THE PAINTER’S FIRE A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution

ZARA ANISHANSLIN

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2025

Copyright © 2025 by Zara Anishanslin

All rights reserved

978-0-674-29023-5 (cloth)

978-0-674-30037-8 (EPUB)

978-0-674-30036-1 (PDF)

Cover art: Wenceslaus Hollar, Warship in the Trough of a Wave, 1665.

Cover design by Madeline Partner

Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows

Names: Anishanslin, Zara, author.

Title: The painter’s fire : a forgotten history of the artists who championed the American Revolution / Zara Anishanslin.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024049291 (print) | LCCN 2024049292 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Artists—Political activity—England—London—History—18th century. | Artists—Political activity—United States—History—18th century. | Art and society—United States—History—18th century. | Art and society—England—London—History—18th century. | United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Foreign public opinion, British.

Classification: LCC E249.3 .A55 2025 (print) | E249.3 (ebook) | DDC 973.3/1—dc23/eng/20241218

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024049291

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024049292

To my father, Paul Reynard Anishanslin, and my stepmother, Penelope Scholl-Anishanslin, with love and gratitude for our transatlantic adventures

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

PART OF THE CHARM of reading an eighteenth-century source is its idiosyncratic spelling and capitalization. I have kept the original spellings and misspellings, as well as capitalizations, in the primary sources I quote, in part to retain the sense of phonetics, accent, and emphasis such choices signal. When quoting primary sources, I also retain eighteenth-century terms that are now considered offensive—such as the word “Negro”—rather than substituting another term. When referring to Native peoples, I follow the lead of scholars using Native American and Indigenous Studies methodologies and recognize that there is not a single preferred term. Word choices depend upon historical and social context. If a national or tribal community affiliation, such as Cherokee or Pequot, is known, I use that name. I use the term “Indigenous” as a broad term of reference for Native peoples, in part to acknowledge a shared global identity. “American Indian” is used to discuss Native peoples depicted symbolically, for example in art or prints, in part to reflect how eighteenth-century colonists used the concept of “Indian-ness” as a racist tool in what is now the United States. The term “Indian” is retained when it occurs in the original primary sources.

Similarly, I retain inconsistencies in the spelling of names when quoting primary sources. When not quoting primary sources, I standardize the spelling of people’s names (for example, “Cuming” instead of alternating between “Cuming,” “Cumings,” and “Cumming”). When not directly quoting primary sources, I always use the names preferred by enslaved or formerly enslaved people themselves. For example, Daphny is usually spelled “Dafney” or “Daphney” by white people, but “Daphny” by her son. Prince Demah used the last name “Demah” to refer to himself and his mother, rather than the “Barnes” surname attached to them both and the “Barker” surname later attached to her by white people. The white Barnes family never used the name “Demah” in reference to either Prince or Daphny. I use their preferred names throughout. The power to choose their own names was among the things slavery often took away from enslaved people. Honoring their wishes in terms of names is a small act of restorative justice, but an important one.

And finally, a note on political terms. For the sake of simplicity and ease of understanding, I often use the familiar terms “Patriots” and “Loyalists” to differentiate between those who supported the cause of American independence and those who stayed loyal to the British crown, respectively. I use the term “Patriot” as a general moniker for supporters of independence, in part to rectify contemporary use of the word “Patriot” in association with right-wing politics in the United States, an ahistorical association that obscures its more inclusive revolutionary origins.

However, it is also important to note that the use of the terms “Patriot” and “Loyalist” (both of which had previously been used in seventeenth-century England) did not solidify until years after the political crisis began. In the early days of the crisis between mother country and colonies, divisions were not as clear-cut. Especially after 1768, Americans did use the (to them) familiar British terms of “Whigs” and “Tories” to differentiate between, respectively, those who favored colonial arguments against parliamentary legislation and those who supported the right of Britain and its king to govern the colonies as they saw fit. As the conflict wore on, these terms took on new meanings within their American context. “Tories,” for example, became a more disparaging than historical term, used to smear the most conservative colonists. “Royalist” or “King’s Man” was used as well as “Loyalist,” which rose into decided prominence within the context of the American Revolution later in the nineteenth century. During the late eighteenth century, it was a word also used to refer to those living in Ireland who favored parliamentary union between Ireland and Great Britain. On the other hand, during the war itself, “Whig” dwindled into a less controversial term in the American context. Instead, colonial resisters of crown policy came to prefer the term “Patriot” for themselves. Meanwhile, use of the term “Whig” in Britain remained, as it had before conflict began, shorthand for Britons who supported parliamentary authority over the monarch. Although “Patriot” and “Loyalist” are used most often to refer to supporters or opponents of American independence, all of these terms are used throughout the book to better reflect how people at the time understood them.

TO show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,

And thought in living characters to paint,

When first thy pencil did those beauties give,

And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,

How did those prospects give my soul delight,

A new creation rushing on my sight?

Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue,

On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:

Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire

To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!

And may the charms of each seraphic theme

Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!

Excerpt, “To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works”

PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)

PROLOGUE REVOLUTIONARY PORTRAITS LOST AT SEA

LONDONERS FOUND much to marvel at in the Royal Academy of Art’s 1780 exhibition. The first annual exhibition held in the academy’s imposing new home in Somerset House, it showcased nearly five hundred pieces of art. The paintings, always the stars of the show, were in a grand exhibition room. There, bookended by enormous new portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte, paintings were hung nearly floor to ceiling on the thirty-two-foot-high walls. Landscape paintings and portraits of nobles jostled for attention alongside historical paintings and imagined scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. To make sense of the crowded display, catalogs were given with admission that assigned each painting a number and detailed its artist and title. Number 202 in the catalog was the work of twenty-two-year-old Joseph Wright, a promising, award-winning Royal Academy student notable for being one of the first Americans to study there. Number 202, Mrs. Wright Modelling a Head in Wax, was his debut entry into the annual exhibition. “Mrs. Wright” was his mother, Patience Wright, the celebrated American wax sculptor who ran a popular London wax museum. She also was a notoriously passionate supporter of the American cause for independence from Britain, now in its fifth year of armed conflict. So passionate, in fact, that she was rumored (correctly) to be a spy. If that weren’t controversial enough, this was more than simply a portrait of her at work. Busts of King George and Queen Charlotte watched her work, and what she modeled was the decapitated head of King Charles I. It was, as everyone who saw it knew, a portrait of regicide.¹

Joseph Wright’s painting was just one of many portraits in the show, but it was one of the most widely remarked upon pieces that year. As one observer put it: “By what lethargy of liberty it happened I do not know,” but the undeniable truth remained that there was “a picture of Mrs. Wright modelling the head” of England’s king famously executed by his own subjects for anyone to see, with “their Majesties contemplating it.” If Wright hoped for fame with this first exhibition, he achieved his goal. His portrait of his mother caused quite a stir. Patience Wright’s fame was already widespread. Her likeness circulated in popular London magazines and prints, making her image known as well as her name. And here on the walls of the Royal Academy for anyone willing to pay two shillings to see was this easily identified woman, as famous for her pro-American politics as her wax creations, symbolically enacting violence against one monarch while threatening another. The portrait’s political implications were obvious. Displayed where it was—in a space that celebrated royal largesse—it created a sensation.²

But reactions to the portrait varied widely. It was railed against as an insult to decency, even treasonous by some. Others saluted it, hailing it as an entertaining and instructive defense of constitutional liberties. The clashing opinions and its remarkable presence at London’s Royal Academy remind us that the war we now call the American Revolution was fought on both sides of the Atlantic by artists as well as soldiers, and in the courts of public opinion as well as on the battlefield. The same week the public (including, notably, the king and queen themselves) first saw Wright’s incendiary portrait on the walls of London’s Royal Academy, the vastly outnumbered American forces in Charleston, South Carolina, were in the final days of a futile attempt to hold off a British siege. Soon they would surrender in what was the American forces’ single largest defeat of the war. Although they fought using different weapons, both those soldiers in Charleston and the artist Joseph Wright were united in their support for the American cause. Both fired shots for liberty in the spring of 1780. Art too could be a weapon, and a powerful one at that in a war where public opinion mattered, as it assuredly did in the American Revolution.³

But art, like many things, does not always survive the havoc of history. What is preserved in our museums is only a very small bit of what was once created and seen. Wright’s portrait of his mother, for example, survives only in archival documentation like letters and newspapers. The portrait itself must be imagined, for it cannot be seen. Although its certain fate is unknown, it likely was lost in a shipwreck. In 1781, Joseph Wright left London for Paris, where the Franco-American alliance had created a craze for all things American. Once American victory over Britain was all but certain, Wright took advantage of the promise of peace and made plans to return to the United States. He thought the new nation offered even more possibilities for an ambitious young artist to make his mark, turn a profit, and capture history. His materials and European-made portraits in hand, Joseph Wright left France in fall 1782, sailing on a Boston-bound ship called the Argo. Unlike its mythological namesake, this American-owned Argo did not complete its quest. After a ten-week journey, battling gusts of snow-filled wind on its last day at sea, the Argo approached the Maine coast and ran aground on a pile of rocks. Although the passengers managed to swim or be hauled on ropes to shore, much of the ship’s cargo—which included tea, brandy, nails, iron, and Wright’s paintings—was lost, washed out of the ship’s hold and either plundered by a passing privateer and people living nearby or sunk below the waves.⁴

Joseph Wright’s portrait of his mother holding the decapitated head of Charles I may have sunk under the Atlantic near the coast of Maine. But even though it is physically lost, it still offers an invaluable window into the revolutionary past. Much as we can dive to retrieve shipwrecked things from the bottom of the sea, we can write histories that allow us to see previously submerged stories about the past. Just because they are submerged or hidden does not mean that they are not there. Bringing up these revolutionary portraits from the depths of the past and into the light, we can see a new transatlantic history of the American Revolution and the creative people who made it, one that transforms the way we think of the nature of patriotism—then and now.⁵

INTRODUCTION TRANSATLANTIC PATRIOTS

THE INFAMOUS PORTRAIT of his mother holding the decapitated head of King Charles I was not the only painting Joseph Wright likely lost at sea. He also lost at least one of his portraits of a widely popular man of international fame, one whose many images made his face “as well known as that of the moon” on both sides of the Atlantic.¹ This man was Benjamin Franklin. When Wright was in Paris, Franklin took time out of his diplomatic duties to let Wright paint his portrait. Franklin allowed Wright enough of his time, in fact, that the young artist feared “he must be tired of seeing me so constantly.”² One of the reasons Franklin showed kindness to Wright was that Wright’s mother was one of the American diplomat’s longtime friends, if often an exasperating and sometimes an embarrassing one. What made Patience Wright and Franklin friends initially was a bond over their prewar celebrity as American geniuses who took London by storm. What kept them friends, despite the strains American rebellion and revolution sometimes placed on their friendship, was a shared devotion to American independence and the larger cause of liberty, an ardent patriotism they practiced first in London and then in Paris. Franklin, Patience Wright, and her son Joseph all shared a bond forged from their common identity as transatlantic Patriots.³

But these three played roles in a whole cast of noteworthy Patriots who learned radical ideas, practiced rebellion, and fought for the young republic in the heart of two monarchies, first in London and then in Paris, as well as across the Atlantic in North America. Artists, spies, soldiers, intellectuals, and prisoners of war, these Patriots fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of Virginia and Massachusetts. Some of them, like Franklin, were influential white men. But more often, and ironically at times to their advantage, they were excluded from formal sites of power, from legislatures and military headquarters. The women and the Black and mixed-race people at the center of this book used their creative fire to shape ideas and events. They practiced idiosyncratic politics, sometimes by necessity as well as choice. They declared their independence with paint, canvas, wax, and wit as well as muskets and pamphlets. Together, these transatlantic Patriots’ stories bring to life the reality that American patriotism in the revolutionary era was far more cosmopolitan and expansive than many still assume it to be today. The full story of American patriotism is only visible through a transatlantic lens.⁴

Although we are now used to thinking that Loyalists—the Americans who opposed independence—continued to nurture bonds with people and politicians across the ocean, we are not as accustomed to thinking of Patriots and their supporters in the same way.⁵ Yet Loyalists were not the only historical actors to foster transatlantic attachments. Pro-American sentiment in Britain was felt in all walks of life. And although it was strongest in London, it was never limited to that city alone. Support for the American cause could be found among celebrities, artists, aristocrats, wealthy merchants, and men and women of ordinary means. When Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the runaway bestseller of 1776 that galvanized American independence, he was a recent, impoverished British immigrant to North America who learned his radical political ideas in England. Commercial and cultural ties between the mother country and its colonies, among other factors, provided material and intellectual support for the American cause in Britain. Some of the most ardent pro-American Britons were radical Whig politicians and thinkers. Although not all Whigs supported independence by any means, their voices and symbols inspired and sustained American Patriots who did, both those in North America and those who lived thousands of miles away but were dedicated to supporting the American cause nonetheless.⁶ Americans recognized these transatlantic connections. When George Washington, newly appointed commander of the Continental army, chose the colors of buff and blue for his uniform, he did so as a nod to the fact that women and men in Britain wore these same colors to announce their Whig politics.⁷

But despite these ties, unless they committed crimes against the state outright, British supporters of the American cause in places like London or Bath rarely risked as much as their American-born counterparts did. British-born artists, for example, might face a loss of patronage and income for creating pro-American art, but they were unlikely to land in the Tower. However, especially after Parliament passed the Treason Act of 1777—an act allowing the government to detain rebels accused of committing crimes in the newly declared United States of America or on the high seas—American Patriots in Britain were viewed with suspicion. American civilians—including South Carolina politician Henry Laurens (captured on the Atlantic) and Patience Wright’s future son-in-law Ebenezer Smith Platt (arrested for treasonous crimes at sea)—were accused of treason under the act and brought to British prisons, even the famed Tower of London. Americans living in Britain, including artist and former Continental army officer John Trumbull, were also arrested and imprisoned. In Trumbull’s case, he was arrested under a charge of espionage. The charge was not an indictment of his art but rather a retaliatory measure, a punishment for Washington’s recent execution of British spy and media darling Major John André. In addition to these celebrity cases, hundreds more anonymous American military men spent the war languishing in notoriously bad British prisons, starved of the basic niceties international standards dictated for prisoners of war—a status they were denied as rebel combatants. If you were born in America or a recent resident of the rebellious colonies, it was potentially very dangerous indeed to be an American Patriot living across the Atlantic Ocean or even sailing upon it during the war.⁸

But this book is more than a transatlantic history of American patriotism, a tale of entangled political loyalties and dramatic, colorful personal lives. It is also a history of the cultural underpinnings of revolution, asking how artists and their networks of families, patrons, and supporters produced revolutionary political culture and created visual and material representations of patriotism. Revolutionary eras are unpredictable, destabilizing times. As such, they allow—demand, even—innovation, invention, and reinvention. They require the work of creative people. In the unstable era of the American Revolution, the future was unclear. Creative people of all kinds had the space and the skills to create and recreate new political cultures. This book considers the history of just such creative people, people whose lives have been too often considered on the margins of politics when in fact they were central to the making of revolution.

The idea that artists document protest and help make revolution is not a novel one. Some of the artists whose images first drove and then commemorated the American Revolution—notably, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and even the cautiously neutral John Singleton Copley—have been studied again and again. It is their art that hangs on the walls of museums; it is their lives studied in numerous biographies. Whether displayed larger than life in the Capitol Rotunda or shrunk to fit on the back of paper currency, the images these men created are everywhere. They continue to shape popular ideas about what the American Revolution looked like and who its heroes were, just as they have done for generations since that conflict began.⁹

But the art—and lives—of these well-known men are not the whole story. In fact, the images and history they created obscure a far more radical and esoteric patriotism practiced by other artists in the same moment. Their decorous representations of the war and republic are reassuring, especially to modern eyes, in their romanticized heroism. By contrast, the artist Patriots in this book often crafted a form of patriotism that faced up to the injustice of slavery and the challenges of patriarchal society. It was patriotism with a different grammar, a different look—one that would have seemed both risky and idiosyncratic at the time. A portrait of a decapitated king and a wax museum filled with lifelike, life-sized political icons offered a different visual effect and material experience and inspired different emotions than viewing a neoclassical history painting in a gilded frame. Patriotism, like revolution and even creativity itself, is not always comforting or familiar. This was especially true for the transatlantic Patriots in this book, including enslaved people who had to hide their politics from their Loyalist enslavers, women who had to make a living in a patriarchal world, and American Patriots living in enemy territory. In centering their experience, this transatlantic story reveals the political importance of both creative women as well as men, and Black and mixed-race people as well as white. It explores how they deployed their creative powers, through slavery and freedom, through rebellion and revolution, from war and into peace.¹⁰

Included in their number are the three Patriot artists whose intertwined lives and families are at the heart of this history: Patience Wright (1725–1786), Prince Demah (c. 1745–1778), and Robert Edge Pine (c. 1726–1788). These three form a natural transatlantic network from their shared overlapping professional, social, ideological, and political connections. They also form a historically (and historiographically) valuable network. This network encompasses broader contributions made by the diverse artists, including women, Black and mixed-race people, and immigrants, who shaped patriotic rebellion, American revolution, and national political culture. A testament to the extraordinary lives of these Patriots is that they, like many of their more famous contemporaries, had remarkable achievements while fighting for the American cause. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was the Revolution’s most famous American intellectual figure living abroad. And his long career as an American based first in London and then in Paris perfectly captures the importance of the transatlantic to these Patriots’ stories. But although extraordinary, he was not singular, either in his transatlantic patriotism or his celebrated genius. This book is the first to consider Demah, Pine, and Wright and their families—alongside the larger cast of historical characters with whom their lives intersected—as an interconnected network that has much to tell us about the American Revolution and Founding Era.¹¹

Like Franklin, Wright was famous (or, depending on the taste of the observer, infamous) in her own time. First as a trailblazing, American-born wax sculptor whose clients included members of the British aristocracy and royal family, and then as a London-based spy for the American cause, she earned fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Exceptional herself, she was also the matriarch of a remarkable family. Her son Joseph was noteworthy for being one of the first American-born students to study at London’s Royal Academy of Art and, later, for being the first artist appointed to design currency for the newly established US Mint. Her oldest daughter Elizabeth, likewise, gained contemporary fame for her artistry as she followed in her mother’s footsteps as a sculptor who operated popular wax museums in the young United States. Elizabeth also caught the public eye for her marriage to Ebenezer Smith Platt, the somewhat unsavory New Yorker who became a slave trader in Georgia. Elizabeth’s husband gained fame as one of the first victims of Britain’s 1777 Treason Act and international sympathy for his long imprisonment in shackles, first on the high seas and then in London. Elizabeth’s younger sister Phoebe, a noted beauty who modeled for high-profile artists in London, including Royal Painter Benjamin West, also caught the attention of the public and King George III himself by her marriage. She wed John Hoppner, a dashing young Royal Academy– trained painter rumored to be the illegitimate son of the king.

In London, the American Wrights shared social and professional networks with the British family of artist Robert Edge Pine, who painted the only portrait of Patience Wright known to survive. Pine, an award-winning painter, was the son of John Pine, a successful English engraver who held royal appointments under King George II and counted famed painter William Hogarth among his close friends. Robert Edge Pine was also an English man who considered himself an American Patriot. Like a significant number of other Britons, including two of his famous portrait clients—radical Whig politician John Wilkes and famed woman historian Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay—he saw a clear throughline from the English republicanism that flourished in the aftermath of the execution of King Charles I in the English Civil War to the American Patriot cause. He was so inspired by the American fight for liberty that he used his art to criticize Britain during the war while living in England. After the war, he—along with his wife and daughters, most of whom were artists, too—immigrated to the United States to chronicle the great moments of the revolution in paint. His father had enjoyed the patronage of the British king; he enjoyed the patronage of George and Martha Washington, who were delighted to commission work from this “artist of taste and eminence.”¹² When Pine chose to immigrate to the United States after the war, the Washingtons welcomed him because they knew his art could help shape the new nation’s political culture and how not just Americans but the world remembered the war they preferred to call a revolution. What they did not know was that Pine was likely of African descent.

Pine’s mixed race might have influenced his choice of one of the pupils he agreed to train in London in the early 1770s, a former mariner from Britain’s North American colonies known at the time as Prince Demah Barnes. Prince Demah, as he preferred to call himself, was the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, born in Massachusetts to Daphny, a woman born in Africa and sold into slavery across the Atlantic. With the encouragement of his colonial enslavers, merchant Henry Barnes and his wife, Christian, a would-be art patron, Prince Demah traveled to London in 1771 to hone his painterly craft. After studying under Pine, he returned to Massachusetts and set up shop as a professional painter of portraits. Once crisis became war, Prince Demah gained his freedom when his Loyalist enslavers fled North America. Prince Demah did not share his enslavers’ politics, a fact he made clear when he enlisted to fight for the Patriots.

One of his neighbors in Boston made a similar political choice when she too gained her freedom. That was the poet Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, Wheatley also traveled to London with her enslaver to further her artistic career. While in London, Wheatley met many of the same people who knew Patience Wright—many of them people whose wax portraits Wright had in her popular Pall Mall museum. Like Wright, Wheatley’s artistic work found support among members of the British aristocracy. And like Wright, she was introduced to Benjamin Franklin (although their initial meeting was less warm than his first meeting with Wright). Like Demah, Wheatley returned to Massachusetts after her stay in London. Along with Benjamin Franklin, she was an integral part of the network of transatlantic Patriots who created revolutionary political culture as they moved around the Atlantic World. Like Franklin, Wheatley is one of the familiar figures who many of the unknown Founders at the heart of this transatlantic tale knew well.

Each of these figures, in turn, opens up broader histories on both sides of the Atlantic. Through them, we will see glimpses of many other revolutionary lives. Through Demah and Wheatley, we see the world of enslaved artists and Black artisans in London as well as in Boston. We see the experience of enslaved people in wealthy Loyalist families, and their careful efforts to keep their politics to themselves and their loved ones safe before seizing their own freedom. We will see the bustle of artistic patronage and training in St. Martin’s Lane—the hum of creative production in a community of artists and artisans, both women and men. We will see the networks of personal and professional connections among artists of all kinds—sculptors, painters, poets, pamphleteers, and more—and how critical their imaginative work was to making the American Revolution.

These people’s histories range from the eccentric to the inspiring and are often stranger than fiction, memorable as well as consequential. Yet, with the exception of Franklin and Wheatley, they have been mostly dropped from our collective memory about the revolution and founding era. In the case of the three artists whose intertwined lives and families are at the center of this book, this is in part because so much of their art is lost. Although the portraits Joseph Wright lost in that shipwreck off the coast of Maine provide a particularly dramatic tale, the loss or destruction of revolutionary-era art was in fact quite common. Most of Patience Wright’s wax figures burned in fires. A handful of wax profiles attributed to her survive, but only one of the life-sized wax statues that made her famous survives today: her portrait of a British politician admired by colonial Americans, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Like Wright’s, some of Robert Edge Pine’s work went up in flames (much of it, in an odd twist of fate, in the very same nineteenth-century museum fire that destroyed many of Wright’s wax sculptures). The whereabouts of most of the portraits painted by Demah, meanwhile, remains a mystery. Some may be tucked away in New England attics, some may be lost to fires, and still others may be displayed in homes or museums as the work of an “unknown artist.” What is seen in museums today does not always give a full reflection of the images, objects, and ideas that widely circulated and influenced public discourse in the past.

Still, Demah, Pine, and Wright are hidden in plain sight. Although their surviving body of work is slim, it is on display in places millions of people visit each year on both sides of the Atlantic. A portrait by Prince Demah hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Edge Pine’s paintings are on display at Mount Vernon and in the National Portrait Galleries in both London and Washington, DC, and Wright’s statue of Pitt stands in Westminster Abbey. Their fame is eclipsed by more familiar white male artists like Peale, Copley, and Trumbull, whose works live on in many museums on both sides of the Atlantic, just as their lives are obscured by the long shadow cast by famous white Patriot figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Bringing these three artists’ stories into the light gives a truer picture of revolutionary art and who made it, as well as a more accurately inclusive, and thus more vibrant and exciting, image of Patriots themselves. Each of these three artists helped create the visual world of the revolutionary era. Moreover, their patriotic contributions also extended far beyond molding wax and wielding paintbrushes. Demah was not just a portrait painter but a soldier. Wright was not just a wax sculptor but an advocate for prisoners of war and a Patriot spy. And Pine was not just a painter but a founder of popular museum culture in the early American republic.

Looking at the revolution through a transatlantic geography reminds us that the American Revolution was fought on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the depth of support for the rebellion, and reasons for that support, shifted at various points in time, at no point was the “American war” universally popular in Britain, just as, it should be remembered, the revolution was never universally popular in America. The establishment of an independent United States of America was never inevitable. The complexity of this picture, the uncertainty of the support, the ambiguity of the outcome, all are reminders that people had to be persuaded (often, more than once) to believe in the cause of liberty and to light its spark. And like liberty, patriotism required a fire to sustain it. But fire needs fuel, and this is what the revolutionary creatives provided. As Phillis Wheatley wrote in her poem, “To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works,” “the painter’s and the poet’s fire” burns within creative souls, no matter their status or situation. During the revolutionary era, a network of diverse people on both sides of the Atlantic used their own creative fire to help ignite and spread the flame of liberty that blazed around the Atlantic. The linking of unfamiliar Founders like Demah, Wright, and Pine through this transatlantic creative network to now better-known Founders, such as Franklin and Wheatley, helped to forge an Atlantic Revolution among Patriots, no less than among Loyalists. This book tells their stories.¹³

1 DAPHNY’S SON

THE PAINTER studied his subject. Despite the heat from the fireplace, it was cold in the room, on that winter’s day in Boston. But the men agreed that for his portrait, the subject should dress for posterity, not the weather. The cotton fabric of his chintz banyan provided little warmth but created a pleasing visual effect. The pinks and reds of its flowers contrasted nicely with the meandering green vines in its pattern, and the flowers echoed the scarlet garnets in the brooch pinned to his white linen shirt, and the red accents on the spines of the books behind him. He wore his hair unpowdered, its russet tones echoed in the wood of the Chinoiserie-style desk and bookcase housing his leather-bound books. All to the good, the painter thought. Pleasing to the eye, and it all announced that this was a man of learning, with time for leisure and the means to wear cloth imported from across the globe. His clothing neatly advertised his trade as a textile importer. The painter continued his survey of his subject. His brooch, fashioned in the shape of a heart from gems symbolizing love, added sentimental iconography to the portrait, a nice touch for the new father and young husband. Young. He was rather young. Twenty-six. He had only been in Boston for three years, come from Scotland in 1770 to make his fortune in the colonies. He wanted a portrait to pass down in his family, and to impress potential customers and social contacts. How to convey a sense of gravitas? Ah, the painter thought, the pose. That was it. He directed his subject to sit, and place one hand on his thigh, the other tucked inside his banyan. A common gentlemanly pose, the one the painter had seen in portraits of men in his hometown of Boston, as well as in the artists’ studios that his teacher, Mr. Pine, had taken him to see in London. Yes, that pose did the trick. Satisfied, he picked up his brush and began to paint.

Prince Demah Barnes, Portrait of William Duguid (1773).

Detail, back of Prince Demah Barnes, Portrait of William Duguid (1773). Inscription behind the painting, in ink on wood, reads “WD AEtatis sui 26 1773 / Prince Demah Barnes Sculpt Pinxit Febr.y 1773.”

The painting of merchant William Duguid, completed in winter of 1773, now hangs on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, displayed alongside the brooch Duguid wears in his portrait. The survival of something worn in a colonial American portrait is a rarity and hints at the painting’s meaning to Duguid’s descendants, who kept brooch and painting together in the family until the mid-twentieth century. But the most unusual thing about the portrait is not visible to museum goers, and that is the painter’s signature on the back of the piece: “Prince Demah Barnes, Sculpt. Pinxit Febr.y 1773.” It is an interesting signature, not just for its use of Latin but also because the words “Prince” and “Demah” are large and bold, with the name “Barnes” small by comparison. Its very existence is odd, too. Few colonial portraits are signed. What makes this signed portrait remarkable, even within that small group of paintings, is that it bears the name of colonial North America’s first identifiable enslaved portrait painter.¹

The label next to Demah’s portrait of Duguid in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies Prince Demah as “an enslaved African owned by merchant Henry Barnes.” But to understand the extraordinary story of how a man born into slavery in Boston grew up to be America’s first identifiable enslaved portrait painter and to fight for the Patriot cause as a free man, it is best not to begin his story as the Met does. We should begin the story of Demah’s remarkable life with a different person altogether, the African woman who brought Demah into the world and gave him his name: his mother, Daphny.²

Some personalities are so strong that they speak to us from the fragments of the past. Prince Demah’s mother, Daphny, was just such a personality. As is all too common with enslaved women, only a handful of sources exist to trace her life—the record of her baptism in 1745, the letters she dictated to her former enslavers after they fled the colonies for England during the American revolutionary era, and the petitions to the state that she and others made on her behalf after the war ended. These sources, scant though they are, allow us to paint a portrait of Daphny, albeit an impressionistic one. In every case, the records Daphny left differ from others of their type; these differences, sometimes subtle, tell us about Daphny and what mattered to her. The strongest impression that comes across space and time is that Daphny was a woman who knew what she wanted and was not afraid to ask for it.

Born in Africa, likely sometime between 1715 and 1725, Daphny spent most of her long life in Massachusetts, first enslaved and then free but impoverished. Despite living most of her life in New England, Daphny always identified herself as African. In 1790, she petitioned the legislative assemblies of the state of Massachusetts for an allowance to “make her comfortable during the short time which probably she has to live.” She was not literate and someone else composed her petition, which bears a firmly incised “X” as her mark, for her. The person who wrote it for her initially titled it as the petition of “Daphny a Negro Woman.” But it was not submitted that way. Instead, before being sent to the legislature, the phrase “a Negro Woman” was struck through, and the words “an African” put above it in its place. Either the person recording it for her, or Daphny herself, wanted to remind those who read her petition that she was not “a Negro Woman” but rather “an African,” just as Olaudah Equiano stated in his own famous memoir, published the previous year. Whether the choice was hers or another’s to cross out “Negro Woman” and replace it with “African,” it certainly was Daphny’s choice to identify herself with her place of birth.

She echoed this same distinction in the petition’s opening. Daphny began her petition with the fact that “she was born in Africa and upon being brought into this Country, was purchased as a Slave by Henry Barnes, Esq.”³ With this single sentence, Daphny described the most momentous arc of her life. The brief biography entirely glossed over what happened between her birth in Africa and her arrival in New England, the details of home and upbringing and capture and enslavement. She said nothing of what must have been some of her most horrifying memories. She said nothing of her abduction to New England, her suffering through the Middle Passage, a journey defined by the physical and emotional horrors of life on a slave ship. She said nothing of what likely were some of her most cherished memories—remembrances of the people, places, and things that made up her life in Africa. She remembered this life despite the passage of time, for after fifty years or more of enslavement across the Atlantic she still chose to call herself an African. Daphny was a “saltwater slave”—and she never forgot it.⁴

When Daphny arrived on the shores of New England, almost everything about it probably seemed strange to her. To Bostonians who saw her come ashore, however, she would not have seemed out of place. When Daphny arrived in Boston, sometime around 1740, colonists in Massachusetts had been participating in the trade and enslavement of African people for over a century. The first documented ship bearing enslaved Africans, the Desire, arrived in the colony less than a decade after John Winthrop gave his famous sermon on another ship that sailed to the colony, the Arabella, on which he held forth about Puritans building a “city upon a hill.” Almost from the start, the work of building the “city upon a hill” depended upon the labor of enslaved people. In 1641, a few years after the Desire sold its first human cargo, it was not the southern colony of Virginia but rather the Massachusetts Bay Colony that held the dubious distinction of being the first of England’s North American colonies to codify its settler colonists’ slavery practices with legislation. The “Body of Liberties” legalized white settlers’ enslavement of both Indigenous and African people, and their trade of them in and out of the colony. Colonial New England never developed the commodities-based plantation economies that drove demand for enslaved people’s labor in other North American colonies like Virginia and South Carolina. Densities of enslaved populations in New England, by the eve of the American Revolution, had not reached those of plantation colonies or even port cities like New York. But the tragedy of slavery hardly rests on numbers alone. Enslaved people were integrated into New England’s economy, households, and laws from the early days of settler colonialism. Although Daphny did not join a large enslaved community, she found herself living in a place where slavery had long been folded into the fabric of everyday reality.⁵

Soon after her arrival in Boston, a young, unmarried merchant purchased Daphny. Her new enslaver was Henry Barnes, born in Boston in 1720. Daphny labored primarily as a cook and maid or housekeeper for Henry Barnes, and she continued to work as the household cook after his marriage in 1746. She would have shared his living space as well. Freestanding, separate structures to accommodate enslaved people—like those the Royall family built in Medford, Massachusetts to house the unusually large number of enslaved people they brought with them from Antigua—were rare in New England. Instead, the architecture of shared space was the stage on which enslaved people and their enslavers played out the forced intimacies of daily life and labor. Daphny likely slept in a back building, an attic, or the kitchen, in close quarters with Barnes. She interacted with his business and social associates and overheard their conversations, for colonial merchants lived in houses that served multiple functions, not just as homes, but as shops and offices, too. She may have been the only other person living in Barnes’s home until his marriage.

Sometime between the time Henry Barnes purchased Daphny and the spring of 1745, she gave birth to her son, Prince. It is unclear how old Daphny was when she gave birth to Prince. It is possible that the young merchant raped or used Daphny for sex, or she may have been pregnant when she arrived in New England or become pregnant after Barnes enslaved her. Prince’s father might have been left behind in Africa; he might have been a mariner on a slave ship; he might have been a Black man Daphny knew in Boston; he might have been a white man she encountered there; he might have been Henry Barnes himself or one of his relatives.⁶

Although the identity of Prince Demah’s father remains a mystery, it seems certain that Daphny’s attachment to her African origins inspired his name. Unlike “Prince,” which was relatively common, “Demah” was an unusual name among enslaved people in colonial America. It may have been a girl’s name with Arabic origins, perhaps Daphny’s own birth name if she were born into a Muslim family. It also might have been her surname, as it is one in African nations today, including Ghana and Nigeria. Whatever the details of the name, “Demah” was Daphny’s choice rather than her enslaver’s. Daphny made sure they shared a name of her choosing, formalizing their bond as mother and son while simultaneously remembering her African past. By giving this name to her son, she kept that past alive, exerting a measure of control over their lives and cultural identities even when the white name “Barnes” was imposed upon them. Similarly, “Prince” was considered to be a Black male name by white New Englanders, a demeaning marker setting them apart as Black. But to Black people themselves, “Prince” could hold entirely contradictory meanings—connotations not just of Black identity but of nobility and pride in African culture.⁷

In addition to giving her son a distinctive name that recalled his African heritage, Daphny decided to have him baptized. She was baptized along with him. For her, this likely was a conversion to Christianity from Islam or a West African religion. Daphny and her son were baptized together at Trinity Church, founded in the 1730s and the newest of Boston’s three Anglican churches. They were among the few Black people baptized at Trinity Church in the 1740s, surrounded mostly by white names in the baptism record just as they were surrounded mostly by white people in life. White baptisms at Trinity Church recorded the identities of both father and mother, listing children as “son of” or “daughter of.” By contrast, the Demahs’ baptismal record did not mention their familial bond with one another.⁸

The way their names are recorded in the church records sets them apart from the white people baptized by that church and from other Black people baptized around the same time. The missionary arm of the Anglican Church, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), encouraged white colonists and clerics to convert enslaved people—in part based on the argument that it made for more docile slaves. But not all enslavers wanted enslaved people converted, and not all enslaved people wished to embrace baptism and Christianity. Relatively few enslaved people were baptized before 1750 in Boston. Trinity Church recorded its first Black baptism in 1740—that of the enslaved man “London, Negro Man Servt of Mr Isaac Walker of Bosten.” He was followed the next year by “Statira, a Negro Child of Capt. John Snow,” and two enslaved people baptized separately but both recorded as the property of “Mrs. Eliza Green the Widow of Mr. Nathl Green,” followed by one more baptism in 1742. No Black baptisms occurred at all in 1743 and 1744. In 1745, Daphny and Prince were baptized together, recorded as “Dafney an Adult + Prince negroes.” Later that same year, “Shelah Negro of Mrs. Mary Aurthor” was recorded, followed in 1746 by “Hannah + Silva Negro Children of Mr. Christ.” Of all the Black baptisms performed at Trinity Church around the same time as the Demahs’, theirs were the only ones recorded without mention of whose property they nominally were.⁹

The year after Daphny and her son Prince were baptized, the man who enslaved them both, Boston merchant Henry Barnes, married Christian Arbuthnot. The white couple’s marriage in 1746, a happy event for them, probably caused a sad turn of events for Daphny and Prince. At some point after his birth, Henry Barnes sold—or gave—Prince away, separating the boy from his mother. In later years, Henry’s wife, Christian, would prove herself willing to sell or give away the babies of another woman the couple enslaved, Juliet, when she found those infants a nuisance. As she revealingly put it during Juliet’s first pregnancy, “I am not a little perplexed how I shall dispose of it [the baby] but sufficient to the Day is the Evil thereof.” There is no reason to think that she was any less hesitant about separating enslaved mothers from their children as a young bride than she would prove to be decades later. Whether the motivation was the marriage itself or his new wife’s opinions on having Daphny’s young son in their home, Barnes sold or gave away the boy to another Massachusetts household (likely that of Christian’s brother, William).¹⁰

Daphny retained a lifelong connection to her West African roots, a place where pregnancy served as a rite of passage and motherhood held particular communal as well as individual meanings. The weight of losing her child, in addition to the loss of home, family, and freedom, would have been unspeakably heavy. She let her enslavers know it, too. Daphny did not hide her sadness at the separation from her son. Nor did she hide her misery with being held in bondage, even after decades. Time did not, it seems, resign her to her fate, at least not while her son lived. Enslaved and separated from him, her unhappiness was unmistakable to her enslavers. She was neither subtle nor reticent about it and was not, as her enslavers observed, “reconciled to a State of Slavery.” The obviousness of her feelings was an act of defiance; her emotions themselves, like her insistence on giving her son the name Demah, a form of resistance to her enslavers. When Henry Barnes purchased Prince in late 1769, by contrast, Daphny’s happiness was palpable. Even Christian Barnes, whose grasp of the feelings of the enslaved people around her ranged from obtuse to misguided, had noticed Daphny’s unhappiness with enslavement and separation from her son. And even she noticed the difference the reunion made to Daphny’s well-being. As she wrote, “Daphney appears to be much better reconciled to a State of Slavery Since her sons arrival upon the whole I believe there is not a Happier Set of Negros in any Kitchen in the Provence.”¹¹

We know little of the detailed contours of either Daphny’s or Prince Demah’s lives for the twenty-four years of their separation between 1745 and 1769. Daphny worked as a cook and Prince as a sailor. Daphny remained enslaved in the household of Henry and Christian Barnes, which moved to Marlborough, a village about thirty miles west of Boston, or a day’s ride by horse. There, Henry expanded his business interests. He continued to sell British manufactured goods from a shop operated out of the family home. He also opened a distillery for making brandy from cider and a potash, or pearl ash, manufactory. The Barneses also expanded their household with newcomers, whom Christian referred to collectively and with no sense of irony as their “family.” One of these, another enslaved person, joined Daphny in the household—the young woman called Juliet whose babies would be taken from her by Christian. A series of young white men and women also worked for Henry Barnes in the mercantile shop (and perhaps at times lived in the household). A young niece named “Chrisy,” the orphaned daughter of Christian’s brother William, came to live permanently with the couple, too. As the years wore on, Daphny no longer lived in close quarters with a young bachelor merchant; instead, she shared her living space with several people, most of them young, and most of them free and white. She continued to work as a cook and may have lived in the kitchen.¹²

In 1771, Daphny and Juliet were two of only five enslaved people living in all of Marlborough. There was no sizable Black community there. And Daphny’s son not only lived enslaved in a household separate from his mother, but had also been away, working as a mariner. As Christian Barnes described it, he had “been Negro to the Sea for many years.” The way Barnes phrased her description of his work—“Negro to the sea,” implied that it had become his world. He was far out at sea and away for long periods of time. Daphny, then, had good reason to miss her son. She also had reason to fear. Work as a mariner was often dangerous labor that kept boys and men away from home for months at a time—a recipe for worry for those who loved them. Daphny saw Prince at least occasionally. In October 1769, for example, Christian Barnes recorded that “Daphenys Son Prince is here and I am siting to him for my Picture.” Occasional visits did not mitigate her visible unhappiness at their separation, though she likely relished not only the chance to see her son, but the opportunity to hear his news of the wider world—news he was well positioned to acquire as a mariner sailing the seas and stopping at ports of call far beyond Boston and its South Shore. Daphny was keen to the point of satirical in her observations of people; no doubt she listened avidly and with enjoyment to the tales her son brought home from the sea, political and personal gossip and news alike. He was a connection—and likely a radicalizing one—to the broader world outside Marlborough and Boston, a connection to the Atlantic world that might have made her think of her African home.¹³

What inspired Henry Barnes to purchase Prince would keep him—at least for a while—on land, reunited with his mother.¹⁴ According to Christian Barnes, her husband purchased Daphny’s son at least partly “with a Veiw of Drawing my Picture,” and because “he has some design of improving his Genius in painting.” Henry and Christian had tested his abilities two months before deciding to purchase Prince. That was the reason for his October visit. Prince did a quick portrait of Christian, something she looked forward to because “he has taken a Coppy of my Brothers extreamly well.” Despite approving of Prince’s skills at copying what was likely a portrait of her brother by Boston artist John Singleton Copley, she was not quite ready to give the budding artist his due, perhaps because she had recently visited Copley in his studio, when he painted her friend Elizabeth Murray Smith earlier that fall. Maybe with Copley and his well-stocked studio in mind, she initially dismissed Prince’s portrait of her as a “curiosity” and “nothing but a Daub for he has not proper materials.”¹⁵

Yet she and Henry must have continued to think about Prince’s artistic talents, for they purchased him not long after that October visit. Although Christian Barnes does not say so in her letters, the matter of Prince was no doubt kept front and center by Daphny, who was (as her later correspondence dictated to Christian Barnes shows) unafraid to voice her opinion to her enslavers and had a gift for sweetening bold demands by wrapping them in humor. Similarly, although Christian credits the family’s discovery of Prince’s artistry based on his copy of her brother’s portrait, it was assuredly Prince himself who made his artistic talents known to the Arbuthnot and Barnes families, rather than his enslavers “discovering” them.

