Unexpected Discoveries at the David Library by Dusty Marie Dye

Guest blogger Dusty Marie Dye is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland. During her residency as a 2018-19 David Library Fellow last summer, she came across some  passages in orderly books, correspondence and diaries that were both insightful, and strange. 

My fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution lasted for the month of June, 2018, and I have to say it is one of the best experiences of my scholarly career. It goes without saying that I was tremendously excited to have the extensive collection at the library at my fingertips on a 24/7 basis, but I could not have expected how amazing my discoveries would be. My dissertation focuses on eighteenth-century mourning customs and how those customs give us insight into the lives of the soldiers and civilians who experienced the turmoil of the American Revolution, the separation of Great Britain from its North American colonies, and the formation of an entirely new nation with citizens who struggled to develop new national identities. With such a peculiar starting point, I have had to be creative in the sources that I have employed to examine my subject and the collection at the library has been an absolute treasure of valuable (and sometimes quirky) information. I found, for example, instructions in an orderly book for New York soldiers to “furnish 3 Sargts & 30 privates to Burrey the dead bodys & carkesses & cover the other putred matters” in and around Yorktown in October 1781. In addition, I found sheet music for funeral dirges and an officers’ handbook (Thomas Simes' Military Guide for Young Officers) that listed, in detail, the order that soldiers should march in funeral processions, what the usual funeral expenses should be, and what should be done with a fallen soldier’s belongings, whether he be an officer or a “common soldier.” As for civilians, the personal papers and diaries that can be found at the library are awash with accounts of attending funerals and lamentations on the deaths of loved ones and friends, including fears for those marching off to battle and consolations to others who lost family members to the war.

Page from Simes' Guide

In the course of my research, I also found other insights into military life, such as when orderly books included prohibitions against soldiers throwing apples at one another or lounging about naked after bathing. There were frequent reminders that the soldiers who fought the Revolution were ordinary men and boys, such as when they noted in their diaries that they missed their families or relieved their boredom by doodling in the margins of orderly books.

A doodle in the margin of an orderly book

In the letters between soldiers and their wives, in between descriptions of battle, there were affectionate jokes and references to mundane matters such as the management of crops and the state of household accounts. In short, the collection at the David Library allowed me a glimpse into the world of the Revolutionary generation and the lives that were shaped both by everyday cares and personal connections and the tremendous disruptions of war. It is my hope that my work, which will be built upon the discoveries that I made during my fellowship, will help others to connect on some level with those who fought in the Revolution and helped to build the nation we live in today.

"Beyond America: The East India Papers of Lords North and Cornwallis," by Adam Nadeau

Guest blogger Adam Nadeau is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He recently completed a four week residency as a 2018-19 David Library Fellow conducting research for his dissertation examining British imperial reform during the Revolutionary era.   

My project seeks to explore the crisis of empire leading up to, during, and immediately following the American Revolutionary War from a British imperial perspective, as well as it intends to incorporate the story of contemporaneous events in British East India into a transoceanic narrative spanning the years from roughly 1763 to about 1793. As such, I had sought out a fellowship at the David Library in order to work through parts of the Library’s vast microfilmed collection of eighteenth-century British imperial papers. 

Charles Cornwallis by John Singleton

 Copley, c. 1795. Wikimedia   

 Commons.

While many researchers venture to the David Library to utilize its British imperial holdings, I was particularly drawn to the Library’s copies of the papers of Lords North and Cornwallis, and I was hopeful that such collections contained materials relating to British rule in India during the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s. In this respect, the David Library far exceeded my expectations. Upon my arrival, I realized that not only did the David Library have the few East India documents that were intermixed with Cornwallis’s American materials; they held the entire Cornwallis collection, much of which concern the general’s career beyond America. 

The English (later British) East India Company was chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600 and granted a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope in an effort to compete with England’s main commercial rival at the time, the Dutch republic. After about a decade or so of activity in Southeast Asia, however, English merchants recognized that Company profits would be greatly increased by shifting their commercial focus to the textile-rich markets of the Indian subcontinent, and where English commerce went English diplomacy followed. 

