grateful to the Peabody Essex Museum for centering its PEM Reads podcast on Salem’s Centuries throughout 2026. There’s a lot to discuss, but as both Brad and I realized as we finished this book, there’s also a lot more to learn about Salem’s vast history, so we hope that its reception encourages further research. And that’s exactly where you want to be at the end of a history project: stories end, history doesn’t.

The First Century (note: an innovative feature of our book is its division into full-length chapters and shorter, more focused “interludes” on people, places, and specific events. This was Brad’s idea.):

“Putting Salem on the Maps” is a grand display of historical and geographical context by Brad, and a perfect orientation for our place and book. My colleague Tad Baker has written the definititve history of the Salem Witch Trials, A Storm of Witchcraft, but he is also an archeaologist and historian of the indigenous peoples of New England, and his contributions to our book showcase both these fields of expertise. “The Dispossession of Wenepoykin” gives some much needed historical background of Salem’s “Indian Deed,” and “Gallows Hill’s Long Dark Shadow” is a first-hand account of the revelation of Proctor’s Ledge, a space below Gallows Hill, as the execution site of the victims of 1692, set in historiographical and contemporary contexts. My brief history of Hugh Peter, Salem’s fourth pastor and a regicide of King Charles I, enabled me to indulge in my own scholarly expertise for a bit, and Marilyn Howard’s depiction of John Higginson and his world is a rewrite of one of the best (no, the best) masters’ theses that I have read at Salem State. A magisterial chapter on “Salem and Slavery,” including both indigenous and African-American enslavement in Salem, by my award-winning colleague Bethany Jay, completes this century. Salem’s Centuries contains five pieces on African-American history, all set in larger contexts.

The Second Century: 

You would think that an eastern American city as venerable and consequential as Salem would have a published history of its myriad roles during the American Revolution, but no. Hans Schwartz, also a graduate student at Salem State who went on to get his Ph.D. at Clark University, has contributed a succinct yet comprehensive history of these roles in Chapter Four, with an emphasis on the social and economic changes brought about by the Revolution. Another one of our graduate students, Maria Pride, contributes some of her dissertation research on privateering in an interlude on Salem’s “hero among heroes,” Jonathan Haraden, with a little public history push by me. A strong theme of the book is Salem’s continuous “outward entrepreneurialism,” which Dane Morrison’s and Kimberly Alexander’s chapter on the rather tragic expatriate residency of the Kinsman family represents well. “Sabe and Rose” summarizes the collaborative research of Professor Jay and Salem Maritime National Historic Park Education Specialist Maryann Zujewski into the lives of the two people enslaved by Salem’s wealthy Derby family. The much-told story of Mary Spencer, “the Gibralter Woman” who (ironically) made and sold her famous hard candy with slave-made sugar while simultaneoulsy maintaining (and passing down) a fierce Abolitionist stance, gets the Austin treatment while I am able to indulge in a longer history of the man who inspired me to dig in, and dig in deeper, to Salem’s history: patriarch, entrepreneur and abolitonist John Remond.

The Third Century:

The Third Century opens with two studies of Salem and the Civil War by former Salem State graduate students Robert McMicken and Brian Valimont. McMicken contributes a general overview (like the Revolution, there isn’t one!) and Valimont a more focused piece on Captain Luis Emilio of the Massachusetts 54th. Here we have another Salem hero with no statue while a fictional witch reigns in Salem’s most historic square (at least Haraden has a plaque, even though it’s in the Korean barbecue restaurant which stands where his home once did). Our colleague Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello contributes a valuable overview of Salem’s Catholic parishes (Irish, French, Italian and Polish) with her chapter on “Immigrant Catholicisms” and we have another example of Salem’s many connections to Asia in Chapter Nine, “A Salem Scholar Abroad: the Worldview of Walter G. Whitman” by our department’s South Asian historian, Michele Louro, and the Dean of the Salem State Library, Elizabeth McKeigue. This chapter is based on Whitman’s writings and lantern slides of his time in Asia in the SSU Library’s Special Collections, and could definitely be the basis of a larger project. There are two focused studies on Salem Willows in this Century: mine on the evolution of Salem’s famed “Black Picnic” from the eighteenth century to the present, and Brad’s portrayal of the Willows as the “playground” of the North Shore. My chapter on four notable Salem representatives of the Colonial Revival movement definitely transitions well in the twentieth century, while my examination of the 1879 “School Suffrage” election is pretty focused on that one year.

The Fourth Century: 

We were slightly deferential to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Salem historiography has been so focused on the witch trials and maritime history and felt that this last century has been a bit ignored. From a department perspective, we also have several acclaimed twentieth-century historians and wanted to showcase their work. Brad and I worked together on all the editing and introductions in Salem’s Centuries, but the one chapter we co-wrote is an overview Salem’s urban development over the twentieth century, beginning with the aftermath of the Great Salem Fire of 1914. This chapter enabled me to finally figure out Salem’s experience of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s! Avi Chomsky, an eminent Latin Americanist who also studies labor history and Hispanic communities here in the US, contributed two pieces to this century, one on the 1933 strike at Salem’s largest employer, the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company, and another on Salem’s changing demographics in the later twentieth and twenty-first century. Brad worked with SSU archivist Susan Edwards on a chapter on Salem during World War II and with Professor Duclos-Orsello on the Salem State community during the lively 1960s: both pieces are based on SSU archival holdings, which we also wanted to showcase. Readers of this blog have read my rather struggling posts about Salem’s public history in its present “tourism era,” but our book contains two much more illuminating studies by public history professionals Margo Shea and Andrew Darien. Drew Darien, our former chair and now Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SSU, presents an analysis of oral histories taken during and after a conference held on the occasion of the 325th anniversary of the Witch Trials back in 2017, which Professor Shea and her former graduate student Theresa Giard explore the lure and meaning of one of Salem’s most popular present attractions, ghost tours. Finally, we have an epilogue (by me, exploring or maybe the better word is summarizing 400 years of Salem history through the perspective of one place, Town House Square) and a coda, by our colleague in the English department, J.D. Scrimgeour, Salem’s very first Poet Laureate.

Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City. Temple University Press, 2026.

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June 2, 2025

Hawthorne’s Salem Notebook

By daseger

For a blog with Salem in its title, I have written relatively few posts about witches, or Hawthorne. Faithful followers will understand the former slight, but I haven’t really discussed my thoughts about Hawthorne here, I think. Essentially I am not a fan of the man or his works. He strikes me as very haughty and melancholy and over-dramatic and not subtle and there are particular aspects of his biography and character which I really don’t like, particularly his attitude towards race and any expression of social reform and his treatment of Salem sculptor Louise Lander in Rome. I don’t think his novels have aged well: just a brief comparison with a near-contemporary like Jane Austen will illustrate what I mean. Despite her smallish world, much smaller than that of Hawthorne, her works are classic and current because she understood people much better than he did. It’s no revelation that Hawthorne was a misanthrope, but it’s difficult to get past that, really, at least for me. In the last year or so, I have been trying to get closer to Hawthorne by reading his notebooks: they’re by my bedside in nice editions and I have been been dipping into them regularly. I started with the European notebooks (English, Italian) and then last month picked up the “lost” notebook, which he kept in Salem from 1835-1841. And now I find myself looking at him not altogether but a bit differently: he seems young, very impressionable, very curious, but still judgemental. True to form, young Nathaniel was not really social in any sense in the world—he even calls himself a recluse—but he is a good observer so he is a good source for Salem. This notebook was published by his widow Sophia in the 1860s in a highly-edited American version: most critics use the word bowdlerized. She took out all the interesting bits! More than a century later it was rediscovered, and published in a 1978 facsimile edition by the Pierpont Morgan Library, which has the original manuscript in its collection.