It was not unusual for enslaved people in colonial North America to be trained and to work as highly skilled artisans and craftspeople. Colonial portrait painters, or limners, would have been considered artisans rather than artists. Enslaved artisans cast silver, set type for print, fashioned furniture, drew and cut wood for printed images, drew silhouettes, carved architectural embellishments, and painted signs, carriages, and portraits, among other things. But they usually did so as the property of enslavers who worked in that same trade or possessed those same skills, and their names did not often adorn shop signs, advertisements, or final products. No one in the Barnes or Arbuthnot families seems to have been an artist; it would have been odd for them to sit Prince down with pastels (or “crayons,” as they were then called) and paper, or paint and canvas, materials not readily available, out of curiosity to see what talent he might possess. Even colonial would-be artists who were free had to be inventive in how they honed their skills and accessed supplies. In the absence of any centralized, formal training academy like that founded by William Hogarth and others on St. Martin’s Lane in London, some painted family members and copied print sources, like Demah’s fellow mariner-turned-painter Robert Feke, and others practiced painting signs before creating portraits, like Charles Willson Peale. These men were both free, and white. It was far more common for artistry among enslaved people to go uncultivated by enslavers than encouraged.

As a child in Newport, Rhode Island, for example, painter Gilbert Stuart (born in 1755) remembered that he had learned to draw by watching an enslaved man, Neptune Thurston, draw faces in chalk atop barrels. Stuart noted the impediments enslavement placed in the way of the naturally talented Thurston, recalling as an adult that “if that African’s mind and natural talent had been properly cultivated, he would have made a much more celebrated artist than his pupil.” That Prince, after years spent working as a mariner, painted his enslavers’ portraits and obtained professional training speaks as much to his passion, his persistence, his talent, and his powers of persuasion as it does to their benevolence or discovery of his artistry.¹⁶

The Barneses did not see it this way, of course. They credited themselves for purchasing him and encouraging his artistry rather than acknowledging Daphny’s determination to be reunited with her son, or her son’s drive to pursue painting. Over time, however, they did come to admire his skill and seek to promote him to family and friends. Three months after Prince moved into their Marlborough household, Christian gushed at “the Qualifications of my Limner” which could be “a subject for several sheets” of paper. She went on in detail: “He is a most surprizing instance of the force of natural Genius for without the least instruction or improvement he has taken several Faces which are thought to be very well done. He has taken a Coppy of my Picture which I think has more of my resembleance than Coplings[Copley’s]. He is now taking his own face, which I will certain send you [in London] as it must be valued as a curiosity by any Friend you shall please to bestow it upon.” She bemoaned their “great loss for proper materials,” noting that “he has worked only with crayons and them very bad ones” on blue paper. Despite these limitations, she opined, his “surprising genius” was undeniable.¹⁷

A few months later, by May of 1770, she had grown so convinced of Prince’s talent that she sent his portrait of her to a friend in London, “as a Sample of the performers Genious.” She also sought her advice, pleading, “do my Dear Friend tell me if you think I am wrong in imagining any benefit will ever arise from his imployment in this way and if you meet with any Persons of Judgment who pronounce him a Genus pray advise me what method I shall take to Cultivate it.” She noted that although she was “ashamed to dwell so long upon a Subject that may appear so triffling” she felt compelled to pursue the matter, as it was “an affair which has taken up my attention for some Months Past and I freely own that any expectations are rather heightened th[a]n diminished.” Still, she hedged, showing the limits of her support, “I am not so far determined as to be at any expence on his account till I find other Peoples Judgment concurs with mine tis for this reason I have desired you to give your opinion freely and you may depend upon it I will be governd by your advice.” Finally, she added, perhaps reminding herself as well as her friend, purchasing and enslaving Daphny’s son was a good investment, for “supposing he is not qualified for a Painter he may be otherwise made a very usefull servant.”¹⁸

In the winter and spring of 1770, fostering Prince’s talent—and dreaming about his future as a limner—became one of Christian Barnes’s favorite pastimes. She seems to have grown fixed on creating Prince the limner for a variety of reasons. She could be cold and unfeeling to an extreme about the feelings of enslaved people around her. She also had a contradictory tendency toward romance (a trait inflated by her belief that she had the second sight). She enjoyed arranging courtships between enslaved as well as free people she knew. And, perhaps because she had no children of her own, she relished plotting young people’s futures—not only that of her ward and niece, Chrisy, but of other nieces and young acquaintances, too. She was at pains to impress her friends. She seems to have appreciated art and other cultural pursuits that life in the village of Marlborough did not provide. And she seems to have focused on Prince as a form of escapism, a distraction from the increasingly alarming political situation and threats of violence unfolding around them. She found refuge in creating a “composed retirement” in one of the rooms in their Marlborough house, describing the scene as “Caty on one side of me dealing out her sentimentals, Chrisy on the other entertaining me with her innocent Prattle, Prince is fix’d in one corner of the room, improving himself in the art of Painting and every two or three hours Mr Barnes enters with his Chearfull countenance and makes us all Happy.” Her contentment at the scene was all the deeper for her belief that they enjoyed “what we call Sollid Happiness while every one around us are sowing the Seeds of Discord and Sedition.”¹⁹

What Christian Barnes viewed as “discord and sedition,” of course, other colonists saw as patriotic protest. The intertwined histories of the Black and white families who shared the Barnes household unfolded within a broader, imperial family crisis in the British Empire. In 1769, when Henry Barnes purchased Prince and brought him to live in Marlborough, the Townshend Acts—duties legislated by the British Parliament in 1767 on British and East India Company goods used in the colonies, including glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea, were still in effect. And reaction to them was one of the reasons it was difficult for the Barneses to find adequate pastels and paints for Prince Demah to work with. The new duties inspired American colonists to turn to old methods of political protest. Like the Stamp Act before them, the Townshend Acts inspired collective colonial resistance in the form of consumer boycotts against British goods. Sons and Daughters of Liberty were reminded in public broadsides and newspapers not to buy goods from merchants who refused to participate in the boycotts, for “in so doing they will bring Disgrace upon themselves, and their Posterity, for ever and ever, AMEN.”²⁰ Women and men pledged, as they had in 1765, not to buy British imports. Merchants, likewise, pledged anew not to sell certain agreed-upon British imports until the taxes were repealed. In 1768, most Boston-area traders agreed that, except for certain necessities like fishhooks, “we will not send for or import any kind of goods or merchandize from Great Britain” until the duties were repealed.²¹ The making and wearing of homespun cloth came back into fashion. Consumer and mercantile boycotts spread up and down the Atlantic coast, from New England to Charleston. But Boston, in part because of retribution against the Massachusetts colonial assembly’s “circular letter” that included the stationing of thousands of British soldiers in the city, was in many ways the epicenter of the political hurricane that hit in 1770. And the Barnes household, despite its physical distance from Boston, found itself directly in the storm’s path.

Henry Barnes was one of a handful of merchants targeted in the Boston press for importing British goods contrary to merchants’ agreements not to do so (agreements he did not sign). Barnes remained defiant in the face of the public attacks and continued not only to sell what goods he had on hand but to continue to import new ones; these decisions would come to haunt him later that year. For her part, although she demurred that “Politicks is a Pudelle I never chuse to dabble in,” Christian Barnes, like many colonial women, became increasingly political in 1770.²²

Christian and Henry identified as Tories (or, as we would term them today, Loyalists) and hoped that the enslaved people living in their household shared their political point of view. As violent events like the Boston Massacre tightened political divisions in the winter and spring of 1770, however, the pair became less sanguine about the political leanings of people around them, including those they enslaved. Perhaps because they spent considerable time together, perhaps because furthering his craft was her pet project, perhaps a mixture of both—Christian wondered in particular about Prince’s politics. She wondered, and she worried about them, in part because they were inscrutable. Christian wanted to believe that Prince was “of Tory principles,” mostly because “he was Born in our family.” But, she confessed, “of that I am not quite so certain as he has not yet declar’d himself.”²³

Although Christian hoped the enslaved people in her household shared her politics, she found the possibility they were not the same as her own a matter of concern. Christian, like most American colonists in the 1760s, felt an emotional attachment to Britain and its empire as well as to the North American colony in which she had been born.²⁴ Her home was physically in Massachusetts, but she also had a symbolic home in Britain. To her mind, of course, it would be far easier for her—and far easier for her to control her household—if the rest of her “family” felt the same. But Prince kept his cards close to his chest, careful not to reveal his politics during an uncertain, turbulent time. His politics most likely aligned more closely with the Sons of Liberty than with his Tory enslavers. American Tories like Christian and Henry Barnes were women and men who favored a society more hierarchical than egalitarian, one dominated by conservative principles, an attachment to the status quo, and loyalty to the monarch as sovereign over his or her people. Mariners like Prince Demah, by contrast, had a long tradition of embracing radical ideas about liberty and a more egalitarian worldview. Mariners played pivotal roles in the Boston Massacre, and a mariner of mixed Wampanoag and Black heritage, Crispus Attucks, was among the handful of colonial protesters killed that cold night in Boston. And by 1770, Black New Englanders already had a tradition of petitioning and agitating for their own freedom from enslavement. As a Black mariner from Massachusetts, Prince was part of multiple communities with fierce traditions of agitating for liberty. In 1770, his silence proved his diplomatic skill at negotiating the complications of sharing a household with his enslavers and patrons.²⁵

As winter turned to spring and Prince continued to hone his artistic skills, Christian became less worried about those in her own household and increasingly nervous about the politics of the people outside it, including her friends, neighbors, business associates, and strangers in their town and New England more broadly. Perhaps she had good reason to think she had the gift of second sight she claimed, for her intuition proved well founded. That summer, the “Sollid Happiness” of the Barnes household was threatened by an act of violence aimed at Henry Barnes. Angry with his months of defiance, men gathered in June to send Barnes a particularly memorable message to cease selling imported British goods. The message took a bizarre form: the tarring and feathering of a horse in Henry Barnes’s name.

2 A TARRED AND FEATHERED HORSE

ANGER AGAINST Henry Barnes simmered for months before it boiled over into the tarring and feathering of a horse in his name. By the time this event took place in the summer of 1770, Barnes was an easy target. He remained one of a handful of Boston-area merchants who steadfastly refused to sign local nonimportation agreements. Several merchants (including Sons of Liberty) signed and then sidestepped agreements by smuggling prohibited goods. But Barnes was no hypocrite. Instead, he openly refused to sign and continued to sell British imports. His name made the first page of Boston newspapers more than once in lists of people who “audaciously” flouted the “united sentiments” of merchants “thro’out North America” by importing British goods. As “Trader in the Town of Marlboro,” he stood out even in these small lists, which provided shop locations as well as merchants’ names; usually, he was the only one not based in Boston. Lumped together as “Enemies to their Country,” Barnes and a handful of others, including Scottish immigrant John Mein and the Barnes family’s friends, sisters Ame and Elizabeth Cuming, were publicly shamed together. At some point, everyone called out in these lists suffered for their politics. Words of disdain often took an ugly turn. People destroyed property, beat, shot, and tarred and feathered men, and even tarred and feathered that one unfortunate horse.¹

Although he holds the distinction of being the only colonist in whose name a horse was tarred and feathered, Henry Barnes was not the first Boston-area “enemy to his country” targeted with physical violence. The first of those listed alongside Barnes to suffer attack was John Mein, who operated a bookshop and published the Tory newspaper the Boston Chronicle. In the late 1760s, colonial Americans like Mein and Barnes who stood steadfastly against nonimportation agreements were in the minority. They found themselves more in alignment with the ministerial policies of the king’s government in Britain and its political adherents there than with many of their fellow merchants in Boston. By contrast, many of their fellow colonists who signed nonimportation agreements and boycotted British goods identified with British Whigs, particularly radical Whigs who believed Britain’s future required a strong empire. These British politicians and thinkers, while they supported constitutional monarchy and parliamentary rule, also favored colonial rights—such as their right to no (internal) taxation without (direct) representation—during moments like the Stamp Act Crisis. Whigs favored a society ruled by unalienable natural rights and championed ideologies of classical republicanism and liberty, while Tories were more conservative in their thinking, more attached to a hierarchical status quo. But then as now, those on conflicting sides of the political spectrum did not always trust that their opponents operated on principle. Although Tories like Henry and Christian Barnes and John Mein were angered and concerned by colonial Whig protest, in the fall of 1769, they disdained it more than anything, scorning much of it as economically self-serving.²

Mein was bold enough to make this perspective public. He used his newspaper to publish ships’ cargo lists that proved American Whigs, or Patriots, continued (hypocritically) to import prohibited British goods despite signing nonimportation agreements. He suffered for his righteous stance, however. On October 28, 1769, Bostonians retaliated against Mein for using his paper as a platform for publishing scathing satirical sketches of local “Liberty Men.” Patriot merchants and tradesmen attacked Mein on the streets, first with a cane and then with a shovel. As a “skreeming” crowd shouted, “kill him, kill him,” Mein drew and fired his pistol, wounding either the arm or the sleeve (accounts differ) of a British soldier. Soon after firing, Mein took shelter in a nearby British Guard House. There he stayed safe from further bodily harm. While Mein hid, the crowd turned its rage on another man, George Gailer. Gailer was not as lucky. He suffered far worse than Mein. That night, he became Boston’s first victim of tarring and feathering.³

Tarring and feathering was a European corporal punishment dating back to at least medieval times. The general procedure remained much the same over the centuries. It involved pouring tar—the pungent, thick byproduct of roasted pine trees, so sticky it was used to waterproof ships—over the victim. The victim was usually stripped at least to the waist before being tarred. Sometimes the tar was hot enough to cause burns. Even if not hot enough to cause burns upon application, it could cause scarring and wounding, as removing the stubbornly sticky substance often required turpentine and tore off skin. Once a person was tarred, their attackers shook feathers of geese or other birds on top of the tar, creating the impression of an unnatural creature that was part human, part bird. Perhaps because of the ready availability of tar on and near ships, it was particularly popular in maritime cultures. It was not practiced in colonial North America, however, until the mid-eighteenth century, when the captain of a New York ship tarred and feathered a prostitute trying to come aboard.⁴ This woman’s experience was an exception to the rule. Subsequent tarring and feathering in the revolutionary era tended to occur in colonial port cities but to involve seagoing men—men targeted overwhelmingly for their politics.

Unlike the hapless prostitute in New York, Gailer perfectly fit the profile of a typical revolutionary-era victim of tarring and feathering. Gailer was a sailor allegedly turned customs informer on a Patriot-owned ship carrying undeclared wine. Like Mein, he tried to hide from his would-be attackers. But once he ventured outdoors, “he was immediately Seized upon by the populace, and soon placed in a Cart, his Jacket and Shirt taken off, and his naked skin well tarred.”⁵ The mob poured tar over Gailer’s bare flesh repeatedly as they carted him around. It was an agonizing experience, made worse each time as tar sank into the wounds left by previous applications. It also was a humiliating ritual, one meant to shame as well as injure. A tarred and feathered man represented a frightening warning of what could happen to others who transgressed in similar ways—a fact those doing the tarring and feathering appreciated. The merchants, mariners, and tailors torturing Gailer, for example, waited to feather him. They applied feathers to the tar only once they stopped the cart in a very particular place: right in front of the Cuming sisters’ door. A calculated decision, this bit of drama was meant to frighten the sisters, who like Henry Barnes continued to sell British imports.

And frighten them it did. The Cuming sisters did not come from a world in which rough-and-tumble street violence was the norm. They came from a well-connected family, enjoyed a genteel upbringing, practiced embroidery, taught girls needlework, and sold things like sewing silk. Witnessing the tarring and feathering of a man outside their door horrified the sisters. Elizabeth Cuming described the scene as a “larg[e] Mob of ful a Thousand Man & boys” that “aranged themselves before our Dorr” with a cart on which “a Man was Exhibited as we thot in a Gore of Blod.” At first, the sisters feared that the man covered in what they thought was blood was their friend Mein. Later, they realized (with a distinct lack of sympathy for Gailer) that “we was happyly mistaken it was an informer they had caught the moment Meen found shalter.” Properly feathered as well as tarred, the unfortunate Gailer was carted through Boston for at least three hours more, while suffering “sundry heavy and grievous Blows” with stones, “Clubbs, Staves, and a hand saw.”⁶ Given the small size of Boston at that time, a three-hour tour through the town ensured that all its residents had the chance to see the grim sight—and that some likely saw it more than once.

According to the Cuming sisters, the crowd also made Gailer carry a lantern in his hands as they carted him throughout town.⁷ The combination of flame and tar obviously held disastrous potential. But Gailer was never set on fire—few victims of tarring and feathering were, a fact that likely brought little comfort to Gailer as he lived through the experience. Burning him was likely not the point, though the thought of it no doubt terrified Gailer that night. Instead, his attackers used the lantern to maximize the dramatic spectacle of Gailer’s tarring and feathering. Holding a lantern while riding in a cart through the streets, Gailer appeared to be a living parody of a familiar and popular tableau: that of the devil riding a cart through the Boston streets on Pope’s Night, or Pope’s Day, celebrations.

Timing helped with the staging of this spectacle. The attacks on Gailer and Mein occurred only ten days before Boston held its annual November celebration of Pope’s Night. These fall festivities were a colonial take on Guy Fawkes Night, an English holiday celebrating the thwarting of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Protestant king and Parliament in 1605. Not surprisingly given the anti-Catholicism that permeated New England’s culture, the New England version was a raucous, alcohol-fueled event. Men and boys paraded in the streets with carts on which effigies of the Pope rode alongside the devil. The effigies held papered-over lanterns that, lit from within, blazed the story for all to read of which supernatural and human beings deserved the scorn of the crowd. At the end of the procession through town, the effigies were ritualistically burned.

When protest against the British intensified in the 1760s, Pope’s Night celebrations took on new meaning. Now they were used to broadcast Patriot politics as well as anti-Catholicism. The processions targeted local merchants who refused to boycott British goods, Loyalist colonial officials, and British ministers. No matter the shift in politics, the devil remained a constant. And in Boston’s Pope’s Night revolutionary-era celebrations, the devil was tarred and feathered, and held a lantern in his hand. The devil, in other words, struck much the same figure George Gailer did: a blackened object of scorn.⁸ He would have been a familiar sight to those watching him carted through the streets that October night, a ritualistic effigy brought to life.

When, less than two weeks after the attack on Gailer, Boston saw the tarred and feathered, lantern-holding devil in the annual Pope’s Night procession, that effigy most certainly reminded spectators of seeing the tarred and feathered Gailer carrying a lantern as he was carted through town. But the organizers of the procession wanted to ensure that Bostonians would not forget that Mein, like Gailer, deserved public punishment, shaming, and bodily harm, even if he had escaped their grasp. Beside the figure of the devil in the parade that year, a large lantern spelled out Mein’s name as an acrostic:

J nsulting Wretch, we’ll him expose,

O ’er the whole World his Deeds disclose,

H ell now gaups wide to take him in,

N ow he is ripe, Oh Lump of Sin.

M ean is the Man, M—N is his Name,

E nough he’s spread his hellish Fame,

I nfernal Furies hurt his Soul,

N ine Million Times from Pole to Pole.

Written on the other side of the same lantern was a promise that, had Mein “receiv’d his Due,” he “in Person would here Swing in View.” Little wonder that Mein remained in hiding until he fled Boston for London.⁹

Linking the attacks on Mein and Gailer to the Pope’s Night devil was not just a matter of convenient timing. The devil had a widespread appeal in Patriot political culture that went beyond Pope’s Night. In addition to parading on the streets as an effigy whose destruction delighted audiences, he leered from political cartoons. Patriots used him to whip up anger against corrupt politicians and fear of tyrannical rulers, and he was often seen whispering in the ear of the king or his ministers.

Playing upon such fears, the devil was associated with the idea (embraced entirely unironically by colonists who kept other people in bondage themselves) that Britain’s Parliament meant to “enslave Americans.” From the Stamp Act crisis on, he often showed up as the emblem of the “badge of slavery,” an image of the devil holding a noose. The devil alerted colonists that their worries that legislation like the Stamp Act would deprive white Americans of their natural rights—would “enslave” them—were legitimate.¹⁰

The others eighteenth-century Bostonians would have associated with “enslavement” besides the devil, of course, were Black and Indigenous people, both of whom colonists often described as “devils.” The devil himself was often described and portrayed as a “black man,” both in Europe and America. The use of black devils in prints and effigies evoked a manufactured fear of Black people that white Americans had used for political purposes long before the revolutionary era. In America, a racialized (and racist) association was attached to the idea of “devils.” When Patriots linked Mein and Gailer to the devil, they connected them to longstanding white American fears about Indigenous and Black people.¹¹

One of colonial Massachusetts’s most memorable landmarks—what Paul Revere called the spot where “Mark was hung in chains”—was a constant reminder of these racialized anxieties. Mark, an enslaved man, was held in bondage by John Codman, a former ship captain who lived outside Boston, in Charlestown. In the late 1740s, Mark was forced to live with Codman, separated from his wife and children, who lived in Boston. Soon after, Codman sold one of Mark’s children away from his family. In addition to Mark, Codman held others in bondage. These people included Phillis, enslaved by Codman since she was a child, and another woman, Phoebe.

Codman had violent tendencies; he once beat an enslaved man so badly that he lost sight in one of his eyes. Mark worried that Codman would hurt Phillis and Phoebe, and he wished to be owned by someone other than Codman. In 1755, he convinced Phillis and Phoebe to help him kill Codman through poisoning his food and drink. Accused of petit treason, the three enslaved people came to a tragic end. Phoebe was deported to the harsh labor of the West Indies. Mark was hanged. And Phillis was burned alive. Mark’s dead body was hung in chains and gibbeted, suspended out in the open in an iron cage. Most likely because it was covered with tar, Mark’s body was preserved for years, a Boston-area landmark so familiar it was one of only a few Revere mentioned when later recounting the history of his famous nighttime ride to Lexington.¹²

The familiarity of Mark’s body on the landscape, in fact, forces us to broaden our thinking about what else Americans would have thought of when they saw the devil in effigy or the blackened bodies of tarred and feathered men like Gailer. Colonists seeing the devil and Gailer on parade in their streets, whether on Pope’s Night or otherwise, likely associated them with Mark’s tarred corpse and its reminder of the dangers of slave conspiracies. More pointedly, as the charge of petit treason made clear, Mark’s body reminded white colonists of what they would have considered betrayal by members of their own household. Fear that enslaved cooks might poison them was common among white enslavers, a fear embittered by their belief that such crimes were also acts of betrayal by members of their “family.” In Massachusetts as elsewhere in North America, white enslavers were not blind to the broader, potentially dangerous implications of their calls for liberty in the face of tyranny. As early as 1765, many New England towns forbade enslaved people from joining in public protests against the Stamp Act. But of course Black New Englanders hearing about or seeing those tarred and feathered bodies paraded through the streets had different reasons to fear such spectacles. Daphny, like Phoebe, cooked for her enslavers, so it may have been especially chilling for her to see Mark’s body hung in chains and to think of Phoebe’s fate. It also might have been frightening for Prince and Daphny to hear about the attacks on Mein and Gailer and to wonder what violence they might suffer at the hands of an angry mob, living as they did in the household of a man also publicly called out as an “enemy to his country.”¹³

Although we must guess at the Demahs’ feelings, there is no doubt that the public anger against merchants and the attacks on Mein and Gailer upset Henry and Christian Barnes. At first, they were angry. Christian’s letters in the fall of 1769 drip with contempt for what she called sarcastically called “those daring Sons of Libberty.” Convinced that the Sons of Liberty were motivated by seizing people’s private property, she mocked their supposed principles as well as their tyranny, noting that “even to speak disrespectfully” is “a Crime equal to high Treason.” She lamented that it was difficult to speak against them in part because “the deluded multitude” of her fellow colonists had “been led astray” by lies published in the press.¹⁴

As fall turned to winter, Christian’s disdain turned to fear. In January 1770, Patriots at Boston’s town meeting resolved to publicly condemn Henry Barnes, along with John Mein, the Cuming sisters, and others for their continued defiance of nonimportation agreements. Less than a month later, things took an even more dramatic turn. In February, protests outside the Boston shop of Theophilus Lillie, another trader publicly condemned in lists alongside Barnes, Mein, and the Cuming sisters, ended in one of the most incendiary events of what would prove to be an inflammatory year: the killing of a ten-year-old boy. The anger behind the attack on Lillie’s shop that resulted in the death of young Christopher Seider was long brewing. Lillie was regularly singled out, alongside Mein and Barnes, for preferring his “own little private Advantage to the Welfare of America.”¹⁵ The month before Seider’s killing, Lillie’s outrage at censure against him inspired him to take to Mein’s decidedly anti-Patriot newspaper, the Boston Chronicle, to make a political attack of his own. Describing himself as a shopkeeper uninterested in “the mysteries of government,” he lambasted the men who had censured him, accusing them of trampling on the very liberties they claimed to protect.¹⁶

“It always seemed strange to me,” Lillie wrote, “that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty.” It was hard to stomach, he went on, that these same men who were protesting British “laws which they never gave their consent in person or by their representative” were themselves making local laws for which “I am sure I never gave my consent.” Impractical as well as hypocritical, he argued, these local mandates punished importers like himself for goods they had ordered before the restrictions were put in place, leaving them stuck with goods they had paid for but couldn’t sell. What were such political maneuverings but “one set of private subjects” deciding “to punish another set of private subjects just when they please”? All in all, Lillie protested, the entire situation made him “a slave to a hundred or more” men.¹⁷

The month after publishing his indignant protest, boys picketed Lillie’s shop, encouraged by the Sons of Liberty. They mounted a large wooden head on a sign with importers’ caricatures and a hand pointing toward Lillie’s shop. A crowd gathered. The much-hated Customs informer Ebenezer Richardson attempted to remove the sign and break up the crowd. His actions inflamed rather than mollified the crowd, which chased him off to his nearby home, throwing sticks and mud at him as they went. Richardson locked himself in his house with Richard Wilmot, a mariner. The crowd broke his windows, and the two men inside threw stones at them in return. Eventually, as an eyewitness later recounted, Richardson fired a musket from one of the broken windows. His shots hit young Seider, who worked as a servant for the wealthy widow Grizzell Apthorp, and whose German immigrant parents lived near Boston’s Liberty Tree.¹⁸

The crowd reacted with fury. Richardson and Wilmot were dragged from the house and nearly hanged before being dragged through town to jail, abused by the mob as they went. Despite medical attention, Seider died from his wounds later that night. It was lucky for Richardson that he was safe in jail when he did. Seider’s death rocked Boston. To have a Customs informer kill someone protesting the continued importation of British goods was bad enough, but for the victim to be a ten-year-old boy was unconscionable.

As a local newspaper declared, and many in Boston agreed, Richardson had “barbarously Murdered” the boy.¹⁹ A snitch for Customs (and a particularly unlikable one at that) had killed an innocent child, a boy brave enough to protest unjust policies despite his youth. It was hard to imagine a more sympathetic figure to generate support for the Patriot cause. Seider’s funeral capitalized on that political potential. It began with “the little Corpse” in its coffin laid under the large elm dubbed the Liberty Tree. Among the inscriptions on the coffin was one placed at its head that read, “Innocentia nusquam tuta!” (Innocence is nowhere safe). The Sons of Liberty placed a board on the tree that called for vengeance against Richardson and justice for Seider:

Thou shalt take no Satisfaction for the Life of a MURDERER;

—He shall surely be put to Death.

Though Hand join in Hand, the Wicked shall not pass unpunish’d.

The Memory of the Just is Blessed.²⁰

The political associations of beginning the procession under the Liberty Tree were clear. They also, no doubt, were made more poignant by the fact that the Liberty Tree stood within sight of the home of Seider’s parents.

Once the coffin left the Liberty Tree, supported by “six Youths, chosen by the Parents of the deceased,” five hundred schoolboys walked in front of it. Another estimated two thousand people “of all Ranks” walked behind it, watched by crowds of spectators. The February funeral was one of the largest (and politically symbolic) Boston had seen.²¹ Again, news of the events in Boston very likely alarmed the Barnes household. After all, Theophilus Lillie was a name placed more than once in lists alongside that of Henry Barnes. First Mein, then the Cuming sisters, and now Lillie. Mobs had intimidated or attacked all four of these men and women. What if it was only a matter of time before the mob came to terrorize Henry and Christian Barnes, too?

Seider’s demise is sometimes called the first Patriot death of the American Revolution. His youth elevated him to heroic status. As his fellow Bostonian Phillis Wheatley put it in a poem she wrote about his death, he was more than a hero, he was “the first martyr for the cause.”²² But he has not enjoyed the posthumous fame one might expect, given that moniker and the outpouring of public grief at his funeral. Instead, about a week after his “little Corpse” was carried through the town’s streets, another event took place that overshadowed his importance in collective memory. That event was the brawl on King Street between British soldiers and colonists that ended in the deaths of five men, the event that became known as the Boston Massacre.

The Boston Massacre took place on a cold night in the first week of March. It began outside a building that Customs rented from Grizzell Apthorp, the wealthy widow, coincidentally, in whose house Christopher Seider was living as a servant at the time of his death. Seider’s recent killing had the town on edge, but there was a longer history at play that night. Two British army regiments had arrived in Boston in fall of 1768 to keep order in the face of colonial anger at the Townshend duties—exactly the type of economic protest that turned into violent mob action and threats against merchants and Customs informers like Mein, Gailer, and the Cuming sisters and that led to the death of Christopher Seider. Their two thousand men and hundreds of camp followers and family members made a significant and not always comfortable addition to the town’s population of about 15,000 people. Although some Bostonians welcomed the soldiers, and dozens of marriages between local women and soldiers occurred, others found their presence distasteful and even threatening. The March event was not the first altercation between soldiers and colonists since the army arrived nearly a year and a half before, but it was the first to turn deadly. That night, a group of boys and men began taunting a British sentry guarding the Customs house. Six British soldiers and an officer came to his defense. The crowd swelled to over a hundred people, including mariners and dockworkers as well as boys, who pelted the soldiers with snowballs, ice, and clubs. As violence escalated, one soldier fired into the crowd. Others followed. Three people in the crowd died on the spot. Among the first to be shot and killed was one of the sailors leading the attack on the soldiers, a man who at six foot two no doubt stood out in the crowd he was leading. He was a sailor named Crispus Attucks, or, as he sometimes called himself at the time, Michael Johnson.²³

Attucks used the alias Michael Johnson to evade reenslavement. Like Prince Demah, Attucks was born to an enslaved mother in Massachusetts and had an African parent. In his case, it was his father who was born in Africa and then sold into captivity in Massachusetts. His mother was an enslaved Wampanoag. In the seventeenth century, New Englanders made a practice of enslaving Indigenous people (women and children in particular) after wars between colonists and Native peoples, like the Pequot War in the 1630s and King Philip’s War in the 1670s. Indigenous people continued to live as enslaved workers in New England in the eighteenth century, often forming families with their fellow enslaved people of African descent. Attucks was the child of such a union.²⁴ Born in 1723, Attucks grew up and labored on a plantation in Framingham, a town about thirty miles west of Boston and ten miles from Marlborough. At age twenty-seven, he decided to self-emancipate. In 1750, he ran away from Framingham. His enslaver advertised more than once in an effort to capture him and offered a reward for his return. In these advertisements, Attucks was described as a “Mulatto Fellow, about 27 years of age, named Crispas, six feet, two inches high, short curl’s Hair, his Knees nearer together than common” and dressed for the elements wearing, among other things, a “Bearskin Coat” and “new Buckskin Breeches.”²⁵ Attucks escaped re-enslavement for the next twenty years, in part because like many other Black and Indigenous New England men, including Prince Demah, he became a mariner.

Paul Revere Jr., after Henry Pelham, The Boston Massacre (1770), hand-colored engraving and etching. Labeled as “The BLOODY MASSACRE perpetrated in King—Street BOSTON on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Reg.t,” Paul Revere’s depiction of the event (copied from Henry Pelham’s somewhat milder version) emphasized blood and one-sided violence, not just through its image but with the eighteen-line poem and list of those killed and wounded below it.

By the time the funeral was held for the five victims of “The BLOODY MASSACRE perpetrated in King—Street,” as it was described in an engraving by Paul Revere, Attucks’s identity as a mixed-race mariner who helped lead the crowd was broadly publicized. In Revere’s wildly popular, widely distributed dramatization of the event, he listed him by name, along with the other men killed, as tragically shot dead by the “bloody hands” of British soldiers, as the poem beneath the print described it. The victim in the foreground is readily identifiable by his clothing as a mariner like Attucks. He wears the long pants of a sailor rather than the breeches and tricorn hat of a gentleman, like most of the men behind him. Revere’s print (and the engraving he copied, designed by Henry Pelham) helped galvanize sympathy for the men who lost their lives. In his iteration, the British soldiers stand calmly in formation, some of them smiling, as they fire into the crowd. Attucks and the other men are unarmed—no clubs or ice-filled snowballs to be seen. They are shown as hapless victims of the British army. And this image of them—whether in Pelham’s original, Revere’s copy, or some variation of them, quickly became the popular visual memory of the event, not just in Boston but up and down the North American coast and in London, where a version of the image was also published.²⁶

Perhaps to allay descriptions of the martyrs as part of a group like that John Adams described as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, and mulattos, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars,” Revere did not show the victims as anything but white (and only one of them was shown as a “jack tar,” or sailor). But in the press, Attucks was described as “a mulatto man” who was “born in Framingham.” Colonists in Massachusetts would have known that one of the “martyrs” of the event was a mixed-race local. Along with the four white victims, his coffin was paraded through the streets of Boston—past the place where they died—to a common burial vault. Their funeral procession was even larger than that of Christopher Seider, attended not only by Bostonians but by people from surrounding towns, like Framingham and Marlborough. As one newspaper reported, “there must have been a greater Number of People from Town and Country at the Funeral of those who were massacred by the Soldiers, than were ever together on this Continent on any Occasion.”²⁷

Given the wide reporting of the events of March 5, the detailed descriptions of its five victims, and the fact that news of the event galvanized colonists in other towns and colonies as well as in Boston itself, Prince and Daphny Demah were certainly aware of the identity and fate of Crispus Attucks. As a former Massachusetts mariner himself, Prince no doubt knew some of the same sailors and dockworkers Attucks knew. They had at times sailed the same seas and pulled into the same ports. They had labored in similar ways, their legs adjusting to balance on shifting decks, their hands callused from working ropes and sails. They had much in common, from their parents to their work. And, as would later become evident, they shared politics in common, too. Especially given all these similarities, Attucks’s death likely was one of the most memorable things about the “bloody massacre” for the Demahs. It was, perhaps, one of the events that encouraged Prince to develop loyalty to the American cause against Britain.