By the turn of the eighteenth century, Britain had become thoroughly drawn into Indian dynastic politics, and the entry of the French East India Company into subcontinental affairs in the 1720s ensured that the imperial wars fought between France and England during the first half of the eighteenth century would play out in the East Indian theatre as well.

Lord Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, 

by Francis Hayman, c. 1760. National Portrait Gallery, London.

During the Seven Years’ War, France and Britain exchanged victories up and down India’s Coromandel Coast until in June 1757, British East India Company troops faced a combined French and Bengali force at Plassey on the banks of the Hooghly River. There, Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, and installed Mir Jafar as nawab in exchange for £1 million for the defrayment of troops and almost £700,000 in loot. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 barred the French from making any further military incursions into Bengal, and in August 1765, the Company acquired from Mughal emperor Shah Alam II the diwani, or right to collect the imperial revenue of Bengal, valued at some £3 million annually.

A series of parliamentary regulations during the 1770s and ’80s integrated the presidencies of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal under the civil jurisdiction of the Governor General and Supreme Council of Bengal and placed the Company under the oversight of a ministerial Board of Control in London. All the while, Company influence continued to expand in India as British officials negotiated subsidiary alliances with a series of Indian rulers, oftentimes carving up autochthonous territories in the process.

 The East India papers present in the David Library’s North and Cornwallis collections cover this crucial period of Company reform and imperial expansion in India during the 1770s and ’80s, including documents relating to the administrations of governors Warren Hastings and John Macpherson, which cast light on the civil affairs of British India and on the various military operations against hostile Indian polities that are coterminous with the chronology of the American Revolutionary War. 

A scan of a letter to the Governor General of 

Bengal from the court of the Nawab,  

May 2, 1785. PRO 30/11/7, fol. 360.

Cornwallis’s papers are especially illuminating. Four years after returning to Britain, Cornwallis accepted the position of Governor General of Bengal in 1786 on the condition that he also be made Commander-in-Chief of British India, becoming the first governor to hold both posts simultaneously from 1786 to 1793 and again in 1805. Cornwallis amassed a significant amount of materials during his time in India, and it appears to me that the bulk of Cornwallis’s papers in fact relate to his career in the East, covering the period of two of the wars fought between the Company and the kingdom of Mysore in the 1780s and ’90s.

The Anglo-Mysore Wars were partially a theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars in Europe in that they saw the Mysorean ruler Tipu Sultan backed by France and republican Europe against monarchical Britain. The result of the Anglo-Mysore Wars, however, was the defeat of one of the last remaining Indian polities that was capable of resisting Company rule, leaving the Indian subcontinent open to British territorial expansion which would persist into the twentieth century. 

The East India papers of Lords North and Cornwallis are a hidden gem among the David Library’s collections and may very well be the largest assortment of such materials on this side of the Atlantic. These documents will become increasingly relevant as trends in scholarship continue to move towards transoceanic analyses of Britain’s eighteenth-century empire and as historians of colonial America and the West Indies begin to expound upon the fiscal and military interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

Further Reading

Bowen, H. V., Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds. Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Marshall, P. J. The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Wickwire, Franklin and Mary. Cornwallis: The Imperial Years. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Real Houswives of Worcester County

 Guest blogger Ken Miller tells us about his research on three Massachusetts women during the American Revolution. 

The American Revolution carried grave consequences for Bathsheba Spooner, a suspected loyalist in Worcester County, Massachusetts. The daughter of the reviled Tory, Brigadier General Timothy Ruggles, the thirty-two-year-old Spooner orchestrated the murder of her well-to-do husband, Joshua, in early March 1778 with the help of three co-conspirators—her young lover, the teenaged Continental soldier, Ezra Ross, and William Brooks and James Buchanan, two British prisoners of war captured during the Battle of Saratoga. After beating their victim to death and disposing of his corpse in the family well, his assailants hastily divided their spoils. Apprehended, tried, and convicted for the grisly crime soon thereafter, all four malefactors perished at the gallows on July 2, 1778. Tragically, revolutionary authorities chose to disregard legal precedent and hang Spooner even though she had reached an advanced stage of pregnancy, with her post-mortem exam revealing a five-month old fetus.