The entries in the notebooks are basically observations interspersed with story ideas. Hawthorne is always walking around Salem: in general (but not always) he prefers to walk away from the city center into nature, to the Willows and Winter Island, to North Salem, along the coastline. Sometimes something he sees will prompt a story idea but usually the story ideas are coming out of his head rather then his environment. He seems to be practicing describing settings, rather than people’s characters. Sophia took out his descriptions of a well-dressed drunken couple observed on a trip to Boston, and young ladies bathing at the Salem shore, but they are restored in the 1978 publication, and another (really great, but again somewhat detached) discourse on society is a great description of the celebration of July 4 (his birthday!) on Salem Common. I made a list of highlights, but you will surely have your own: the lost notebook, which is also Hawthorne’s Salem notebook, is a quick, engaging read.

On Nature: Hawthorne loves the shoreline and describes its features in great detail. He seems to relish “marine vegetables” in general of an olive color, with round, slender, snake-like stalks, four or five feet long, and a great leaf, twice as long, and nearly two feet broad; these are the herbage of the deep-sea. I had never heard of samphire, or mutton sauce, growing somewhat like asparagus; it is an excellent salad at this season, salt yet with an herb-like vivacity, and eating tender. A succession of cookbook authors agree: where have I been? It’s all over Juniper Point, along with jellyfish. Hawthorne also liked to observe farmland and farm animals, especially pigs, which surely are types of unmitigated sensuality; — some standing /^in/ the trough, in the midst of their own and others victuals; — some thrusting their noses deep into the filth; — some rubbing their hinder-ends against a post; — some huddled together, between sleeping and waking, breathing hard; — all wallowing in each other’s defilement; — a great boar -going /swaggering/ about, with lewd actions; — a big-bellied sow, waddling along, with her swag-paunch. He’s judgemental even of PIGS.

Samphire illustration by Mrs. Henry Perrin from British Flowering Plants (1914).

I would have like to have seen this, but the Bulfinch Almshouse/Hospital was demolished in 1954: The grass about the hospital is rank, being trodden, probably, by nobody but me. The representation of a vessel under sail, cut with a pen knife, on the corner of the house. I would have liked to have seen both the building and the vessel carving.

The Salem Almshouse and Hospital of Contagious Diseases built 1816, Frank Cousins glass lantern slide, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum via Digital Commonwealth.

Looking glasses: Young Hawthorne clearly loved nature, but he was a materialist too, interested in and inspired by structures and objects. I found multiple reference to mirrors: To make one’s own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story. An old looking-glass—somebody finds out the secret of making all the images that have been reflected in it pass back again across its surface.

Wondrous Forces: Many of the story ideas which pop up in the notebook involve plots in which some sort of wondrous force drives the action. I like this one: a person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate — he having made himself one of the personages. Hawthorne seems very interested in all forms of magic, particularly of the kind that alters forms, like alchemy. What I think was the Deliverance Parkman House (demolished just before Hawthorne began his notebook entries; he must have seen it) draws forth several alchemical connections: the house on the eastern corner of North & Essex streets (supposed to have been built about 1640) had, say sixty years later, a brick turret erected, wherein one of the ancestors of the present occupants used to practice alchemy. He was the operative; a scientific person in Boston the director. There have been other Alchemysts of old in this town — one who kept his fire burning seven weeks, and then lost the elixir by letting it go out.

Stereoview of a drawing of the Parkman House, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Macabre bits: Hawthorne’s interest in the dead and dying are pretty well-known and there are certainly lots of death references in the notebook: one story idea involves a young couple [who] take up their residence in a retired street of a large town. One day, she summons several of the neighbors in, and shows them the dead body of her husband. That’s it! I wonder where he was going with that? He is of course enchanted with and by the Old Burying Ground on Charter Street where he encounters the grave of his witch-trial judge ancestor and the famous epitaph of Nathaniel Mather, “an aged person that had seen but nineteen winters in the world.” Hawthorne admits that he is quite considerably affected by these words, which he himself revealed to the world when I had away the grass from the half buried stone, and read the name.

July 4: Probably my favorite entry is Hawthorne’s depiction of a very festive Fourth in Salem in 1838. It was a “very hot, bright sunny day,” and the town was “much thronged”. On the Common were booths selling gingerbread &c. sugar-plums and confectionery, spruce-beer, lemonade. Spirits forbidden, but probably sold stealthily. On the top of one of the booths a monkey, with a tail two or three feet long. He is fastened by a cord, which, getting tangled with the flag over the booth, he takes hold and tries to free it. The object of much attention from the crowd, and played with by the boys, who toss up ginger bread to him. He goes on to describe more of the festivity, but he can’t help himself from commenting on the “plebianism” of the crowd!

True Crime via Wax Figures: A very festive July 4th/birthday for Hawthorne as he also attended an exhibition of wax figures which made quite an impression on him. Wax-figure displays had been happening in Salem from at least the 1790s: they were often patriotic or religious in theme, but this particular “statuary” consisted  almost wholly of murderers and their victims; — Gibbs and Wansley the Pirates; and the Dutch girl whom Gibbs kept and finally murdered. Gibbs and Wansly were admirably done, as natural as life; and many people, who had known Gibbs, would not, according to the showman, be convinced that this wax figure was not his skin stuffed. The two pirates were represented with halters round their necks, just ready to be turned off; and the sheriff behind them with his watch, waiting for the moment. The clothes, halters, and Gibbs’ hair, were authentic. E K. Avery and Cornell, the former a figure in black, leaning on the back of a chair, in the attitude of a clergyman about to pray; — an ugly devil, said to be a good likeness. Ellen Jewett and R. P. Robinson; — she dressed richly in extreme fashion, and very pretty; he awkward and stiff, it being difficult to stuff a figure to look like a gendeman. The showman seemed very proud of Ellen Jewett, and spoke of her somewhat as if this was figure was a real creature. Strang and Mrs. Whipple, who together murdered the husband of the latter. Lastly the Siamese Twins. The showman is careful to call his exhibition the “Statuary”; he walks to and fro before the figures, talking of the history of the persons, the moral lessons to be drawn therefrom, and especially the excellence of the wax- work. Gibbs and Wansley were notorious pirates, Ellen (Helen) Jewett was a Maine girl who became a prostitute in New York City and her murder in the spring of 1836 triggered sensationalist headlines for the rest of the year as R.P. Robinson was tried and acquitted of the crime. E.K. Avery was Ephraim Kingsbury Avery, a Rhode Island Methodist minister accused of murdering a factory worker in his congregation named Sarah Cornell whom he had impregnated: he too was aquitted and this was another sensational murder case involving a (very) lasped clergymen which perhaps inspired The Scarlet Letter. In yet another notorious case, Jesse Strang and Elsie Whipple conspired to murder the latter’s husband outside Albany in 1827: she was acquitted and he was executed. I guess “Siamese twins” refers to the conjoined Bunker twins from Thailand who were thrown in here for good sensationalistic measure.

Cornell Digital Collections.

Social Commentary: Hawthorne does not seem to be interested in the contentious causes of his time and place. Salem was characterized by dynamic temperance and abolition movements in the 1830s, and he makes no mention of them in his notebook except for another story idea, a sketch to be given of a modern reformer — a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold-water, and all that. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a keeper of a mad-house, whence he has escaped.

While I enjoyed reading Hawthorne’s Salem journal more than the European ones, especially in this unadulterated form, I can’t say I like him anymore than I did before I delved in. I do admire his curiosity, his descriptive abilities, as well as his tendency to engage—-and often wrestle with—the past, even in his odd anti-humanistic way. When I read his proposal of a history of modes of punishment, ancient and modern I finally understood the rationale behind the Salem Museum of Torture! (just kidding; I doubt a Hawthorne connection). And while a statue on Hawthorne Boulevard and the House of the Seven Gables stand testament to Hawthorne today in Salem, there is also a wax representation, which seems appropriate, given his fascination with that genre.