Ironically, the British army itself offered a surer route to freedom than those protesting against the policies it was there to enforce. Soon after the troops arrived in fall of 1768, when Prince was still laboring as a mariner and thus perhaps in and out of Boston’s port regularly, rumors flew about that alarmed enslavers and likely intrigued their enslaved workers. Black New Englanders had a tradition of petitioning for liberty or seizing it for themselves by self-emancipating, as Crispus Attucks did. But the British army (which included some free Black drummers among its troops) offered a different model for possible freedom. One night, having “drunk plentifully,” British army captain John Wilson “met with several Negroes in the street, asked them whether their masters were Liberty Boys” and “told them to go home, be abusive to their Masters, & to cut their throats, then to come to him for protection, he would give them arms, & make them Gentlemen soldiers.”²⁸ While nothing came of this offer, it put local enslavers on edge. It no doubt raised fears of slave insurrections that haunted all colonial settlements in North America, fears kept fresh in white Bostonians’ minds by the familiar presence of Mark’s body hanging in chains. It also, no doubt, planted another seed in Black Bostonians’ heads about possibilities of freedom. One way or another, liberty was a topic on everyone’s minds.

A little over a week after Crispus Attucks’s death, Christian and Henry Barnes faced a new worry. Before, Henry Barnes’s name had appeared in lists read out at meetings in Boston and published in Boston newspapers. Now, however, these notices appeared in their own town of Marlborough. At first, they were dismissive of the danger. Christian reported, “The whole town of Marlboro have this Day put up a notification to warn the inhabitants to town meeting to vote against importation of English goods,” goods which Henry Barnes, as everyone well knew, continued to sell. Christian felt secure in the righteousness of their stand, however, noting that “it does not give us much uneasiness for as a Guilty Conscience needs no accuser, so Conscious Innocence fears none.”²⁹ She remained far more concerned that March with developing Prince’s talent than with local politics, worrying that—no doubt in part because of the boycotts—it was difficult to gain supplies for his art. She fretted that he lacked adequate materials, so that he had no access to oil paints, only pastels, and “we are so ignorant as not to know what they are to be laid on,” and that he had no canvas, only paper, though she hoped, at some point, that “something better may be found.”³⁰

But as spring warmed to summer, things changed. Publicly censured since March, violence against the Barnes household began in June. First, men broke windows at the pearl-ash works Barnes operated. Christian Barnes believed they were motivated by greed, by the desire to seize Barnes’s goods for themselves. They then “atack’d a wagon load of goods which belong’d to us they abused the driver and cut a Bag of Pepper” (a valuable commodity) and “letting it all into the street then gathered it up in their Hands & Hatts & carried it off the rest of the load.” As things continued to escalate, she began to dread that the men’s greed would lead them to further violence. The day after the pepper was stolen, a chilling message appeared: “an Effigy was Hung upon a Hill in Sight of the House with a paper pin’d to the Breast wherone was wrote Henry Barnes an Infamous importer.” Surely the parallels with the caricatures and signs mounted outside Theophilus Lillie’s house were not lost on the Barnes household.³¹

The effigy hung in view of their house all day. At night, men burned it. That same night, they created a similarly threatening ritual with a far less familiar routine. Local “Liberty Men” stole someone’s horse from a nearby stable, tarred “the Horse Saddle & Bridle,” and then mounted an effigy on his back, setting “him loose about the town with an infamous Paper Pin’d to the Breast which was sum’d up with wishing of us all in Hell.” It must have been a horrible spectacle: a horse running, riderless, in panic through the town, dripping with tar. It would have been awful to see and hear, the pounding of the horse’s hooves, the whinnying and snorting as it felt the tar matting to its hair and smelled the pungent pine mingle with the smell of its own fear. It is the only recorded instance of an animal being tarred and feathered during the revolutionary era, and it no doubt made a lasting impression on the people who saw it. Who, they might have gossiped among themselves, would do such a thing to a living creature? A creature that was such a valuable piece of property, besides? The name “Barnes” would have been on everyone’s lips; wondering what the “Liberty Men” might do next on everyone’s minds. Remarkably, however, despite the threatened violence, Henry and Christian Barnes remained calm, until they received what Christian called “an incendiary Letter” the day after the horse was tarred and feathered.³²

Sent by a self-styled “Son of LIBERTY” and “Inspector General,” it called Barnes an “infamous Importer” and “Enemy to the Country,” slurs he had heard more than once. But the letter offered fresh threats. If, the Son of Liberty warned, Barnes did not shut his store and cease selling imports, “I will Fire your House and Store and destroy all your substance you have on the earth, and I will take your Body and I will Tar it, and if nothing else will do but Death you will have it certainly.”³³

The letter did what the breaking of windows, the stolen pepper, the effigy and its burning, and the tarring and feathering of a horse did not: it shook Henry and Christian Barnes to their core. As Christian wrote five days later, “It’s not possible for me to express what I suffered upon the perusal of this Letter.” She had not slept since they received it, and every night “it is the business of the Evening to see the fire armes Loaded and lights Properly placed in the Store and House.” Prince and Daphny, no doubt, helped place the lights every night and shared the fear of an attack on what was, after all, their home, too. Henry Barnes, for his part, decided to turn to the governor of Massachusetts for help. The governor roundly condemned the attacks against the Barneses and the letter, but the cuplrits were never found, and the Barnes household continued to live in fear.

By July, the situation was so bad that Henry Barnes planned to leave Massachusetts entirely. He discussed moving the household to sparsely colonized parts of New Hampshire. He advertised the sale of “the whole of” his real estate, including the family’s “very pleasantly situated” house and outhouses, the “large convenient Store” opposite their home “well-calculated for Business both Wholesale and retail,” the store’s garden with “Asparagus Beds in their prime,” seven acres of pasture next to the store, a pearl-ash works, and a cider and vinegar distillery.³⁴ Barnes placed the same advertisement again the following month, with a telling postscript. The addition assured readers that although “some People” thought the advertisement was intended to “amuse the Publick,” he was in fact “determined to sell” for a reasonable price.³⁵ But, as he and Christian came to regret in later years, he never managed to sell the Marlborough property. Instead, the Barnes household, enslaved and free, stayed put in Massachusetts.

Most of them, that is. That fall, to the delight of Christian Barnes, Henry Barnes agreed to take Prince Demah with him across the Atlantic. Although Christian confessed that her friends might “laugh at this scheme,” she felt it worthwhile as “the expense will not be great for (if his mother pleases) he can work his passage to and from London having been used to the sea for many years.” Prince would work for his passage, both as personal servant to Henry and as a mariner aboard ship.

But the trip itself was not the cause of Christian’s delight. No, she was thrilled at the chance it gave to foster the talent of her “Hogarth.” Although no doubt both Daphny and Prince exerted persuasive input, Christian felt emotionally invested in the journey, claiming that Prince’s transatlantic journey was “entirely my own” idea; the only scheme “I ever engaged in” so that she would “be greatly disappointed if it does not succeed.” She and Henry had planned to arrange for something few enslavers would have considered in the long history of American slavery. Once in London, it was decided, Prince Demah would study with a professional artist there so that someday he, too, might become a professional portrait painter in Boston. Just like Mr. Copley.³⁶

3 BLACK LONDON

PRINCE DEMAH HAD embarked as a sailor on a sea voyage many times. But this voyage was different. On this trip across the Atlantic, he would have less time to himself than ever before. This time, he would work as a valet as well as a sailor, sometimes tending to the needs of his enslaver and sometimes tending to the needs of the ship and its crew. Despite its unrelenting labor, the journey was filled with more possibility and hope than any he had undertaken. This time, every wave sliced through, every mile of ocean crossed brought him closer to the training he wanted. Although he had “been Negro to the Sea for many years,” Prince Demah now sailed with a different purpose. This time, he crossed the Atlantic with “a view of improving his Painting.” His enslavers hoped that he, their Black “Hogarth,” as they nicknamed him, might impress Londoners with “his performances.” Demah and his enslavers shared the hope that this sea voyage would end in London with the acquisition of a teacher who would be willing, as Copley was not, to train a Black man to become a professional portrait painter. And find him they did, in the person of Robert Edge Pine.¹

Even the briefest of inquiries surely satisfied Prince Demah and Henry Barnes that not only was Pine willing to train Demah, but that he was a far more impressive teacher than Copley. In 1770, everyone in Boston wanted a portrait by Copley. But in Britain his reputation was scant, resting as it did on a single portrait, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, that he had shipped to London for exhibition in 1766. Although Sir Joshua Reynolds called the portrait “a very wonderfull Performance,” he also warned that Copley needed to leave the colonies to study in Europe before his “Manner and Taste were corrupted or fixed by working in [his] little way at Boston.”² Copley needed, in other words, to embark on the journey Demah had just undertaken—a journey Copley would not take for another four years. In the meantime, Demah was following the advice Reynolds had given Copley. And he was doing it under the mentorship of a painter with a far greater reputation in London than Copley.

Pine, in contrast to Copley in 1770, did not just paint portraits for a living. He was also a history painter. History paintings, large canvases depicting the people and places of important long-ago events, were seen as the pinnacle of the painterly art in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, superior to genres like landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Although Pine also painted portraits, by the time Demah arrived in London, Pine had won awards from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce twice in the 1760s for history paintings of great moments in England’s past. These paintings were copied into prints and enjoyed a broad circulation beyond the Society’s exhibition walls. In 1770, Pine was in his early forties, a member of the Society of Artists, one of Britain’s popular portraitists, and an experienced teacher whose students included the prize-winning landscape and history painter (and future Society of Artists’ president) John Hamilton Mortimer.

Training with Pine was a coup not only because he was an experienced and award-winning maker of history paintings but because he came from a family of well-connected artists. His brother Simon worked as a miniaturist in Bath, and his sister Elizabeth was the wife of landscape painter Alexander Cozens, an artist famous for rumors that he was the illegitimate son of Russian tzar Peter I. (The tzar was actually his godfather, but the rumors added glamour nonetheless.) Pine’s father, John Pine, was a highly skilled engraver. His engravings include, among others, surveyor John Roque’s famous 1746 map of London, illustrations of the Spanish Armada tapestries that once hung in the House of Lords, and a 1733–1737 edition of Horace’s works, with text as well as images entirely engraved, which was underwritten by patrons including Alexander Pope and the Prince of Wales. John Pine also helped to draw the first maps for the colony of Georgia and James Oglethorpe’s city plan for Savannah. He was principal engraver to London’s Grand Lodge of Freemasons (of which he was a member), operated a printshop on St. Martin’s Lane, was a member of the committee responsible for the first (and unsuccessful) attempt to form a Royal Academy of Art, and held royal appointments to King George II, both as Engraver of His Majesty’s Signet and Seals and as Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms at the College of Arms, the organization responsible since medieval times for creating and maintaining official registers of coats or arms and family pedigrees. Robert Edge Pine’s father, in short, was a very well-connected artist indeed.

There was another fact about Robert Edge Pine that certainly would have delighted Christian Barnes, if she had learned of it, and flattered, amused, or annoyed Demah, depending upon how he felt about the nickname Barnes gave him. That fact was that Robert Edge Pine not only knew the famous painter William Hogarth but knew him well, for his father was one of Hogarth’s friends. Although Hogarth became famous as a painter, like Pine, he trained as an engraver, and the two men enjoyed a close working relationship as well as friendship. Both were Freemasons, both were leaders of the artistic and artisanal community clustered around Old Slaughter’s Coffee House and St. Martin’s Lane, and both were bon vivants who savored the lively, bawdy social world centered around the taverns, coffeehouses, and theaters of Covent Garden. They worked together to get Britain’s first act protecting artistic copyright passed and served as governors of London’s Foundling Hospital. Hogarth also made a portrait of his friend John Pine in 1755 that, like so many of his paintings, became widely available to the public once copied into mezzotint prints. In this portrait Pine, who wears a fur-lined coat with a single pearl earring dangling from his ear, looks like the man of African descent he was rumored to be.³

Although the Pines never referenced a mixed-race background, there are reasons to believe that this rumor (unlike that of the regal Russian parentage of their relative by marriage Alexander Cozens) was true. Chief among these is the visual evidence of John Pine’s portrait by Hogarth. How Hogarth portrays Pine—his features, his hair, his coloring, and the pearl earring Pine wears—reinforces the idea of Pine as a mixed-race man. By the mid-eighteenth century, the figure of a Black page boy wearing a pearl earring was a motif that proliferated in literary as well as visual references, in everything from theatrical scenes to calico prints as well as portraits. The whiteness of the pearl earring was used to call attention to the blackness of the page boy’s skin, which in turn highlighted what was seen as the desirable whiteness of white people’s skin. In Hogarth’s time, having a Black “servant” (a term that glossed over the indeterminate status of many such people as enslaved, free, or quasi-enslaved) was a fashionable marker of wealth.

James Macardell, mezzotint after William Hogarth, John Pine (circa 1740–1765).

Most artists who placed Black figures in their paintings used them as symbols of the luxurious lifestyles of the white people with whom they shared a canvas. But although no one was safe from Hogarth’s biting caricature work, his use of Black people was more ambivalent than many of his contemporaries. Hogarth used the figure of the Black page boy wearing a pearl earring more than once in his own work, in widely circulated prints such as A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Marriage A-la-mode (1745). He did not limit himself to page boys, however. He also included Black adults in his scenes of London life. A Black man wearing a pearl earring woos a white woman in The Four Times of Day: Noon (1738), for example. But Hogarth did not just depict types. He painted Black people he knew personally, like “Black Betty,” who worked in a local coffeehouse and appears in the tavern scene painting of A Rake’s Progress (1732–33). In fact, Hogarth portrayed Black figures in his art more often than his contemporaries. And he employed them to different effect. Hogarth used the image of Black people not just to reference luxury or whiteness, but also as a reminder of human hypocrisy and vice, a visual critique of the rottenness at the heart of contemporary British society.⁴

Hogarth’s incorporation of Black people working and living in London highlighted the city’s racial diversity. Since at least Roman times, London had been home to people of different races. But in the eighteenth century, it was markedly diverse; a city whose population reflected the vast reaches of Britain’s global trade and empire. People from India, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as Africa, walked its streets and labored and loved in its houses.⁵ Hogarth humanized the city’s Black residents, at times depicting them as individuals rather than always resorting to stock stereotypes like the page boy. And he emphasized that Black Londoners played roles other than servile ones. For example, in Noon, although the clothing of the Black man (like that of the white woman he caresses) marks them both as servants, Hogarth shows him in a relaxed and pleasure-seeking rather than servile pose. Hogarth’s portrayal of the couple in Noon also reflected important realities about Black life in London. White working-class people, like sailors or servants, by and large did not object to working side by side with their Black counterparts. And white and Black Londoners did not just work together. Interracial relationships and marriages (and the mixed-race children they created) were commonplace, and at times even prominent, in Britain. Famous eighteenth-century Black residents of London like Olaudah Equiano and Francis Barber married white women and fathered mixed-race children. Although they were always a minority of London’s population, mixed-race men like John Pine were always present—noticeable, certainly, but by no means unusual. And certainly not outcasts.⁶

Engraving by William Hogarth, Noon (The Four Times of Day) (March 25, 1738). The second image in William Hogarth’s satirical print set of Four Times of Day, published in 1738 and based on paintings made by Hogarth in 1736–7. Noon illustrates a contrast among Londoners between elegant French Huguenots on the right and far less refined English figures on the left, including the flirtatious Black servant.

In part that was because for much of the eighteenth century, race was a more fluid construct than it became in later centuries. Ideas about what it meant to be “Black” or “white” had not yet hardened into categories defined by pseudoscience, like the “one-drop rule” that translated race into justifications for first enslaving and then oppressing people of African descent. Such pseudoscientific racism had its roots in the mid-eighteenth century, to be sure, in thinking like that of Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, who in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae (1758) classified humans according to a moral and physical hierarchy that placed Black people at the bottom. But although works like those of Linnaeus started to harden racial categories, they did not represent how most of his contemporaries viewed race. Ideas that claimed biological justifications for racism did not become widespread until the nineteenth century. Instead, most eighteenth-century people tended to categorize race by visual factors, assessing and then classifying individual people as certain race types based on physical appearance.⁷

Hogarth, for example, in his work The Analysis of Beauty (1753) made clear that in his opinion, race was visual rather than hierarchical. “It is well known,” he wrote, that “the fair young girl, the brown old man, and the negro—nay, all mankind, have the same appearance, and are alike disagreeable to the eye, when the upper skin is taken away” to reveal the ugly interior of the muscle and bone making up the human body. In Hogarth’s view, all human beings were the same underneath their skin. What made them look different was the variety of skin colors to the “cutis,” what he identified as a lining of human skin formed by a network of threads of different colored pigments. White pigmented threads created the “very fair complexion,” while “yellow makes the brunette, brownish yellow, the ruddy brown; green yellow, the olive; dark brown, the mulatto; black, the negro.”⁸ Blackness, in other words, carried none of the moral judgments associated with Linnaeus’s thinking. Instead, it was visual, just one of many possible colors dictated by the different possible networks of pigment in human skin. Racial difference, to Hogarth’s thinking, was more aesthetic than anything else, a matter of individual distinction rather than a rigid taxonomy, a source of the variety of human appearance that delighted him.⁹

Hogarth was a master of visual symbolism who knew exactly what message Pine’s portrait would send. He gave a nod to their shared professional world, placing his friend in the same pose, and oval surround, that he used in the self-portrait he had painted ten years before, The Painter and His Pug. Hogarth presented Pine the same way he represented himself: as a successful artisan. But he took pains to show that his friend Pine was a successful man of mixed race by painting him with a pearl earring, the motif he had used so many times before—as John Pine well knew—to identify Black men and boys in his paintings. John Pine undoubtedly had a say in how Hogarth portrayed him. The two were friends whose social and professional circles overlapped in significant ways. Pine himself was an artist well attuned to the power of symbolism in art. Moreover, the two men were both Freemasons, members of a society steeped in traditions of employing visual symbols to send messages both obvious and secret. Hogarth used the language of formal portraiture to show that Pine was a fellow member of Hogarth’s world and, like other Black figures, a member of London’s diverse community. Pine’s mixed race was merely a fact of his identity that merited recognition as unusual, but by no means bizarre.

If Demah saw Hogarth’s portrait of his new teacher’s father, he would have known that his teacher was a man who shared his African heritage as well as his desire to wield a paintbrush. And it is entirely plausible that he did see the portrait in print form, either at his new teacher’s home or in one of the many London printshops within walking distance of the Pine residence. Multiple prints were made of Hogarth’s portrait by mezzotint engraver James Macardell. Macardell was a prolific London engraver who ran in the same artistic circles as the Pines. He created prints of portraits by artists including Rubens and Hogarth. But his real specialty was making print copies of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits. He made so many, in fact, that Reynolds noted of Macardell, “by this man I shall be immortalized.” Within Macardell’s sizable body of work, prints of Pine’s portrait are the only ones that depict what appears to be a man of African descent. Macardell was a brilliant practitioner of his craft, and one of the artistic merits of mezzotint prints was that they allowed for subtle shading of tones between black and white. Macardell was deliberate in his intent to convey that Pine was a mixed-race man: in his prints, Pine’s skin is darker than it was in Hogarth’s original painting.¹⁰

Whether or not Pine was of African descent, then, is almost beside the point. Through Macardell’s prints, Pine’s image circulated through London and beyond. And anyone looking at Macardell’s engravings of his portrait would be hard pressed not to take Pine for a man of mixed race. This realization of his teacher Pine’s African heritage—or even the possibility of its truth—would have encouraged Demah to think that his desire to become a professional painter was an attainable goal. At the least, it was a visual reminder that London was a place where being Black meant something different than it meant back in New England.

This is not to say that being Black in London did not come with difficulties. After all, the colonial American association of blackness with the devil stemmed from much older European ideas and fears. By the eighteenth century, metropolitan merchants and American settler colonists alike had been engaged in the African slave trade for centuries, learning over time to link slavery to blackness, and blackness to cultural inferiority. Black Londoners were subjected to everyday racism that ranged from seeing prints in shops that portrayed Black page boys as indolent and deceitful to violent physical attack and all manner of ill treatment in between. Famed abolitionist Granville Sharp, for example, stumbled into his antislavery activism because of his encounter with sixteen-year-old Jonathan Strong. Enslaved in London by a lawyer from Barbados, Strong suffered a beating at his enslaver’s hands in 1765. His enslaver beat him with a pistol so severely that, before he kicked him out into the streets to die, the pistol broke against his face. Sharp encountered Strong on the London streets while he waited to see Sharp’s brother, a medical doctor. The boy could hardly walk and nearly went blind from his injuries. With the help of the Sharps, he survived after spending nearly five months in the hospital, and lived in freedom thereafter. One day, two years later, he ran into his former enslaver. His enslaver captured him and sold him to a Jamaican planter. In his two years of freedom, however, Strong had learned to read and write. He sent a letter from prison to Granville Sharp, who in a dramatic turn of events managed to secure his freedom.¹¹

Jonathan Strong was smart enough to turn to Granville Sharp for help, and lucky a judge ruled in his favor. Not all Black people living in London were so fortunate. The case of Jonathan Strong reminds us that the legal status of enslaved people in Britain was complicated while Demah was in London. Although some Britons objected to slaveholding on moral grounds, most viewed it as a colonial rather than a local problem. It was Atlantic slave traders and American enslavers who were to blame for the regrettable system, not British law or practice. In Britain, enslaved people like Jonathan Strong found their freedom in the anonymity of the streets or turned to the courts for help with their individual freedom cases. Demah and Barnes knew this about London. Barnes, in fact, feared the effects London might have on Demah. He wrote to his friend Elizabeth Murray Smith, who was also visiting Great Britain from Massachusetts, “Indeed, his life & situation are so precarious if he should even attempt his Freedom it would give me such a disgust to him I should not overlook it.” In eighteenth-century parlance, the word “precarious” most commonly referred to something “held or enjoyed by the favour of and at the pleasure of another person; vulnerable to the will or decision of others.”¹²

In other words, Barnes felt Demah owed him gratitude for the opportunity to study painting in London. Never mind that Demah’s artistic talent was his own, or that he worked his way across the Atlantic using his maritime experience. Barnes’s sense of entitlement for his own largesse went deeper. Demah owed him loyalty for his very existence. Barnes concluded his musings on Demah’s potential freedom-seeking by asking Smith if, when she returned from Scotland to London, she could bring her own enslaved servant Bill as a companion for Demah, “for I do not let him converse with any of his own colour here.”¹³ Barnes may not have had reason to worry. As Demah undoubtedly knew, in 1770, finding freedom in London was still a patchwork system that sometimes led to liberty and sometimes not, depending on sheer good luck or the whims of the magistrate in charge of the case. All Black Britons, no matter their legal status, lived with the fear that they might be kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic to slavery in the West Indies. And that, certainly, would be a worse fate for Demah than returning to New England.¹⁴

With a handful of exceptions, most Black people who lived in London were not financially well off. Most worked as servants. Black servitude often meant a state of quasi-freedom if not outright enslavement. That blurred line is one reason it is impossible to say how many Black Londoners were enslaved, and how many were free. Many of the certainly free Black men that came in and out of London were not servants but sailors, like Prince Demah was before he joined the Barnes household. Whether enslaved or free, Black sailors like Demah, because of their wide-ranging travels, were among the most cosmopolitan of all Black people living in the Atlantic World. Black people born in Africa and then enslaved in British North America, like Demah’s mother Daphny, were among the worldliest people in Britain’s empire; people who had traveled across oceans to other continents, met people from different cultures and religions, communicated in multiple languages, and experienced life in diverse, far-flung places.¹⁵

By nature of their worldly lives, cosmopolitan people often had a wide range of knowledge as well as experience, knowledge that was highly valued and that they were willing to share. Boyrereau Brinch, who arrived in Boston from Africa’s Niger Valley via Barbados in the mid-1760s, later recalled that in Massachusetts, people of African descent “asked me many questions about my native country.”¹⁶ Black sailors were subject to queries when they made port, as well. Whether enslaved or free, they were among the most well-informed of any African-descended people in the eighteenth-century British Empire, gathering and spreading news around different Black communities as they sailed from port to port. And London was the city in which these sailors, whether born in Africa, North or South America, Europe, or the Caribbean, met most frequently. In large part because of Black sailors, London, then, was a city that was not just the capital of the British Empire but also the “hub of the Black Atlantic.”¹⁷ Demah’s seagoing days ensured that he too was a member of this cosmopolitan club. He had much in common with Black Londoners he would have encountered, whether on the docks, on the streets, or in elite white people’s homes. Such familiarity highlights the fact that Demah, in many ways, was more worldly than his enslaver Henry Barnes. In his futile hope that he could keep Demah from conversing with other Black people in London, Barnes exposed his own lack of knowledge about Black London’s active community networks, especially for a former mariner.¹⁸

Demah also had things in common with another group of cosmopolitan Black men who were less commonly found in London but no doubt known to Demah—men employed in London’s artistic circles that overlapped with those of Robert Edge Pine. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, who was certainly well known to Pine, employed a formerly enslaved man as his servant. The man—whose name is not known—was enslaved on an Antiguan sugar plantation before crossing the Atlantic and moving into Reynolds’s grand London house. This unnamed servant may be the subject of Portrait of a Black Man, which Reynolds painted in 1770, the same year that Demah lived in London. The portrait was long identified as a portrait of Francis Barber, the servant of Reynolds’s good friend Dr. Samuel Johnson. Previously enslaved, Barber joined Johnson’s household in the early 1750s. He was ten when Johnson took him in, employed him as a servant, educated him, and left him most of his lucrative estate. The fact that the Black man in the 1770 portrait could be either of the two men points to the presence of Black servants in London households, as well as the fascination they held as subjects for London artists. Although there were not many Black men like Demah in London’s artistic circles, they were a visible presence.¹⁹

The trajectories of the unnamed man’s path from slavery in Antigua to service in Reynolds’s townhouse and of Francis Barber’s journey from enslaved child to wealthy heir in the Johnson household point to something important about being Black in London. Despite the harsh realities of life for most Black Londoners, the city held different, and sometimes measurably better, possibilities for its Black residents than colonial places like Antigua or Boston ever could. Although Demah would have found a familiar community among London’s Black seagoing men, his time in London also introduced him to a world in which a Black man could imagine a different life than the one he led in Boston. Or even aboard a ship.

London was without rival in the British Empire as a training site—and social hub—for artists of all sorts. Demah’s time in London simultaneously put him at the center of the Black Atlantic and exposed him to the most vibrant artistic community in the British Empire, all under the tutelage of a man of African descent. It was hard to imagine a more promising situation for a budding Black artist from the colonies. Especially one with genius.

4 BLACK GENIUS

AMONG THE NUGGETS of wisdom in Benjamin Franklin’s wildly popular publication Poor Richard’s Almanack was a proverb: “A fine genius in his own country, is like gold in the mine.” It lay buried beneath the surface, unrecognized and unknown, waiting to be excavated. Franklin’s own life proved the truth of this axiom. Like Demah, Franklin was born in Massachusetts and viewed by his contemporaries as blessed with innate gifts and talents, or genius. But his genius, and the international fame he gained for it, came into sharpest relief once he left the colonies, first for London and then Paris. In part that was because Europeans found genius in Americans fascinating, particularly in contrast to what they viewed as the limitations imposed by a colonial upbringing and education. In 1770, when Prince Demah arrived in London, Franklin had lived there for over a decade, lobbying for colonial American interests where he believed it easiest to do so while enjoying international fame as a man of science renowned for harnessing electricity. Franklin was an American whose genius shone brightest once he left his own country. Similarly, although his was a much briefer sojourn, and one restricted by the realities of his enslaved status, Prince Demah’s time in London allowed him to mine the gold of his genius. And studying with Robert Edge Pine gave him the tools to burnish that excavated gold.¹

Pine was quick to see the promise in his pupil from the colonies. As Henry Barnes reported once they were settled in London, “Prince comes on extremely well” with “Mr. Pine who has taken him purely for his genius.” So impressed was Pine with Demah’s genius, in fact, that he did not charge Barnes for his training (though Barnes did give Pine twenty-five pounds as “an acknowledgment”). Observers of Demah’s work under Pine’s tutelage acknowledged the colonial painter’s genius, assuring Barnes that he “shall carry him a Treasure to America.”²

Although his own family’s mixed race likely played a role in his willingness to train Demah, Pine was not one to do things out of pure charity. As he once admitted, although he could not “refuse to help the Deserving when in my power” he “would not recommend an unworthy person, however solicitious.”³ Pine also would have seen the potential fame and profit in fostering and publicizing the creative genius of Prince Demah. Much as there was a fashion in Europe at the time for depicting Black servants or slaves in portraits alongside elite white people, there could be a certain cachet to cultivating genius among talented people of African descent. Londoners (especially those with antislavery leanings) admired the writings and musical composition of formerly enslaved shopkeeper Ignatius Sancho, who corresponded with literary luminaries like Lawrence Sterne about slavery and abolition and whose impassioned, witty letters were admired enough to be published in London in 1782. Born on a slave ship, Sancho spent his childhood enslaved in Greenwich. He learned to read and write with the help of the Duke and Duchess of Montagu and eventually joined their household as a servant. But even while a servant, he continued his education and was admired for his intellect. When famed painter Thomas Gainsborough visited the ducal household and painted Sancho’s portrait from life, he took care not to define him as a servant. Instead of a servant’s livery, Sancho wears a gold-trimmed waistcoat and has his hand tucked in it, a popular pose that eighteenth-century viewers would have immediately known to be gentlemanly.⁴ It is likely that the decision to pose Sancho this way was not merely Gainsborough’s choice. Sancho himself took an interest in art. He counted among his friends the acclaimed painter John Hamilton Mortimer, once Robert Edge Pine’s student, a Royal Academy Fellow, and also president of the Society of Artists. At Mortimer’s request, Sancho often offered his opinion on Mortimer’s paintings.⁵

But there were limits to acknowledgments of Black genius throughout the British Empire. When it was recognized, Black genius was deemed exceptional; an individual fluke that ran counter to what most white people considered to be the general inferiority of the Black race. Categorizing individual Black genius as exceptional also diminished Black achievements by relegating them to the status of a “curiosity.” In London, Black genius might be acknowledged, but not often, and it was usually done grudgingly. Such acknowledgments were even fewer and more fraught in the colonies. Forced to confront the fact of Sancho’s published letters, for example, Thomas Jefferson dismissed his writing as doing “more honour to the heart than the head,” evidence of an imagination both “wild and extravagant” that “escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky.” Although obligated to “admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment,” Jefferson remained firm in his judgment that “when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.”⁶

The treatment Jamaica-born Francis Williams (c. 1697–1762) received on both sides of the Atlantic differs sharply. Born to free Black parents in Jamaica who became wealthy enough to own both land and enslaved workers, Williams, like Demah, spent time on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote poetry in Latin and studied law at Lincoln’s Inn in London, where his wealth, fashionable dress, and erudition made him a memorable figure. Once he returned to Jamaica, he put his education to use running a school for Black students. He also successfully argued in Jamaican court for his right to self-defense when a local white man assaulted him and he fought back. As the assault case hints, white Jamaicans were less than comfortable with the prominence of Williams and his family. In 1744, Scottish traveler Dr. Alexander Hamilton, then visiting New York City, wrote in his diary about dining with two gentlemen from Jamaica. Talk turned to the subject of Williams, whom the Jamaicans described to their new acquaintance as “a certain free negroe in Jamaica who was a man of estate, good sense, and education.” Nevertheless, Hamilton reported, one of the Jamaicans questioned whether “that negroe’s parents were not whites, for he was sure that nothing good could come of the whole generation of blacks.”⁷

The only surviving portrait of Williams, painted well after Hamilton’s dinner conversation occurred, emphasizes his wealth and education by portraying him as both a gentleman and a scholar. Painted by an artist in Jamaica, it shows a well-dressed Williams standing in a book-lined study appointed with fashionable British rococo furniture. Like Gainsborough’s portrait of Sancho, Williams’s portrait uses clothing to emphasize that, in contrast to most Black men portrayed in paintings at the time, he is neither a servant nor enslaved. His blue coat is of the finest broadcloth wool, and he wears a satin waistcoat, bristling with gold tassels. The whiteness of his wig matches his pristine white stockings and cuffs. He gazes directly at the viewer, a pose that emphasizes his command of his portrayal. He points to a copy of Newton’s Principia, open to a page offering guidance for plotting a comet’s path, likely an allusion to Williams’s own calculation of the 1759 return of Halley’s Comet in the Jamaican sky depicted behind him. The books and scientific instruments in the room mark him as well-studied in mathematics, Latin, astronomy, and geography. Ink and quill emphasize his identity as a writer. The portrait also emphasizes Williams’s identity as a Jamaican. The open window shows a landscape dotted with palm trees and architecture reminiscent of Spanish Town in Jamaica, while the globe on the floor next to him is turned to read “The Western or Atlantick Ocean”—an emphasis on the sea echoed in the shell motif on the chair behind it. Williams stands straddling two tiles of the floor, one black and one white, a symbolic stance that reflects his dual identity as a Black Jamaican man who also was a naturalized citizen of Britain—he took the oath of citizenship while studying in Britain. Literally as well as metaphorically, he inhabited worlds that were both Black and white. The portrait, in short, is a clever one, rife with symbolism.⁸

But its symbolism over time is not straightforward. The portrait descended through the family of one of Williams’s fellow Jamaicans, Edward Long. Long, who wrote about Williams in his 1774 book The History of Jamaica, was virulently pro-slavery. Much as Jefferson did with Sancho, Long acknowledged Williams’s achievements but made a point to be derogatory in his opinion of them. The fact that Long’s family owned the painting for several generations lends some credence to the idea that the painting, in which Williams has a disproportionately large head, tiny feet, and legs so matchstick thin his stockings sag, was not so much a portrait as a caricature. Social and political satirical prints and caricatures were widely popular in the eighteenth-century British Empire; hung on walls or printed in books, they were a source of amusement and conversation. A caricature portrait, within this context, is not as strange as it might seem to modern eyes.⁹

Francis Williams, The Scholar of Jamaica, Unknown Artist, ca. 1759–1762.

Other scholars have conjectured that either Francis Williams himself or itinerant British painter William Williams created the portrait. Arguments for it being a self-portrait are based in part on the evidence of X-ray analysis revealing the artist’s use of geometric painting techniques published in painter’s guides. But we have no other evidence that Williams practiced painting, and this portrait shows a practiced if not highly skilled hand. William Williams, on the other hand, was like Demah, a mariner turned a professional limner who helped train a young Benjamin West when they both lived in Pennsylvania. While in North America, Williams painted portraits of Mohawk leader Hendrick Theyanoguin and Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay. Both portraits are, like that of Francis Williams, symbolic and crudely rendered. Lay’s portrait also uses a book to signal his thinking (in his case, a reference to seventeenth-century Anabaptist and antislavery thinker Thomas Tryon) and depicts him with similarly spindly legs and a disproportionately large head. Adding to this possibility is the fact that William Williams was in Jamaica in the 1760s. Another possibility is that it was painted by one of the talented students who attended Williams’s school for free Black children in Spanish Town. A student might have consulted a painter’s guide as easily as his teacher and painted this portrait in homage to Williams. In any of these cases, it might be argued that his disproportionately large head is not so much mocking caricature as it is symbolic of Williams’s outsized intellect and education. Just as Long’s description of Williams, despite his pro-slavery intentions, only served to call attention to Black genius, the portrait, if intended as caricature, backfired in its intent. Instead, it stands as a testament to Williams’s achievements and success.¹⁰

The fact that his portrait carries such a dichotomy of potential meaning is a visual reflection of the fact that on both sides of the Atlantic, Williams was a lightning rod for debates about racial inferiority, either denigrated or celebrated for his achievements. Scottish philosopher David Hume singled out Williams as evidence in his case for racial inferiority in those of African descent. Musing on characteristics of various nations and people, Hume made his own racism clear, noting that he was “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.” As further proof of their inferiority, he noted that although there were enslaved Black people “dispersed all over Europe,” none of them had “ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity.” Perhaps anticipating that Williams might be held up as proof that his ideas were false, Hume admitted that “In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning.” Hume hastened to add, however, that “it is likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.”¹¹

But Williams found his defenders, as well. In Essay on Truth, the best-selling tract that Hume’s fellow Scottish philosopher, James Beattie, published the same year Demah came to London, Beattie roundly rejected Hume’s assertions. Instead, he argued, Africans “are known to have many ingenious manufactures and arts among them, which even Europeans would find it no easy matter to imitate.” Furthermore, Hume was wrong on the subject of enslaved people of African descent living in Europe. His ideas about their lack of accomplishment were false, as was his opinion of their natural inferiority. It was not innate qualities (or lack thereof) that kept enslaved people from achieving greatness in arts and innovation, but rather the horrific nature of slavery itself, as “the condition of a slave is not favourable to genius of any kind.”¹² After Beattie’s counter to Hume was reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1771), an anonymous commenter offered Williams as evidence for Beattie’s points. As this writer noted, Williams was proof “that Blacks, if properly educated, are capable of the same improvements as Whites.” For “about forty years ago, Mr. Williams, an African of fortune, who dressed, like other Gentlemen, in a tye-wig, sword, &c.… was admitted to the meetings of the Royal Society” and proposed as qualified to be a member of that society by his friends. He was, however, “rejected solely for a reason unworthy of that learned body, viz. on account of his complexion.” And while it was true that “the vulgar, indeed, used sometimes to jeer and insult” Williams “in the streets,” Beattie was right to take Hume to task for his ideas about racial inferiority, for “philosophers as Mr. Hume, and those of” the Royal Society “might have known, that souls are of no colour, and that no one can tell, on viewing a casket, what jewel it contains.”¹³

As these rebuttals to Hume’s ideas about Williams and other Black people showed, despite significant limitations, there was room for Black genius to be recognized, at least by some, in the broad expanses of the eighteenth-century British Empire. In London, Francis Williams might be nominated, at least, to the Royal Society. That recognition alone never would have occurred in the colonies. Even if his membership was blocked in London there was no prohibition against the nomination. Similarly, although he might face derision from some for dressing like a gentleman in London, he was never physically accosted for showing off his wealth through fashion. But in Jamaica, his lifestyle as a well-heeled free man left him open not just to derision but to violent assault. Like Williams, Prince Demah was intimately acquainted with the distinct—even if still slim—possibilities that London held for Black men of genius. After all, Copley’s unwillingness to train an enslaved painter in Boston was chief among the reasons Demah came to London in the first place.