I spent the month of February at the David Library researching the Spooner case as a short-term residential fellow. I’m approaching the controversy as the centerpiece of an anticipated microhistory designed to illuminate the perils of loyalism across Massachusetts during the initial years of the Revolutionary War. To contextualize the murder, I conducted extensive research in Britain’s loyalist claims and colonial office records, the British headquarters papers, and the correspondence of the Massachusetts general, William Heath. I also perused the papers of Robert Treat Paine, the case’s prosecuting attorney, uncovering long neglected trial testimony.

My investigations ultimately shed light on the wartime travails of Spooner’s more obscure Worcester County neighbors, underscoring the painful costs of allegiance for Whig and Tory alike. Among the loyalist claims, for example, I located the petition of the widow Ann Greenleaf, a Bolton resident who courageously defied local Whigs by carrying intelligence to the enemy until she was finally discovered and forced to take refuge behind British lines in late 1778. Sarah Duncan, by contrast, the wife of a loyalist merchant, refused to abandon her home and family, prompting her devoted husband to remain in Worcester and brave the wrath of vengeful patriots. The stories of these diverse Massachusetts women illustrate the wide range of female experiences during Americans’ first civil war.

As for Bathsheba, the site of her husband’s slaying, the infamous Spooner well, remains an historic landmark, located just off East Main Street in Brookfield, Massachusetts. Alas, two hundred and forty years after the crime that sent her to the gallows, Bathsheba’s final resting place remains unknown.

Ken Miller is associate professor of early American history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and the author of "Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence," just released in paperback by Cornell University Press.

Fellow's Perspective: Tracing African-Americans in the Rhode Island Regiment

"African-American history in this early period is often a “needle in a haystack” operation, and the David Library has the most haystacks anywhere."

Today's post comes from Professor Judith Van Buskirk of SUNY-Cortland, a past fellow of the Library who is currently researching her new book on African-American soldiers in the Revolution. Judy has spent months going through the Library's records to reveal the story of Rhode Island's African-American troops, uncovering many new aspects of their experience and discounting some apocryphal tales. In her entry below, Judy discusses the strengths of the Library's collections and how they aided her research into the Rhode Island Regiment. We look forward to offering other details on her work once the new book is published. Please read below for the full story.

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Fellow's Perspective: The significance of Revolutionary Committee Meetings

 In this installment of Fellow's Perspective, Dr. Ken Owen, who conducted research at the Library during the Spring of 2010, shares his finding on the meetings of Revolutionary committees. Most readers will be familiar with the stereotypical drudgery of committee work, something that has largely remained unchanged over the centuries. Beneath this veil of discussion, debate, and reams of notes, however, lay a social process that was vital to the formation and application of American revolutionary ideology, as Dr. Owen notes below. Dr. Owen received his DPhil from The Queen's College, University of Oxford, after completing his research at the Library and now teaches at the University of Sussex.

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Committee meetings may not seem the most exhilarating events in the historical record. These meetings, though, were crucial in determining how Americans declared Independence and what governments they formed when they did. In the winter of 1773-4, individuals throughout the state of Pennsylvania met at county courthouses to elect committees charged with prosecuting resistance to the British Crown. These committees then began to seize political leadership in the state, eroding the authority of the colonial legislature and ultimately resulting in the adoption of the most radical constitution created by any of the newly-independent states.

Fellow's Perspective: Rachel Herrmann on Food Diplomacy

Rachel Herrmann is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and joined us as part of the 2010-11 Fellowship Program. Rachel is a confirmed foodie and brings her love of all things eatable to her scholarship, revealing the hidden worlds of food in history. The historical study of foodstuffs, their preparation, and the socio-econo-cultural significance thereof has been a growth field since the mid-1980s, so Rachel stands in good company. Her dissertation, examining the symbolic and pragmatic usage and value of food during the American Revolution, promises to provide new insights for further work on how what we eat shapes who we are and what we do.