I pinched this photo of Hawthorne’s wax figure at the Salem Wax Museum of Witches & Seafarers from the author J.W. Ocker’s website, Odd Things I’ve Seen. In “Wax City,” Ocker observes that Salem tells its history through wax museums, and I agree, although I would put quotations around the word “museums.” Ocker wrote the great book The Season With the Witch about his residency in Salem during Haunted Happenings in 2015, and since Salem’s tourism has escalated so much over the past decade, I think he should return for a sequel.

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April 28, 2025

Salem Silk Swatches

By daseger

Periodically I dip into the papers of Salem supercargo Benjamin Shreve (1780-1839), which offer interesting and insider perspectives on Salem’s early 19th century global trade. Fortunately these sources have been digitized by the Phillips Library, but even before they were available to the general public I had access through an Adam Matthew source collection, to which the Salem State Library has subscribed for quite some time. Benjamin Shreve is interesting, as he is not from one of those old Salem families (nor is he attached to the Shreves of Crump and Low): in the Boston Weekly Magazine for July of 1804, he is described as a “merchant of Alexandria” in the notice of his marriage to Miss Mary Goodhue of Salem, but he quickly made his mark in his wife’s native city. Shreve opens a window into a world of trading logistics and trends through his meticulous commercial correspondence: he’s a numbers guy for sure but also a diplomat of sorts, negotiating the best price and quality for his Salem purchasers back home from his suppliers in South America, East Asia, and Europe. Wherever he goes, he has to fulfill large orders but also buy smaller items for all the wives of his employers back home, as well as for his own. He writes everything down, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate. If I dig into his papers for long my head will start to swirl, so I have to be pretty focused, and this time I was focused on silk. I’m in the exciting stage of research on my next book, which is on saffron in the late medieval and early modern eras, and there are some interesting parallels between it and silk, so that’s where I was coming from, but how I ended up in 19th-century Salem I do not know; I guess it’s just that persistent Salem tug on my time! Anyway, I was looking through a bound book of Shreve’s miscellaneous memoranda from 1809-30 when I came across these cool silk samples in the midst of much drier fare: I was caught!

Benjamin Shreve Papers (MH 20), Trade Memoranda, 1809-1830, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

These are samples of Italian silks sent to Shreve by a friend in letter packets, with advice on how and where to buy silk in Italy. It’s 1819; Shreve has certainly been buying silk in China for a while, but he was always looking to expand his sources. I think this is so interesting because I have long thought that Salem’s trade with Europe as compared to Asia has been under-represented in the scholarship. Italy and France were great suppliers of silk so why not buy there if the price was right? And Shreve himself is also under-represented in the scholarship! Why isn’t there a book on him, using all of his amazing accessible papers? He is best represented in China Trade expert Carl Crossman’s book, The China Trade: Export Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects, 1785-1865, which was published in 1972 and reprinted several times afterwords. Crossman knew the collections of the Peabody (now Peabody Essex) Museum and its library very well and drew on them heavily—I learn a ton of stuff whenever I pick up his book. And as I was just reading about Shreve there, I found two other “Salem silk swatches” from the Shreve papers included by Crossman as illustrations: two sheets of silk samples from the Chinese merchant Eshing given by Pickering Dodge of Salem, owner of the Governor Endicott, to Shreve as a buying guide for Canton, and a letter with some strands of raw silk from Dudley Pickman to Shreve–plus a miniature portrait of our man Shreve on ivory! Crossman digs even deeper into some of the Shreve sources for his last book, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings, and Exotic Curiosities (1991). Encouraged by Crossman, I went back to Shreve (for just a bit!) and found one more silk swatch among the Government Endicott papers, a sample of black “Levantine” silk. 

Not for the first time, my title is a bit deceptive: swatch books from the early modern era and after are numerous and generally refer to sample books offered up by producers rather than buyers. The Victoria & Albert Museum has several in its collection, including my favorite, a confiscated traveling salesman’s book of silk samples from Lyon, reproduced in the amazing book Selling Silks. A Merchant’s Sample Book 1763 by textile curator Leslie Ellis Miller. Shreve’s snippets of cloth, embedded in commercial paper, can’t compare to a comprehensive collection such as this, but they certainly offer some visual insights into the global trade of this conspicuous commodity in the early nineteenth century.

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April 14, 2025

Salem is a No-Show at Lexington and Concord

By daseger

We are returning to the Revolution with the big Lexington & Concord 250th commemoration coming up next week! I find that I must revisit a question posed in a post several years ago: why didn’t Timothy Pickering and the Salem militiamen join the fight at Lexington or Concord or during the British retreat back to Boston? Pickering addressed this question many times during his life, and his failure to join the fray does not seem to have slowed him down: he went on to a distinguished career in service during the Revolution and after in a succession of appointed and elected Federal offices. His essential explanation? He thought it would all be over by the time he and his men marched to the front(s). I don’t think this is good enough, sorry, Colonel Pickering!

National Portrait Gallery

Here’s as objective a summary of the events of the day as I could muster: Pickering, who was most definitely the chief beneficiary of town offices previously held be exiled Salem Loyalists, was in his office at the Registry of Deeds when Captain Samuel Epes from Danvers came in with the news of the conflict at Lexington and Concord on the morning of the 19th. Pickering was the Colonel of the Essex County Militia: he ordered Epes to gather his men and march, and Epes did so, mustering EIGHT Danvers companies. The Danvers men played a key role in harassing the British retreat at Menotomy and suffered significant casualties (7 men; more than any other town with the exception of Lexington) in the process, including Salem’s lone participant in the events of the day, Benjamin Peirce. Just to the north of Salem, militia men from four Beverly companies were on the road to Lexington fairly quickly that morning, also engaging the British at Menotomy (now Arlington). Pickering did not summon his soldiers immediately; rather he called for a meeting of Salem’s leading gentlemen in Webb’s tavern—and this would not be his only tavern stop of the day—to deliberate. His accounts of these deliberations are consistent: he did not think the Salem men could get to the action in time so was predisposed to remain on the North Shore. His was a minority view, however, as most of the Salem gentlemen believed that the Town had to demonstrate its willingness to fight. The Derby brothers, Elias and Richard, were particularly vehement on this point. So Pickering reluctantly marched, but not for long! Just past the Bell Tavern in Danvers, he halted for refreshments and recommended that the militia remain there until news of a British withdrawal came. His men were anxious, and so he relented, and they marched to Lynn, where they stopped at Newhall’s Tavern for more “refreshment.” Back on the road, there was a more determined march from Lynn to Medford, where they learned that the British were still in the process of retreating, and close by. On Winter Hill, Pickering actually saw “the (reinforced) British force marching from Cambridge to Charlestown…..and the smoke of musketry” and prepared to engage, but received orders from from Brigadier General William Heath not to, an important detail which Heath later disputed. And so the Salem men guarded a Medford bridge on April 19, and that was that.

Pickering’s tavern stops on April 19, 1775: Fireboard view of Court House Square by George Washington Felt at the Peabody Essex Museum; the Bell Tavern on the far left in “Eagle Corner and Washington Street” by Charles Dole, 1828 and a print from the collection of the Peabody Historical Society; the Newhall Tavern in a photograph and sketch from the collection of the Lynn Museum & Arts Center—thanks to Christopher Locke for sourcing these for me!

There was quite a bit of comment about Pickering’s “tardiness” and “timidity” from his contemporaries, and historians followed suit. The best indication of the former is the “Memorial” that the Town of Salem sent to the General Court of Massachusetts in August, which is included in the biography of Pickering by his youngest son, Octavius. This is such an incredible document that I’m going to include quite a bit of it, as Octavius Pickering did. He thought it was “vindication” for his father; I do not.