But genius alone would not be enough. Demah, like all aspiring painters, required training. This fact was apparent even to colonial merchants and craftspeople like Henry and Christian Barnes and their friends. The Barneses’ friend, Janette Barclay, a recent transplant to London who until her move made fashionable millinery and taught Boston girls needlework, minced no words in pointing out the drawbacks of Christian’s wish to make Demah into a professional painter. Christian’s “Hobby Horse,” as she put it, “will amuse her but will certainly never turn out to any advantage,” since painting “is a science” and while “a good genios is necessary” it also required “a great deal of instruction.” Although she was wrong to fear that such instruction would be costly, given Robert Edge Pine’s willingness to train Demah without charge, she was not wrong about its importance.¹⁴

Sir Joshua Reynolds, who spent much more time than Janette Barclay thinking about art, was vehement about the necessity of molding genius through careful study and training. Innate genius was not enough. Reynolds argued that it was a “false and vulgar opinion that rules are the fetters of genius. They are fetters only to men of no genius.” The rules of training, he argued, were like “armour, which upon the strong becomes an ornament and a defence.” It was only “upon the weak and misshapen” that rules turned “into a load, and cripples the body which it was made to protect.”¹⁵ The need to train genius, in fact, was one of the motivations behind establishing Britain’s Royal Academy of Art in 1768. As Reynolds, who was its first president, put it, “The principal advantage of an academy is, that, besides furnishing able men to direct the student, it will be a repository for the great examples of the art. These are the materials on which genius is to work.”¹⁶

According to Reynolds, before an artist of genius could create his own masterpiece, he first had to copy the masterpieces of others. A talented boy (in its early years, the academy was almost entirely populated by male artists) honed his ability through studying work created by more highly trained artists. Working first with chalk or pastels on paper, a would-be painter would copy paintings and sculptures. Once deemed sufficient in drawing sculptural casts, he moved on to sketch from life, studying anatomy from living models rather than plaster casts or marble statues. Along the way, he also learned the art of employing color and the science of using oil paint. In the eighteenth century, painters working in oil had first to grind pigments into colored powders. These could be lead white, Mars red, Prussian blue, or Naples yellow, among others. They would then use a combination of linseed or walnut oil and pigment to mix the powder into usable paint. In addition to pigments and oil, painters also used megilp, a combination of varnish and drying oil that created a gel-like substance. A variety of other ingredients could be added, including beeswax, spermaceti oil, pipe clay, gypsum, and bitumen, to create different effects for priming as well as painting.¹⁷

But most critics agreed that to become truly great, a painter had to move from the mere mechanics of copying work to the poetics of creating his own. Not only imagination but also intellect was required for this leap. The Royal Academy stimulated both qualities with a curriculum that embedded artistic practice in a broader intellectual and theoretical context; the type of learning that simultaneously expanded knowledge and sparked creative imagination. Students listened to lectures from experts on everything from anatomy to architecture, as well as more theoretical musings on philosophies of art and the nature of artistry. Through this manual and intellectual education, the Royal Academy equipped budding artists with the armor they needed to do battle in the highly competitive art world of eighteenth-century Britain. “The artist who has his mind thus filled with ideas, and his hand made expert by practice, works with ease and readiness,” Reynolds pronounced, as opposed to “he who would have you believe that he is waiting for the inspirations of genius,” but is “in reality at a loss” and “at last delivered of his monsters with difficulty and pain.”¹⁸

Not everyone agreed with Reynolds’s strict procedure for training genius. Fellow artist and poet William Blake (who seems to have bought The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds primarily to scribble outraged notes in it) fumed in the margins that Reynolds was “hired to Depress Art.” As Blake noted next to one of Reynolds’s comments on genius, “The Man who says that Genius is not Born, but Taught—Is a Knave.”¹⁹ But the fact remained that painterly genius did not thrive without help. Copying other works of art was the primary way eighteenth-century painters honed their craft. Such copy work was one of the reasons that colonial painters were at a disadvantage compared to their European counterparts. They simply did not have access to the paintings and sculptures found across the Atlantic.

The career of Robert Feke (also, like Demah, a mariner turned painter) offers a case in point. In the 1740s and 1750s, Feke was one of the most sought-after and prolific painters in the colonies. When Dr. Alexander Hamilton observed Feke at work in Newport, Rhode Island, he called him “the most extraordinary genius ever I knew, for he does pictures tolerably well by the force of genius, having never had any teaching.” But although Feke had no formal training, he knew he needed it. What impressed Hamilton about Feke, for example, was his painting “of the Judgment of Hercules copied by him from a frontispiece” of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s popular work, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Since he lived in the colonies, Feke did not know many other painters, nor could he view large collections of painting and sculpture. Instead, for the most part, he copied prints published in books. The painting Hamilton saw was one based on a black-and-white engraving, which meant that Feke had to use his imagination to choose and blend colors, consider brushstroke and layering techniques, and apply a finish. Budding painters in London had access to not only books and prints but rich collections of paintings and sculptures, and could find a plethora of established artists to teach them. But Feke never had the chance to study in London. According to Reynolds’s theory, Feke’s lack of training diminished his career: despite his “extraordinary genius” he painted only “tolerably well.” By contrast, Prince Demah had the chance to train in London. And he did so in a place that in 1770 had a far longer and richer history of shaping young artists and artisans than the two-year-old Royal Academy: St. Martin’s Lane.²⁰

The most vibrant artistic community in London centered on St. Martin’s Lane and the two neighborhoods that surrounded it, Soho and Covent Garden. Though not large, geographically speaking—its length could be walked in about six minutes—St. Martin’s Lane held artistic multitudes. In 1735, William Hogarth helped found the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, which led the training of painters and sculptors for decades. Although Hogarth founded it in part because he wished to forestall the creation of a Royal Academy, St. Martin’s Lane Academy influenced the eventual Royal Academy, not least as Reynolds, its first president, studied there. Artists who studied at St. Martin’s Lane Academy had access to local experts working in a variety of media, local studios filled with paintings and sculptures, and sellers of books and prints that provided further tools for study. John Pine ran a printshop on St. Martin’s Lane, where he sold engravings. John Noble ran a bookshop and a circulating library of over five thousand books, which patrons could borrow for a small subscription.

St. Martin’s Lane bustled with artists, artisans, and tradespeople—women as well as men—who lived, worked, debated, studied, shared coffee and rum punch, bought supplies, ran errands, and sold their wares in its buildings. In addition to the workshops and shops of skilled artisans, shopkeepers sold goods like snuff, toys, drawing quills, ink, and combs. Many tradespeople and artisans ran shops in ground-floor rooms at the front of their homes and lived in private spaces behind and above the shops. It was a community in every sense of the word—a small artistic enclave within the global entrepôt of London that fostered rich, entangled social and professional networks. Many of its residents were highly trained not just in painting and sculpting, but in engraving, upholstering, wood carving and turning, frame making, goldsmithing, and cabinetmaking. Their skills and shops made St. Martin’s Lane famous. It was not just locals who patronized its well-known shops, like that of Thomas Chippendale. Patrons and consumers from all over flocked to St. Martin’s Lane to buy—or to buy and then resell—the products of its residents to hang on walls and beautify homes around the British Empire.²¹

There, the Pines lived a life comfortable enough to afford both silver and servants. They lived in a pleasant as well as convenient location, on a street dotted with tree-lined courts and small yards behind crowded homes. Theirs was an ideal artist’s house, with plenty of windows for letting in light to sketch and paint. Places that made St. Martin’s Lane such a magnet for artists, like Noble’s bookshop, Slaughter’s Coffeehouse, and Edward and Martha Powell’s colorshop (which sold ground and mixed pigments) were all but a short stroll from the Pines’ home. So too was the theater district of Covent Garden, which provided sociability and artistry of its own, and was especially important for an artist like Pine, who painted the famous actor David Garrick more than once and an entire series of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Demah’s studies with Pine put him in the heart of the most vibrant artistic community in the British Empire. Demah was lucky in his mentor in more ways than one. Not only were Pine and his family well connected, but well placed.²²

Thomas Sandby, A View of St. Martin’s Court, c. 1765. Pen, ink, and watercolor. The proximity of bookseller John Noble’s shop to the Pine’s residence on St. Martin’s Lane is evident in this watercolor, where Noble’s shop is marked by his sign and signature bust of Dryden over the door.

Robert Edge Pine and his family—his wife Mary Fulford Pine, and their many daughters—lived conveniently situated in the heart of this bustling artistic community on St. Martin’s Lane, near John Noble’s bookshop, in a house opposite New Street, Covent Garden. In Thomas Sandby’s watercolor of St. Martin’s Lane, there is a house with an artist at work, wearing a smock and a skull cap, in the window to the right. The Pines lived either in this house or in one very nearby and of similar appearance, one certainly, given their house’s proximity to Noble’s shop, within a moment’s walk of the scene. It was very much a household of artists. Mary Pine drew and painted portraits, and at least two of her daughters drew and painted as well. Jane, the youngest, would go on to have a career as a pastelist and exhibit at the Royal Academy. When Demah was training at their home, the Pine girls ranged in age from nine-year-old Jane to seventeen-year-old Rose Mary. The house bustled with artistic business and youthful, feminine energy. Such energy would have seemed familiar to Demah, as there were many young women and girls in the Barnes household in Massachusetts as well. But it is possible that, at least at the beginning, being in the Pine household made him uncomfortable. Demah occupied a strange new role when he was there. In his mid-to-late twenties when he studied with Pine, Demah was too old to socialize with the Pine daughters, and his enslaved status probably stood in the way of his courting any of the Pine girls. Neither servant nor son to the household, he likely co-existed with the family like most apprentices did, relating to the Pines from a position of some deference, socially adjacent to the family but not folded into its ranks as a family member or friend would have been. Perhaps it was easier for Demah when Henry Barnes left him in London while he went to Bristol on an extended trip. Then, at least, he didn’t have to navigate between serving as Barnes’s enslaved valet and working as Pine’s apprentice. It likely was a confusing as well as heady period for Demah as he navigated between worlds in more ways than one.²³

It is unclear how Demah and Pine found each other. In any possible scenario of their initial contact, however, Pine’s location in the thick of things on St. Martin’s Lane was surely central. Americans as well as Londoners knew why St. Martin’s Lane was famous. Barnes, who as a successful colonial merchant would have been skilled in the art of finding good tradespeople and shops on his visits to London, may have found Pine through a city directory. City directories listed men and women by trade first, and then by address and particular skills. Pine listed his services as a “History and Portrait Painter” in the popular Mortimer’s Universal Director, noted his address on St. Martin’s Lane, advertised himself as a prize-winning artist for history painting, and noted that his choice of prize-winning subject did “honour to his judgment.”²⁴

It is more probable that Barnes’s contacts in London recommended Pine to him. The Barneses do not seem to have identified a mentor for Demah before arriving in London. Christian sent samples of Demah’s work—along with the memorable addition of a wild goose—to contacts in London before Henry and Demah crossed the Atlantic. She noted that she sent them “as a Sample of the performers Genious who never (till about four months ago) made any attempt of the kind” and had never benefited from formal training. Despite her own ideas about Demah’s genius, she wanted a second opinion. She asked that the portraits be shown around London for judgment and opinion of whether Demah had the potential to become a professional portrait painter. She sent them to Bridgen & Waller, the mercantile firm that handled her friend Elizabeth Murray Smith’s business in London. Once the pictures made it from Massachusetts to Britain, one of the firm’s partners, James Waller, sought an artistic opinion, with Jannette Barclay serving as a go-between for him and the Barneses. Barclay also stood ready to turn to one of her fellow Scots in London, engraver Robert Strange, “tho I have very little acquaintance there, & carry the Picture for his Judgement, and give him the History of Prince.” If she or Waller did show the pictures to Strange and told him about Demah, it is entirely possible that Pine was his recommendation. Strange and Pine were both members of the Society of Artists and among the small group of members who took the lead in creating its first annual exhibition in 1760. These professional connections meant they ran in the same social circles, too. The agreement to hold annual exhibitions, for example, was reached during a gathering at the Turk’s Head, a tavern in Soho.²⁵

Or Pine himself might have volunteered for the task. Naturally, Waller’s search would have taken him to the artistic community of St. Martin’s Lane. Pine easily could have encountered Waller when he was inquiring around on behalf of the Barneses or heard about his quest. Pine had more than one reason to want to train Prince Demah, and more reasons than most painters in St. Martin’s Lane. There was, very likely, their shared African heritage. There were the personal rewards and public cachet of training an unusual protégé—a man of genius who was both Black and colonial. There was Pine’s own self-avowed conviction to work for “the advancement of the Arts.”²⁶

And then there were Pine’s republican politics and egalitarianism. Both history paintings that won him awards in the early 1760s were tinged with anti-monarchial meaning. In 1771, he resigned his elected position as a director of the Society of Artists out of disgust that “one man”—its president—was “abusing” the society’s rights to self-governance. He then decided, however, that this was neither ideologically fitting nor legal according to the society’s charter. He could not resign without a vote from the society’s members, he believed. So, he took up his position again only to resign it again after a vote (to which his fellow members, who wished him to stay on as a director, agreed very reluctantly). His ideological bent predisposed him to interest in all things to do with the North American colonies, embroiled as they were in debates about attacks against rights and liberties.²⁷

Like Robert Edge Pine and his fellow Whigs in Britain, American Whigs also celebrated the constitutional liberties guaranteed by Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, and the natural rights embraced by the great republican thinkers of the English Civil War and philosophers of the Enlightenment. Like their British counterparts, especially the more radical ones, American Whigs championed not just the storied liberties they saw in their common political past, but contemporary British politicians they believed fought to maintain those liberties. Chief among their shared popular heroes was John Wilkes.²⁸

Wilkes, a libertine British member of Parliament, was famous around the empire as publisher of the often incendiary (and more than occasionally vulgar) popular publication The North Briton. The publication began as an attack against the king’s ministers (notably, Lord Bute, whom it mocked, among other things, for allegedly cuckolding Frederick Prince of Wales and fathering George III). In April 1763, Wilkes took his scathing attacks one step too far. In issue number 45, he mocked the king as well as his ministers, and was arrested under a general warrant for seditious libel against the monarch. Wilkes claimed immunity as a sitting member of Parliament and argued against general warrants as despotic and arbitrary. He won that case but was dismissed from Parliament and charged again. He evaded imprisonment by fleeing to Paris for a few years but was tried and convicted in his absence. In 1768, he returned to England, both to dodge his French creditors and to return to British politics. He ran (successfully) for Parliament but was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in King’s Bench Prison in London. His imprisonment outraged his many supporters. And they showed it. At first, they offered mild protests, like chalking the number “45 on the coaches of the nobility as they passed through the streets.” But soon, things took a more dramatic turn.²⁹

On the day of Parliament’s state opening that May, a crowd estimated at 15,000 people—nearly the size of the total population of Boston at the time—gathered in St. George’s Field near King’s Bench Prison to protest Wilkes’s imprisonment. As a disapproving witness later recalled, the crowd began to become “exceedingly riotous” when officials removed a “paper” posted to the prison. The paper “seemed the raving of some patriotic bedlamite, and in six lines, as stupid as they were seditious, talked about Liberty being confined with Mr. Wilkes, and desiring all good Englishmen to pay their daily homage, at the place where those invaluable blessings were lodged.”³⁰ This particular witness scoffed at the paper’s message, but the thousands of people gathered in St. George’s Field did not. Demanding the paper back, they chanted slogans like “Wilkes and Liberty” and “No Liberty, No King” and threw stones at the soldiers called there to keep order. After reading the Riot Act, soldiers fired into the crowd, killing six or seven people. And in a case publicized for years that involved petitions to Parliament itself as well as criminal trials, soldiers also shot a man who had not been involved in the protest but had the misfortune to be wearing the same color as the protestor they had been chasing.³¹

“Soldiers firing among the Mobs and killing Men, Women and Children,” had “produc’d an universal Sullenness, that looks like a great black Cloud coming on, ready to burst in a general Tempest.” The day’s events sent a shock wave through the city. The effect this event had in Britain was not unlike the convulsion that came to be known as the Boston Massacre would cause in the colonies a few years later. As Franklin reported back to Philadelphia, “this Capital, the Residence of the King, is now a daily Scene of lawless Riot and Confusion. Mobs are patrolling the Streets at Noon Day, some Knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and Liberty.” Unlike the “mobs,” however, Franklin did not hold the king accountable. In 1768, he was still very much in favor of what he called “the best Constitution and the best King any Nation was ever blest with.”³²

Franklin reported that there was chaos everywhere in the city after the popular protest in support of Wilkes. The upheaval affected politics and the justice system, with “Courts of Justice afraid to give Judgment against him.” But it went far beyond that. The St. George’s Massacre, as it later came to be called, lit the spark of pre-existing labor discontent into a fire of protests, with “Coalheavers and Porters pulling down the Houses of Coal Merchants that refuse to give them more Wages; Sawyers destroying the new Sawmills; Sailors unrigging all the outward-bound Ships, and suffering none to sail till Merchants agree to raise their Pay; Watermen destroying private Boats and threatning Bridges; Weavers entring Houses by Force, and destroying the Work in the Looms.” The crowds that gathered to protest on behalf of “Wilkes and Liberty” were larger, and in many ways their protest methods were more dramatic, than those in Boston after the death of Christopher Seider and the five men on King Street a few years later.³³

Wilkes’s popularity crossed the Atlantic. Like American colonists, Wilkes opposed the use of arbitrary legal measures like general warrants and favored British constitutional traditions like the right of people to elect their own representatives. Although, when it came to it, he would not support American independence, his political stance in the early years of the conflict made him a hero to American Whigs. In part, this was his own doing, a conscious effort on his part. In 1769, he enhanced his already celebrated reputation among American Patriots when he wrote to the Boston Sons of Liberty, condemning the king’s ministers and noting that their treatment of the city seemed “as if it were the capital of a province belonging to our enemies,” more akin to “Asiatic despotism” than anything else.³⁴ His name became synonymous with the cause of liberty for American Patriots like Paul Revere, who immortalized the slogan “Wilkes and Liberty” on a silver punch bowl he made for the Sons of Liberty to use to drink forty-five toasts to their own protests against the British government. Wilkes’s words and story circulated widely in newspapers and prints. So too did his image. A few weeks after the massacre at St. George’s, Mary Darly was but one of the London printers who capitalized on the renewed and massive interest in Wilkes in the wake of the violence, releasing a new copy of an engraving another London printer made a few years before. Darly’s print, like the earlier one she copied, circulated one of the most popular—and the most sympathetic—portrayals of Wilkes. And these prints were all based on a portrait of Wilkes done by Robert Edge Pine.

James Watson after Robert Edge Pine, John Wilkes Esqr (1764), mezzotint.

After he was first charged with seditious libel in 1763, Pine painted a portrait of Wilkes that, through widely sold mezzotint print copies made by multiple engravers and printers first in 1764 and then again in 1768, became one of the most popular images of the famous politician. It was one of the more flattering depictions of the famously ugly, cross-eyed Wilkes. Pine’s portrait was far kinder than another popular portrait of him, a leering caricature etched by Hogarth five years before. Pine showed a well-dressed Wilkes seated at a desk, engaged in the activity that made him a republican icon: writing. Pine linked Wilkes to great English republican heroes of old through his incorporation of Algernon Sidney’s treatise, Discourses Concerning Government (1698), and a cameo portrait of English Civil War parliamentarian hero, John Hampden. He also made a nod to British constitutional liberties with a medieval scroll representing the Magna Carta. These symbols reflected not only British republican ideals but American ones, too. During protests against the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts, colonial Americans used Sidney’s writings, Hampden’s politics, the Magna Carta, and the slogan “Wilkes and Liberty” as rallying cries for the righteousness of their cause against arbitrary rule.³⁵

By the time Prince Demah arrived in London and began studying with Pine, Wilkes was well established as a legendary lightning rod for liberty on both sides of the Atlantic. And Robert Edge Pine was one of the men who helped popularize his image as a warrior for liberty. For Pine, who by 1770 had already given a great deal of thought to expressing republican politics through art, the chance to hear firsthand accounts of the American situation from Demah surely held appeal.³⁶ And Demah, for his part, likely relished the chance to spend time in a household in which he heard American events discussed from a republican rather than a Tory perspective. Perhaps, with Pine, he felt comfortable breaking the strategic silence he maintained about politics in the Tory Barnes household. Although we have no record of what conversations passed between Demah and Pine, we know from their later decisively patriotic actions that they shared an attachment to the American revolutionary cause. And there was reason for politics to come up.

We have proof that Pine, for one, had liberty from tyranny on his mind. This proof comes in the form of a painting Pine was working on while training Demah: John de Warenne (1231–1304), 6th Earl of Warren and Surrey, Giving his Answer to the King’s Justices on the Enforcement of the Statute of Quo Warranto, 1278. It garnered mixed reviews when exhibited. One critic noted that at least one man in the painting appeared “diabolical,” and that while it “shews its author to have a good deal of mechanical skill, it is not a truly judicious performance, the subject, which is serious being treated in too burlesque a manner.”³⁷

J(ames) Basire, print n.d., after Robert Edge Pine, John de Warenne (1231–1304), 6th Earl of Warren and Surrey, Giving his Answer to the King’s Justices on the Enforcement of the Statute of Quo Warranto, 1278 (c. 1771).

The historical event Pine portrayed was a dramatic one in British legal history. John de Warenne was asked to respond to the demands of King Edward I for quo warranto, proof from nobility that their rights were their own and not the crown’s. Warenne appeared before royal justices and defiantly drew his sword. Sword drawn, he proclaimed that his ancestors gained their land through force of arms, and that his sword served as his proof of possession. The dramatic event became a symbol of defending property—by force if necessary—against arbitrary seizure by the crown. It was a moment that dramatized fighting for rights in the face of tyrannical royal power. Warenne’s response to quo warranto took on added symbolic significance in the wake of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, when Parliament passed “An Act for Reversing the Judgment in a Quo Warranto against the City of London and for Restoreing the City of London to its antient Rights and Privileges,” an act that restored rights of the City of London seized by Charles II and James II to increase royal revenues. Although Pine chose an event from the thirteenth century, the subject—the defense of rights against arbitrary crown rule—was of obvious relevance to contemporary politics in the era of “Wilkes and Liberty” and colonial American protest against infringement on their constitutional rights.

Pine exhibited this painting in the spring 1771 Society of Artists exhibition, which meant that he worked on it while training Demah. It might, in fact, have been the chief way he used his own work in progress to demonstrate technique to Demah. They would have discussed the significance of the historical event as well as the mechanics of painting it. Pine may have had to explain the history behind the painting to Demah, but once he did, the implications of the subject would not have been lost on him. Especially given the dramatic actions of military service and emigration each later took, it is intriguing to wonder, between the student and his teacher, whose political ideologies influenced whom.

But even with all they had in common, politics not least, training with Pine might have been strange as well as invigorating to Demah. In the Barnes house artistic practices like painting and drawing were secondary to the mercantile work of the white members of the house and the domestic labors of its Black occupants. Here, in the Pine household, they were central. In Massachusetts it was difficult to find pastels and paper, much less oil paints and canvas. In St. Martin’s Lane there was a ready source of any supplies an artist’s heart desired. In Massachusetts, Demah could study some Copley portraits and copy prints, muddling his way through drawing from life without expert guidance. Here, he had access to Pine’s large collection of history paintings and portraits as well as sculptures, and the guidance of a man who was a skilled enough mentor to mold at least two young artists (John Hamilton Mortimer and his own daughter Jane) whose work was deemed good enough to exhibit at the Royal Academy.

As important as these artistic and mechanical opportunities, perhaps, was the unusual and tantalizing chance to spend time in a household in which he was considered a talented student rather than an enslaved servant. Demah likely felt more confident and at ease in the Pine household than he did in Marlborough. Especially since, the head of that household was likely of African descent, too, and so more attuned than most to what it meant to be, like Prince Demah, a Black genius in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

The term genius, especially for Black people and women, was sometimes a judgment-laden word. Despite that, it was meaningful, especially when applied to a man like Demah, who managed—against all odds—to parlay his talent with drawing and his experience as a mariner to train at the epicenter of the empire’s artistic scene with a man acknowledged by his fellow artists to be “certainly one of the best portrait painters we have.” Although Demah only studied with Pine for a matter of months, it undoubtedly was a pivotal time in his life. Was he tempted, as other enslaved men had been before him, to stay—to seek his freedom in London? Tempted he might have been, but he left London with his enslaver and returned to Boston, and Daphny, in 1771. There, he would put what he learned in London to work, advertising his skills as a portrait painter “whose extraordinary Genius has been assisted by one of the best Masters in London.”³⁸ And not long after his return to Massachusetts, another colonial American that Londoners considered to be a genius followed in his path and crossed the Atlantic. This time, the genius was a woman, and an eccentric one at that. But she, like Demah, would find the gold of her genius burnished to a bright shine in London. And she had advantages Demah did not. She was white, and she had a letter of introduction to the most famous American genius of all: Benjamin Franklin.

5 A COLONIAL WOMAN TAKES LONDON BY STORM

LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION were worth far more than their weight in gold in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. A stranger armed with a letter of introduction from a trusted source could gain access to people that others could not. Every American who came to London wanted to see the celebrated Dr. Franklin. But not every American could. Americans with a letter of introduction, however, stood a better chance than most. Especially if the letter came from someone Franklin loved or trusted. One such person was his favorite sister back in Boston, Jane Franklin Mecom. Among Mecom’s many letters to her brother in London was one asking him to welcome one of her friends, a fellow American colonist named Patience Wright, who was relocating to London from New York City. Although in her forties at the time, Wright was bold enough to reinvent herself in the crowded, cosmopolitan capital of the British Empire. Admittedly, she had reinvented herself before. As a widow with four young children, she had left behind her domestic life and become a maker and exhibitor of wax sculptures. Partnering with her sister Rachel Wells, she made wax figures that were put on display as far north as Boston and as far south as Charleston. The sisters gained a fair amount of fame in the colonies for their “ingenious” work. But now, Wright wanted to try for something bigger. She wanted to ply her trade and find fame and fortune in London. Jane Mecom’s letter would help.¹

In the cold early winter of 1772, Patience Wright wrote her will, said farewell to her children and friends, and left her “native country,” as she put it, to sail for England on the newly built Snow Mercury. Along with her clothes, the tools of her trade, and wax heads of celebrities like evangelical preacher George Whitefield, the letter sailed with Wright across the Atlantic from New York City, no doubt tucked into the securest of places as its bearer navigated nearly two months of roiling waves and winter weather. One of the first things Wright did after docking safely in London was call on Franklin in his townhouse on Craven Street. She handed him the letter from his sister and showed him what brought her to London to make his acquaintance: the astonishingly realistic sculptures of people’s heads that she made from wax. His sister’s letter got her in the door, but the wax heads, particularly that of his friend and fellow man of science Cadwallader Colden, got his attention. They were, in Franklin’s opinion, “extraordinary.” So much so that he offered to recommend her to his considerable circle of friends and to “do her all the Service in my Power.” Most complimentary of all, he agreed to take time from his demanding schedule to sit for her while she crafted a likeness of him for the London wax exhibition she planned to open. It was a promising start for any artist, much less one from the colonies. Before long, some of Britain’s most famous and powerful people would come to share Franklin’s opinion of her work, and toast her, as they did him, as a genius from the colonies.²

Genius, it seems, ran in Patience Wright’s family. Born in Oyster Bay, Long Island in 1725, Patience was a cousin of Robert Feke, the colonial painter whom the Scottish traveler Alexander Hamilton called an “extraordinary genius.” The cousins came from a long line of American colonists with radical religious beliefs: Puritans, Baptists, Quakers. Like many of their friends and family living in Oyster Bay, Patience’s mother, Patience Townshend, was a Quaker. But her father, John Lovell, embraced even more unconventional views. John Lovell admired the teachings of seventeenth-century thinker Thomas Tryon. (Lovell even published some of Tryon’s writings in 1761.) Tryon’s rules were intended to foster spiritual, mental, and physical health among his adherents. They were equal parts practical advice for daily living and optimal bodily function and philosophical guides to foster a strong moral compass with a true north of Christian religiosity. His views were compiled in several publications, including The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness (1683) and Wisdom’s Dictates: or, Aphorisms & rules, physical, moral, and divine, for preserving the health of the body, and the peace of the mind (1691). Spiritually inspired self-help books of sorts, Tryon’s works offered lessons on the physical and spiritual benefits of everything from wearing all-white clothing to vegetarianism. He also applied his ideas to the antislavery movement, raising moral parallels, for example, between eating meat and transatlantic slavery in “The Negro’s Complaint” (1684).³

Profile bust of Benjamin Franklin, attributed to Patience Wright, ca. 1775. Profile busts in wax (especially small ones like this one, which measures 6 3/8 × 5 1/4 in. or 16.2 × 13.3 cm) were popular. These small profiles were not what Wright was known for—rather, she was famous for her life-sized wax portraits—but it is a good reminder that her creation of portraits of Franklin were central to her initial success in London.

John and Patience Lovell raised their ten children—nine daughters and a son—in keeping with Tryon’s guidance, first in Oyster Bay and then, from the time their fifth daughter, Patience, was about four years old, in western New Jersey, about thirty miles up the Delaware River from Philadelphia. They prospered under Tryon’s dictates, and the family owned several substantial properties by the time Patience’s parents died. Like her sisters and brother, young Patience ate a diet devoid of meat, fish, or, as Tryon memorably put it, the “dying groans of God’s innocent and harmless Creatures.” Later, she would claim that her parents’ refusal to “let their children eat meat” was “the reason we were all so injenious.”⁴ Following his “Rules of Health and Abstinency for all young People,” she wore wooden clogs instead of leather shoes, white linen and wool instead of clothing made of “rich colours,” and avoided sugar and “East and West-India Commodities, as Nutmegs, Cloves, Mace, Cinnamon, Ginger, and the like.” When in public, she and her sisters wore veils with their white dresses and wooden shoes. They were encouraged to avoid blindly following tradition, to ponder the meaning of their “Dreams and Visions of the Night,” and to embrace freedom of religion for all. It was an unusual childhood. And it left indelible marks.

But it chafed, too. When Patience reached twenty years old, she longed to explore the world beyond rural New Jersey. Specifically, she wished to go to Philadelphia, “where she then conceived all the Arts of the known World were to be seen.” As she recollected decades later, her “Desire of going to Philadelphia” was “so violent, that, for the first Time, she became a little disobedient.” She left home around age twenty. She settled in Philadelphia for a few years, perhaps at least initially to join her cousin Feke, who was painting portraits there at the time and was a natural mentor to introduce her to “all the arts.” Once away from home, she experimented with things once forbidden to her. She gave up wearing all-white clothing and began to eat meat. Still, despite her headstrong decision to leave home and many of Tryon’s pragmatic commands behind, she continued to adhere to many of his more philosophical rules throughout her life. She never lost her religious fervor, her attention to messages that came to her through dreams, or her fierce attachment to liberty and willingness to question traditional authority. All these convictions were on public display as she took London by storm in 1772.⁵

But these remarkable tendencies did not find full voice right away. Before middle-aged American colonist Patience Wright became a London celebrity, and after her brief bout of early rebellion, she lived a life of conventional domestic duty. In the spring of 1769, Wright was living in the village of Bordentown, New Jersey, occupied with motherly duties. The Wrights had three daughters, Mary, Elizabeth or “Betsy,” and Phoebe, and one son, Joseph. The oldest daughter Mary was married and living in her own household by then, but Patience was busy with Phoebe, the youngest at eight, Joseph, aged thirteen, and their older teenaged sister, Betsy. The Wrights owned a brick house in the center of town and lived a comfortable life near the manor where Patience spent much of her childhood. Wright’s much older husband, Quaker Joseph Wright, spent most of his time that spring in Philadelphia, where he kept a separate household so that he could work as a cooper in the city. Although his need to move to the city to find work hints at economic troubles, he remained prosperous enough to keep an enslaved woman called Coba, who was about the same age as Patience, laboring in his house. Patience may not have minded the separate households. In fact, she might have welcomed the distance. She later recalled that her husband “had nothing but Age and Money to recommend him to her favour,” and that she “gave her hand” to this “substantial Quaker” in 1748 only because she found herself “very straitened” after living in Philadelphia on her own. Given this less than glowing recollection of why she married Joseph, it seems likely that she breathed a sigh of relief rather than one of longing when separate households kept them apart.⁶

Wright’s quiet village life changed forever when her husband died in Philadelphia that May. Patience was forty-five years old. Suddenly widowed, unexpectedly pregnant with a fifth child, who would be born months after its father’s death, Wright found herself simultaneously freed and constrained by widowhood. In lieu of a dower portion of a third of his estate, her husband left the bulk of his estate to the four children he knew existed. Sarah, or Sally, born after his death, received nothing at all. Patience got only the use of the house at Bordentown and its contents. And that legacy came with the loaded caveat that she care for their children “in the best manner she may be capable” until they came of age or married. She could pursue her own path now, but she had four children at home—including the new infant, Sally—to support and not enough income to do so. Other women of her time in the same circumstances might have remarried. But Patience Wright made a different and somewhat daring choice. With the encouragement of her younger sister in Philadelphia who was also a widow, Rachel Wells, Wright entrusted the care of infant Sally to another of the Lovell sisters and, older children in tow, joined Wells in the business of making and exhibiting wax figures.⁷

Although work as a professional wax sculptor was by no means a common occupation in colonial North America, the profession had a long history, dating back at least to ancient Greece and Egypt, where miniature wax figures were used in funeral rites and religious ceremonies. Life-sized depictions of the human form in wax served many purposes. Some were sculptures of the human body—or its parts—created for the scientifically curious to learn about anatomy or for students of medicine to practice their craft. Other life-sized wax figures of royal or noble figures, sometimes clothed in their own garments, were displayed in churches after their death. Other waxworks were created to amuse and entertain the paying public with depictions of royalty, biblical scenes, and characters from folklore and legend. In 1733, colonial North America hosted its first public waxworks when a Boston man imported and displayed London-made wax models depicting Margaret, Countess of Henneberg and her children. Margaret, a medieval Dutch noblewoman, gave birth to 365 children at once, each tiny as a mouse, because of a beggar woman’s curse (according to legend, that is). A few years later, residents of Charleston, South Carolina, could pay ten shillings to visit the house of bricklayer John Vaughan to see “the Royal Waxwork.” Vaughan displayed life-sized models of King George II and his queen, Caroline, along with two of their daughters, all “dress’d in their Royal Robes.” The royal party posed with a duchess, a chaplain, and “a Drummer moving, all represented to be a Royal Banquet of the richest Varieties, with many other admirable Curiosities, the like never heretofore seen in America.” Like the 1733 display, these waxworks were imported from London, made by “the celebrated Mrs. Mary Salmon,” who operated a wax exhibition space on Fleet Street for decades and enjoyed “many Gratuities from the Royal Family” for her “curious Performances.”⁸

In contrast to these earlier displays by entrepreneurial colonial men, Rachel Wells did not import other people’s wax figures. Instead, she created her own. At first, Wells pivoted between making anatomical wax sculptures and wax portraits of biblical scenes and famous people. She was almost certainly the local “Gentlewoman who is a great tho unimproved genius” who made a wax figure of conjoined twin girls (“the exact semblance of the original that I have in spirits”) that Philadelphia doctor William Shippen, Jr. sent to Benjamin Franklin in London as a gift to the Royal Society “for the Use and amusement of the curious and the learned.”⁹ But once in partnership with her sister, she left anatomical modeling to Dr. Abraham Chovet, a physician who came to Philadelphia from the Caribbean in 1770 and set up a long-running anatomical museum.¹⁰

Instead, the two sisters focused on creating wax exhibitions meant for popular rather than scientific enjoyment. Their displays reflected their religious upbringing, featuring Old Testament scenes like “Murder of Abel by Cain,” the return of the Prodigal Son, and “the Treachery of Delilah to Samson.” Soon, they had exhibition spaces up and running in New York City, where Patience decided to move, as well as in Philadelphia, where Rachel kept shop. During the winter, perhaps inspired by the example their cousin Feke provided as a successful itinerant portrait painter, the sisters toured the southern colonies, setting up temporary exhibitions in places like South Carolina. Their exhibitions, which “amazed spectators of all ranks,” included more than religious figures. But unlike their British predecessors, like Mary Salmon, they offered something new: portraits of living or recently deceased residents of the North American colonies. Their wax figures celebrated America’s best and brightest, like John Dickinson, “the beloved Farmer of Philadelphia.” Dickinson was well known as the author of Letters from an American Farmer (1767–8), political tracts that rallied colonists together against what he and many others saw as unconstitutional taxation without representation under the Townshend Acts. In the sisters’ deft hands, “his numberless friends in Boston” could see his “living image.” The sisters helped make famous Americans like Dickinson into celebrities up and down the coast.¹¹