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Figuring out Food Diplomacy

by Rachel Herrmann

I arrived to take up my research fellowship at the David Library last October (2010). When I got there I thought I was interested in Revolutionary foodways of free blacks, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans. After a month at the library, I’d figured out that I was more interested in starvation and what food meant to people in the Revolutionary period, and that the types of foods people were eating were less important to me. The historical sources are much more likely to say interesting things about food when there isn’t enough of it. My time at the library allowed me to come to terms with the idea of food diplomacy, and to think about how I was going to use that concept in my research on Creek and Cherokee Indians in the American South.

Fellow's Perspective: Dangerous Liaisons in the Pennsylvania Backcountry

In this installment of Fellow's Perspective, Prof. Ken Miller of Washington College discusses a brawl between captive British officers and local whig notables in the Pennsylvania backcountry. Prof. Miller's research, which will figure in his forthcoming book, focuses on the experience of British prisoners of war during the Revolution, particularly those confined at Lancaster. His entry highlights the value of the Library's microfilm collection for uncovering episodes of micro-history that can help to link together larger pieces of historical puzzles.

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During my fall 2010 academic leave from Washington College, I undertook my second David Library of the American Revolution residential fellowship to complete the research for my book manuscript, Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence. Among other matters, my study investigates the manifold tensions springing from the hosting of British and German prisoners in the diverse wartime communities of the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia interiors. Before commencing my recent fellowship at the David Library, I had attempted to unravel a violent confrontation between the captive British officers and the militant Whigs of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the leading detention site for enemy prisoners of war. Earlier research had yielded clues of an early 1782 brawl between the officers and their patriot hosts, but I had yet to discover what had sparked the conflict.

Fellow's Perspective: Small Pox and Slaves in Revolutionary Charleston, SC

In this installment of Fellow's Perspective, Ph.D. candidate Melissa Amy Maestri of the University of Delaware showcases the value of the David Library's printed sources. While many researchers come to consult portions of our 10,000-reel microfilm collection, the Library also sports over 7,000 books, pamphlets, and other printed works, including original manuscripts, reprints of primary sources, and scholarly accounts. The Library boasts a complete set of the Arno Press reprints of primary printed accounts, released during the bicentennial and seldom found concentrated together in one archive. Moultrie's Memoirs are available here as part of this collection.

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After visiting Fort Moultrie this past September, I was eager to read William Moultrie's first hand accounts surrounding South Carolina during the American Revolution while at the David Library of the American Revolution in November. William Moultrie was born in 1730 and died in 1805. He served as governor of South Carolina from 1785-1787 and 1792-1794. He was a general from South Carolina during the American Revolution. In 1776, Moultrie and his troops defended a fort on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. Moultrie prevented Sir Henry Clinton from attacking and taking over the important city of Charleston at that time. As a result of his tactful military defense, the fort on Sullivan’s Island was later named Fort Moultrie.

Fellow's Perspective: Peter Gilmore on William Irvine

 Today's entry begins a new series showcasing the work of David Library Fellows. Every year the Library awards residential research fellowships that include a stipend and one month's lodging on the Library's campus in the Feinstone Residence for Scholars. Dr. Peter Gilmore, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, joined us over the summer to conduct research on western Pennsylvania politics and Presbyterians. 




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William Irvine: Distinguished Revolutionary Veteran and Political Moderate Outraged by the Excesses of Conservative Politicians

by Dr. Peter Gilmore

William Irvine (1741-1804), a physician from County Fermanagh in the north of Ireland, emerged a major figure in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary and Early Republic eras. As a brigadier general, Irvine had responsibility for operations based at Fort Pitt in the latter years of the war, and returned west to the Ohio Country in 1794 in command of the Pennsylvania militia assembled to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. He was a Congressman and trustee of Dickinson College. Irvine is often regarded as a Federalist because of his firm support for ratification of the United States Constitution. However, upon examining the correspondence of General Irvine contained in the Draper Manuscripts, it gradually became clear to me that he might better be described as a moderate, without respect to partisan political designations. While certainly not a radical like some other prominent Irish immigrants (William Findley and John Smilie come to mind), Irvine responded critically, even testily, to the conservative direction of politics in post-war America.