  • “The town of Salem humbly showeth, that, many calumnies and misrepresentations having been made and industriously propagated concerning the conduct of the town upon and since the 19th of April last, in consequence of which its character has been greatly injured and some of its inhabitants insulted and abused, the town thinks it a point of duty to take effectual steps to vindicate its innocence, and procure a redress of those grievances, which are too many and too heavy any longer silently to be endured, and therefore beg leave to give the following detail of facts : —
  • “On the 19th of April, very soon after authentic intelligence arrived of the barbarous deeds of the King’s troops at Lexington, the inhabitants mustered in arms, and near three hundred marched off, and directed their course according to the intelligence they were continually receiving on the road of the situation of the troops ; but, though they marched with as much despatch as was possible, consistent with their being fit for action after so long a march as they must necessarily make, yet they arrived in sight of the troops not till the last of them were marching up Bunker’s Hill. Why the inhabitants of Salem should be so highly censured for their conduct on this occasion, the town cannot conceive. Thousands of men, nearer, much nearer, the scene of action, either stayed at home or arrived no sooner than the Salem militia. From Milton and its environs, in particular, the militia got as far as Cambridge only, at the same time that the Salem militia arrived at Charlestown; yet, by a strange and unaccountable partiality, the inhabitants of Salem only are reproached; and the multitudes near at hand, who never stirred an inch, or, though they lived but at half the distance, arrived as late as the Salem militia, are entirely excused. In short, it is most absurdly declared by many, that, if the Salem militia had not been negligent and pusillanimous, the King’s troops must have been entirely cut off; that is, fewer than three hundred men could have done infinitely more in one or two hours, than the whole body of militia assembled had been able to perform that day.” [The Memorial then addresses another charge upon Salem: that British ships were being provisioned by the town!!! Must look into this!]
  • “This, may it please the Honorable Court is a brief, thorough faithful, narrative of facts; hence it may be judged how injuriously the town of Salem has been treated. The town cannot forbear to express its astonishment. What could occasion the reproach so liberally thrown upon us? What motives could be imagined sufficient to tempt us to neglect the duty we owe to ourselves, our posterity, and our country ? What proofs have we given of our insensibility, that we should neither dread the curses of slavery, nor feel the blessings of liberty? What could we have done more than we have done, to secure the latter to ourselves and all our dearest connections ? When the balance of public affairs was most doubtful, — when neither money nor the means of payment were provided, and the sentiments of the Continent were unknown, — then Salem furnished every needful supply in its power, as soon as the army’s wants were known ; how readily, and to how great amount, the Committee of Supplies and the Treasurer can inform. We have continued these supplies, and the town is drained. What more remains for us to do?”

The Seat of War in New England, by an American Volunteer, 1775; Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon via ARGO: American Revolutionary Geographies Online [this is a great site–check it out!]

Timothy Pickering was the town’s secretary (one of many positions he held in Salem) so made a “true copy” of the memorandum after the town meeting; I don’t know if it was his initiative. But the tone of this composition is very defensive. Salem was a major Massachusetts town which had recently been the colonial capital and official port of entry; it was expected to lead and it had not lead; it’s not just about Pickering. As for the man himself, I think his actions demonstrate how difficult the position many Patriots were in and just how HUGE the conflict at Lexington, Concord, and Arlington was. Pickering was still, despite the all the antagonistic actions of General Gage in Salem the year before, a British citizen yearning for the rights enjoyed by his fellow Britons across the Atlantic. But Lexington & Concord and then Bunker Hill, altered that stance, that identity, irrevocably. I think some of his logistical concerns were valid at first, but I can’t explain all those tavern stops! There was another issue: there were British ships off Salem and Marblehead, raising defensive concerns, which (I think) kept the Marblehead men from marching. I don’t like to judge people in the past, but I do like to lay out as many of the conditions they faced as possible. When I look at Timothy Pickering in as much context as I can conjure up, he looks like someone who could easily have been a Loyalist, but he was not. He was quite the opposite: a leader of the revolutionary resistance in his town and region. But he was also just a man, responding to events as they occurred on one Spring day.

Appendix #1 Without a military presence at Lexington and Concord, I think the most important contribution of Salem to this epic event was likely printer-publisher Ezekiel Russell’s broadside Bloody Butchery by the British Troops, or, The Runaway Fight of the Regulars. Being the Particulars of the Victorious Battle fought at and near Concord … between Two Thousand Regular Troops, belonging to His Britannick Majesty, and a few Hundred Provincial Troops, a major propaganda coup. The Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum will be presenting an exhibition on Russell for the Salem’s quadricentennial next year, which is great news!

Appendix #2 I am giving my first Revolutionary talk next week for Historic New England’s Phillips House: excited and a little nervous! Pickering will be referenced, but not in relation to Lexington and Concord: he is very representative of an increasing Whig resistance to the royal government that created a deep division in Salem in the decade before the Revolution, what I am calling a “pre-revolutionary revolution.” On the 29th, my colleague Tad Baker will be giving a talk on some of the Salem Witch Trial references which surfaced in Revolutionary rhetoric—a very interesting topic! You can find more information and register here: https://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/events/.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem

January 27, 2025

Headline History

By daseger

I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley to look through some scrapbooks memorializing the Salem Tercentenary of 1926 late last week and found myself enchanted by the presentation and curation of one particular album put together by a certain Frank Reynolds. There were two big scrapbooks actually, and while I was expecting photographs (I guess that would be an album, rather than a scrapbook), there were only newspaper articles pasted in in a meticulous and chronological manner with attached white labels. At first I was disappointed, but then I went with it, and found the juxtaposition of the headlines really interesting. Then I came upon one particular article that really illustrated the concept of “headline history” and then I had my post.

Thus inspired, I divided my Tercentenary headlines into several categories:  1) The Big Row; 2) Getting Ready; 3) Advice to Tourists; 4) Dress Up; 5)) Crowds; 6) Presidential Address.

The Big Row was over the date of the founding of Salem, actually no, it was over what “founding” meant. Everyone knew that Roger Conant came down from Gloucester to Salem in 1626 with the “Old Planters” but William Crowninshield Endicott, Jr., the President of the Essex Institute, insisted that Conant and his colleagues were mere “fishermen and squatters” and Salem wasn’t really founded until his ancestor John Endecott arrived with the first royal charter in 1628. So Salem’s Tercentenary should be delayed for two years. The most eminent Salem historian of the time, Sidney Perley, made it clear that this was a ridiculous stance, and resigned in protest from his curatorial postition at the Essex Institute. Then Endicott resigned, and that was the situation in March of 1926, only a few months before the celebrations were to begin. I’m really not sure how it was resolved, but it took a lot of meetings and made a lot of headlines. Endicott went on to become President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, so maybe all the Boston Brahmins got together and offered him a bigger prize to back down.

Full speed ahead! We get some great headlines about getting ready. A lot of focus on cleaning Salem up. There was one big new project—a pineapple-topped bandstand on Salem Common—but much more of an emphasis on restoring and scrubbing (reports on parades later on often noted how clean Salem’s streets were). Hamilton Hall was stripped of its paint; the massive train depot was sandblasted.

There were some interesting marketing campaigns associated with the Tercententary. Every Salem store seems to have dressed up its windows with historical scenes; Parker Brothers reissued its first board game, The Mansion of Happiness. There seems to have been an outreach to Quebec, because of Salem’s large Franco-American population, but also to other areas of the country, and I think that might explain these odd witch headlines. The Salem Tourist Camp at Forest River Park seems extraordinary to me: this very same space hosted a refugee camp after the Great Salem Fire just twelve years earlier (and no, the Fire was not “kind to the city.”)