Like their subjects, the sisters, too, were celebrated up and down the eastern seaboard of the North American colonies. The two were touted as “extraordinary geniuses” not just for their talent, but for the fact that they had no formal training for their art. They were, as one newspaper poetically described it, artists who “By Heav’n and Nature, not a Master taught,” were able to “give to Statues, Passion, Life and Thought.”¹² Their lack of training was part of their mystique. How the sisters got their start making wax figures is uncertain, not least because, when asked, Patience Wright chose to emphasize both their eccentric childhood education and untutored genius rather than the mechanics of the sisters’ craft. Wright romanticized their education as one that revolved chiefly around “the Arts of the Dairy, of Agriculture, and every Branch of such useful and Pastoral Knowledge as tended to make them good Wives to Men.”¹³ Wright described an education that her contemporaries would have recognized as a pastoral ideal—an upbringing that kept her close to nature. Being close to nature, in turn, fostered virtue. Wright may well have exaggerated here for effect, to build what became, in England, her carefully maintained image as an American, “a native of a NEW WORLD, where she was taught, by virtuous Parents, to acknowledge no Distinction between Men, but that which is produced by Superior Virtues, or distinguished Merit.”¹⁴

But it is doubtful that Wright had quite the entirely pastoral education she claimed. Thomas Tryon encouraged female education, in part because, as he put it, “the preservation of mankind principally depends on the good education and discreet conduct of women.”¹⁵ The preservation of mankind required more than a milkmaid’s education. One of Tryon’s books that John Lovell surely consulted while raising his children was A New Method of Educating Children (1695). In it, Tryon noted that girls “are of a quick, penetrating Fancy, apt to comprehend anything that is fine or curious, as the Art of Housewifery, Needle-work, Painting, Musick, Writing & c. In these things no man can exceed them, if they have both timely and proper Education and Instruction; being both by their Genius and Complexions naturally adapted for all easie Employments, and curious Arts.”¹⁶ Given the Lovell sisters’ careers, and Tryon’s approval of artistic pursuits for girls, it seems likely they learned artistic as well as agrarian skills. And in fact, Wright did recount how she and her sisters pursued the arts. But she was careful to keep their creativity close to nature, and to safely domestic pursuits. She remembered how they “expressed Juice from the Herbs and Flowers of their Garden, and extracted Gums from the Trees of the Forest; with these they made Colours, and vied with each other, which should exceed most in the Line of Genius they pursued.” Although she worked at first with “dough intended for the oven,” eventually Wright became “a Modeller in Clay” who “at length, almost made Man.”¹⁷ She continued to make clay figures while a wife and mother, as her marriage “enabled her to buy such Materials as she wanted, and to pursue the Bent of her Genius.” She was prolific while married to her husband, making “an hundred” clay statues although “not one to his Goût,” or taste (another reason, perhaps, she did not recall him fondly). After years modeling first in dough and then in clay, she at last turned to wax. But not until after she became a widow and her sister Rachel introduced to the craft.¹⁸

Rachel Wells too seems to have parlayed her skills molding first dough and then clay into working with wax. Whether she had any formal training is unknown. Most makers of wax figures, however, followed the same technique. The term wax figure is somewhat misleading, as wax figures usually were only partly made from that substance. Only the unclothed, visible parts, like the head, neck, and hands, were made of wax. These wax parts were then attached to wooden frames or stuffed sacks hidden by clothing. Wax heads and hands were usually made from molds, often created by casting plaster molds on clay heads or hands (a technique that would have put the sisters’ clay modeling to good use). At other times, these molds were taken “from life” (or as death masks from the recently deceased). The head and hands were brushed with oil and then covered in plaster to create a mold.¹⁹

Bleached beeswax was then applied to plaster casts to build the wax figures. To bleach beeswax, raw beeswax taken from honeycombs was laid out in thin layers in sunlight. In Europe, the beeswax came from European or Asian bees, with some English wax makers using beeswax from the Ottoman Empire. In America, local beekeepers provided ample supply. To make it more pliable and keep it from cracking, turpentine was added to melted beeswax before it was poured into plaster molds. Throughout the British Empire, the common source of turpentine was Britain’s North American colonies, North and South Carolina and Georgia, where it was harvested from pine trees by enslaved laborers. Made from natural resources extracted from places as far-flung as Asia and America, wax figures in eighteenth-century London embodied the global reach of Britain’s empire.²⁰

To achieve their trademark realistic appearance, waxworks required color. Some waxmakers added powdered dyes to melted wax before pouring it into plaster molds. Others painted their finished heads and hands—skin was painted shades of color to signify races, lips were pinkened. Here, again, the Lovell sisters could draw upon their childhood education. They learned to make dyes from plants and trees, with the ever-helpful Tryon offering detailed thoughts upon the possibilities of color. Although he used his discussion as an analogy for why diets should include multicolored foods, Tryon’s The Way to Health included a treatise on hues. He offered practical advice on creating colors: “take Indigo, Ultramarine, or any Blew, and mix it with White, and it makes a Skie to what degree you pleased,” while “if you would have the deepest Black, take the whitest Ivory you can get, and burn it, and the Ashes will perform your desire.” He also offered more poetic explanations of the possibilities of color, noting that “there are but seven perfect Colours in the World, which have their original form from the seven Constellations, viz. Black, Red, Yellow, Blew, Lake, Green, and White” from which “an ingenious Arist in Painting can imitate and represent the Colours of all things in the whole Universe.” It is easy to imagine the effect such words about the grandiose possibilities of paint colors had on creative young girls passionate about pursuing art.²¹

Once painted, wax figures needed a few more components to look like the realistic copies of people they were meant to be. Glass eyes were used to fill eye sockets, and hair, usually human hair purchased from barbers, but occasionally horsehair in a pinch, was attached to scalps. Forms had to be made—wooden frames constructed, sacks stitched and filled. The forms had to be dressed in clothing—sometimes clothing that had belonged to the person depicted, but usually clothing made for the figure itself. A skilled hand was required for making and dressing the figures, not least as gaps between fabric and figure might reveal where wax ended and wood or sack began, shattering the realistic illusion. Only then were they were complete, ready to be posed for viewing, either on their own or in tableaux with other figures.²²

Rachel Wells, for example, posed Samson with Delilah, while Patience Wright charmed London viewers with posing her parents sitting together, wearing their white clothes and wooden shoes. However, making and displaying them was not the end of the process. They required upkeep after their initial creation. In part, this was because visitors to wax exhibitions, enticed by the figures’ lifelike appearance, liked to touch them. Turpentine could leech out and stain clothing next to it, like collars and cuffs, and clothing could require repair as well as washing. And itinerant exhibitions, like those of the Lovell sisters in the early 1770s, required the laborious tasks of disassembly, packing, moving, and reassembly of the figures.²³

The sisters gained fame in the colonies in part because they were clever enough to travel north to south, making a name for themselves in the process, and in part because they created lifelike representations of real people; people who would have been familiar to many of those who paid a few shillings to see them in wax. Perhaps because she had experience casting anatomical wax figures, Rachel Wells made a practice of making wax images from life as well as her imagination. She made a wax statue of famed evangelist Reverend George Whitefield “as large as life, properly dressed, before Mr. Whitefield died”; a likeness “said to be so striking, that it astonishes all who have seen it.” Indeed, some observers who saw it after he died delightedly declared that Wells had revived Whitefield “from the grave,” so like the man was her rendering of him in wax. Seemingly religious herself, Wells carried her wax portrait of Whitefield after he died “at her own expence, to Georgia (upwards of 900 miles), and made a present of it to Bethesda College,” Her journey, she wrote, was motivated by “her regard to the memory of that great and good man.” But she did not relinquish the portrait before she and her sister made copies, one of which eventually crossed the Atlantic.²⁴

This wax figure of a baby was made in France in the 1780s, alleged to be Louis Charles, Dauphin of France, second son of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. The French nuns who sold it to Nantucket whaler Captain Jonathan Coffin claimed it was made from life. Whether or not it represents the dauphin, it is a rare surviving example of an intact eighteenth-century wax figure in the realistic style for which Wright was known. In this image, its clothes are not on, which allows for the figure’s construction technique (again, similar to that Wright employed) to be seen. Stains from the turpentine used to mold the wax are evident on his torso.

To make the portrait of Whitefield from life, Rachel Wells likely used a plaster cast taken from his face and a mold. Or she might have sculpted his face and hands while he sat for her, molding them out of wax, her fingers pressing the wax to mimic the folds and features of the face and hands her eyes studied. Although we have no record of how Wells worked, her sister became famous for using this type of freeform technique, working like a sculptor in clay but using wax instead. Such a technique was remarked upon because it was unusual. The way Wright practiced it, at least when under observation, also had more than a hint of suggestive sexuality to it. In London, she “made portraits in wax in a most extraordinary manner, holding the wax under her apron,” warming it between her thighs, while she “moddled it into the features of the Person sitting before her!” before pulling it out, fully formed, from her skirt, in a performance that mimicked the act of giving birth.²⁵

Wright used this technique not just to impress (and possibly titillate) those observing her at work, but also to engage with her subjects. It was a tactic that allowed her to disarm them with conversation, a means to get at their personality, just as a portrait painter would do with his sitters. Observers of her work remembered the “expression of her eye” and “an energetic wildness in her manner. While conversing, she was busily employed modeling, both hands being under her apron.” The popular London Magazine spread knowledge of her unusual practice to the broader public in 1775, when it published a portrait of her engaged in her work, a just-finished wax bust of a man sitting on her lap. Wright looks down at the bust, dominating him with her gaze and firm grip. He is clearly her creation—real enough to speak, but waiting to hear her command.²⁶

London Magazine, Patience Lovell Wright (née Patience Lovell), line engraving published December 1, 1775.

In London, these performances fascinated people, but so too did her frank conversation, her deliberate emphasis of her American eccentricities, and the appeal of the “wild flights of her powerful mind” that “stamped originality on all her acts and language.”²⁷ Her appearance helped, too, as the “vigor and originality of her conversation corresponded with her manners and appearance,” which was physically striking. She was “a tall and athletic figure” who “walked with a firm, bold step, and erect as an Indian.” Although her “complexion was some-what sallow,” she had high cheekbones, “olive eyes” that were “keen, piercing, and expressive” and a glance so sharp it was “appalling,” with “almost the wildness of the maniac.”²⁸ This persona, as well as her performances and artistry, proved a winning combination in the capital city of the British Empire, quickly eclipsing the success and celebrity she enjoyed in the colonies.²⁹

Ironically, it was partly a disaster rather than her own ambitions that propelled her to London in the first place. Wax figures, made of wax and turpentine and draped in fabric, were highly flammable things. In June 1771, fire broke out in the exhibition space she operated in Manhattan. Two of her children—Betsy, likely between sixteen and eighteen, and Phoebe, age ten—lived with her there. Her son, Joseph, aged fifteen, attended school in Philadelphia, but as it was summer, he might have been in New York too. The fire started while Wright was out of the house “and only children at home, and was occasioned by one of them accidentally setting fire to a curtain inclosing some of the figures; the child for some time in vain endeavoured to extinguish the fire, which was soon communicated to the cloaths of the figures, and the wax of which they were composed.” With the help of neighbors and the fire company, the fire was extinguished. The child who caused it—whether Betsy, Joseph, or Phoebe—no doubt felt ashamed as well as terrified. Although there was “little damage to the house,” most of the “wax-work was destroyed (together with some new pieces which Mrs. Wells, sister to Mrs. Wright, had lately brought from Charles-Town, the whole amounting, it is said, to the value of several hundred pounds.” That sum accounted for not only the wax figures themselves but also their clothes, some of which were likely made by one of Manhattan’s premier tailors, Hercules Mulligan, at least for the male figures. Some wax statues did escape the flames, including “the curious pieces of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield” and “the Pennsylvania Farmer,” John Dickinson. But it was a disaster nonetheless; hours of work and much of the widow’s source of income gone up in flames.³⁰

Patience Wright, however, was not one to back down from a challenge. She and Rachel made what repairs they could to the damaged New York exhibition, created new pieces, and took their show on the road to Boston. There, as everywhere in the colonies the two sisters went, they dazzled ordinary people as well as “Persons of Distinction” with their art. Wright was singled out not just for something she shared with her sister—their “Skill in taking Likenesses”—but also for her way of “expressing the Passions” of those she rendered in wax.³¹ Perhaps this ability to capture emotion and personality in her sculptures explains why it was Wright, rather than Wells, who decided to try her luck in London. Or perhaps it was their own personalities that decided things—after all, Wright was bold, with a history of allowing her desires to propel her into solo travel. This personality trait might explain why Wells, who does not seem to have had any underage children to care for, chose to stay. Whatever the reason, it was decided that Wright would travel to London, leaving Betsy, by then approaching young adulthood, to mind both her ten-year-old sister Phoebe and the reopened exhibition in New York while their brother and Wells went back to Philadelphia.

Once in London and armed with Benjamin Franklin’s support, Wright wasted little time in setting up shop. She arrived in March, and by summer, she had opened a multiroom exhibition space. Unlike Mary Salmon, the most famous British wax maker in London before her whose exhibitions were still running after her death, Wright did not set up shop in Fleet Street. Although they included biblical, historical, and royal figures, Salmon’s waxworks, with figures such as the Countess of Henneberg and her 365 newborns, a room filled with shepherdesses and shepherds making love, and “Dwarf Zanzibars,” were renowned as much for their fantastical nature as for their striking realism. Salmon’s wax exhibition was a place where ordinary people flocked to find ready entertainment for a sixpence. Wright’s exhibition spaces, by contrast, featured more portraits of actual historical and living people than of legendary figures. Rather than the Countess of Henneberg and her hundreds of children, tiny as mice, visitors to Wright’s exhibition encountered famous colonial men of science and politics like Cadwallader Colden and Benjamin Franklin (whose portrait in wax was the first she completed in London), celebrity Britons like actor David Garrick and historian Catharine Macaulay, and the British Empire’s most popular itinerant preacher, George Whitefield. Rather than fanciful people, Wright displayed wax figures of learned elites and celebrities—the same types of people whose portraits graced the walls of the Royal Academy of Art’s annual shows and whose prints populated books, magazines, and the walls of private homes.³²

Wright, in short, crafted wax figures that were more portraits than spectacle. She made wax figures of the same people whose portraits were painted by William Hogarth and Robert Edge Pine. She did not, however, follow the path of Pine and other portrait painters and settle in St. Martin’s Lane, although she lived within easy walking distance of it. She eschewed the vibrant creative community around St. Martin’s Lane as well as the tawdry entertainments of Fleet Street. Instead, she planted herself where it was easy for the famous, the fashionable, and well-heeled patrons of art to come to see her exhibitions. And come they did: Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and his daughter Polly, Lord Camden and Lord Temple, the King’s Chaplain Dr. William Dodd, and, of course, Benjamin Franklin all visited her exhibition in its first months. There, they could see “the most remarkable persons of the present age” (including, in some cases, themselves—a fact that undoubtedly delighted Franklin despite any pretensions to the contrary). Franklin also very likely enjoyed seeing Wright’s portrait of George Whitefield on display, for, like so many of his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, he had been impressed by how Whitefield’s “Eloquence had a wonderful Power over the Hearts and Purses” of the huge crowds that gathered to hear his sermons.³³ And just as in New York and Boston, London visitors marveled at the “striking resemblance” of Wright’s wax portrait of the deceased evangelical preacher, posed “in a sitting posture, as large as life.”³⁴ Living first in the neighborhood of the Strand, near Covent Garden, and then in Pall Mall, she exhibited close to the royal palace, ensuring that her exhibition was near the epicenter of fashion and political power.³⁵

Her choice of location was savvy. It also reflected where wax making stood in the hierarchy of eighteenth-century British art. In that hierarchy, life-sized wax figures, no matter how skillfully done, were never seen as serious art, much less high art. That judgment was part of the reason that the Royal Academy prohibited artists from displaying such works at its annual exhibitions. The realism of wax figures was their greatest appeal. The medium allowed for a simulation of flesh often remarked upon for its lifelike qualities, enhanced by three-dimensional, life-sized forms. More than once, visitors to Wright’s exhibit spoke to wax figures, thinking they were living people. But the very quality that made them so popular to so many people helped keep them from being recognized as serious art. Their realism, certainly, was one of the primary reasons wax sculptures distressed Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds found portraits in wax to be “rude and inartificial” because they expressed “the softness of flesh by the softness of wax.” Their extreme realism meant, to his mind, that they were unable to inspire the “grateful surprise” at an artist’s skill that an imaginatively rendered painted portrait did.³⁶

Reynolds was not alone in his disdain. Although small framed medallion and bust portraits in wax could be displayed at the Royal Academy, its bylaws prohibited display of “models in coloured wax, or any such performance,” especially if they had previously been displayed for “emoluments.”³⁷ The Royal Academy of Art wanted no association with lowbrow art, a category that included popular waxworks like Mary Salmon’s on Fleet Street and, later, Patience Wright’s exhibitions.³⁸ But although the Royal Academy did not welcome her work, its royal patron did. By the end of 1772, Wright had the privilege of making a wax portrait from life of the king himself. It was hard to imagine a more promising start, or a more meteoric rise, and all in the span of less than a year. It was a triumph for an artist under any circumstances, but especially for a colonial American woman recently come to London. Even one with a letter of introduction to Benjamin Franklin.

6 BLACK BOSTON

THE SAME YEAR Patience Wright took London by storm, James Somerset, another former resident of the colonies living in the city, also gained fame around the British Empire. One of the places his name became a buzzword was Boston, where Prince Demah had set up shop painting portraits. Like Demah, Somerset was a Black man who traveled from Massachusetts to London with his merchant-enslaver. Unlike Demah, however, he never came back across the Atlantic. And in fact, his fight never to return to Britain’s colonies was the reason for his fame, as it was the basis of one of the British Empire’s most significant legal cases related to slavery.

Before he was James Somerset, he was called Somerset Stewart. And before he was called Somerset Stewart, he had another name. That name, the one given to him by his family, is unknown, because, like Daphny Demah, Somerset was originally from Africa, sold into slavery across the Atlantic as a child. Beginning in 1749, he was held in bondage by Scottish merchant and imperial official Charles Stewart, first in Virginia. Once Stewart received a lucrative post administering colonial customs from Quebec to Virginia, Somerset lived with him in Boston as well, with a yearlong sojourn in Philadelphia and much travel up and down the coast. Although Stewart held multiple people in bondage, it was Somerset who traveled with him on business (as well as alone on Stewart’s behalf). Stewart seems to have taken Somerset with him and allowed him to operate for him on his own, in part because of the enslaved man’s admirable qualities. White as well as Black acquaintances wrote of their “friendship” to “able Sommerset Steuart.” Although both white and Black people often mentioned enslaved people in their letters, gossiped about their lives, and passed along greetings to and from them, they were not always discussed in favorable terms. Somerset was. Before his name became news around the British Empire, his skills and personality had earned him a widespread reputation as a commendable man.¹

Although Somerset was not a mariner like Prince Demah, his travels, like Demah’s, exposed him to a similar variety of communities, places, and networks in the Black Atlantic. In 1769, Stewart relocated to London, bringing Somerset with him. In 1771, the same year Demah studied painting with Robert Edge Pine, Somerset made a different choice than Demah had in London. Rather than staying with his enslaver, Somerset took advantage of the city’s crowded streets and networks of free Blacks and other abolitionists and escaped from his enslaver. His freedom was short-lived. Somerset was captured, and Stewart, despite their decades together and Somerset’s skills, imprisoned him on board a Caribbean-bound ship, where Somerset would be sold, and in a place where being enslaved was more deadly than in Virginia or Massachusetts.²

But like Jonathan Strong before him, Somerset had antislavery connections and the will to use them. While living in England, he had been baptized (hence his new name), and his godparents worked to help free him from his ship prison with a writ of habeus corpus. Somerset connected with Granville Sharp, the same antislavery activist who helped Strong, and the case came before the Court of King’s Bench. The Court’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield, ordered that Somerset could go free while he waited for the trial and verdict. The trial did not come to court for months, and the chief justice did not render his verdict speedily when it did. These delays allowed both pro- and antislavery voices ample time to drum up publicity for their positions. By the time Mansfield finally decided the case in June of 1772, his verdict was eagerly awaited. And it was explosive.³

For a ruling so long in coming, Mansfield’s explanation of his decision was remarkably short. Mansfield ruled, “I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.” Enslaved people could not be forced to leave England. Somerset was to go free. Mansfield noted that slavery was “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” In other words, slavery was not supported by natural law which enshrined rights such as life, liberty, and property. It was neither a natural nor a moral condition. Only manmade law could support it, and Mansfield believed English law did not provide that support. And yet an echo of the proslavery voices crying for Somerset’s continued enslavement could be heard in Mansfield’s concern for the “inconveniences” that might “follow from a decision.”⁴

Mansfield had good reason to feel conflicted about making such a ruling. Many wealthy, powerful people feared the global ramifications of a decision in Somerset’s favor and pushed hard against it. And although Mansfield was careful to make his ruling only about Somerset’s enforced removal from England, rather than a blanket statement abolishing slavery there, he had a personal reason to dislike slavery—a reason so personal that she lived in his home. Mansfield had in his care a great-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, born in 1761 to his nephew John Lindsay and an enslaved African woman, Maria Belle. Mansfield and his great-niece had an affectionate relationship, and she was educated alongside her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, another great-niece in Mansfield’s care. Dido sometimes helped Mansfield with his correspondence, and she was cherished enough to be memorialized in a portrait with her cousin Elizabeth. Likely done not long before the Somerset case, between 1768 and 1770, the girls’ double portrait was by David Martin, a Scottish-born painter who trained at St. Martin’s Lane Academy. When Mansfield commissioned the portrait of his nieces, Martin was a sought-after artist, made famous for his 1767 portrait of a bespectacled Benjamin Franklin that circulated widely as a mezzotint print. Although the girls are portrayed as luxuriously dressed and affectionate, their differences are apparent. Lindsay’s African heritage is emphasized. Her darker skin is dramatized by a white gown, she is linked to nature by holding fruit and flowers, and she wears the turban and pearl earrings emblematic of Blackness in so many contemporary portraits. In contrast, Murray holds a book to emphasize her connection to the constructed culture of “western civilization,” and the pallor of her skin is so distinct that her arm is paler than Lindsay’s white dress.⁵

Although the painting emphasized their racial differences, it also expressed what they shared. The girls were posed together with Kenwood House, the stately family home in which they both lived, in the background. Whether it was Martin, the artist, or the Mansfields who chose this color palette and props, the family certainly liked the finished portrait, for they commissioned Martin to paint a portrait of Mansfield a few years later. The portrait of the girls clearly indicates that Lindsay is both part of the family and set apart by her race. She almost surely was on Mansfield’s mind as he pondered his decision about the fate of James Somerset. She reminds us, as her presence probably reminded her uncle, that enslaved people were central actors in the history of their own times, particularly when it came to slavery and abolition. But Mansfield must have worried about her fate as a mixed-race woman in Europe; he was careful to specify that she was free in his will.

Although people then and historians since have disagreed about the legal implications of Mansfield’s ruling, it had a broad impact on public opinion around the British Empire. What Mansfield actually meant to rule is perhaps (for everyone except Somerset himself) less important than how his contemporaries perceived his ruling. Despite Mansfield’s desire to limit his ruling to Somerset the individual rather than comment on the existence of slavery writ large, his decision outraged proslavery forces and encouraged antislavery advocates. When Mansfield delivered his verdict, Somerset and other Black observers gathered in the court reacted with “the most extravagant Joy.” That joy carried over from the courtroom into London—a few hundred free Black people held an assembly dance in the city to celebrate a few days after Mansfield’s verdict. American newspapers followed the case, especially in Boston, which covered it almost as avidly as the British press. Mansfield gave his verdict in June; by August, colonial papers reported on his decision. Many held the opinion that the case held particular import for the colonies because it seemed “pregnant with consequences extremely detrimental to those Gentlemen, whose estates chiefly consist in slaves.”⁶

Among those in Massachusetts who followed the case with interest, no doubt, was Prince Demah. In September of 1772, a Boston newspaper noted that the Somerset case meant that, “as Blacks are free now” in Britain, “Gentlemen will not be so fond bringing them here as they used to be.”⁷ Demah and Barnes left London only months before Somerset’s case began. Like Somerset, Demah might have run to his freedom while in London the year before (Henry Barnes, certainly, feared that he might). But he did not. Did he regret his decision to return to the colonies when he heard Mansfield’s verdict? Or did he, like hundreds of Black Londoners, feel the urge to celebrate this judicial win? Whatever his emotional response, he had people to share his reaction with, people like his unabashedly antislavery mother Daphny back in Marlborough, or any number of the other enslaved and free Black people he lived alongside once he set up shop in Boston as a painter of “Faces at the lowest Rates.”⁸

In New England, news of the Somerset verdict raised hopes within the colonial Black community not only by virtue of Mansfield’s decision alone. Because it involved former residents of colonial North America and mandated that Somerset could not be shipped back across the Atlantic to slavery in the West Indies, it made it clear that slavery was a matter of imperial as well as British concern. One New England lawyer who witnessed the trial in London fumed at the imperial implications. “Let Britain then be constant and discourage Slavery entirely,” he wrote, “or take their Part of the Shame and by no Means under a plausible Pretence to more noble Ideas of Liberty than their Neighbors.” In particular, he found the idea “that British Soil and British Air differs essentially from the Soil and Air of America’s” irksome, as it would “cheat an honest American of his Slave.”⁹ Difference in air and soil aside, the case undeniably gave further cause to question the existence of slavery in the British Empire, in the colonies as well as in London. And question it enslaved people did, notably in the place Somerset lived before he set sail for London in 1769: Demah’s own New England.¹⁰

Even before the Somerset case, Black New Englanders had a long history of seeking freedom. They chose informal means like running away but also made use of formal channels like the courts. As early as 1701, a man called Adam sued his enslaver John Saffin for breaking his promise to let Adam buy his freedom. After several lawyers, a pamphlet war, and a few years, Adam finally won his case. In the 1760s, enslaved people still tended to make their freedom cases through the courts, with the assistance of white lawyers sympathetic to their cause. Although court cases long remained a standard abolitionist tactic, in the 1770s, enslaved people seeking their freedom shifted tactics, in part influenced by the publicity attached to well-known cases such as Somerset’s, and the attention given to Mansfield’s verdict. Individual people added their names or their marks to group petitions, petitions that were sent directly to executive or legislative authorities rather than winding their way through the courts. Petitions had the advantage of being easily published as broadsides, as pamphlets, and in newspapers, allowing them to become widely known and tried in the court of public opinion. They were useful devices for helping the relatively small Black community in Boston become more aware of its collective political power.¹¹

Although slavery had been a constant presence in the colony of Massachusetts since the 1630s, the number of people of African descent in Boston was small enough for individual members of it like Demah to be familiar with many members of Boston’s Black community by name or reputation if not by acquaintance. By the mid-1760s, slightly over a tenth of the just over 15,000 inhabitants of Boston were Black. News of the case would have made its way quickly through the town’s Black community. After all, news about the Somerset case traveled quickly through London’s Black community despite that group being estimated as much larger than Boston’s, at between 15,000 and 20,000 people. In Boston as well as in London, news traveled quickly in part because of the crowded nature of urban living, whether those cities were large like London or small like Boston. The names Somerset and Mansfield made their way through the city, whispered about in kitchens after enslavers went to bed, behind hands on Sundays in segregated church pews, written and read about by the many literate members of Boston’s free Black people, and talked about on the streets and in the shops where Black peoples’ lives and labors took them.¹²

On January 6, 1773, less than six months after the Somerset verdict and the day before Demah first advertised his services as a painter in the Boston News-Letter, an enslaved man named Felix petitioned Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson and the General Court. He did so on behalf of himself and “many Slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns in the Province.” Although a freedom petition, it did not state that desire outright. Instead, it asked for Massachusetts leaders to show the “Wisdom, Justice, and Goodness” to better the “unhappy State and Condition” of the colony’s enslaved people. The petitioners situated their local plight within the broader transatlantic world of the British Empire. The petitioners enlisted antislavery sentiment in “the Hearts of Multitudes on both Sides of the Water,” calling out in particular “Men of great Note and Influence; who have pleaded our Cause with Arguments which we hope will have their weight with this Honorable Court.” So soon after the Somerset case, the implication was clear: Massachusetts leaders like Hutchinson should model Mansfield when they made their decision about Felix’s petition.¹³

Although Demah was not one of the Boston men who helped write the petition, it is hard to imagine that he did not know of it. News of the petition—the first made by Black people to a legislature in New England—soon made its way into a Boston newspaper. It also circulated in pamphlet form, accompanied by a version of a newspaper opinion piece and antislavery letters from “A Lover of True Liberty” and “The Sons of Africa”—the latter pen name signaling that it was written by men of African descent. Like the original petition, these publications used current events to point out that slavery was hypocritical at best and spiritually bankrupt at worst. The newspaper piece also argued (neatly sidestepping laws allowing slavery in the colony) that the Massachusetts Charter prohibited it.

The charter ensured that all residents of the colony “shou’d enjoy the same Liberties and Privileges as in England.” Lord Mansfield, in “a late memorable Case determined at the highest Court of Common Law at Home,” had just reiterated that the laws of England meant “no Person can be held as a Slave, otherwise than by an express Law of the Country he lives in.” And “that there is any such Law in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay,” the author “absolutely” denied. It went against “the Spirit and Intention of the Charter” to keep people in bondage. Meanwhile, in the same pamphlet, the “Sons of Africa” argued that slavery in New England went against the spirit of “patriotism” itself. The “Lovers of Liberty” agreed, pointing out that for colonists protesting imperial policies like the Townshend Duties “to be talking of Liberty, and, at the same Time to continue importing and making Slaves of whole Cargoes of their Fellow Creatures, must, I think, be judged” as hypocritical indeed.¹⁴

As these last critiques make clear, the Somerset case was not the only justification used in freedom petitions after 1772. By the 1770s, such petitions resonated with the broader political culture. From the Stamp Act on, colonial protest against parliamentary infringements on their constitutional rights made calls for freedom from tyranny commonplace. Colonial protests against imperial policy gave enslaved people a powerful ideological language to advance and justify their cause. But Black abolitionist activists held freedom dear long before the Stamp Act or James Somerset’s name became news. When we reconstruct the architecture of revolutionary-era protest, we must consider how white colonists might have borrowed from Black calls for freedom as well. As one petition by “a Grate Number of Blackes” to the Massachusetts governor put it, a few years before the Declaration of Independence said much the same: “we have in common With all other men a naturel right to our freedoms.”¹⁵

In part because of the Somerset case, and in part because of efforts spearheaded by Black abolitionists supported by sympathetic white colonists, in early 1773, as Demah first advertised his professional painting career in a Boston newspaper, local publications ensured that transatlantic ideas about slavery and abolition were in the news, integrally tied to colonial protests against imperial policy. One of the men in Boston who certainly gave thought to colonial liberty from tyranny, and most likely to slavery, too, was the white man who let Demah use his shop as his place of business, watchmaker John McLean. Like Demah, McLean had trained his skills across the Atlantic, first apprenticed “in Dublin to one of the best Finishers there” and then “in London for improvement.”¹⁶ During the uproar over the Townshend Duties that led to the killing of young Christopher Seider, the beating of John Mein, and, eventually, the tarring and feathering of a horse in Henry Barnes’s name, McLean stood with the boycotters. In October of that year, he proudly advertised that he was “now at Work on a Watch, the whole of which will be finished in the Province, except the Two Plates and Cases.” By making a homespun watch, he placed himself at the forefront of domestic manufacturing and the “Made in America” movement.¹⁷

McLean’s ad ran in the same edition of the paper that had as first-page news one of the lists Henry Barnes would soon feature in with regularity, that of “the Names of those who have AUDACIOUSLY counteracted the UNITED SENTIMENTS of the BODY of Merchants throughout NORTH-AMERICA, by importing British Goods contrary to the Agreement.”¹⁸ First in London and now in Boston, Demah’s mentors were men who were, like himself, creative and talented with their hands. Despite the very different objects they produced, their contemporaries would have viewed both men as skilled artisans. The two men who helped Demah in London and Boston had other things in common, too. Both Pine and McLean were sympathetic to American protest against Britain and changed the things they made to reflect that political point of view.

Their politics also meant that both Pine and McLean had political leanings in direct opposition to those of Demah’s enslavers. In 1773, as they had been in 1770 and would be still in 1775, Henry and Christian Barnes remained staunch and outspoken Loyalists. Future events, on the other hand, would prove that Demah did not share their political views. Demah had more in common, politically as well as professionally, with Pine and McLean than he did with Henry and Christian Barnes. Why, then, would the Barneses allow Demah such close associations with Pine and McLean?

It is unlikely that the Barneses knew of Pine’s republican politics in 1770—there was no reason for them to question whether distasteful politics lurked beneath his desirable exterior as an award-winning British painter. True, Pine had painted a portrait of John Wilkes, but he also had painted a portrait of King George II that circulated widely in print form. Demah and Henry Barnes left London a few months before Pine painted another portrait that might have given them cause to worry about his radical politics—that of London’s Lord Mayor Brass Crosby, a supporter of John Wilkes sent to the Tower of London for advocating for the publication of debates in Parliament. Pine’s portrait of Crosby holding a copy of the Charter of the City of London, with the Tower in the background, picked up on earlier themes in both his portrait of John Wilkes and his history painting of John de Warenne… Giving his Answer to the King’s Justices on the Enforcement of the Statute of Quo Warranto (1771). By fall of 1771, Pine’s portrait of Crosby was circulating as a print. But the Barneses did not know of Pine’s politically charged 1771 portraits before Demah trained with him. The Barneses, certainly, did not know of Demah’s political leanings when they sent him to London in 1770, and it is unlikely that they knew them in 1773, either. Demah had a history of guarding his political views in front of his enslavers, a circumspection that speaks to his cleverness as well as his caution. Besides, the Barneses assumed that he shared their perspective. Like many eighteenth-century enslavers, even though he was a grown man, they viewed him as perpetually infantilized, someone who, as Christian put it, was “Born in our family” and thus loyal to their beliefs, much as a child would be to its parents.¹⁹

Although the Barneses were likely to know where McLean stood politically (at least on the matter of boycotts), it was unlikely that, in late 1772 and early 1773, the watchmaker’s Patriot sympathies kept them up at night. In January 1773, when Demah first started advertising the availability of his services from McLean’s shop, politics were less volatile. No one was rioting in the streets, smashing shop windows, or tarring and feathering political scapegoats. The Tea Act, which granted the East India Company monopolistic control over sales of tea in the North American colonies and caused a roar of colonial protest, would not be passed until May. Demah began working out of McLean’s shop during the calm before the next political storm, something of course no one living through the time could have known. By early 1773, the Barneses had less control over Demah’s choices. Five years later, Demah documented in his will that he was a free man. But in early 1773, Demah seems to have been living in what is best described as a state of “unfreedom,” somewhere between enslaved and free, in which he lived and labored on his own in Boston but remained technically the property of the Barneses in Marlborough (who undoubtedly demanded a share of his profits, too).²⁰

It was not uncommon for talented enslaved people to be permitted or even encouraged to learn skilled artisanal trades and then practice those trades outside their enslavers’ homes or businesses. They worked alongside goldsmiths, painters, and printers in Boston throughout the eighteenth century. In the 1750s, Peter Fleet, enslaved by printer Thomas Fleet, was seen as “an ingenious man” who “cut, on wooden blocks, all the pictures which decorated the ballads and small books of his master.” Peter Fleet had enough pride in his work to put his initials on some of his prints.²¹ In the 1730s, painter John Smibert relied on his enslaved assistant Cuffee to grind his pigments for his portraits—work Cuffee gave up when he ran to freedom. Cuffee, like Demah, had been a mariner before learning about painting.²² Demah was one of a long line of artisans living in Boston who were enslaved. But unlike Cuffee or even Fleet, Demah was seen as something beyond skilled. He was not merely talented; he was a genius.

Regardless of their politics, the people who encouraged Demah’s painting on both sides of the Atlantic all recognized that genius. His genius was the reason Robert Edge Pine gave for taking on Demah’s training in London (and without charge, at that). And his genius was the reason Christian Barnes gave for sending him to London in the first place. No doubt with Daphny’s encouragement, Christian Barnes saw Prince Demah’s genius from the start. Barnes crowed to her friends that he was “a most surprising instance of the force of natural Genius,” all but stating outright that he was a truer genius than Copley, a man whose works Barnes knew well and who was widely acknowledged at that point to be America’s best resident portraitist.²³ The more she saw of his work, as he sketched in pastel and painted under her watchful eyes in the Marlborough home they shared after the Barneses purchased him, the more impressed she became. She marveled at the portraits he made, including his self-portrait. He was a painter who never (according to her, at least) painted until very recently, and “has never had the least instruction or direction.”²⁴ Christian Barnes was not alone in using lack of instruction as a hallmark of genius. Untutored skill was particularly noteworthy when it came to American genius. Benjamin Franklin was a case in point. One of the reasons Hume admired his friend Franklin’s genius was that he considered him the first American genius; his intellect akin to a raw material extracted from the land. Hume made the comparison explicit, telling Franklin that “America has sent us many good things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo &c.: But you are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden to her.” Franklin’s fellow Philadelphian and American Philosophical Society member David Rittenhouse was discussed in similar fashion. As Thomas Jefferson noted of Rittenhouse, he was “second to no astronomer living; that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught.”²⁵

But although untutored talent could be a mark of genius, trained genius was desirable, particularly in someone like a painter who relied on commissions. The Barneses knew this fact, of course. Their desire to polish Demah’s genius for their profit certainly was one of their motivations for sending him to London to hone his craft. Given the trouble many residents of the British Empire had envisioning Black genius, however, this decision (although logical in some ways) was an unusual one, met with derision by the Barneses’ friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Their friend Janette Barclay wrote to their mutual friend Elizabeth Murray Smith about Christian Barnes’s dreams for Demah, noting her astonishment at his London training as she “never dreamt she intended to make him a Limner.” Part of her disbelief lay in the problem that even if Demah “after all were to answer her Expectations, who in Boston wou’d prefer a Negro to Copley”?²⁶

At least some in Boston, it seemed, did. Merchant William Duguid, whose portrait hangs at the Met Museum today, commissioned his likeness from Demah around the same time Demah first advertised his services as “a Negro Man whose extraordinary Genius has been assisted by one of the best Masters in London.” Before making his decision, perhaps Duguid walked first to McLean’s shop, curious to see the “Specimens” of Demah’s “Performances” on display. While there, Duguid might have looked at watches as well as portraits. Having a genius in residence was good for business, McLean might well have thought. But McLean seems to have been interested in art as well as profit. He also sold tickets for concerts of “musick” at his shop.²⁷ Sponsoring a Black genius and letting him display his work in his shop made sense on a number of levels for McLean.

But Demah was not the only Black genius who lived in Boston. He was not even the only Black genius working in McLean’s neighborhood. McLean’s shop was in a bustling part of Boston, on King Street, near the State House that served as backdrop for Crispus Attucks’s killing by British gunfire in what we now call the Boston Massacre. McLean’s shop was a short walk both from the site of the massacre and to the corner of King and Mackerel, where a family called the Wheatleys lived.

Like the Barneses, the Wheatleys were a mercantile family and enslavers. Among the residents of the Wheatley home was Phillis, who had lived with them since she arrived in Boston as a seven-year-old child, stolen from her African family and sold across the Atlantic. Demah and Wheatley had parallel lives in more ways than one. Like Prince Demah, Phillis Wheatley was an artist, though she wielded a pen rather than a paintbrush, pouring her genius out in poetry instead of portraits. Like Demah’s, Wheatley’s enslavers encouraged the education required to hone her craft. The two Bostonians were in the public eye at the same time, too. The day after Demah first advertised his availability to paint portraits at McLean’s, an advertisement ran in another local paper seeking subscribers to publish a book of Wheatley’s poems. But like Demah, Wheatley would find she needed to leave Boston to further her artistry. Just as Copley refused to train Demah, local efforts to publish Wheatley’s book of poems failed. Instead, she too needed to sail to London to further her genius. But her trip differed in a crucial respect from Demah’s. She sailed after rather than before their fellow former resident of Boston, James Somerset, made transatlantic news. Unlike Demah, if she wanted to, she had good reason to believe she could parlay her time in London into more than becoming a professional artist—she could, like Somerset, seek her freedom.²⁸

7 LADIES OF GENIUS

CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN for London in the summer of 1773 was different for Phillis Wheatley than it had been for Prince Demah a few years earlier. Unlike Demah, Wheatley was no mariner, familiar with sails and rigging and weather portents at dawn and dusk. She was not accustomed to the rolling sway of waves and cramped quarters of a ship under sail. But Wheatley was familiar with the sea. She had crossed the Atlantic before. For like Demah’s mother Daphny, Wheatley was a saltwater slave. Like Daphny, Wheatley had endured the Middle Passage, existing for weeks in “a floating World,” as another African woman taken as a child and enslaved near Boston put it. A floating world filled with “scenes which her imagination had never conceived of,” including “the sporting Monsters of the deep” and “three hundred Affricans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torments; and some of them rejoicing, that the pangs of death came like a balm to their wounds.” Whether it ended in death or survival, it was a harrowing journey. Although Wheatley did not sail on a slave ship this crossing, surely she thought of that first voyage. Senses stir memory. The smell of the ocean, the feel of the wind, the sound of the ship slicing through the waves, the sight of endless water stretching to the horizon—all must have evoked memories of that first transatlantic trip on the ship that ripped her forever, as she put it, from “pleasing Gambia” and its “verdant shores.” That ship carried her into slavery and inspired her enslavers’ name for her—a ship called Phillis.¹

Poet that she was, Wheatley was attuned better than most to the import of choosing one word rather than another, the power of metaphor to make meaning. Even if she grew up to carry the weight of that first transatlantic voyage more in bodily memory than conscious remembrance, the recurring theme of vast, often rough seas of “waves on waves devolving without End” in her poems tells us it left its mark.² Maybe she felt lighter when the cawing of seagulls alerted her that England was near. Yet for all its discomforts the journey was worth it. For like other talented Americans who made the journey—Benjamin Franklin, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright—the Atlantic crossing helped the gold of her genius shine brighter. As it was for Franklin, Britain was a place where she would find herself and her intellect celebrated by famous and powerful people. And as it was for Demah, in London more people were willing to recognize her artistry. And like Patience Wright, in the capital of the British Empire she would find herself placed in a small circle of women around the British Atlantic World who were acknowledged to be geniuses. When she left London after her six-week visit, everything was secured for publication of her poems in a book touted as “perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced.”³

And it was precisely those networks of women—in America as well as in London—that were pivotal to getting Wheatley’s book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773. Despite being well publicized, attempts to raise the three hundred subscribers required to publish the book in Boston had failed the year before. The attempt succeeded in London in part because of the patronage of British aristocrat Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.⁴ The countess had a long history of patronage and philanthropy. Along with John Pine and William Hogarth, she was an early supporter of London’s Foundling Hospital in the 1730s. By the 1760s, she was famed not merely in Britain but throughout the British Atlantic for her charitable efforts in support of evangelical religion. She financed the building of chapels in Britain and the Georgia orphanage operated by the Reverend George Whitefield. She was at the center of a transatlantic network of missionaries and ministers that included Mohegan preacher Samson Occom as well as Whitefield. Like Whitefield, she became an enslaver when she inherited Whitefield’s former Georgia orphanage. She also, however, financed publications by enslaved and formerly enslaved people.

Wheatley’s 1773 book of poems was the second such publication she financed. The first was published in Bath in 1772, the year before Wheatley arrived in London. The first African slave narrative published in English was the autobiography of an African prince called Ukawsaw Gronniosaw who was formerly enslaved first in Barbados and then in New York. Like Wheatley, he was sold into captivity while young—in his case, as a teenager. His last enslaver was a Dutch reformed minister, friendly with Whitefield, who encouraged his avid attachment to Christianity and freed him upon his death. After a brief career privateering in the Caribbean, Gronniosaw traveled across the Atlantic to England, in part drawn by his admiration for Whitefield. There, as James Albert, he married an English widow, had children, and lived a free but impoverished man supported by his wife’s meager earnings as a weaver. His narrative recounted this biographical and spiritual journey, or what he called “of GOD’s wonderful Dealings with me.” Although it denounced racism in the British Empire, it was less a condemnation of slavery than a celebration of how Christian gospel could spread to “benighted parts of the world” like Africa. Dedicated “Through Her LADYSHIP’s Permission” to the countess, A Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As related by himself proved popular and went through multiple editions in America as well as in Britain. Women were as integral to the publication’s success as Gronniosaw’s wife and her “hard labor at the loom” was pivotal to his support. The countess financed it, and readers learned that it was “committed to paper by the elegant pen of a young LADY of the town of LEOMINSTER.”⁵

Like Gronniosaw’s book, Wheatley’s publication had the support of more women besides the Countess of Huntingdon. It succeeded in London in part because of efforts Wheatley’s enslaver Susanna Wheatley made. The Wheatleys admired Whitefield and his teachings and encouraged Phillis to correspond with Mohegan preacher Samson Occom (Occom, in fact, was Wheatley’s first celebrity correspondent). When it became evident that there was not enough financial support for the Boston publication of her poems, Susanna Wheatley helped publicize word of her trip to London, placing Phillis’s poem “A Farewel to America” alongside notice of her forthcoming trip to England in newspapers in Salem, Worcester, and Connecticut towns as well as in Boston. She also sent the poem and notice to The London Chronicle—a savvy move that ensured that Phillis and her work would be front and center in the public eye when she arrived in London.⁶

Much as Christian Barnes had done with Prince Demah a few years before, Susanna Wheatley made every effort to ensure that her enslaved genius protégée met with the support in London they had not found in Massachusetts. The two white women’s motivation for their efforts seems to have been similar but not precisely the same. Christian Barnes seemed motivated by a desire to reap at least some financial benefit from training Demah to become a professional painter, while Susanna Wheatley seemed less motivated by hope for profit, for Phillis hoped to claim half the money made from her book sales.⁷ Both white women seemed to have a genuine, if proprietary and thus ultimately self-serving, wish to see their enslaved workers’ genius publicly acknowledged. But just as Daphny coaxed Christian to notice her son and Prince Demah used his talent and labor first to guarantee his training in London and then his work as a professional painter, Phillis Wheatley used her talent and cleverness to ensure first her book’s publication and then her own freedom. Integral though they were in their encouragement of their enslaved protégées’ genius, neither Christian Barnes nor Susanna Wheatley was, ultimately, responsible for their flourishing, any more than the Countess of Huntingdon was responsible for the intellectual content of the books she financed. Yet these women and their connections were critical to the warm welcome Demah and Wheatley enjoyed in London.

For Phillis Wheatley, one of the most important of these networks was that made up of evangelical Christians who formed a transatlantic community in which both the Countess of Huntingdon and George Whitefield (even after he was dead) were central nodes. Like Patience Wright, who had journeyed to London only the year before, Wheatley crossed the Atlantic with a portrait of the deceased reverend that she hoped to put on public display. Wheatley’s portrait was in prose on paper rather than in wax, however, and dedicated to Whitefield’s “truly noble Benefactress,” the “worthy and pious” Countess of Huntingdon.⁸ Wheatley, of course, meant for her portrait to be published as part of a collection of poems rather than displayed in a room with other wax figures. In fitting tribute to the importance religion held in both women’s lives, it was their portraits of Whitefield that helped set them on the path to fame and secured their reputation as ladies of genius. When Wheatley arrived in London in 1773, Wright’s statue of Whitefield was already on display, alongside a “most striking likeness of the celebrated Dr. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, of Philadelphia, now in London.”⁹ Both were featured in Wright’s prestigious new exhibition space on Chudleigh Court, situated between Pall Mall and the gardens of St. James’s Palace.

Wright also had chosen to add the wax figure of another woman widely recognized as a genius in the British Empire. This genius was British historian Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, who was “so much admired for her great Learning, Writing and amiable Character.”¹⁰ Among those like Wright who were passionate about American politics, Macaulay was just as admired for her warm support of the republican cause as for her histories of Britain. Macaulay’s was one of the first wax figures Wright made in London. By 1772, Macaulay’s ideological bent was evident in the first five volumes of A History of England, published between 1763 and 1771. Her work was celebrated among Wright’s fellow American colonists with republican leanings, including John Dickinson, whose portrait in wax Wright also made and displayed in her galleries. At one point, Dickinson sent Macaulay a piece of silk homespun in Philadelphia, as proof both of his admiration and of the ability of colonists to manufacture textiles for themselves during economic boycotts.¹¹ As John Adams noted, “America has not got two warmer friends in” Great Britain “than Mrs. Macaulay, and her Own Brother.” Macaulay’s brother was John Sawbridge, an early supporter of John Wilkes, a radical member of Parliament, and elected sheriff and alderman of London. He was indeed an influential man of the time. But it was Macaulay who was the real star—on both sides of the Atlantic.¹² And she was that rare intellectual able to have wide popular appeal, as evidenced by the Massachusetts colonists Nathanial and Elizabeth Barber, whose daughter’s name of Catherine MacAulay Barber complemented those of her two brothers, John Wilkes and Oliver Cromwell Barber.¹³

Like Macaulay, Wheatley found that her writing brought her to the attention of famous and powerful people, women as well as men. At times, such notoriety brought unwelcome attention. Because of contemporary ideas about what was and was not appropriate feminine behavior, Macaulay, Wright, and Wheatley, like all women intellectuals of their time, found themselves facing greater scrutiny (and criticism) than their male counterparts. John Adams, for example, celebrated Macaulay but also held the general opinion that “History is not the Province of the Ladies.”¹⁴ For all women celebrated as a genius, that designation was a double-edged sword. Wheatley, of course, faced the extra indignity of proving her ability to those who deemed people of African descent inferior, just as Prince Demah did. In fact, white people questioning whether her talents were indeed her own meant that when she published her book of poems in London, it included some unusual features. One of the most unusual was Wheatley’s own proposal, although her part in putting it together was hidden to public view, with a list of white men’s names visible rather than her own.

In lieu of a list of subscribers who paid in advance for their copies to finance the publication, Wheatley’s book included the copy of a signed manuscript that Wheatley brought with her to London. This document was an “attestation” by “WE whose Names are under-written” that the poems were “written by PHILLIS,” a girl “who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town.” Nevertheless, these men confirmed, “some of the best Judges” had examined her, and they agreed that she was “thought qualified to write them.” The men signing their names to this attestation did so, they said, at the request of Wheatley’s London publisher, Archibald Bell, who worried that “Numbers would be willing to suspect” that the poems “were not really the Writings of PHILLIS.” The group itself offered proof of Wheatley’s wide-ranging appeal as well as her talent, as it included seven ministers, “her Master” John Wheatley, Sons of Liberty leader John Hancock, and one of the Sons of Liberty’s most vilified protest targets, Tory Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson.¹⁵

Wheatley was no stranger to doubts about the authenticity of her poems, nor to the fascination people had with the very African descent and enslaved status that made many question her abilities in the first place. She and the Wheatleys, particularly Susanna, confronted this dichotomy head on. The list of men signing their names to the “attestation” of her authorship was her idea. She knew there would be doubts that her poems were the “performance” of “a Negro, since which she has had a paper Drawn up & signed by the Gov. Councils, Minister & most of ye people of note in this place, certifying the authenticity of it.”¹⁶ While trying to gain support for a Boston publication of Phillis’s poems, Susanna Wheatley advertised her hope that “Encouragement will be given to this Publication, as a reward to a very uncommon Genius, at present a slave.”¹⁷ When Susanna Wheatley sent a copy of “A Farewel to America” and news of Phillis’s impending arrival to The London Chronicle, the note to be published with the poem acknowledged that she was “an extraordinary negro girl,” and one with natural genius at that, as it was “by her own application, unassisted by others” that she “cultivated her natural talents for poetry” and wrote “several pieces which (all circumstances considered) have great merit.”¹⁸ As Christian Barnes had with Demah, Wheatley’s enslavers used her enslaved status as well as her race to highlight her natural genius.

Phillis Wheatley was either clever or sardonic enough to do the same. In the fall of 1772, William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth, was appointed to the King’s Cabinet as head of the Board of Trade. The earl was widely believed to be friendly to colonial American interests, for he had voted to repeal the Stamp Act. Americans in London, like Franklin, as well as those in the colonies, found hope in his appointment. Among those who hoped the appointment would help them was Thomas Woolridge, a British merchant on the make in the colonies married to a colonial woman, Susannah Kelly. Likely at the instigation of his wife, Woolridge visited the Wheatleys and cheekily demanded Wheatley produce a poem on the spot to prove her abilities. Proving herself more refined than her visitor, she told him to propose a subject and return the next day. He proposed “the Earl of Dartmouth,” and the next day, on October 10, she wrote in front of him a lengthy and erudite poem addressed to the earl.¹⁹

Although a remarkable poem in any case, it is likely that she had more time to think about it than Woolridge knew, and because of his own wife Susannah, at that. It seems that Woolridge’s American wife Susannah worked with Susanna and Phillis Wheatley to concoct the plan to get Woolridge to demand a poem from Wheatley as proof of her talents for Dartmouth (and by extension, Dartmouth’s friend the Countess of Huntingdon). Wheatley’s poem “Ode to Neptune. On Mrs. W—’s Voyage to England” records her warm feelings for Woolridge’s wife, asking the gods for calm seas “While my Susannah skims the wat’ry way” across the Atlantic to London. Tellingly, it is the only poem dated in her 1773 book, and it is recorded as written in Boston on October 10, 1772: the same day Woolridge visited her to collect on her Dartmouth poem. Although Thomas Woolridge did not know it, he did precisely what the three colonial women wanted him to do.²⁰

The poem Wheatley wrote for Woolridge to send to England was titled, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth.” It expressed hopes that the earl’s cabinet appointment signaled an end to the “Wanton Tyranny with lawless Hand” that previously sought “to enslave, O Liberty! Thy Land” in America. It also referenced her African heritage and enslavement, the “Seeming cruel fate” that “snatch’d” her “from Afric’s fancy’d happy Seat.” Just as Black freedom petitioners were also doing in the wake of the Somerset decision that year, she expressly linked liberty from political tyranny with freedom from slavery. Anticipating the question of whether “you, my lord, while you peruse my song,” would “wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, / Whence flow these wishes for the common good,” she pointed to her own captivity and separation from her father as reason that “I deplore the day / When Britons weep beneath Tyrannic sway.” She answered those who doubted her authorial voice by acknowledging her African origins and enslavement while simultaneously using it to comment upon imperial politics, and to one of the king’s cabinet members, no less. Little wonder that when she made it to London, the Earl of Dartmouth met her.²¹

The Earl of Dartmouth was but one of the numerous aristocrats she met while in London. She also met Lord Lyttelton, a politically powerful Whig aristocrat who was, among other roles, chancellor of the Exchequer between 1755 and 1756 and famed as a tastemaker and arbiter of good literature. Lyttelton was a champion of women intellectuals as well as male writers. He wrote Dialogues of the Dead with Elizabeth Montagu. And of Catharine Macaulay, he said, “I would have STATUES erected to her memory, and once in every age, I could wish such a woman to appear, as a proof that Genius is not confined to Sex.”²² In addition to aristocrats, Wheatley met global intellectual luminaries like Benjamin Franklin and British women famed for their activism, intellect, and robust female networks. Among these was the writer Mary Reynolds Palmer, older sister of Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is intriguing that Wheatley singled out Palmer (whose writings were published anonymously during her lifetime) for notice. Perhaps she saw in her a kindred spirit, as she called her not only “an accomplished Lady” but also “a Poetess.”

Wheatley accumulated books as well as acquaintances in London. Those she chose to buy were older works with a decidedly humorous bent, including Samuel Butler’s seventeenth-century burlesque, satirical poem “Hudibras,” Miguel de Cervantes’s early seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote, and a book of stories in rhyme that managed to be both funny and moralizing, The Fables of John Gay, first published in 1727. Although they all impart moral lessons, the works Wheatley bought from London booksellers were humorous and witty rather than staid or serious.²³

The merchant Brooks Watson gave her a folio edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was notable, as she put it, for being printed “on a Silver Type, so call’d from its elegance (I suppose),” with Watson’s coat of arms on its frontispiece. Watson was himself a former resident of Boston, famous for having only one leg after a shark attacked him in Havana Harbor during his youthful work as a mariner. The Earl of Dartmouth gave her money to buy “the whole of Mr. Pope’s Works,” a suggestion to which Lyttelton undoubtedly gave a hearty second, for he was one of Pope’s friends and patrons. Lyttelton died shortly after meeting Wheatley. But his celebrated, discerning eye for good poetry outlived him, making him a logical person for her London publisher to cite in advertisements for her book as amazed “at the gifts with which infinite Wisdom has furnished her.”²⁴ During her six weeks in England, she saw some of London’s most impressive sights, including Westminster Abbey, Greenwich Hospital, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and, as she put it, “&c. & c. too many things & Places to trouble you with in a Letter.”²⁵ Despite her whirlwind tour and many new acquaintances, in an odd twist of fate, Wheatley never met the Countess of Huntingdon, who was in Wales during the six weeks Wheatley was in London.

She did, however, meet abolitionist Granville Sharp, who “attended me to the Tower & Show’d the Lions, Panthers, Tigers, & c. the Horse Armoury” as well as the crown jewels and “the Font for christening the Royal Family.”²⁶ Sharp, of course, had been instrumental in helping to secure the freedom of formerly enslaved Black men in London like Jonathan Strong and James Somerset. Perhaps the visit to see captured animals taken far from their African homes served as an opportunity for Sharp to remind Wheatley that if she wished, she could, like Somerset, refuse to return to America and claim her freedom in London instead. It is hard to imagine that he did not raise the matter, given his history of activism on behalf of formerly enslaved freedom-seekers like Jonathan Strong and James Somerset. It is equally difficult to imagine that the two did not discuss the relatively recent verdict of the Somerset case during their time together, not least as Somerset, like Wheatley, had come to London from Boston.²⁷

The visit to see the Tower menagerie might also have reflected something Sharp had not given much thought to at all, so deeply embedded was it in contemporary culture. That was the tendency of white Britons at the time to emphasize the perceived exoticism of non-European people and things that so fascinated them, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Americas, and to not distinguish much between those people, their things, and their local natural world. Certainly, this cultural norm helped explain the popularity of two other places that Wheatley mentioned visiting, at least in passing, while in London: the British Museum and Cox’s Museum, an exhibition of automata opened just months before. Although she herself may not have made this connection, many of the Britons she met certainly would have thought of her in the exoticized terms in which they thought of the wonders they saw in both museums.²⁸

Wheatley’s visit to the British Museum might have been suggested (or inspired) by Lord Lyttelton, who was one of its trustees. At the time, the museum held historical artifacts from around the globe, a library including medieval manuscripts, and also a sizable natural history collection with many objects from the East and West Indies. Especially because of the latter, it is also possible that Wheatley’s visit was inspired by either of the two famous natural history connoisseurs she met while in London. One of these was the Swedish naturalist Doctor Solander, who was Assistant Keeper of Natural History at the museum. Solander accompanied Joseph Banks on his voyage around the globe between 1768 and 1771 on the HMS Endeavour, under the command of Captain James Cook. Solander helped Banks catalog and bring home drawings and samples of more than a thousand previously unknown plant species. Like Banks, he became a darling of the London scientific community upon his return from the celebrated voyage. In addition to Solander, Wheatley also met phenomenally wealthy and influential natural history collector the Duchess of Portland. Both the duchess and Solander would have been fascinated by Wheatley’s African heritage and time in America. Wheatley, in turn, might have seen samples of African plants familiar from her childhood, or found as much curious delight in things from Tahiti as any other resident of the British Empire in the 1770s.²⁹

Wheatley would have seen very different things on display in Cox’s Museum, although both collections appealed to the same eighteenth-century culture of curiosity. Any of her aristocratic and wealthy new acquaintances might have suggested she visit. The museum’s proprietor, goldsmith, and clockmaker, James Cox, was forthcoming in advertisements about it being a site intended for the nobility and gentry, although it also proved popular with well-heeled literati. Unlike other entertaining places of spectacle, like Mrs. Salmon’s waxworks, it was expensive. It cost over ten shillings to visit. The high entry fee was in keeping with the value of the pieces. Originally created for markets in India and China (including some pieces made to delight the Chinese emperor), it was a collection of bejeweled, mechanized figures, popularly called “sing-songs,” some of which later ended up in the collections of the Russian empress. Valued at the extraordinary sum of 197,000 pounds, it may have been less awe-inspiring and majestic than the crown jewels, but it was just as dazzling. As one Rhode Islander in London put it, it was “impossible to celebrate sufficiently so precious and ingenious a Work.” It was like being in an “inchanted castle.” Simultaneously beautiful, scientific, and exotic, it was exactly the combination of marvels to impress well-educated eighteenth-century viewers.³⁰

There was nothing remotely like it in Boston. At Cox’s Museum, visitors could see moving figures like that of sixteen elephants supporting two seven-foot-tall temples adorned with 1,700 pieces of jewelry, and a “gardener’s boy” made of “rich gilt” over “molten copper,” posed “upon a beautiful green enamel’d ground, whereone various fruits, roots, leaves, insects and implements of gardening are placed, differently composed of gold and jewellry,” wearing on his head a “Vase of avanturine and lapis lazuli” that played musical chimes, featured a “curious time-piece,” and “grew” a “richly gilt” silver “pine-apple copied from nature, whose leaves are finely enaml’d of a beautiful transparent green.” These burst open when the chimes played to reveal a nest with a bejeweled bird feeding her young.³¹ Conveniently situated near Charing Cross, St. James’s Palace, and St. Martin’s Lane, Cox’s Museum was accessible to its wealthy patrons and but a few minutes’ walk to Wright’s wax museum.

Although Wheatley did not mention Wright’s museum among the London attractions she saw, she would have recognized most if not all of its wax subjects. Some she knew by reputation, and some she knew in person. Others were people she was invited to meet while in England but did not have a chance to, given the brevity of her visit, including King George III. Wheatley’s and Wright’s circles overlapped in more ways than one. It is possible Wheatley visited Wright’s waxworks but did not find it worthy of noting to correspondents back home, given their familiarity with its American proprietor. Or perhaps Wheatley simply saw no need to add a visit to her itinerary. She likely had seen samples of Wright’s work in Boston two years before. If she had, she certainly would have been drawn to the wax portrait of Whitefield, who was the subject of her own elegiac poem dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon. This elegy made a household name of “PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 years of Age,” who until nine years ago had been living in Africa. Highlighting the details of her biography was both helpful and damaging. As with Prince Demah before her, Wheatley’s artistic talents were viewed as all the more remarkable—a compelling proof of genius—given her state of enslavement. Some believed that a state of enslavement made it impossible to be a genius at all. Some found it hard to reconcile her personal history with the art she created. Others found it hard to believe that an African-born enslaved girl, the property of “Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston,” was capable of such poetry.³²

And yet, despite the doubts of some white people, her elegy about Whitefield became the most popular poem written about the British Empire’s most popular preacher, printed and reprinted (at least nine times) in broadside form in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Newport and circulated across the Atlantic to London in many forms well before it was published as part of her 1773 book of poems. The popular poem, in fact, likely helped boost the appeal of Patience Wright’s Whitefield statue. Many of those who paid to see it, whether in New York, Boston, or London, would have bought, read, or heard Wheatley’s poem, as well. Both Wheatley’s poem and Wright’s wax figure were integral to the transatlantic popular culture that kept Whitefield’s celebrity alive and well after his death.³³

Among Whitefield’s many enthusiasts in London were a few of his wax companions in Wright’s galleries, including Lord Lyttelton. Also sharing the galleries with Whitefield and Wright was one of Whitefield’s real-life acquaintances and the only American Wheatley mentioned meeting while in London: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was familiar with Wright’s wax figure of Whitefield and almost certainly read Wheatley’s 1770 elegy.³⁴ It was of interest to all who admired Whitefield but particularly so to Americans. In the broadside versions that circulated in the colonies and London, Wheatley’s elegy positioned Whitefield as a friend to America in general and New England in particular. As she wrote:

When his Americans were burthen’d sore,

When Streets were crimson’d with their guiltless Gore!

Wond’rous Compassion in his breast now strove:

The Fruit thereof was Charity and Love.

Towards America what could he more!

Than leave his native Home, the British Shore,

To cross the Great Atlantick wat’ry Road,

To see New England’s much-distress’d Abode.³⁵

Whitefield died in the fall of 1770, about six months after the dramatic events of what later became known as the Boston Massacre. The trials of the British soldiers involved made news around the British Empire. Wheatley chose to situate Whitefield’s death within the context of that event, using his death as an occasion to recall American streets red with the innocent blood of colonists.

Her elegy written to honor the deceased preacher commemorated one street in particular—King Street. Not only was this the street upon which she happened to live, it was also the site of the Boston Massacre, which occurred within sight of the Wheatley home.³⁶ Wheatley’s elegy amplified one of the most popular pieces of propaganda produced about that incendiary event: Paul Revere’s engraving, “The BLOODY MASSACRE perpetrated in King—Street BOSTON on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Reg.t.” This engraving became a widely disseminated popular print, its memorable visuals accompanied by a lurid poem at the bottom. Any careful reader of Wheatley’s elegy would have picked up on how her description of American streets “crimson’d with guiltless gore” echoed the reference to “hallow’d Walks besmear’d with guiltless Gore” in the poem under Revere’s image. The scene and its phrasing are too memorable and exact to be accidental. Either she deliberately paraphrased Revere’s phrasing, or she herself wrote the poem below Revere’s print and then borrowed part of her earlier phrasing for her Whitefield scenario. In either case, the original versions of the poem that first brought her transatlantic fame included a deliberate echo of the poem attached to Revere’s famous print.³⁷

Perhaps to avoid trouble for the London publisher or out of courtesy to her aristocratic patron the Countess of Huntingdon, when Wheatley published a version of this elegy in 1773, the reference to American streets and guiltless gore was erased, just as entire poems (including her odes to the death of young Christopher Seider and to the Boston Massacre) meant to be in the never-published Boston book were excised from the London publication. But just as those two odes were published in Boston newspapers, her reference to the Boston Massacre persisted in earlier broadside versions of Whitefield’s elegy that circulated in London as well as in America. Anyone reading it would know which direction Wheatley’s politics leaned.³⁸ To London residents interested in American events, like Franklin, Wheatley’s earlier reference to the Boston Massacre undoubtedly did not escape their attention, especially given its resonance with Revere’s popular print.

Phillis Wheatley proved a bit of a conundrum for Franklin. Like Patience Wright, Wheatley was recommended to Franklin by one of his Boston relatives as an uncommonly talented American he should meet while she was in London. Franklin’s reception of Wright, of course, was immediately enthusiastic. As he wrote to Jane, his sister who had recommended Wright, her waxwork was “extraordinary” and “I shall recommend her among my Friends if she chuses to work here.”³⁹ Franklin’s support helped launch Wright’s London career. By contrast, his reaction to Wheatley was more complicated. As he reported back to the Boston relative who urged him to meet Wheatley, “Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and offer’d her any Services I could do her.” He said nothing about Wheatley’s work, whether he found it extraordinary, or whether his conversation with her was memorable. Instead, he emphasized the awkwardness of the fact that before he left, “I understood her Master was there and had sent her to me but did not come into the Room himself.” This snub led Franklin to believe that Nathaniel Wheatley, Susanna and John Wheatley’s adult son who traveled with Phillis to London, was “not pleased with the Visit. I should perhaps have enquired first for him; but I had heard nothing of him.” And, he concluded, “I have heard nothing since of her.”⁴⁰

In large part, of course, his tempered response to meeting “the black Poetess,” as well as Nathaniel Wheatley’s odd snub of America’s most famous London resident, was because Wheatley was enslaved. Franklin’s views on slavery were complex and changed over the course of his life. Although eventually he came to support both the education of enslaved children and abolition, he was an enslaver himself of six people over the course of his life. When Franklin sailed to London in 1757, he and his wife held a married couple, Peter and Jemima, along with their son, in bondage in Philadelphia. Although he specified in the will he made before his sea crossing that the enslaved couple should go free upon his death, he brought Peter (whether the father or his son with the same name is unclear) with him to England, and purchased a boy called King to work as a servant for his son.⁴¹ In London, Franklin became involved with the Associates of the Bray Schools, a charity committee that established Anglican schools for enslaved and free Black children in the North American colonies. Franklin was enthusiastic about the project, which challenged colonial prejudices that “Reading and Knowledge in a Slave are both useless and dangerous.”⁴² Contrary to some, Franklin saw no inherent racial inferiority that precluded the ability of people of African descent to become educated. He pushed for Philadelphia to be the site of the first Bray school in North America, and his wife, Deborah, sent Othello, one of the boys the Franklins enslaved, to study there. Franklin’s enthusiasm for educating free and enslaved Black children was something he held in common with influential Britons like Samuel Johnson, whose interest in the charity had personal meaning because of Francis Barber, the previously enslaved boy Johnson employed as a servant, educated, and eventually made his heir.⁴³ It also was something Franklin held in common with the white Wheatleys, who by their own account responded to Phillis’s “own curiosity” to write and “great Inclination” to learn foreign languages, including Latin and English, by educating her “in the Family.”⁴⁴

Why, then, was Franklin not more enthusiastic about meeting the young poet who came recommended by his family in Boston? Was she not living proof of Black ability to benefit from education, a cause Franklin himself supported? It was not simply due to Franklin’s own complicated experience with slavery. It was also because Phillis Wheatley’s London visit was unavoidably tinged by imperial politics and transatlantic debates over slavery.⁴⁵ The Somerset case added another dimension to Franklin’s difficult political situation. Franklin likely was as eager to avoid discussing the case with her as Granville Sharp was eager to bring it up. On both sides of the Atlantic, the hypocrisy of American enslavers lecturing British politicians about freedom went neither unnoticed nor unremarked. Franklin sought to shift the transatlantic conversation about slavery away from colonial America and instead focus on the evils of the British slave trade. In response to Mansfield’s verdict on the Somerset case, Franklin published a scathing piece in the London newspapers that attacked “Pharisaical Britain!” for priding itself “in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts,” when “thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!”⁴⁶

Although Franklin’s attack on the verdict was undoubtedly politically motivated to protect American interests, his personal experience affected his reaction, too. Ten years before the Somerset case, one of Franklin’s enslaved servants, King, ran away from him in London, just as Somerset did from Stewart. Franklin worried about the effect living in London might have on his enslaved servants. A few years into their stay in the city, he wrote to his wife to answer her queries about their London household and noted that “Peter continues with me, and behaves as well as I can expect, in a Country where there are many Occasions of spoiling Servants, if they are ever so good.” King, on the other hand, was a different matter. As Franklin explained to his wife, he “ran away” from their London residence in Craven Street near Charing Cross, “near two Years ago, while we were absent in the Country.” Franklin’s landlady Margaret Stevenson advertised for his return (undoubtedly on Franklin’s behalf). The advertisement noted that “a likely BLACK BOY, named KING, but sometimes calls himself JOHN KING, about sixteen Years of Age, and is somewhat paler than the generality of Negroes” had “Absented from his Master’s Service.” The mention of a “name” versus what he “sometimes calls himself” makes it likely that, as James Somerset later would, John King had chosen a new first name for himself after being baptized in London. When he left, King took “a good Hat with a Silver Button and Loop, an old blue Frock and Waistcoat much worn and dirtied, Leather Breeches, and spotted Worsted Stockings” but “left a new Livery behind him, probably that he might the better pass for a free Negroe” rather than a servant. A reward was offered for information about him, as well as a warning that “Whoever harbours or conceals him will be prosecuted.”⁴⁷

As it turned out, King “was soon found in Suffolk,” where “he had been taken in the Service of a Lady that was very fond of the Merit of making him a Christian” and educating him. Perhaps because by then he was in his second term as chair of the Associates of the Bray School, or perhaps because, as Franklin put it, King “was of little Use, and often in Mischief,” he and his son William “consented to her keeping him while we stay in England. So the Lady sent him to School” and had “him taught to read and write,” studies which were in keeping with the education students got at Bray Schools. The “Lady” also had King taught “to play on the Violin and French Horn, with some other Accomplishments more useful in a Servant.”⁴⁸ Franklin’s dismissive reaction to the artistic education King received through his patroness begs the question of whether, despite his support of education for Black children, he entirely approved of the still-enslaved Wheatley’s career as a poet.⁴⁹ But in 1773, Franklin’s opinion did not really make a difference for Phillis Wheatley. Unlike Patience Wright, Wheatley did not need Franklin’s patronage to succeed in London. Even though she was there for only a month and a half, she found she “was reciev’d in England with such kindness, Complaisance, and so many marks of esteem and real Friendship” by famous and powerful people that it “astonishes me.”⁵⁰ Although she secured publication of her book of poems, news of Susanna Wheatley’s rapidly deteriorating health forced her to leave London before the book was released in September.

Her trip to London was even more transformative than Prince Demah’s had been. Unlike Demah, who knew he returned enslaved and while in London knew his only way to freedom was to run and hope not to be caught, when Wheatley was in London she knew, because of the Somerset case, that she could stay in England and claim her freedom. She chose not to because, like Demah with Daphny, she too had people in North America who mattered to her and who she wished to see again.⁵¹ Unlike Demah, because of the timing of her visit and the powerful people she met, she sailed home with the hope that she would be granted her freedom. The promise was not conjecture on Wheatley’s part. As she wrote later that fall, “Since my return to America my Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom.” Her time in London gave her an international celebrity that made the Wheatleys’ continued enslavement of a poetic genius look especially cruel. Because of the Somerset case, it also gave her bargaining power. The Wheatleys could not force her to leave England if she wished to stay and claim her freedom. It also gave her the contacts and savvy to obtain a promise of freedom and the right to the profits from sales of her book in writing: “The Instrument is drawn, so as to secure me and my property from the hands of the Executrs. administrators, & c. of my master, & secure whatsoever should be given me as my Own,” a document she had the foresight to send for safekeeping to one of the lawyers, Israel Mauduit, whom she met in London.⁵²

Leaving London no doubt inspired mixed feelings. Nathaniel Wheatley stayed in England, so this time, she sailed across the Atlantic alone, which left ample time to sit with those feelings. Wheatley passed her third Atlantic crossing staring at the sky and sea, reading her new books, and writing poetry. She loosely documented her shipboard life in a poem, “Ocean,” that she penned on this voyage.⁵³ The poem was another that spoke to the awful power of the sea, describing how “The King of Tempests thunders o’er the plain, / And scorns the azure monarch of the main. / He sweeps the surface, makes the billows rore, / And furious, lash the loud resounding shore.” But it also was a meditation on her own writing process. She wondered about her writing, calling for the “muse divine, thy heav’nly aid impart, / The feast of Genius, and the play of Art” but seeming to confess to writer’s block, as “In Vain my Eyes explore the wat’ry reign, / By you unaided with the flowing strain.” She stared at the “rough surge” of the sea and at the “azure vaulted skies,” imagining mythical creatures beneath the waves. Her allusions make it evident that she studied her new books, notably Alexander Pope’s five-volume translation of The Iliad of Homer gifted to her by the Earl of Dartmouth, to write the poem.⁵⁴

By September, slightly less than a year after she wrote her ode to the earl, she was back in Boston. The return of “the extraordinary Poetical Genius, Negro Servant to Mr. Wheatley” was widely celebrated in local newspapers.⁵⁵ Although much of her time was spent caring for the dying Susanna Wheatley, her thoughts were also preoccupied with her book. She worried about colonial printers creating pirated copies of her book and wrote to acquaintances in other colonies asking them to help prevent pirated copies of her book from being made. She eagerly awaited the shipment of her book that she hoped would arrive in port on a ship—poetically named Dartmouth—before the end of October.⁵⁶ The ship’s departure from London was delayed while the captain waited for cargo, however. Wheatley would have been both excited and relieved when, at the end of November, the Dartmouth sailed into Boston Harbor at last. But Wheatley would have to wait a bit longer to hold her book in her hands. Because in addition to Wheatley’s books, the ship carried 114 chests of East India Company tea. Tea that American protestors, masquerading as “Indians,” would destroy by tossing it, along with tea from two other ships, into the harbor a few weeks later, causing a tempest as wild as any Wheatley described in her poems about the sea.