So many “antiques”! The word is used very broadly: houses, dresses, furnishings, all on display. There was a great opening of houses throughout Salem, and also a great opening of attics. While the parades presented a broad overview of Salem’s centuries, the open houses and performances were very focused on the Colonial: and its revival.

The entire July week was jam-packed: THREE parades, a big bonfire on the fourth in the Salem tradition, fireworks in the Willows along with a triple parachute jump from a hot air balloon and then an attempted quadruple jump two days later by Louise Gardner (who would fall to her death before an Atlanta crowd of 15,000 two years later), athletic competitions, lectures, a ball, all sorts of exhibitions. The Massachusetts papers covered everything in detail, as did some national papers, and there were a lot of headlines about crowds. For the Historical and Floral parade at the end of the week, the participants were estimated at 10,000 and the crowds at nearly 100,000.

By all accounts the Salem Tercentenary was a resounding success, but clearly there was a need for a presidential nod to cap it off. I had always thought that Calvin Coolidge was dissing Salem by not attending the big event as he always summered nearby, but apparently this year he was in another part of the country. So he sent Vice-President Charles Dawes, who interrupted his annual fishing trip to Maine. The Vice-President reviewed the first tercentenary parade, and gave a speech on how the radio could safeguard the constitution from rampant populism. But even that sounds better than President Coolidge’s note, below. So enthusiastic: “even if Salem ships no longer circle the world and the life of the community goes on in less picturesque and spectacular channels” Salem still has its history! You’d think Silent Cal would have congratulated the city on putting on such a big party, but no. The President does make the point that anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was being celebrated in the Salem year as Salem’s 300th and this year we have another concurrence with the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Revolution 250 is going to leave Salem 400+ in the dust, but we shall see.

Tercentenary font? Quincy is up this year: you can check out their schedule here.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

October 21, 2024

History is Gray

By daseger

For the past month or so, I’ve been considering the case of the Salem City Seal and various reactions to it. In the past, before last month, I’ve probably thought about the seal for 5 minutes; over the last month, I’ve been thinking about it for many hours—too many, certainly. If you haven’t read my previous posts, here is what happened, succinctly: several members of the Salem community complained that the seal, with its depiction of a Sumatran man, pepper plants, and Salem ship, was stereoptypical and insulting to Asian-Americans. Their condern and complaint was brought to the city’s Race Equity Commission, which had deliberations over the summer and concluded that “damage had been done” and the seal should be redesigned. The Race Equity Commission reported this finding to a subcommittee of the Salem City Council which concurred (I think), but somewhere in the process someone stepped in and suggested a public task force to add some transparency and public comment to what had heretofore been quite a closed process—I think at best 40 people knew that our circa 1839 seal was deemed suspect in a city of over 40,000.  And this is what the City Council finally voted on: the creation of a task force which will sit for 18 months and hear public testimony and garner historical perspectives. So that’s where we are and I think that’s a good place, in theory. In practice, I have my concerns, because I’m just not sure those in positions of authority have the capacity to grasp historical perspectives, frankly. In the Salem of my experience, every single public history issue has been black and white, villains vs. heroes, the powerful and the powerless, with an overcast of green, for money. Nothing is nuanced, multi-causal, two-dimensional, or gray, and that’s a problem, because most of history is gray. Salem has been without a professional historical society for a long time, and it shows.

 

Salem Stereotypes: Seal and Patch

My first concern about how this whole process will play out relates to stereotypes. The original accusation against the seal was that it represents a generic “oriental” stereotype. I can understand that, at face value. But before I gave the seal much thought, I always thought it was really cool for its cosmopolitan character, depicting a ship over there rather than in Salem Harbor. So I sent a note to our city councillors asking them to consider the very global nature of this very early civic symbol. About half wrote back, all but one branding the seal’s figure a stereotype. This got my dander up as it indicated a general closed-mindedness before we had even delved into the matter, and of course I couldn’t help but think about the certain stereotype which is everywhere in the Witch City. Wasn’t this a hypocritical position on the part of our Councilors, given that there is a crone-like character with a pointy hat riding on a broomstick on all of our police cars? And you know, people died who were not witches. (Edit: a city councillor informed that the City Council does not approve “mascots,” only the seal, so the omnipresent witch is not under their jurisdiction—I have to say that it’s not particularly uplifting to know that the Salem schools would choose the witch as their “mascot”).  No matter—there’s really no questioning this particular stereotype, and no constituency for its removal. The historical record regarding the intended depiction of the city seal’s character is pretty clear: he was supposed to be from the specific part of Sumatra (Aceh) which grew the pepper which was so sought after by Salem ship captains and merchants. He did look vaguely Asian to me except for the hat—the hat was a little different and a little distinctive and I thought I had seen it before. And then I remembered: Theodor de Bry, a Dutch engraver and publisher who specialized in depicting and disseminating images of “new” people as Europe intensified its voyages of expansion and conquest in the early modern era. Below is a 1599 engraving by de Bry’s son, and an image from nearly three centuries later of a group of Aceh men during the brutal Aceh War with the Dutch. Same hat, right? But again, it doesn’t matter:even if Salem’s seal features a unique provincial figure and not a general stereotype, if people label it as the latter it becomes one. There’s only so much history can do.

J.T. de Bry, Inhabitants of Sumatra, 1599, Bartele Gallery; Aceh envoys seeking British support against the Dutch in the Aceh War, 1873, Bridgman Images.

 

The “enormous condescension of posterity”.

George Peabody, Salem alderman and son of Joseph Peabody, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants, chaired the committee that designed the seal following the adoption of a new city charter in 1836. As a Sumatra trader himself, Peabody had familiarity with Aceh and its people, but again, I’m not sure this really matters. As expressed by public opinion, it seems to me that those for a complete redesign of the seal and against are rather equally divided, but last week a long column was published in the Salem News which condemned support of the Sumatran image as “toxic nostalgia.” It’s a well-written piece, so it commanded my attention, as did its almost-complete ahistorical argument: it’s an excellent example of labor historian E.P. Thompson’s famous quote, “the enormous condescention of posterity.” According to the author, “regardless of what the seal was meant to celebrate, it must be acknowledged that George Peabody was a product of his times and that the seal he designed reflects a lot of the imagery that came to be associated with western notions of superiority over eastern peoples.” Coincidental with the adoption of the seal in 1839 was the beginning of the shameful Opium Wars instigated by Great Britain upon a weak China, and as “some American merchants (including no doubt some from Salem) did engage in the Opium Trade and benefitted from the British actions in China” we should reject the seal on the basis of this connection? Are we also to reject the East Asian collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, all the Federal Salem houses built with fortunes made by pepper and spices, and the navigational expertise of Nathaniel Bowditch, whose miraculous return from Sumatra in 1803 made The New Practical American Navigator authoritative? Are we to reject anybody who had anything to say in 1839 and just wallow around in the progressive present? If so, it’s going to be a bit difficult to learn from the past. George Peabody’s time seems far less toxic to me than later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extensions unleashed a cascade of anti-Asian vitriol in the United States, and we should all note that one of Salem’s most famous native sons, Joseph Hodge Choate, argued against the Act before the Supreme Court in 1893.

 

 

History is not cherry-picking.

Proponents of the seal tend to talk about “history-erasing” and its critics focus overwhelmingly on the violence which characterized the trade with Sumatra, which led to two US interventions after American ships were attacked by Malay pirates. Indeed, it’s not a pretty picture, but history seldom is. It is certainly not true that it was a one-way trade imposed upon the Acehnese: American ships brought a lot of silver over there. I’ve been reading as much scholarship as possible since this seal business began, and last week Anthony Guidone, an assistant professor at Radford University in Virginia, forwarded me his dissertion, “The Empire’s City: a Global History of Salem, Massachusetts, 1783-1820” (George Mason, 2023). It’s a detailed interdisciplinary study: I hope it gets published soon so everyone can read it. Guidone gives us the complete picture of Salem’s first global age: the black and the white, and lots of gray. Trade with Asia brought great wealth to Salem but also intensified its connections with slavery and the plantation economy in the Caribbean. But at the same time, it also benefitted a much wider slice of Salem’s population than I had realized, including African Americans and women, and facilitated the creation of a diverse community of sailors (he makes great use of the Salem Crew Lists 1799-1879 at the Mystic Seaport Museum, a great resource). In summary, Salem’s trade with Asia impacted “nearly all aspects of life in the town, changing Salem’s economy, politics, race relations, material culture, civic identity, and historical memory.” Whew! Even though the dissertation ends in 1820, Guidone expands it a bit further to discuss Salem’s anniversary moments in the next decades and the adoption of the city seal. He sees the commemorative focus on commerce by newish institutions such as the East India Marine Society and the Essex Historical Society as evidence of the desire to “construct a narrative that posed an alternative to the town’s witch-hunting past” even as (or because of ???) encroaching commercial decline. I agree completely: members of these institutions tended to identify the witch trials as a “stain” rather than an opportunity and waved no witch flags. How backward they were!

I’ve got to admit, Paul Revere’s first Massachusetts seal from 1775 is my favorite, even though its central figure cuts a rather simplistic figure.

13 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, Salem

September 23, 2024

Salem Can’t Lose Sumatra

By daseger

I’m still thinking and reading about Salem’s endangered city seal, so this is Part II of last week’s post. I promise there will be no part III (at least for a while) as I think I have resolved my feelings about this little scrap of paper, wood, or metal, which links past and present in very interesting ways. My present stance is: Salem can’t lose Sumatra. Let me first recap the issue and bring us up to date, as I was a bit sketchy in last week’s post about how we got here. Certain members of the Salem community find the figure on the 1839 seal, representing an early 19th century dignitary from the Aceh Province of Sumatra, offensive, and appealed to the city’s Race Equity Commission. This commission approved a recommendation to the City Council to redesign the seal unaminously in August. I don’t think there was any public awareness of this issue at the time (or much now, although there was an article in the Salem News last week). Thankfully, somewhere between the Race Equity Commission and the City Council emerged the idea of a task force, I think from the Mayor’s office, and that is what the City Council will be voting on this week. I am grateful that a public process is being considered, although I have yet to ascertain whether the task force will be a true gauge of public opinion or a rubber stamp.

I believe that this seal is unique in its provincial (vs. generic “oriental”) depiction and its global perspective for reasons I laid out in last week’s post. I subscribe to my former colleagues Dane Morrison’s and Nancy Schultz’s assertion that the aged Salem City Seal can still represent a relatively new cosmopolitanism in American Studies, as outlined in the preface to their authoritative volume on Salem history, Salem: Place, Myth and Memory. 

      “After Salem was incorporated in 1836, 210 years after its founding, the community imagined by city leaders was a much more globally connected entity than conventional histories have depicted. They called for a city motto, Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum—“To the farthest ports of the rich East”—that served as a reminder of Salem’s intimate connections with the trade of China, India, and Sumatra, the pepper-rich island in the South Pacific. The city council commissioned a design by pepper ship owner George Peabody to represent Salem’s global connections. It portrays an Atjehnese man, surrounded by palm trees and a pepper plant, holding a parasol to shade himself from the hot Sumatran sun, and wearing traditional attire—a flat red turban, red trousers and belt, a yellow kneelength robe, and a blue jacket—common to the Atjeh province of the island. In the background, a Salem vessel, with sails unfurled, navigates the harbor. Filling out the emblem are compass rose motifs and the image of a dove bearing an olive branch. The Salem City Seal may be read as text that illustrates this new direction in American Studies, offering a fresh way to envision cannections, not just between the local and the national, but also among the local, national, and global.”

Dane’s and Nancy’s preface, which is part of their instruction for students and teachers, instructed me to investigate the American meaning of the Salem-Sumatra connection, and boy did I find a lot! (and I’m sure there’s a lot more, but I actually have to work—when I found myself in the digital archives of the State Department at 2:00 in the morning I made myself stop). There are a lot of well-known facts: Sumatran-supplied pepper made Salem the 6th largest city in the US and its import duties 5% of the nation’s gross revenues, for example. There’s also well-known lore: so many Salem ships plied the Sumatran coast that the island’s residents thought SALEM was a country. But there’s much more. In 1905, the Merchant Marine Commission released a report to Congress with a striking summary statement that “only 10% of our vast seaborne commerce is now conducted in American ships” and a comparison from a century earlier, when that percentage was 91%. In the syndicated news stories that followed, published in newspapers across the country, Salem represented the earlier golden age of commerce when her pepper ships ruled the seas and transformed both the city and the nation. All of these stories featured the “romantic” narrative of Salem’s pepperdom, but they were also looking for lessons from the past—and equating Salem’s pepper ships with America’s merchant marine.

Then there are a succession of presidential references to Salem’s pepper trade and traders: daring free agents in a world of expanding European empires. This was the party line of presidents as diverse as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson (of course, he was very proud of his naval intervention in retaliation for a native attack on a Salem ship), Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, William McKinley (a big jump!), Franklin Roosevelt, and most of all, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy clearly loved the Salem-Sumatra story: he referenced it when President Sukarno of Indonesia visited the US in 1961 and whenever he happened to be in a town or city called Salem.

Then-Senator Kennedy identified the image as an “Indian,” indicating that the Seal’s figure did not have an localized identification then as well as now. But the emphasis on “people of courage” still rings true, I think. His different Salem variations are interesting, but they all go back to Salem, Massachusetts, the connecting link between east and all the different wests. It would be so sad to lose this Salem, to a sanitized version of a witch’s hat (!!!!) or even the Custom House. We would be going back, I think, back to the provincial and away from the worldly. I am not of Asian descent, nor am I a politician or a human resources professional or a graphic designer so I have none of those perspectives: this is just one historian’s view: Salem can’t lose Sumatra.

P.S. I’ve had a lot of emails and read comments elsewhere…..yes, I too am struck by our city government’s lack of awareness about the contradiction between the perceived stereotype of the Sumatran city seal and the obvious stereoptype of the Witch, Salem’s other official city seal (or patch?), and plan to write about this in a future post. Every single Witch Trial descendant who I know or have heard from is offended by this image, but their outrage, our outrage, has no representation or redress.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Salem

September 16, 2024

The Salem City Seal

By daseger

Last week, the Salem City Seal was an agenda item for a meeting of our City Council: apparently there are concerns about its representation and plans for its replacement. I don’t know much more than that, as I wasn’t able to attend the Council meeting or any of the previous subcommittee meetings that have brought us to this point. The Council sent the matter to another subcommittee, I believe, so hopefully a public process of deliberation will ensue. I do think it is appropriate and even useful for a community to reconsider past representations on seals, statues, and other expressions of collective heritage or identity, as long as those conversations are public, so I’m hoping to contextualize this discussion a bit. I’m also kind of curious about the history and reception of our city seal myself, as it always struck me as rather unusual. So I spent a few hours this past weekend digging into some primary and secondary sources—certainly not long enough! What follows is certainly an impressionistic history and a work in progress, but first, here IT is:

So as you can see, there are some variations of this image. The first seal is the official one, which I have taken from the city’s website, and it is accompanied by this description:

The City Seal was adopted as the insignia of the City in March 1839, three years after Salem was incorporated as a City and 213 years after its founding. The Seal depicts a ship under full sail approaching a coastal land in the East Indies. A native inhabitant in traditional garb stands in the middle, surrounded by plants of the region. A dove sits atop the scene, with an olive branch in its mouth. The City motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” – “To the farthest port of the rich East” – is below. The Seal is ringed by the incorporation dates of both the Town of Salem, 1626, and the City of Salem, 1836.