8 AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE

ABOUT A WEEK after colonial white men thinly disguised as American Indians dumped tea in Boston Harbor, Benjamin Franklin sat in his London house on Craven Street and composed a letter to The London Chronicle. Franklin was no stranger to submitting pieces to be published in London newspapers. Just two months before, he’d published satirical pieces titled, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” the latter so well done that many assumed at first it was truth rather than satire.¹ His December letter was different. It was uncharacteristically short, it was signed, and it was written in what was an unfamiliar genre for Franklin. It was a confession. In it, Franklin publicly owned his role in a scandal about imperial politics that grabbed attention on both sides of the Atlantic. This was not a new scandal—it had been a matter of public gossip and government debate for months. But Franklin could remain silent no more. Motivated by his alarm at learning that “two Gentlemen have been unfortunately engaged in a Duel” over the matter and escaped grave harm only because of their mutual ineptitude with both pistol and sword, he felt he had to confess. It was an honorable act, and a brave one. Although he could not possibly know it at the time, since news of the destruction of the tea in Boston would not reach London until nearly a month later, it was also incredibly poorly timed. So ill-timed that it marked the beginning of the end of Franklin’s long career as a colonial agent in London.²

The scandal in which Franklin confessed his part was over letters from Massachusetts that he shipped back to the colonies in December 1772. The letters were written to British government officials in London, and many of them written by the present governor and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver. How they came into Franklin’s hands remains a mystery, for he never gave up his source. The letters were a few years old, written around the time colonists were protesting the Townshend Acts. But they were incendiary, nonetheless. After reading them, Franklin had “reason to believe” they “laid the Foundation of most if not all our present Grievances.”³ The letters “considerably abated” his “Resentment against” Britain, “for its arbitrary Measures in governing us, conducted by the late Minister,” Lord Grenville, “since my Conviction by these Papers, that those Measures were projected, advised and called for” by colonial Americans like Hutchinson and their persuasively “Misleading” advice.⁴ So damning were the letters, in Franklin’s eyes, that he wished “I was at Liberty to make the Letters publick.”⁵ But he had promised his source not to publish them. So he instead sent them back across the Atlantic to Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, so that he, “the other Gentlemen of the Committee of Correspondence,” and a few others might see them before Cushing shipped them back across the Atlantic again to Franklin.⁶

Cushing received the letters in Boston in early 1773 and shared them with Massachusetts Whig leaders, including John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams. The colonial men were not inclined to give the letter writers, particularly Hutchinson and Oliver, the benefit of the doubt. It probably did not help that both Hutchinson and Oliver had raised the ire of Whig protestors before. Both men were familiar public targets from the days of the Stamp Act protests. Oliver had been slated to be the local Stamp Tax Collector. In August 1765, anti–Stamp Act protesters hung Oliver in effigy from the Liberty Tree and ransacked his offices. Later that month, in an all-night mayhem fueled by the ample wine they found stored in his cellars, anti–Stamp Act protesters looted then-Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson’s Boston mansion. They ransacked its contents and physically tore the building apart from the cupola down to the foundation.⁷ When in June of 1773 the Massachusetts House of Representatives attacked both men again, it was a less physically violent but no less pointed condemnation. It was also more damaging to their political careers. The House voted “by a very great majority” to ask the king to remove both Hutchinson and Oliver from office.⁸

In taking this vote, the legislature charged that the letters proved that both men worked to ensure “that certain acts of the British Parliament for raising a revenue in America, might be carried into effect by military force.” Worse, they hoped that this military would “intimidate the minds” of colonists, “prevent every constitutional liberty,” and “destroy that harmony and goodwill between Great Britain and this colony.” And all to “raise their own fortunes, and advance themselves to posts of honour and profit,” at “the expence of the rights and liberties of the American colonies.” Adding insult to injury was the fact that these were Americans betraying fellow Americans, as the two men were “born and educated among us.”⁹ Although both Hutchinson and Oliver denied that they had any such intent—Hutchinson countered that he in fact had worked to uphold constitutional rights, not upend them—they found little support in the House.¹⁰

Soon, both men were vilified far beyond Boston. News of the letters and their content spread through colonial newspapers up and down the North American coast. The letters, the reading public was informed, did nothing less than reveal “the fatal Source of the Confusion and Bloodshed” in Massachusetts and elsewhere, which has “threatened total Destruction to the Liberties of all America.”¹¹ The news crossed the Atlantic. In London as well as in North America, people were outraged. They were incensed for very different reasons, however. Some were outraged at the content of the letters, others at the fact that the letters had found their way into Massachusetts leaders’ hands, and that Oliver and Hutchinson had been publicly outed. In London that summer and fall, Massachusetts was much in the news. There was enslaved Boston genius Phillis Wheatley’s visit and the widely advertised release of her book, and there was Hutchinson, Oliver, and the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Newspapers speculated and people gossiped about who might have sent the letters back to the colonies. It was this relentless gossip that led to the duel between two men who were both suspected of being responsible. Such gossip was the main reason that, looking to prevent “farther mischief,” Franklin owned up to the deed in December, confessing “I alone am the person who obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question.” With this confession, he joined Hutchinson at the center of the controversy.¹²

But although he confessed, he never apologized. Franklin remained steadfast in the rightness of his position. He held that these were not private letters that had been made public. Instead, they were “written by public officers to persons in public station, on public affairs,” meant “to procure public measures” and “handed to other public persons who might be influenced by them to produce those measures.” Moreover, he noted, their intention was a nefarious one—“to incense the Mother Country against her Colonies,” and “widen the breach” between them. It was “his duty to transmit them to his Constituents” in Massachusetts.¹³ More than once as the crisis in imperial politics between Britain and its North American colonies unfolded, he’d been sneeringly referred to as “Dr. Doubleface” in the London papers.¹⁴ This time, however, no one could accuse him of hypocrisy, dissembling, or playing both sides. He was, clearly and irrevocably, acting in concert with the interests of colonial leaders in Massachusetts who disagreed with British policy.

It was unfortunate for Franklin that his brave moment of unequivocal conviction coincided with colonial protest against the Tea Act, coming as those protests did in the same month he made his public confession. By the end of January 1774, news had reached London of the combined colonial reaction to the first tea ships sent to North America after the act took effect: the seizure of tea by customs in Charleston, South Carolina, and Philadelphia’s refusal to allow the tea-laden ship Polly to dock in its port. So widespread was the colonial discontent that London newspapers reported, “All America is in a flame on account of the tea exportation.”¹⁵

But by far the most shocking of all these dramatic events was the one that caused the most economic damage: the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor. In the collective protest that later became famous as the “Boston Tea Party” colonists destroyed—in dramatic, public fashion—thousands of pounds’ worth (millions of dollars in today’s currency) of East India Company (EIC) property in the form of tea. On December 16, 1773, thousands of Bostonians gathered around Old South Church to discuss how to respond to the continued presence of the Dartmouth and two other ships carrying cargoes of tea in the harbor. In the face of Governor Hutchinson’s continued refusal to let the ships leave harbor to placate protest, Bostonians, led by members of the Sons of Liberty, staged a theatrical protest. Men and boys disguised themselves (loosely) as American Indians, painting their faces black, red, or copper, throwing blankets around their shoulders, carrying hatchets they called “tomahawks,” and whooping and whistling. It was less a realistic and thorough disguise than it was a mocking and stereotypical gesture. The choice was savvy, however, both in the camouflage the painted faces provided and in the performance’s ties to widely familiar cultural symbolism.¹⁶

For hundreds of years Europeans and European-Americans had used the figure of an American Indian, usually wearing a feathered headdress and often naked from the waist down to designate “America” on everything from maps to ceramics. When political tensions began to mount between Britain and its North American colonies after the end of the Seven Years’ War, the figure of America as an Indian took on added political meaning. America as an Indian—usually, an Indian princess—became a stock figure in popular political cartoons, and American colonists adopted the symbol to distinguish themselves from the mother country.¹⁷ Disguising themselves as American Indians and destroying a shipload of tea sent a strong political message. Those who disapproved of the event linked protesting colonists to popular stereotypes of Indigenous people as savages. As one disapproving Boston Loyalist put it, referencing the same longtime associations of American Indians with devils used in Pope’s Day parades, the men destroying the tea needed to “make their Agents first look like the Devil, in Order to make them Act like the Devil.”¹⁸ The event, in short, left a dramatic impression. Like the other protests gainst tea, it proved that colonists were outraged by the implications of the Tea Act.¹⁹

Much as for the Townshend Acts, politics behind the Tea Act—and potential future politics—enraged colonists even more than economics. Prime Minister Lord North presented the bill to Parliament in May 1773, and it passed into law quickly. The Tea Act would funnel cash to the EIC by making it the primary, and direct, seller of tea to North American colonists. The act was not financially onerous; it actually made EIC tea cheaper than smuggled tea. But it took aim at the booming colonial smuggling trade with Dutch suppliers in the Caribbean, and it included a few pennies of tax via the sole unrepealed portion of the Townshend Acts. Although colonists disliked its monopolistic upset of the broader colonial tea trade, what was most alarming about it was political. It raised the same issues of unrepresentative taxation imposed by the Townshend Acts, duties which had so outraged some colonists that they threatened Tory merchants like Henry Barnes by tarring and feathering a horse in his name. The Tea Act also was meant to establish a legal precedent, for the future ability of Parliament to impose taxes on other goods colonists imported into North America. It was, in short, about much more than the price of tea.

The Tea Act not only informed Americans they had no say in how they were to be taxed, it also showed them how low they had sunk in the colonial pecking order. About a week after the Tea Act, a piece of legislation called the Regulating Act came before Parliament. The Regulating Act also had to do with the East India Company, but it concerned its assets and governance in India rather than its sales in North America. The Regulating Act took away complete civil and military governing authority from the EIC and gave shared power of governance in India to the British government. Together, the two acts were intended to shore up the disastrous finances of the EIC while also expanding the British government’s control over its global empire. The British government was now even more firmly enmeshed in the affairs of the EIC and invested in its success. The two acts together also demonstrated that North Americans were less important to the sitting British government than the EIC. That same entanglement meant that colonial protest against the Tea Act affected not just the EIC and its finances, but the British government as well. On both sides of the Atlantic, there was good reason for there to be a tempest over tea.²⁰

Franklin found himself tossed into the center of the storm over the Tea Act and colonial protests of it. Perhaps reflecting upon his own recent moral stance about the crucial distinction between public and private things, Franklin initially thought Boston’s destruction of tea “an Act of violent Injustice” as it destroyed “private property” in a “Dispute about Publick Rights.”²¹ He called for Massachusetts to offer “speedy Reparation” for the cost.²² Eventually he changed his mind, but ultimately his reaction to the event did not matter much. Despite his negative opinion about Boston’s destruction of the tea, he bore the brunt of British wrath when called to the Privy Council at the end of January. Ostensibly, he was there to hear the final decision on a Massachusetts petition to remove Hutchinson from office (the petition was rejected). But the main point of the proceedings was to call Franklin to task for his part in leaking the letters and to make him stand proxy for British ire against Massachusetts colonists for destroying the tea. By the time he stood before the Privy Council in the “Cockpit” on January 29, the man famous for his electrical experiments was nothing less than a lightning rod himself, taking the blame for the many grievances Privy Council members had about rebellious colonists in Massachusetts. Although he stood silent under attack, for nearly an hour he was harangued, accused of being a thief and a liar. It was a humiliating experience that he never forgot. Two days later, he suffered another blow when he was stripped of his colonial post as deputy postmaster general of the Royal Mail.²³

Meanwhile, Lord North, Lord Dartmouth, and others pondered whether, legally speaking, colonists refusing, confiscating, or destroying tea in Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston could—or more importantly should—be charged with treason. After all, they were subjects of the crown and in defiance of its rule. Ultimately, the answer decided upon was no. Even in the most egregious case—that of Boston—the lack of willing witnesses and the unknown identities of those who destroyed the tea made such a charge near impossible to prosecute. There also was the question of maintaining strong ties between the colonies and the mother country. Here public opinion mattered as much as the law. In March Parliament voted to pass more sweeping legislation instead of issuing individual charges of treason. The legislation fulfilled Lord North’s determination to punish the colonists for their protests and the destruction of tea in Boston. The Boston Port Act would force Boston to pay the East India Company for its losses. Parliament did not mince words about its motivation in crafting this legislation. It was intended as a response to what Parliament called the “dangerous commotions and insurrections” that “have been fomented and raised in the town of Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England, by divers ill-affected persons, to the subversion of his Majesty’s Government.”²⁴ Practically speaking, effective June 1, 1774, it blockaded the port and shut down Boston’s maritime trade. Franklin and twenty-nine other American men living in London, including Virginians William and Arthur Lee and South Carolinian Henry Laurens, formally petitioned Parliament to vote against the legislation. But Parliament passed the bill, and the king signed it into law at the end of March.²⁵

News of it would not reach the colonies until May. In the meantime, Americans living in London were worried by the implications of the Boston Port Act. Worry turned to alarm when this act was followed in May by other legislation that collectively made up what the British called the Coercive Acts. Again, a group of American men living in London, including the Lees, Sayre, Laurens, and Franklin, begged Parliament and petitioned the king not to pass these acts, which, as they bluntly put it, would “reduce Americans to the alternatives of being totally enslaved, or contesting with a parent state that they have loved and venerated.” The petitioners also feared American reaction to the legislation, warning that it would “inflame the colonists’ passions, flout the principles of liberty that they have inherited from England,” and “drive them to the last Resources of Despair.”²⁶

Two of these new acts were aimed at Massachusetts. The first, the Massachusetts Government Act, drastically restricted town meetings and allowed the royal governor to appoint the previously elected Massachusetts Council. The second, the Act for the Impartial Administration of Justice, also increased the governor’s powers by giving him the right to move trials to other colonies or Great Britain, thus robbing accused people of their rights to trial by juries of their peers. A third new act, the Quartering Act, applied to all the colonies, not just Massachusetts. It allowed the British military to be housed in privately owned outbuildings or unoccupied houses, at colonists’ expense.

Worst of all, in many Americans’ opinions, was another piece of colonial legislation discussed around the same time and then made law in late June, the Quebec Act. Together with the Coercive Acts, the Quebec Act was the final piece of legislation that colonists referred to as the Intolerable Acts. The Quebec Act included two provisions that outraged many colonists living in other parts of British North America: it extended Quebec’s borders south to the Ohio River and granted religious freedom to French Catholics in Canada. The provisions alarmed colonists with visions of westward land expansion and those with anti-Catholic sentiments alike. As the distressing legislation rolled out of Parliament that spring and summer, some Americans living in London began to act on behalf of their beleaguered fellow colonists across the Atlantic.²⁷

Among those Americans was Patience Wright. Wright had every practical reason not to make a fuss in support of colonial protesters. In early 1774, she was an unqualified success in London. She and most of her family had settled in nicely. Her oldest three children, Betsy, Joseph, and Phoebe, all teenagers now, had joined her in London the previous year. Patience Wright by herself had been a force—now, with her talented children around her, she made even more of an impression. As the London Magazine put it, all three of the younger Wrights were “inspired with geniuses similar to their mother, and all excellent at working with their fingers,” a fact observers found all the more remarkable because in “some families you find one child excelling, but then it appears by the small share remaining with the rest, that he has bankrupted the others: in these children I have seen the observation fully and only contradicted, for they are all ingenious.”²⁸ Their fellow American and lapsed Quaker, artist Benjamin West, took the Wrights, especially the children, under his wing. West and the Wrights had overlapping social networks. West’s cousin drew up the will of Patience Wright’s husband when he lay dying in Philadelphia.²⁹ West was a valuable patron, as he enjoyed considerable royal favor. The king made him a charter member of the Royal Academy of Arts and, in the same year Patience Wright arrived in London, his historical painter—the most prestigious of all court painters. Patience “was intimate with Mr. West and his family”; he helped enroll Joseph as a student at the Royal Academy, and he often used “the beautiful form and face of her younger daughter,” Phoebe, “in his historical compositions.”³⁰ Wright’s oldest daughter, Betsy (who began to go by Elizabeth in England), began modeling in wax, too. Both daughters likely also helped her with the dressing and maintenance of the figures in the galleries. Their talents tied them to London, making them just as invested—if not more—than their mother in staying there.

At the start of 1774, even as Franklin was falling from grace, Patience Wright’s star—and that of her talented and attractive children—only continued to rise. Wright’s year started off very differently from her friend Franklin’s. In early January, as he was facing the uproar over his confessed role in the Hutchinson letters, she was being touted in the London papers for her charisma and genius. She enjoyed royal favor: “his Majesty” had “several times sat for her to take his likeness.”³¹ She felt sure enough of that favor to have “a deal of discourse (she says) on politics &c & the distresses of the People.”³² Her Pall Mall exhibition continued to be popular, drawing “a great resort of company of the first distinction, among whom are some of the principal nobility.” Her work was “greatly admired; she has as much business as she can possibly go through,” and was “in a fair way of making an ample fortune.”³³ She continued to add new wax portraits of interest to her galleries, ensuring its continued novelty and popularity to a wide range of visitors. Busts of King George and his minister Lord North could be found along with one of republican hero John Wilkes and his supporter John Sawbridge. Wax figures of cultural icons like Lord Lyttelton and Shakespearean actor David Garrick joined Catharine Macauley and Benjamin Franklin. And she continued to have a transatlantic presence, too. On January 10, 1774, she shipped two new wax figures to New York City: one of General Monckton, a man “entitled to the highest esteem and respect of the colonies on account of his warm and steady attachment to their interest,” and one of Phillis Wheatley’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, “remarkable for her piety and general benevolence of heart.”³⁴

But just as Franklin found he could not remain silent when it came to the Hutchinson letters, Patience Wright found that she could not ignore British reaction to colonial protest over the Tea Act. Even before news of what much later became known as the Boston Tea Party crossed the Atlantic, and despite being “much favoured by the King and Queen,” Patience Wright was known in London for her “utmost freedom of speech, especially in defense of the rights and liberty of the American colonies, and in advantageous representations of them and their inhabitants.”³⁵ And that spring of 1774, what she really began digging her fingers into in London was not just wax, but politics and espionage.

Wright sat in the galleries watching the proceedings when portions of the Intolerable Acts were discussed in Parliament.³⁶ First the Boston Port Act, and then the Quebec Act, or “Canady Bill,” as she called it, drew her particular ire. The Quebec Act, she worried, had the potential to do nothing less than allow “Sattan” to “destroy the Protestant Religion” and “Ruin all America.”³⁷ Taken as a whole, the Intolerable Acts, as she wrote to a friend back in New York City, were “scheams to Inslave you all.”³⁸ She was just as outraged about the legislation and its potential to trample colonial liberties as men like Franklin and Laurens. Because she was a woman, she did not have access to the same political spaces and tactics that they did. Women were not asked to sign the petitions the Lees, Laurens, and Franklin presented to king and Parliament. Despite her celebrity, she was no exception. She did, however, have an advantage these men did not: her waxwork exhibitions. Both the museum space and the figures themselves became vehicles for the political activism that she pursued openly and in secret. As she had when she first arrived in London, she started her political work by turning to Franklin.

Despite the public humiliation Franklin experienced after revealing his role in the Hutchinson letters, the incident restored Franklin to something he had temporarily lost: Wright’s good graces. For much of 1773 she and Franklin were not on good terms. As Franklin wrote to his wife, “As to Mrs. Wright, I have done all I could to serve her here; but I have somehow or other, I know not which way, displeas’d her of late, so that she does not now come near me.”³⁹ The cooling of their friendship likely was partly due to Franklin’s careful politics. Unlike Franklin, Wright’s overt support of colonial interests was always unequivocal and noticeable; no one ever called her “Dr. Doubleface” in the press. The other rift between them seems to have concerned her relations with the Penn family, descendants of Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn who remained in proprietary control of the colony. Soon after her arrival in London, Wright became friendly with Lady Juliana Penn, wife of Thomas Penn. Although Thomas Penn had been involved with colonial governance for decades, when Wright arrived in London, Lady Juliana, who was thirty years younger than her increasingly ill husband, was as active in its politics and administration as he was. At Lady Juliana’s suggestion, Wright completed a wax portrait of her husband to be sent to Philadelphia “as a present to the American Philosophical Society.”⁴⁰ Wright’s wax portrait of Penn was celebrated in newspapers as one “which has been much admired by their Majesties, and most of the Nobility of England,” and “justly esteemed the Performance of a most extraordinary Genius.”⁴¹

But the Penn family was by no means universally popular in Pennsylvania. And there was a longstanding mutual animosity between Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Penn that went back to the 1740s and did not dim with time.⁴² At one point, Franklin wrote of Penn that he had “a More cordial and thorough Contempt for him than I ever before felt for any Man living—a Contempt that I cannot express in Words.”⁴³ Thomas Penn, for his part, thought Franklin was “a dangerous Man” of “a very uneasy spirit.”⁴⁴ The American Philosophical Society was one of many Philadelphia organizations Franklin helped found, and it had elected him as its first president four years before. Wright’s well-publicized portrait of a man he found contemptible being sent for display in a society of which he was president surely rankled Franklin no end. Perhaps the complicated personal history between Franklin and Penn was why Wright sent it as a “Present from Lady Juliana” to “the People of Pennsylvania, to be lodged in the public library” (likely the legislative assembly’s library in the State House) and kept “for Posterity, in memory of the Penn Family and of Mrs. Wright’s Ingenuity.”⁴⁵ Whether the cause of Wright’s falling out with Franklin was her bust of Thomas Penn or his equivocating politics, they renewed their friendship in 1774 over shared grievances with British policy toward America.

Despite her love for Britain and “the greatest politeness and sevility” with which its inhabitants treated her, the Boston Port Act was a watershed moment for Wright. From the moment she saw the legislation proposed in Parliament, she became wedded to the “Glorious Cause of sivil and religious liberty.” Her ideas about liberty were not rooted in natural rights ideology or constitutional law. Instead, they were spiritual, rooted in the Christian faith and replete with biblical examples and metaphors. Here, again, she may have been drawing upon her childhood education and the teachings of Thomas Tryon. Among Tryon’s works was A Treatise of Dreams & Visions (1689), which dissected biblical stories about dreams, like the prophetic dreams Joseph had in Egypt and shared with the pharaoh. Tryon also examined the positive and negative meanings of dreams and visions in general, noting that “Almighty God, in a special and extraordinary manner” reveals “secrets to those that fear him in Dreams, which are more usually called Visions.”⁴⁶ Wright’s ideas about the political crisis in the British Empire flowed to her in exactly this way, through visions. She was as frank about sharing them as the source of her ideas as she was about everything else. They earned her the nickname of “Sybilla, for which there was some foundation, for she professed sometimes to foretell political events, and was called the Sybill.”⁴⁷ Among her recurring dreams was one in which the “good god who governs the world and rules in the heart of princes, he Raises up a Frankling to do his great work,” so that “America should be honourd with her Son Benjiman the youngest of his Father Famaly and the man whom I have been taught to look on with the highest hopes to my Contry.” Franklin, in her mind, was “the garduin Angel” of America.⁴⁸

But he was not, in her opinion, America’s only guardian angel. At least in 1774, he shared that distinction with William Pitt, the former prime minister who despite being made Earl of Chatham in 1766 retained his nickname of “The Great Commoner.” Already popular for his hawkish role in the Seven Years’ War, Pitt became a hero of Whiggish Americans when he stood against the Stamp Act of 1765. He asked for its immediate repeal. “The parliament has a right to bind, to restrain America. Our legislative power over the colonies is sovereign and supreme,” he asserted, but he was nevertheless unequivocal in his support of America’s right to protest what he saw as unjust taxation that was “robbing the colonies of their constitutional rights.” Because of the rightness of their cause, he proclaimed, “I rejoice that America has resisted.”⁴⁹ America, in turn, celebrated Pitt.

In 1768, American artist Charles Willson Peale, who was then studying in London, painted an allegorical portrait of Pitt on commission for the Westmoreland Association of Patriots, who intended to display it in Westmoreland County, Virginia’s courthouse. He based Pitt’s head and face on a bust of him by British sculptor and Royal Academy fellow Joseph Wilton, who allowed Peale access to his London studio. Peale’s portrait, crowded with republican iconography from ancient Rome and the English Civil War that contemporaries would have recognized immediately, memorialized Pitt as a champion of liberty. The toga-wearing Pitt holds a copy of the Magna Carta. Behind him, a statue of British Liberty carries the ancient symbol of freedom from slavery—a liberty cap—atop a pole and tramples Congress’s petition against the Stamp Act. Peale further emphasized the portrait’s link to liberty with an altar to liberty supported by busts of Algernon Sydney and John Hampden, two seventeenth-century men who lost their lives supporting representative government and civil and religious freedom. A classical pillar behind Pitt represented, as Peale put it, “Stability in the Patriot and his Principles.”⁵⁰

The portrait also referenced America, both its loyalty and willingness to fight, with images of an armed American Indian and a dog. Perhaps the most striking iconography of all, however, was the choice to put the Banqueting House at Whitehall, where King Charles I was executed, in the background behind Pitt. Peale made two copies of his portrait. One was commissioned for display in Virginia by Peale’s London patron and fellow Marylander Edmund Jenings and sent to Richard Henry Lee, leader of the Westmoreland Association of Patriots, who raised money to pay for it. The other Peale sent to his home colony of Maryland, also to be put on public display. Peale’s mezzotint of his painting Worthy of Liberty, Mr. Pitt scorns to invade the Liberties of other people (1769) circulated the image around the colonies. Colonial cities also commissioned images of Pitt for display. In 1770, town officials in Charleston, South Carolina, placed in one of the busiest parts of town a marble statue of Pitt dressed in a Roman toga. The sculptor was Joseph Wilton, whose bust Peale copied. Observers noted that “almost the whole of the inhabitants” of the city watched the statue’s installation and dedication.⁵¹ Two months later, a statue of Pitt by Wilton was placed in public view in New York, where Patience Wright, who was living there at the time, would have seen it.⁵²

It is not surprising, then, that Pitt, now called the Earl of Chatham, had been on Wright’s mind since she came to London. His combination of political and personal fame, with its extra gloss of pro-American sentiment, was exactly the formula that would appeal to her. She hoped to add his portrait in wax to her exhibition space. Unlike Peale, who based his painting on a bust by Wilton, she wished to make her wax portrait from life. Crafting wax heads from life, and in her idiosyncratic way, was her specialty. Her connections made it plausible that she would get Chatham’s assent to sit for her. After all, other men whose wax portraits were on display in her museum, including Phillis Wheatley’s supporter Lord Lyttelton and Shakespearean actor David Garrick, were his friends. For years, however, Chatham put off her request. In the spring of 1774, he finally granted her permission to sculpt him from life. By May, she only needed “to see him a few moments” to finish her bust of him.⁵³ He changed his mind partly because of the persuasion of his wife, whose brother, Lord Temple, had his own portrait in Wright’s galleries. But mostly he seems to have warmed to Wright’s request because of her enthusiastic efforts to gather political intelligence for him on the American crisis. Although he was no longer in the ministry nor the House of Commons, he held a seat in the House of Lords and was not in favor of the harsh reprisals against Boston favored by Lord North’s administration and many in Parliament.⁵⁴

Despite the swiftness with which the Boston Port Bill became law, early 1774 was a political moment in Britain characterized more by contingency than certainty. Not everyone agreed with the current administration’s views on America. Pro-American politicians like Chatham, John Wilkes, and Catharine Macaulay’s brother John Sawbridge worked to mitigate the harshness of the legislated punishment. Americans living in London, like Franklin and Arthur Lee, who was a leader in Britain’s Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, kept up a concerted propaganda war, circulating copies of colonial political pamphlets, petitioning the government, and publishing their own arguments on behalf of America.⁵⁵ Wright’s wax figures both reflected and helped to create transatlantic political networks, ones which she and the people she portrayed maintained through gossip, letters, and relayed intelligence overheard in her rooms at Pall Mall, whispered at a tea table, or murmured at the waters in Bath. Gossip was pivotal to the gathering and sharing of intelligence. Letters could be seized and read or lost. In the wake of the Coercive Acts, gossip as well as letters circulated the knowledge that people on both sides of the Atlantic were united against imperial policy, much as they had been during the 1760s, when people recognized connections between economic protests by London weavers and merchants, and boycotts by American colonists.⁵⁶

Alternate plans to replace the measures put in place by the Boston Port Act were put forward. As Patience Wright reported to Chatham, some British merchants wished to broker a deal with Lord North that would partly absolve Boston of its destruction of the tea by offering “a sum of money to Pay the India Company the Loss and Damage of thir tea Destroyed at Boston Praying in behalf of the traid” and buy “time to Bring the offendrs to Justice not punishing the Inocent with the gulty” as “Boston did not aprove of the tea being destroyd.” On the other side of things, however, were the rumors that the EIC had been trying to force colonists to buy tea that was “Extream bad.” She had heard through “Mr. Colings packer of the India tea at fench Street Ware House,” that the tea sent to the colonies was “old some 3 years old mouldy unsailable.” Lord North, however, was not open to bargains or arguments. He was “determind to make” Boston “submit to the athorety of Parlement” and “do all he could to Bring them to proper Submission.” Such were “the facts” her contacts “Related to mrs Wright” to pass along to Chatham. Much of what she put in writing she already had told him in person, including “Ld Norths Refusial” being “the Same as she related.”⁵⁷

Although Wright was by no means the only person in London gathering intelligence on behalf of American Whigs, she was in a better position than most to do so. She had the ear of the king and access to some of the most powerful nobles and politicians in England. Her networks included aristocrats, politicians, and merchants with interests in colonial affairs and trade as well as imperial politics. Britain’s most important people frequented her galleries, and Americans of means made a point to visit her museum while in London, as her “rooms in Pall Mall” were a “fashionable lounging-place” as well as a feast for the eyes. While in her galleries, she could eavesdrop on conversations, and she could easily ask for information from friends and family in the colonies, especially in Philadelphia and New York. Even though she was widely admired for “the excellence of her wax figures” and the “vigor and originality of her conversation,” people underestimated her and let their guard down accordingly. As might be guessed from her idiosyncratic spelling, her Tryon-heavy education did not equip her with sophisticated erudition. As one American who knew her in London put it, “her deep penetration and sagacity, cloaked by her apparent simplicity of purpose, enabled her to gather many facts and secrets important to ‘dear America’ ” as she referred to “her native land, which she dearly loved.”⁵⁸ Her waxworks were their own material network on both sides of the Atlantic. In Philadelphia as well as in London, Wright’s wax portraits allowed people to gaze upon the prominent British politicians fighting over the future of the North American colonies, men like Chatham, North, and the king, and women like Catharine Macaulay. Americans as well as Britons wanted to see wax portraits of British politicians and writers, while Britons in turn were charmed by images of Americans like Franklin and Dickinson. Wright capitalized on this fascination to gather intelligence for America.

Using Franklin as her chief point of contact, she both “communicated much important information” to him and passed information from him along to Chatham.⁵⁹ As an artist used to seeking out and pleasing patrons, Wright understood, perhaps even better than Franklin, the value of courting the support of someone like Chatham. A celebrity aristocrat who inspired public monuments in America could wield political influence in different, and sometimes more powerful, ways than a single member of the House of Commons. Wright understood patronage and how it worked, and she quickly put her ready-made, eclectic network to work. She met with John Sawbridge and with British merchants who traded to the colonies. She gathered news from other Americans in London, including merchants from New York and Virginia like Arthur and William Lee. William Lee and his business partner Stephen Sayre were both politically connected enough to be elected Sheriff of London.⁶⁰ The words of Americans abroad, as well as news and gossip from the colonies, influenced perspectives in London and affected imperial politics. At the same time, Americans in the colonies were eager to hear from British allies like Macaulay and Americans in London for information about political decisions and British public opinion.

Women were central to these networks. Their active gathering of intelligence about imperial affairs increased along with political tensions.⁶¹ Like Wright, Catharine Macaulay corresponded with American patriots as political tensions worsened in 1774, sharing news from Britain but just as eager to hear the colonial perspective. While Wright pressed Virginian William Lee for intelligence, Macaulay corresponded with his older brother Richard Henry back in Virginia, as well as John and Samuel Adams in Massachusetts and John Dickinson in Pennsylvania, whose Letters from an American Farmer influenced her politics just as Macaulay’s histories of England influenced his. Republican-minded American women as well as men regarded her as a celebrity for her histories, and her American correspondents included Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren.⁶²

In fall 1774, Macaulay exchanged letters with both John and Abigail Adams. Parliament was dissolved, awaiting a new election in which radical Whigs in England would mount a propaganda campaign about the injustice of the Coercive Acts. Across the Atlantic, Americans convened the First Continental Congress in response to the Intolerable Acts. People on both sides of the Atlantic were divided politically and worried over next steps. As Macaulay wrote to John Adams, politicians like Chatham and her brother “strenously and ever zealously” spoke up on behalf of “the injured rights of America but the bands of the Ministry in both houses are so numerous that opposition serves to no other purpose than to publish the sentiments of individuals not in the smallest respict to obstruct the designs of Government.” Meanwhile, she fretted, she, Chatham, and Sawbridge were in the minority, albeit an impassioned one. “The people of this country,” she feared, “are so dead to any generous principle in policy that they regard the Quarrel of the Government with the Americans only as it may affect their own interest. They will snarl a litle if they meet with interruption in their commerce but I believe no evil short of the entire destruction of their property will produce an effectual opposition to the career of power.”⁶³

Sentiment on the other side of the Atlantic, though by no means universal, was far less complacent. As Abigail Adams reported to Macaulay, colonists were suffering “misiries and distresses brought upon us by the late inhumane acts of the British parliament.” The “American Cause” had “become so serious to every American that we consider it as a struggle from which we shall obtain a release from our present bondage by an ample redress of our Grieveances—or a redress by the Sword.” To Adams’s eyes, the North American colonies stood at a crossroads, with “all the Horrours of a civil war threatning us on one hand, and the chains of Slavery ready forged for us on the other.”⁶⁴ If it came to that, everyone in the British Empire was in danger, for “America if she falls to use the words of the revered and ever honourd Mr. Pitt, will fall like a strong Man, will embrace the pillars of State and pull down the constitution along with her.” It is easy to think that Macaulay’s eyes widened as she sat across the Atlantic reading Adams’s letter to its close. As the year 1774 neared its end, Adams informed Macaulay, “The only alternative which every american thinks of is Liberty or Death.” It was a declaration firm enough to suit even Patience Wright’s passionate patriotism. But was it true?⁶⁵

9 BAYONETS THROUGH THE HEART

A FEW MONTHS before Abigail Adams sent her thoughts on liberty and slavery across the Atlantic, another woman in Boston turned her attention to the same topic. With her own emancipation finally secure, Phillis Wheatley shared her thoughts on liberty with her longtime correspondent and fellow American traveler to London, the Mohegan Reverend Samson Occom. About a week before Lord North presented the Boston Port Bill for Parliament’s consideration, her letter to Occom was made public in a Connecticut paper. The letter was prefaced by an editorial note that it was “an extract of a letter from Phillis, a Negro Girl of Mr. Wheatley’s, in Boston, to the Rev. Samson Occum, which we are desired to insert as a Specimen of her Ingenuity,” or genius. Her letter situated the political debate over liberty not in metaphorical political slavery, as Abigail Adams had done, but firmly in the context of the history of Americans keeping people in bondage. Apparently Occom had done much the same in a letter to her, which made sense given the long history of New Englanders enslaving Indigenous people as well. The extract of Wheatley’s letter began with her agreeing with Occom that Africans, like Europeans and white Americans and everyone else, had natural rights. Liberty lived in every person’s heart.¹

Her faith made her sure this was true. The fact was that “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.” In Wheatley’s mind, “civil and religious Liberty” were “so inseparably Limited, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one Without the other.” Like Patience Wright, Wheatley turned to the Bible as inspiration for her ideas about liberty, offering the Israelites’ longing “for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery” as proof of the indissoluble connection between civil and religious liberty. And while “the same Principle lives in us,” eighteenth-century enslavers were “modern Egyptians.” They were hypocrites, too, living in the “absurdity” of exercising “oppressive Power over others” while calling out a “Cry for Liberty.”²

Between mid-March and mid-April, Wheatley’s letter was published in ten other New England newspapers, which in and of itself made quite a statement given the amount of news and advertisements crammed into each small run of a colonial paper.³ People in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts would have known her thoughts on liberty and slavery, and her condemnation of the hypocrisy of Americans protesting British tyranny while holding people enslaved. Those who had read her book of poems might also have connected her own creative pursuits to her desire for liberty, as her poem “On Imagination” noted that it was at the command of imagination, “the leader of the mental train,” that “joy rushes on the heart, / And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.”⁴ Her stance on liberty echoed arguments made by enslaved and free men of African descent writing freedom petitions in Massachusetts in the wake of the Somerset case, including the pieces by the “Lovers of Liberty” and the “Sons of Africa” in pieces printed alongside Felix’s petition in a 1773 pamphlet.⁵ Wheatley’s pointed remarks about “modern Egyptians” also resonated with comments made across the Atlantic, in London reviews of her book, before her emancipation from slavery became common knowledge. As one London reviewer put it, Wheatley’s very existence made it clear that although the “people of Boston boast themselves chiefly on their principles of liberty,” they were hypocrites. Turning Franklin’s criticism of British law for freeing but a single slave in the Somerset case on its head, the reviewer argued that “One such act as the purchase of her freedom, would, in our opinion, have done them more honour than hanging a thousand trees with ribbons and emblems.” Wheatley likely would have agreed with this London writer—there was something hollow about celebrations around Liberty Trees planted in soil where slavery existed.⁶

But Wheatley’s status as enslaved or free, as well as her thoughts on liberty and slavery, were more than matters of philosophical inquiry or political ideology. They directly affected something that became of pressing concern to a newly emancipated Wheatley in need of money: sales of her books. In London as well as in America, her identity, whether that of an enslaved poet or an emancipated poet, and one born in Africa, made her book stand out. Even men like Thomas Jefferson, who disparaged her work more than he did Ignatius Sancho’s, noting that hers was “below the dignity of criticism,” knew he had to acknowledge its existence (much as he knew he had to discuss Sancho).⁷ Her published letter to Occom reminded the public of her personal background, an identity that piqued people’s interest even when they doubted the abilities of an African-born, formerly enslaved woman to compose classical poetry.