The second seal is also from City Hall: I think it’s the watercolor image produced by Salem artist Ross Turner but the city’s art inventory is not very descriptive. An article in the Beverly Citizen from the spring of 1888 informs us that “Mr. Ross Turner, the artist, has made an interesting and handsome study of the city seal of Salem, designed half a century ago by Colonel George Peobody, who is still living. Mr. Turner adheres to the original design, which has suffered a great deal at the hands of engravers and others.” The third and fourth images are from a pediment carved for the President of State Street Bank which came up at auction a few years ago and the last is from a really fun book, Town and City Seals of Massachusetts by Allan Forbes and Ralph Eastman, which was published in 1950. If you browse through this last book, it’s immediately apparent how unusual the Salem seal is: it’s the only one recognizing a foreign identity and region as integral to the history of the city/town. Every other seal has a recognizable landmark or person or industry from that place—there are quite a few ships but Salem’s is the only one on the other side of the globe! I think it’s one of the oldest seals in the book, too: Massachusetts called for every town and city to come up with a seal only in 1899, when Salem’s was recognized as “ancient.”

The designer of the original seal in the 1830s was George Peabody, son of the wealthiest pepper trader in Salem, Joseph Peabody, and a city alderman. There were deliberations before its acceptance and commission, LOTS of deliberations due to “diversity of opinion”: you can read all about them in the March 1866 volume of the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute. There seems to have been universal agreement that the seal was to represent two things: Salem’s unrivalled prosperity and Salem as City of Peace. Given Peabody’s background, it’s understandable that he chose to depict the personage of a distinctly East Indian man from the Aceh province of Sumatra rather than a more generic “Eastern” figure: this region was the source of the pepper which had enabled Salem’s commercial ascendancy. Joseph Peabody alone is credited with 61 voyages (6.3% ot the total trade)  to Sumatra alone from 1802-1844, and 100 voyages (or 10%) with his son-in-law John Lowell Gardner): this was the family business. The pepper trade was also Salem’s major business between 1799 and 1846, with 179 ships engaged on multiple voyages. The 1866 account of the Salem seal’s approval concluded that “it was her shipping, fitly typified by this design, carrying the fame of her merchants as well as the flag of the country into unknown  areas, that made her name in the first half of this century, a synonym for commercial honor, enterprise and success, throughout the other hemisphere as well as this.”  The second theme of the seal, peace, symbolized by the dove bearing an olive branch, is a bit more of a tough sell in this specific historical context, given the fact that the 1830s was the decade which saw two U.S. military interventions in Sumatra in retaliation for native attacks on American shipping. The connection between peace and commercial prosperity was often emphasized in early nineteenth century newspaper accounts as it was very clear to everyone that Salem’s era of prosperity began after the American Revolution. The pepper trade had been a dangerous one from its beginnings at the turn of the century, but the 1831 attack on the Salem ship Friendship certainly brought things to a head with the first Sumatram intervention, often referred to as the “Battle of Qualah Battoo” (now Kuala Batee) in the following year. The broadside below (from the Phillips Library’s digitized collection) is representative of the “war fever” of the era, but it was printed in Portland, Maine rather than Salem. The Salem accounts are a little less “patriotic” and a lot more detailed: they note the precise number and names of those who were killed or wounded (five and six rather than “all”), everything that was taken, and call for restitution.

George Peabody’s seal was designed a mere four or five years after this engagement, and both his family and his city wanted to continue this valuable trade. When I look at this solitary Sumatran, I tend to identify him with Peabody family friend Po Adam, a local dignitary who warned the Americans about the coming attack on the Friendship and helped them recover their ship. This was a sacrifice on his part: he wrote to Joseph Peabody afterwards that his acts had earned him the “hatred and vengeance of my misguided countrymen” and that “the last of my property was set on fire and destroyed, and now, for having been the steadfast friend of the Americans, I am not only destitute, but an object of derision.” This identification is only conjecture on my part, but the original figure on the Salem seal was certainly more respectful recreation than stereotypical figure. The connection between Sumatra and Salem endured through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, even into the twenty-first. It was referenced in regard to the new (well not really) heritage trail or “yellow line” just a few years ago, and much more significantly after the terrible 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, when relief efforts on the North Shore were organized in deference to the “old ties” between Massachusetts and Sumatra. Almost 20 years later, it seems like these ties are broken, or about to be.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

May 6, 2024

Salem History: my Reading List

By daseger

We got word last week that our book Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, 1626-2026 cleared its final rounds of review and approval and will be published by Temple University Press in the fall of 2025, just in time for Salem’s Quadricentennial in 2026. This project has been challenging in many ways but I think our book will expand Salem’s written history rather dramatically: there are four pieces on African-American history alone, chapters on Salem’s experience of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and lots of twentieth-century history that has never been written, and much more. I felt vulnerable throughout the whole process: I had never edited a volume before, and I am not trained in American or modern history but here I was writing chapters not only on the seventeenth century, but also the nineteenth and twentieth. The whole project would not have been possible without my colleague and co-editor Brad Austin, who is both an experienced editor and a modern American historian. I also relied on Salem historians past and present, as I felt I had a detailed grasp on the topics I was writing about from a local perspective, but no general, much less comprehensive, context in which to place my Salem narratives. So the whole experience was like a deep dive into historiography for me, and I learned a lot. As a tribute of sorts, I thought I’d post my Salem bibliography, in chronological order of publication. These are the sources, primary and secondary, from which I learned the most. I’m going for breadth over depth here so I’m not going to annotate each and every title, but if you have questions ask away!

A couple of caveats: my chapters are on Hugh Peter, John Remond, the suffrage and Colonial Revival movements, and urban renewal in the twentieth century, so my reading list is going to reflect those eras and topics. This particular bibliography is not comprehensive in regard to the Witch Trials as our book is about new perspectives. I’ve got my colleague Tad Baker’s Storm of Witchcraft on here and a couple of classics, but that’s it.

  1. Francis Higginson, Nevv-Englands plantation. Or, A short and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that countrey. Written by Mr. Higgeson, a reuerend diuine now there resident. Whereunto is added a letter, sent by Mr. Graues an enginere, out of New-England (1630). First impressions and physical descriptions, plus Reverend Higginson was like a bridge for me, as he’s from my period.
  2. John Smith, Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where. Or, the Path-way to erect a Plantation…by John Smith, sometimes Governour of Virginia, and Admirall of New-England. (1631). 
  3. Lewis Roberts, The merchants map of commerce wherein the universal manner and matter relating to trade and merchandize are fully treated of, the standard and current coins of most princes and republicks observ’d, the real and imaginary coins of accounts and exchanges express’d, the natural products and artificial commodities and manufactures for transportation declar’d, the weights and measures of all eminent cities and towns of traffick in the universe, collected one into another, and all reduc’d to the meridian of commerce practis’d in the famous city of London (1700).
  4. Samuel Sewell, The Selling of Joseph. A memorial (1700).
  5. Joseph Barlow Felt, The Annals of Salem, from its first Settlement (1827). This is my favorite of the antiquarian histories–full of details!
  6. Charles Moses Endicot, Account of Leslie’s retreat at the North Bridge in Salem, on Sunday Feb’y 26, 1775 (1856).
  7. Harriet Sylvester Tapley, Salem imprints, 1768-1825 : a history of the first fifty years of printing in Salem, Massachusetts, with some account of the bookshops, booksellers, bookbinders and the private libraries (1870). More than printing here!
  8. Thomas J. Hutchinson, Patriots of Salem. Honor Roll of Officers and Enlisted Men in the late Civil War (1877).
  9. Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall. 1674–1729. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878-1882.
  10. Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee, A Half Century in Salem (1887). There are quite a few memoirs by Salem women; this is my favorite.
  11. William Pynchon and F.E. Oliver, editor, The diary of William Pynchon of Salem. A picture of Salem life, social and political, a century ago (1890). There are several Salem Tory diaries; most left, Pynchon remained.
  12. Lyman P. Powell, ed., Historic Towns of New England (1898).
  13. Essex Institute (William Bentley), The diary of William Bentley, D. D.,Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (1905-1914). The ultimate detailed diary: new annotated edition coming soon, I believe!
  14. Arthur Barnett Jones, The Salem Fire (1914).
  15. Mary Harrod Northend, Memories of Old Salem (1917).
  16. Frank Cousins, The Colonial Architecture of Salem (1919).
  17. Clifford L. Lord, ed., Keepers of the Past (1965). Really good chapter on George Francis Dow.
  18. Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626-1683: A Covenant Community (1975). A really important book, key to understanding the religious structure and mindset of Salem’s religous foundation.
  19. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed. The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1976).
  20. Essex Institute, Dr. Bentley’s Salem: Portrait of a Town. A Special Exhibition (1977).
  21. Elizabeth Stillinger, The antiquers : the lives and careers, the deals, the finds, the collections of the men and women who were responsible for the changing taste in American antiques, 1850-1930 (1980). So many seekers of Salem stuff!
  22. Charles B. Hosmer, Preservation Comes of Age, 1926-49: from Williamsburg to the National Trust (1981). Salem is key in a national historic preservation movement.
  23. John Demos, Entertaining Satan. Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (1982).
  24. Bryant and Carolyn Tolles, Architecture in Salem: an Illustrated Guide (1983, 2003, 2023).
  25. Michael Middleton, Man Made the Town (1987). Urban renewal.
  26. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The great silent army of abolitionism : ordinary women in the antislavery movement (1998).
  27. Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea. Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (2005). OMG what a tour de force!
  28. Dane Morrison and Nancy Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth and Memory (2005). This is our exemplar, and we tried to make our book complementary.
  29. Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters. Three Women who ignited American Romanticism (2006).
  30. Avi Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the making of  a Global Working Class (2008). My colleague and a contributor to our volume: Salem needs more labor history!
  31. James R. Ruffin, A paradise of reason : William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (2008).
  32. Gretchen A. Adams, The Specter of Salem. The Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (2008). A big theme in our last century: the overwhelming impact of the trials.
  33. Georgia Barnhill and Martha McNamara, eds., New views of New England : studies in material and visual culture, 1680–1830 (2012).
  34. Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America. Life Stories from early New England (2013).
  35. Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience (2014).
  36. Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (2015). Descriptions of Salem in mourning from Sarah Browne’s diary.
  37. Jacob Remes, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (2015).
  38. Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Optimism in Antebellum America (2019). Essential for school desegregation in Salem.
  39. Nancy Shoemaker, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji (2019).
  40. James Lindgren, Preserving Maritime America. A Cultural History of the Nation’s Great Maritime Museums (2020).

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January 22, 2024

Salem 1799

By daseger

I always tell my students forget dates, you can always look them up, dates are a terrible way to learn history, but sometimes dates just stand out: 1348, 1517, 1776, 1789, 1914. The other day I was engaged in some endnote-editing and somehow, the date 1799 just started jumping out at me: it suddently seemed like the most important date in Salem’s history! Why? A lot of building mostly: of two of the most spectacular Derby houses and Salem’s first federal frigate, the Essex. But there were other notable things that happened in that year too: the foundation of the East India Marine Society for one, and the renaming of Salem’s long-ignored seventeenth-century fortification, Fort Pickering, for another. 1799 was a big year for Salem, then the eighth largest “city” in the United States with a population of over 9000. Its commercial vitality was already well-established, but it aquired a new civic reputation with the construction-by-subscription of the Frigate Essex for the federal government. The most wonderful book sheds light on the whole commission/subscription/construction process: Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The frigate Essex papers : building the Salem frigate, 1798-1799 (1974): I wouldn’t presume to add to it! I will, however, include a couple of its maps. Salem had terrible flooding last weekend and I think we need to remember that we live in an infilled-city, and that a river runs through it.

The US Frigate Essex, built in Salem by Salem residents.

Joseph Howard, watercolor of the Essex, after 1799, Peabody Essex Museum.

Maps from Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The Frigate Essex Papers.

 

Not one but TWO Derby houses built in 1799, with Bulfinch & McIntire designs.

The Ezekiel Hersey Derby House and the Elias Hasket Derby Mansion, one which existed long enough to be “denatured” into a commercial building and the other very short-lived, as its commissioner, the wealthy merchant Elias Hasket Derby, died in the same year that it was built: 1799. Think about the Salem in which these two structures were raised: talk about McMansions! These were conspicuous structures: Chestnut Street was at least five years into the future.

These were houses of a son and father of Salem’s first family. I’m not sure how long Ezekiel, the fifth child of Elias Hasket Derby, lived in his elegant house, one of just a few in Salem to be designed by Charles Bulfinch (with interior architectural details by Samuel McIntire). He was more focused on agricultural pursuits and the development of south Salem, where he had a sprawling farm. His town house stood long enough to be stripped, as happened to so many notable houses, and architectural historian Fiske Kimball established a Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with its architectural features.

Plans and photos of the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; the Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Elias’s mansion did not stand long enough to be “denatured” (which certainly would have happened in its central location, maybe its short life was a blessing) or photographed, but there are sketches and plans in the PEM’s Phillips Library. It gave way to the present-day Derby Square.

 

Captain Devereux opens up trade with Japan!

It is decidedly NOT true that Commodore Perry opened up trade with Japan in 1853; rather, Captain John Devereux of Salem and the Boston ship Franklin did so in 1799. The Dutch had had a monopoly on western trade with Japan since the early 17th century, primarily because they did not proselytize like their European counterparts during the Reformation. Two centuries later, they licensed American ships to go to their trading post on Deshima Island just off the port of Nagasaki, including the Franklin in 1799 and the Salem ship Margaret in 1801. Devereux brought Japanese goods back to Salem, and so did the captain of the Margaret, Samuel Derby. The former’s account book in the Phillips Library lists “128 raincoats” purchased there, as well as several items of “lacked” (lacquered) furniture: the Peabody Essex Museum has a Hepplewhite-style knife box, several card and tip-top tables, and a large server/oval waiter in its collection from this cargo, the focus of an article in the July, 1954 Magazine Antiques below. Of course, the Reverend Bentley ran right over to see Captain Devereux’s hall at his house on the Common as soon as he returned, as recorded in his famous Diary.

 

The Foundation of the East India Marine Society!

The Peabody Essex Museum’s foundation date of 1799 and claim to be the oldest (maritime) museum in the United States is based on the establishment of the East India Marine Society in that year. I love the description of the society included in the American Neptune of 1944, in an article marking the completion of the restoration of the the Society’s East India Marine Hall: In the autumn of 1799 a group of thirty Salem shipmasters met to found a society so exclusive that only those who had sailed around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope as masters or supercargos would be eligible for membership. As the first New England vessel had reached China only thirteen years before, this requirement made the society comparable, for its time, to a modern aviation club, for which only pilots who had successfully crossed the Atlantic or Pacific could qualify. Its members were equipped with notebooks so they might advance navigational and geographical knowledge, and like Captain Devereux, they brought home things to embellish their Society’s “cabinet”. There are quite a few old histories of the Society (like the 1920 text below) which reprint the foundation documents and highlight all sorts of little details, but there’s also George Schwartz’s recent history, Collecting the Globe, which presents a more comprehensive context for its foundation year, 1799.

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