Although it made for an “elegant engraved like-ness of its Author,” the portrait of her used as the frontispiece to her book emphasized this same background.⁸ Knowledge of her identity was not left to chance. The words “Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston” were included at the top of the oval frame surrounding her image. This placement gave the words particular emphasis. Most labels were printed below the image and separate from it, rather than at the top and folded into the frame as if part of its decoration. This label undoubtedly gave some viewers racist reasons to deride Wheatley and her work, while others found it proof of the lack of innate inferiority among people of African descent. But for Wheatley, the portrait was a chance to present herself as someone whose identity transcended race and slavery—as a creative person engaged in artistic production. For although she is identified as a “servant” (a word that was often contemporary code for enslaved), she is at work on creative rather than manual labor. Seated at a table, her body is more at rest than at work.⁹ She is posed in profile, slender with sloping shoulders, delicately pretty, and caught in the thoughtful act of writing. She is graceful and pensive, cupping her chin in one hand with a quill hovering above a partially covered page in another. A book on the table next to the ink quill emphasizes her education as well as her creativity. She is dressed, as Susanna Wheatley preferred, in plain clothes. But although her clothes are simple, she wears a black ribbon tied in a bow around her neck, a bonnet adorned with pleats and a bow, and a white fichu around her shoulders, as well as an apron. Her clothes and accessories echo the modest fashion choices of the Countess of Huntingdon in some of her own portraits.¹⁰ Although she is quite literally framed as a servant, her image itself offers a different narrative. For Wheatley, her portrait was an act of self-creation as much as a presentation of her likeness or a promotional tool.¹¹ Wheatley found art inspirational and intriguing. Evidence for this is found in some of her poems, including “NIBOBE in Distress for her Children slain by APOLLO, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. and from a view of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson.” This poem—added to her book during her visit to London—connects painting and poetry. It is Wheatley’s interpretation of a painting by Richard Wilson, an artist with whom her fellow Bostonian Prince Demah may have been familiar, too, as Wilson was in the same circles as Robert Edge Pine. Like Pine, Wilson was an early member and director of the Society of Artists. That painting, which captivated the London art scene in the 1760s, showed both Wilson’s landscape painting skills and the tragic fate of Niobe, who witnessed the death of all fourteen of her children at the hands of vindictive Greek gods. It circulated widely in print form, which is likely how Wheatley saw it in London. Its subject matter—and Wheatley’s treatment of it—speak to a mother’s grief, a tragic loss of her children that must have resonated with this poet forcibly removed from her own parents. But it also showed Wheatley’s attentiveness to painting, and to the artists who created them. After all, she did not need to add Wilson’s name either to the title or the verse, but she references him in both. Given the poetic evidence of her fascination with painting, it does not take a great leap of faith to imagine that she took an interest in her own portrait.¹²

Like any portrait, however, it was a negotiated rather than a solo act of creation. Although Phillis Wheatley undoubtedly had a say in how she presented herself in the portrait, Susannah Wheatley did, too. As her enslaver, she had long determined Phillis’s budget for clothing and accessories, and she preferred that Phillis “be dress’d plain,” even when in London meeting aristocracy.¹³ The Countess of Huntingdon also had a say in the creation of the image. Including it in the book had been her idea, approval that would have been critical to the publisher’s decision to include it. Although it was thought in this case that including it “would contribute greatly to the Sale of the Book,” adding a portrait frontispiece to a book added extra cost to both its production and its sale price.¹⁴ Including the frontispiece was an idiosyncratic choice. Most portrait frontispieces at the time were of male rather than female authors. And before Wheatley, all of the handful of women authors whose published works featured their portraits were white. Wheatley was the first Black woman author in the British Empire to have her portrait printed alongside her work. She also was the first colonial American woman. Her image carried weight far beyond its superficial meaning as a likeness or an illustration.¹⁵

Phillis Wheatley, after (?) Scipio Moorhead (London: Archibald Bell, 1773).

The circle of people who contributed to the creation of the portrait went beyond Wheatley herself, the countess, and Susanna Wheatley. It also included the Boston artist who created the original drawing, pastel, or painting as well as the engraver of the print. Like the book itself, the production of Wheatley’s image was a collaborative, creative labor between colonial and metropolitan makers.¹⁶ An unknown London maker created the line engraving, using careful cuts and furrows in the copper plate to show the clean lines of the wooden table and chair, the soft folds of her clothes, and the dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes.¹⁷ Her skin is not exaggeratedly dark. Instead, the engraver took care to make her hair, eyes, and ribbon around her neck all darker than her skin, a decision that set her apart from caricatured Black figures in contemporary British art. She is also distinguished from such stock figures by what she is not wearing. Most Black people in portraits wore pearls to signify their “exotic” African heritage, like John Pine in his portrait by Hogarth. Or they were painted with silver collars around their neck to signify their enslaved status. Both pearls and silver collars served a practical visual purpose as well as a symbolic one. They highlighted the contrasting darkness of their wearers’ skin, just as their wearers’ skin was meant to contrast with the paleness of the white people with whom they were posed. Both visual tropes can be seen in paintings like the double portrait of cousins Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Belle Lindsay. They are also in black-and-white satirical popular prints, like Hogarth’s Taste in High Life (1746). In this print, a Black boy wears a turban, pearl earring, and silver collar around his neck to signify both his exoticism and his enslavement. His dark skin contrasts with both the pearl and silver and the pale skin of the fashionably dressed white woman who clucks him possessively under the chin. The paleness of her skin is also emphasized by the black ribbon she wears around her neck, a black ribbon like the one Wheatley wears in her portrait.

Portraying Wheatley wearing a black ribbon is an unusual element for a Black portrait. Black ribbons pop up with regularity in paintings, drawings, and prints of the time, by artists like Gainsborough and Reynolds, as well as Hogarth. Sometimes they are wrapped around the neck of servants, but more often they set off the pale skin of wealthy or genteel ladies, like Reynolds’s 1761 portrait of Lady Anstruther.¹⁸ Colonial artists used black ribbons for the same effect, as Copley did in his 1772 portrait of Dorothy Wendell Skinner.¹⁹ Almost without exception, the girls and women wearing black ribbons in paintings and prints are white.²⁰ Wheatley’s black ribbon and her genteel, leisurely pose set her apart from how most Black women and enslaved people were portrayed at the time. In important ways, her image is at odds with its label, as anyone conversant with popular artistic practices of the day would have known.²¹

Those people included the artist who created the original image from which this print was made. Because the print was left unattributed and the original does not survive, it is not certain who created it. Many have suggested, however, that it was made by one of Wheatley’s fellow enslaved Bostonians of African descent called Scipio Moorhead.²² Scipio was baptized in 1760 under the name Scipio Sarahson at King’s Chapel, Boston. He was listed as a “child” rather than an infant, making it likely that he, like most children who were baptized and not listed as “infant” in eighteenth-century Boston, was about two years old, though it is possible that he was older. Beyond his intriguing temporary surname of Sarahson, the baptismal record noted nothing about his parents. It’s possible he was one of the infants born to enslaved women in New England who were regularly sold—or just given away—by their enslavers, who wished to avoid the extra cost or complication of letting enslaved mothers keep their children.²³

Instead of listing his mother’s name, as Prince Demah’s baptismal record had, Scipio’s described him simply as “a Negroe Servant to Rev.d John Morehead.”²⁴ Among his sponsors was Reverend Moorhead’s wife, Sarah Parsons Moorhead. A creative and talented woman, she published poems—including one in honor of Whitefield—and was a skilled enough artist that she sometimes taught drawing, japanning, painting on glass, and embroidery. If she had the inclination, she might have taught Scipio as well, or at least encouraged his talent as Christian Barnes had encouraged Prince Demah. Even if she chose not to teach him, living in her home would have exposed him to creative practices and materials. Although no known works survive, Scipio Moorhead is remembered as an artist because of Wheatley’s poem “To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works,” published in her book.²⁵

The Moorheads and Wheatleys were neighbors and well acquainted. John Moorhead was among the men who signed the attestation that she was indeed the author of the poems to be published in her book. Phillis and Scipio certainly knew one another. Phillis would have been the same age, or certainly less than a decade older than Scipio. Assuming Scipio Sarahson took his new enslavers’ last name, as was common, he would have been Scipio Moorhead, “S. M.,” when they knew one another. Wheatley begins her poem by describing the pleasure viewing his art gave her: “When first thy pencil did those beauties give, / And breathing figures learnt from thee to live, / How did those prospects give my soul delight, / A new creation rushing on my sight?”²⁶ Clearly delighting in the work of a fellow talented young artist from Africa, she goes on to call him a “wondrous youth” and urge that he “each noble path pursue, / On deathless glories fix thine ardent view; / Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire / To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire.”²⁷ She hopes for nothing less for his “wishful eyes” than “immortal fame.”²⁸ The poem makes it clear that she is encouraging his talent. But did she write her poem thanking an artist for his portrait of her, or as a consolation prize to a friend who was not chosen to paint the image for her book?

Although Wheatley was keen to cultivate Black creativity, she also was ambitious. And Susanna Wheatley was ambitious on her behalf. Every step of getting Wheatley’s poems published in London—from the attestation of Boston worthies to the staged performance for Woolridge, from Susanna Wheatley’s letters to the countess and the editors of London newspapers to Phillis’s trip to London—was carefully planned and executed. Once they decided to pursue a London publication, neither Phillis nor Susanna Wheatley thought small. It was one thing for a colonial North American writer to seek a London publisher; it was quite another to seek the patronage of the Earl of Dartmouth and the Countess of Huntingdon to make it happen. By the time Susanna Wheatley learned of the request by the Countess of Huntingdon to have a portrait made of Phillis for the frontispiece, all of Boston knew that there was an enslaved man—one of genius trained by one of the best artists in London, no less—painting portraits in the Wheatleys’ neighborhood. That man, of course, was Prince Demah, who ran advertisements multiple times in 1773, beginning with the January 7 edition of the Boston News-Letter. Although his enslaved status and race undoubtedly caused some Bostonians to shy away from his work, in 1773 he was the only London-trained portrait painter working in Massachusetts.

In February, he completed his portrait of merchant William Duguid, and examples of his work could be seen at the watchmaker’s shop a short walk from the Wheatley home. By 1773, in addition to Duguid’s, he had painted his own self-portrait, as well as a number of “pictures from the life,” some of them (in Christian Barnes’s admittedly biased opinion) “as good likenesses as ever Mr. Copling took.” He also had made copies of some of Copley’s portraits, including a portrait of Christian Barnes.²⁹ He was well connected, too. Unlike Scipio Moorhead, he could ask his teacher, Robert Edge Pine, for recommendations about engravers in London. After all their careful planning to secure aristocratic patronage, it is difficult to imagine that when she needed to get a portrait done quickly (assuming Copley was not to be had), Susanna Wheatley would turn to an amateur teenage boy rather than a local London-trained “genius” with a proven body of work. Even if that amateur were worthy of being called, as Wheatley dubbed him, “a wond’rous youth.”³⁰

Prince Demah, Christian Barnes (1773?). From the evidence of her correspondence and visual similarities to his work, it is likely that this was the copy Prince Demah made of a (now lost) portrait of Christian Barnes by John Singleton Copley.

Phillis Wheatley might have wanted a different outcome. At the time, Demah was in his late thirties—more of an age to be Wheatley’s parent than her friend. Perhaps she did prefer to sit for Scipio Moorhead. Perhaps her poem to him is a quiet act of rebellion that she did not get to choose him as the artist for her portrait. Or perhaps, even if Scipio wanted to do it, she preferred to rely on Demah for the book’s frontispiece and wrote the poem to Scipio to console him in his disappointment. Despite its title, the poem is hardly a straightforward outpouring of praise for his work. While she writes that she hopes the “muse inspire each future song! / Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d, / May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!,” she also hints that creative satisfaction might elude him and his “wishful eyes.” She reminds him, however, that any earthly art they produce—no matter how inspired it might be—is not what truly matters in the end. True immortality is found for Christian souls in the afterlife, where “darkness ends in everlasting day.”³¹

Prince Demah, Henry Barnes (1773?). Unlike that of his wife, the portrait of Henry Barnes likely was done from life rather than copied from another portrait. His portrait has more expression than hers and is surrounded by an oval rather than a rectangle. The two portraits are, however, in matching frames whose lack of sophistication marks them as made in the colonies.

Such a reminder likely resonated for Scipio, enslaved as he was in a minister’s home. Although it might have been a bitter reminder, given that he was enslaved by a minister whose wife, by 1773, suffered horribly from a mental illness that required laborious nursing. It was not a situation conducive to a peaceful life, particularly for a young person enslaved in the home. Nor was it one that left much time or opportunity for practicing art, particularly if it had been Sarah Moorhead training him before her illness incapacitated her. Especially given her illness, it also is not certain that the household would have had the necessary supplies on hand to make an oil painting.³²

Although Scipio as the image’s artist cannot be ruled out, Wheatley’s image offers some additional clues that it was likely the work of Demah. In 1773, among the paintings Demah certainly made were those of William Duguid and a copy of Copley’s portrait of Christian Barnes’s closest friend, Elizabeth Murray Smith (recently become Mrs. Ralph Inman). For the latter, although he was making a painting from a painting, Demah was not satisfied with working solely as a copyist. He preferred to work from life, as he would have learned to do while training with Robert Edge Pine. The summer of 1773, Christian Barnes wrote to Inman that, “if you have an hour to spare at any time when you are in Boston you will allow Prince to make some alterations in the Coppy he has taken from your Picture which he says he cannot do but from the life.”³³ Barnes—likely reflecting Demah’s own concerns—made a particular note about getting “the dress of the head” right. In the Copley portrait, Inman wears a turquerie-style turban—a more elaborate headdress than what Demah saw most women wearing in Boston. Although Demah’s copy of Copley’s portrait of Inman is lost, his copy of Copley’s portrait of Christian Barnes makes evident his keen, detailed eye for rendering clothing and accessories, including headdresses. Barnes wears a detailed cap atop her head, its ruffles and ribbons precise yet delicate. The floral pattern of her dress is equally exact, showing the same attention to the pattern of the fabric that he took in painting Duguid’s banyan. The brooch Duguid wears in the portrait survives, making it also evident that Demah reproduced its details faithfully (more faithfully than a critic like Reynolds would wish). In Duguid’s portrait, Demah also included a plethora of objects. Duguid is a man defined by the things around him, the objects he owns and uses, as much as by his face and figure. The chair he sits in, the bookcase behind him, the books themselves—all are as carefully delineated as the details of his face and clothing.

Only the engraving of the Wheatley portrait has survived, making it difficult to know how exactly it looks like the original painting. There are, however, notable visual similarities between Demah’s surviving portraits and the print of Wheatley. The treatment of Wheatley’s bonnet is similar to the rendering of the one worn by Christian. Both Wheatley’s and Duguid’s portraits are defined as much by the surrounding objects as by the figure. In both images, the figure is defined by a large forehead, small sloping shoulders, and delicate small hands. Although Wheatley’s is a finer portrait than Duguid’s, that difference might stem from the fact that portraits in profile like Wheatley’s are far easier to produce than frontal views like Duguid’s. Demah’s artistic training is itself an argument. His time in London and his time with Robert Edge Pine made him more familiar than other colonial artists with the meanings behind various painterly poses and the iconography of gender and race as it was popularized in prints by artists like Hogarth. We also know he studied Copley’s work in depth, copying his portraits more than once. There are marked similarities between Wheatley’s portrait and Copley’s work in Boston the year before it was painted, including his portrait of Dorothy Wendell Skinner in half profile, wearing a black ribbon, seated at a wooden table with one hand tucked under her chin. In the end, it is impossible to know whether it was Demah or Moorhead who painted Wheatley. What is most notable is that there was not one, not two, but three extraordinarily talented enslaved artists living and working within a few minutes’ walk of one another in 1770s Boston.³⁴ They were not exceptional so much as they were all talented and determined enough to pursue those talents, with the help of networks of Black and white women, despite the odds stacked against them by enslavement.

In the colonies Wheatley relied upon networks of women, Black as well as white, to sell her book outside of the Boston booksellers, Cox and Berry on King Street, who had license to sell it. She wrote poems on commission for women who heard her read her poems aloud in other women’s homes.³⁵ Deborah Cushing, the wife of Thomas Cushing, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and Franklin’s confidant in the case of the Hutchinson letters, bought a copy of Poems on Various Subjects for her husband and noted that she did so because a number of other women they knew “were so pleased with Phillis and her performances that they bought her books and got her to compose some pieces for them.”³⁶ Wheatley’s poems circulated in much the same way in places where she herself was not present, including in Philadelphia. There, Quakers like Susanna Wright and wives of prominent local men like Julia Stockton Rush, wife of Benjamin Rush, bought her book and circulated manuscript copies of her poems to their friends.³⁷

One of Wheatley’s dearest friends, Obour Tanner, helped her sell books in Newport, Rhode Island, which in the 1770s was the epicenter of New England’s transatlantic slave trade to Africa. Like Wheatley, Tanner, whom Wheatley often addressed as her “dear Sister,” was a young Black woman born in Africa. Like Wheatley, she crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship—perhaps, according to oral histories, even aboard the Phillis—the same ship that carried Wheatley to North America. Whether or not that was true, they shared the experience of surviving the Middle Passage as young girls and being sold into slavery in New England. They also both were evangelical Christians. Before the first shipment of her books arrived in Boston, Wheatley wrote to Tanner to ask for her help raising interest in her book and getting subscriptions, or advance orders, for copies in Newport. She was successful, and the two friends exchanged money and books between Rhode Island and Massachusetts.³⁸

In early May of 1774, Wheatley reported to Tanner that she had just received another three hundred copies of her book of poems from the “last” London ships.³⁹ As it turned out, she wrote only a few days before Bostonians learned that their port would be closed in a few weeks. Wheatley’s books had the misfortune to cross the Atlantic at politically fraught moments that slowed the sale of her books. The first shipment had arrived on one of the ships carrying tea dumped into Boston Harbor. Now another batch had arrived just before the distressing news of the Boston Port Act. Every ship that sailed back and forth between Britain and its colonies carried gossip and information as part of its cargo. Although rumors came with every ship that docked in a North American port, as late as the end of April, colonists still weren’t sure what to expect from the British government in reaction to their winter protests against the Tea Act. Now, in early May, just as Wheatley received another batch of her books to sell, all that changed as Boston received confirmation of the shocking news that Parliament had, in fact, passed the Boston Port Act.

Uncertain apprehension turned into distinct alarm. Boston’s Committee of Correspondence sprang into action, enlisting the help of other committees to send news of the development throughout the colonies. News of the legislation soon spread through newspapers as well as private correspondence, and soon all of America was discussing what was to be done. To Patriots in the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the answer was clear: “This attack, though made immediately upon us, is doubtless designed for every other colony who will not surrender their sacred rights and liberties into the hands of an infamous ministry. Now therefore is the time when All should be united in Opposition to this violation of the Liberties of All. Their grand Object is to divide the Colonies.” Their proposed solution was to implement tactics that had worked before in the wake of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts—begin an immediate boycott of British goods throughout the colonies, as “a great but necessary sacrifice to the cause of liberty [that] will effectually defeat the design of this act of revenge.”⁴⁰ Within a month, there were colonists from north to south who agreed. To George Washington, writing to his friend George William Fairfax in England, it seemed the British government sought to “fix the Shackles of Slavry upon us,” making “the cause of Boston the despotick Measures in respect to it I mean now is and ever will be considerd as the cause of America,” although, he hastened to add, “(not that we approve their cond[uc]t in destroyg the Tea).”⁴¹ In the face of the immediate widespread response to the Boston Port Act, it surely occurred to Wheatley—despite her ideological devotion to liberty—that another colonial boycott was imminent. She might not get future shipments of books to sell, for her Boston distributors, Cox and Berry, would be subject to public pressure not to sell newly imported British goods.

But despite the fiery rhetoric of republicans like the men of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, 1774 was a time of uncertainty in America as well as in Britain. The future was unpredictable, dependent upon one contingent decision falling domino-like into another. It took time to make and coordinate decisions across the colonies. In the meantime, people continued living their lives. Wheatley kept writing poems and selling her books. The same month the British closed the port of Boston, Prince Demah completed a portrait of the son of a wealthy local merchant, Melatiah Bourn, who clearly was interested in encouraging Black talent, as he also paid for two enslaved boys to be educated.⁴²

But by fall of 1774, politics became near-impossible to avoid. The other colonies rallied to help Massachusetts. The First Continental Congress was formed and met in Philadelphia, where it passed the “Continental Association” in October, an agreement across the thirteen colonies to immediately boycott the import and consumption of British goods. A similar ban was enacted in December that included Ireland and the British West Indies, along with a threat to ban exports from the colonies to these same places unless Parliament repealed the Coercive Acts. The Continental Association specified that merchants who did not participate in the boycott, as Henry Barnes had refused to do in the wake of the Townshend Acts, were “enemies of American liberty” who should be shunned by their communities.⁴³ Abigail Adams reported to Catharine Macaulay in England that the colonies were united in another boycott of British goods because “tho it was formerly the pride and ambition of American[s] to indulge in the fashions and Manufactures of Great Brittain now she threatens us with her chains we will scorn to wear her livery, and shall think ourselves more decently attired in the coarse and plain vestures of our own Manufactury than in all the gaudy trapings that adorn the slave.”⁴⁴ But Abigail Adams was sometimes as incorrect as she was fierce in her opinion. Plenty of American colonists, including her fellow Massachusetts residents Henry and Christian Barnes, saw another boycott as curtailing rather than protecting their liberties. They did not see their political choice as one of liberty or death. Instead, even though it cost them most of their possessions, they would see flight as a better option. But as 1774 came to a close, neither Abigail Adams nor the Barneses, neither Phillis Wheatley nor Prince Demah nor Scipio Moorhead knew what the future held.

The year 1775 brought changes to them all. In January, Reverend John and Sarah Moorhead’s daughter Mary put many of her deceased parents’ possessions up for auction. In part because of the economic distress of many Bostonians, sales of valuable portions of their property such as books did not go as well as they might have a year before. Among their possessions sold at a site “not far from the Liberty Tree” was Scipio. Phillis Wheatley must have mourned for her young and talented friend when she heard the news. She likely also was glad that she had guaranteed her own emancipation, and kept official documentation safe across the Atlantic. Scipio’s fate was far more common than her own. In contrast to Wheatley and Demah, Scipio was not given the chance to cultivate and pursue his creative talents professionally. His potential, unlike theirs, was largely unmet. His final whereabouts, like his art, remain unknown. Scipio was put up for sale, then disappears from the historical record.⁴⁵

Although Scipio Moorhead’s fate remains a mystery, the political events of 1774 and 1775 led to unqualified emancipation for Prince Demah. Since returning from London, he had worked in Boston, staying sometimes in Marlborough. The Barneses allowed him to work as a professional painter rather than primarily as their servant. Whether or not they had freed him at this point is unclear—there are no emancipation records and it seems that he lived in a state of unfreedom in which he had independence of movement and work while remaining, just as his mother Daphny was, legally bound to the Barneses. Despite the Barneses’ encouragement of his talents and profession, his state of unfreedom—like his mother’s continued enslavement—no doubt weighed on his mind. Not only, to paraphrase Phillis Wheatley, because the desire for liberty lived in everyone’s heart, but because the Demahs had good reason to fear the Barneses’ control over their future.

Around the same time Henry and Christian Barnes purchased Prince Demah and began to encourage his art, another person they held in bondage—a young woman called Juliet—began a romance with a man called Jack. Jack was enslaved by their good friend Elizabeth Murray Smith, who left him in Massachusetts when she took a trip to Britain in 1769. Christian Barnes, who adored gossip and drama, delighted in sharing news of the burgeoning romance between Jack and “Lady Juliet,” as she styled her, in letters she sent across the Atlantic to Smith. In September, she reported that “Jack behaves extremely well only we are afraid as he has quitted the field of Bacchus that he will soon be under the banner of Venus, and that Juliet wil become the object of his affection.” If, Barnes continued, she was correct and he had traded his fondness for alcohol for a fondness for Juliet, “as you are a party concerned I shall stipulate that the marriage shall not be consummated till you return.”⁴⁶ Unsurprisingly, however, her intent to control their affections and sexual relationship proved untenable. In December, she reported that Jack had presented Juliet with a pair of earrings; a few months later, they decided to marry, or, as Christian put it, “take each other for better or worse.”⁴⁷ They made a happy couple, and Jack was an “extreme fond husband” who “could not bear to be long absent from his beloved.”⁴⁸

By contrast, Christian Barnes was a woman who was not content with her lot in life. She found being “Chain’d down to domestic Dutys” distinctly unsatisfying. It was enough to “stagnate the Blood and Stupefie the Senses.”⁴⁹ She felt chafed by social restrictions placed on women in general, noting with approval that she hoped young women shopkeepers she knew would “be crowned with success for their own sakes, as well as for the Honour of the Sex,” for “Who shall say we have no equal abilitys with the Men when Girls of 18 years of age discover such great capacitys?”⁵⁰ Dissatisfaction with her restricted life and the confines of domestic pursuits were among the reasons, undoubtedly, that she found such pleasure in fostering the talents of her “Hogarth,” Prince Demah, in the first place. And now, perhaps because Prince Demah was away in London, she needed a new source of amusement, and so she continued to take an active interest in the romance between Jack and Juliet. In November of 1770, while Prince Demah and Henry Barnes were away in England, Juliet went into labor with the couple’s first child. A midwife was called, and Christian, at Jack’s request, had Juliet labor in the “Best room under the green curtains.”⁵¹ Daphny bustled around, cooking for the family and guests, and after a long labor, Juliet gave birth to “an extreme fine Child the very Picture of its Pappa.” Jack was the “very happiest of mortals.”⁵²

His happiness was short-lived. Christian Barnes viewed his daughter as “a trouble brought upon me.”⁵³ She soon “dispos’d of” the baby girl, giving her to a woman who lived three miles away from the Barnes household.⁵⁴ Although Barnes did not record how Juliet or Jack reacted to her giving away their child, it is easy to imagine their sadness and distress. The enforced separation from their child must have seemed especially cruel after Barnes had encouraged their relationship and supported Juliet’s labor. Daphny knew something of what Juliet was feeling, as she too had been separated from her child by her enslavers. Daphny was someone whose dislike of slavery was so intense that it was palpable to her enslavers. Witnessing Christian Barnes give away another enslaved woman’s child, as her own child had been, likely ate away at Daphny just as it saddened Juliet and Jack. It also surely made all three enslaved people wary of any promises and suspicious of any kind words from Christian Barnes. The quick disposal of Juliet’s baby made it clear that she had just as much power as Henry Barnes to make decisions about their enslaved people’s future.⁵⁵

If Daphny’s trust of Christian Barnes increased as Christian and Henry Barnes supported her son’s career as a painter and let him set up shop on his own in Boston, events in the summer of 1773 reminded her of how little the Barneses could be trusted, and how dangerous their control of an enslaved person’s fate. In July of 1773, Christian was simultaneously raving about Prince Demah’s skills at painting—better than Copley, she said—and shattering the lives of Juliet and Jack. That month, Barnes complained that “at present my family is rather in an unsettled way,” in large part because Juliet had just given birth to another baby. But this child was not Jack’s. Christian Barnes reported to Jack’s enslaver and her friend Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman that the baby’s complexion was “what we expected.” The baby’s complexion made it clear that the father was white. Once again, Barnes decided that she could not “consent to have it in the House.” This time, however, either because she was tired of Juliet’s pregnancies or because the child was of mixed race, she decided to “dispose of” Juliet “and the Child together.” Despite this cruel decision, she continued to take an interest in the couple’s romance. She wrote to Inman that, “if you have any inclination to part with Jack I belive it would conduce to both their happiness to be fellow Travilers.” It was, she confided, what Jack and Juliet themselves wanted. Despite the fact that she had given birth to another man’s child, she observed, Jack’s “dillicacy does not seem to be much herd” and Juliet “has declar’d that if she could be with jack she would never” have “any other Husband.”⁵⁶

Given the baby’s mixed race and the desire of Jack and Juliet to be together, Juliet very likely was raped by a white man, whether Henry Barnes, some other man known to them in Marlborough or Boston, or someone passing through town and stopping at their store. Juliet giving birth was “trouble” enough. Juliet giving birth to a white man’s child was, apparently, a crime that Christian Barnes could not forgive. After that summer, Barnes wrote no more of Juliet, Jack, or their babies. The little family disappears from the historical record, their fate as much a mystery as Scipio Moorhead’s. The Barneses did not replace Juliet with another enslaved worker.⁵⁷

And so in April of 1775, when living in Massachusetts became unavoidably frightening for the Loyalist Barneses, the only enslaved person living in their Marlborough home was Daphny. Henry Barnes was not living in the house then. He was in Boston, a town occupied by thousands of British troops under General Gage, the British military governor sent the previous summer to replace the disgraced Thomas Hutchinson. Getting from Boston to Marlborough was no longer an easy matter. Colonial militia in the villages and countryside surrounding Boston stood armed and ready to march against Gage’s men. It did not seem safe for Henry to travel past them, nor even to come home to Marlborough. In part this was because of Barnes’s renowned Loyalist politics, and in part because of a dramatic event that occurred at the Barneses’ home two months before. One snowy night in February, two of Gage’s men arrived there. Although “disguised as countrymen, in brown cloaths and reddish handkerchiefs” around their necks, they were soldiers. The men were named Captain William Browne and Ensign Henry De Birniere, and they were on a reconnaissance mission for Gage, tasked with making sketches of the local countryside for making maps.⁵⁸

Even before they arrived in Marlborough, the men were met with suspicion along the way. One night they planned to stay at a tavern, despite knowing its proprietor was not a Loyalist. They ate dinner at the tavern, “which was brought by a black woman.” Although “at first she was very civil,” she was also perceptive and, evidently, a Patriot like her enslaver. She “began to eye us very attentively; she then went out and a little after returned.” When the men tried to make small talk with her, noting “that it was a very fine country,” she “answered so it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it, and if you go up any higher you find it so.”⁵⁹ Aware they had been warned as well as chastised, the men did not stay at the tavern and instead went on their way. As they approached Marlborough, they were stopped almost immediately by a man who asked them where they were going. They told him that they were going to “see a friend (as we intended to go to Mr. Barns’s a gentleman to whom we were recommended, and a friend to the government).” The man continued to press them, asking “if we were in the army,” which they denied, but “were a good deal alarmed at his asking us that question,” which he followed with “several rather impertinent” more. Although Gage’s spies pressed on, someone—either that man or the Black woman at the tavern—sent word of their coming to Marlborough. As soon as they came into town, despite the blowing snow, “the people came out of their houses” to “look at us.” When a baker asked where they were going, they told him they were going to see Henry Barnes. Once they arrived at the Barnes home, the men told Barnes that they “were officers in disguise,” to which Barnes replied that “he knew our situation, that we were very well known (he was afraid) by the town’s people.”⁶⁰ When the men asked for a safe tavern recommendation, Barnes informed them that they “could be safe no where but in his house; that the town was very violent,” and that the night before “a party of liberty people” had gone after them where they had originally intended to stay. Barnes asked the men who spoke to them in town, and when they “told him a baker; he seemed a little startled at that, told us he was a very mischievous fellow, and that there was a deserter at his house”—a deserter who, as it happened, was a drummer in Brown’s own company. Knowing then that their disguise was useless, the men weighed their options. What, they asked Barnes, would his fellow townspeople do “if they did get us into their hands”—a question that “he did not seem like to answer” but, being pressed, he “then said that we knew the people very well, that we might expect the worst of treatment from them.” Not long after this exchange, a local doctor (who had not visited for two years) came to the door, asking to join the Barneses for supper and trying to pry information from the Barneses’ niece and ward Chrisy after Barnes informed him they had company and “could not have the pleasure of attending him that night.”⁶¹

With the inquisitive doctor gone, the men sat down for one of Daphny’s suppers, “and were just beginning to eat, when Barnes (who had been making enquiry of his servants) found that they intended to attack us.” “Then he told us plainly that he was very uneasy for us, that we could be no longer in safety in that town.” The men set off immediately, with Barnes escorting them out of the house by the stables to a road that would lead them to a back way out of town. The men set out into the blizzard, spending the night in the woods, eating bread from the Barneses washed down with melted snow.⁶² Despite the men’s snowy night, the Barneses’ night might have been worse. When Henry Barnes went to Boston later that spring, he met with the two men. He told them what had happened after they left. Almost immediately, “the committee of correspondence” paid Barnes a visit. They demanded to see the British soldiers, and when the Barneses told the committee they were gone, “they then searched his house from top to bottom, looked under the beds and in their cellars.” When they found nothing, the men threatened Barnes nonetheless, telling him that “if they had caught us in his house they would have pulled it about his ears.”⁶³ Despite that threat, Barnes was brave enough to misdirect the men, who sent “horsemen after us, every road.” Barnes told the committee they “were not officers, but relations of his wife’s” from Maine, who were on their way to a different town than the way the men had gone.⁶⁴

That night was frightening enough. But in April, Christian Barnes would go through “the heaviest affliction” she “ever encountered” without him.⁶⁵ Christian was already churning with worry before these events occurred. She worried about whether to press Henry to leave Boston for home. She worried about her own safety in Marlborough. She sought assurances from the Marlborough selectmen that she “need be under no apprehension from the townspeople” and that it would be safe for Henry to return home. As insurance, she asked her friend Elizabeth Inman to get her a note from Patriot general Israel Putnam that neither she nor Henry was to be molested, which Barnes thought “would be a surer protection for me than any thing in their power to offer.”⁶⁶ Barnes fretted that “no one knows where they are safest at this time” and feared attack from multiple fronts. She worried about her fellow townspeople, she worried about passersby, and she worried about Patriot troops “molesting me” as they marched through town. As spring came to Massachusetts, she wrote of her fear that “my fortitude will fail me. The dreadful accounts I hear from abroad and the unhappy situation I am in at home makes me almost distracted.”⁶⁷ The first Sunday in April, she experienced “the greatest terror I was ever thrown into.”⁶⁸

Her fears came to life when a stranger came to her gate “and loaded his musket and before I could determine which way to run he entered the house and demanded a dinner.” She “sent him the best I had”—presumably through Daphny, her cook and sole enslaved worker in Marlborough. Despite this service, the man “was not contented but insisted upon bringing in his gun and dining with me,” which “terrified the young folks [her family and shopworkers] and they ran out of the house.” Christian “went in and endeavoured to pacify him by every method in my power,” but she “found it was to no purpose, he still continued to abuse me and said when he had eat his dinner he should want a horse, and if I did not let him have one he would blow my brains out.” The man said he was a soldier and “pretended to have an order from the General for one of my horses but did not produce it. His language was so dreadful, and his looks so frightful that I could not remain in the house but fled to the store and locked myself in, he followed and declared he would break the door open.” Luckily for Barnes, her fear of her neighbors was somewhat misplaced, as some “people very luckily passing to meeting prevented his doing any mischief and staid by me until he was out of sight.” She was utterly traumatized by the event. As she remembered it, “I did not recover from my fright for several days, the sound of drum, or the sight of a gun put me into such a tremor that I could not command myself.”⁶⁹

In the wake of the soldier’s abuse, a distressed Barnes worried over what to do next. She wanted her husband home but feared that he would be subjected to “insult” from Patriot soldiers between Boston and Marlborough, and from soldiers and neighbors “after his return.” She felt alone and frightened and begged a friend, “Do advise me for I know not what to do.”⁷⁰ The soldier’s attack and growing militarization of Massachusetts affected Daphny, too. Like Barnes, she surely fretted over separation from her loved one in Boston, and worried about Prince Demah’s safety there. A few weeks after the soldier ate Daphny’s supper and frightened Christian Barnes, Massachusetts militiamen and British soldiers fought and killed each other in the villages of Lexington and Concord. War had come to New England. British-occupied Boston came under siege by Massachusetts militiamen, joined that summer by a newly formed Continental army under the leadership of George Washington. In August, King George III declared the North American colonies to be in “open and avowed Rebellion.”⁷¹ The Barneses fled Marlborough, leaving Daphny, Prince, and most of their possessions behind. These possessions included their acres of land in Marlborough, their house, their pearl-ash works, their distillery, their store, thousands of acres in New Hampshire, furniture, linen, plate, a harpsichord, a coach, a wagon, horses, and “some valuable paintings,” including the portraits of themselves and their niece and ward Chrisy painted by Prince Demah.⁷² Despite it being left in the care of a relative (which should have protected it from seizure), within months the General Court awarded their home and its possessions to be used by Patriot General Henry Knox and his wife Lucy, who had left their own possessions behind when they fled Boston.⁷³ Christian, who knew Lucy, felt angry and betrayed. But the Patriots who came to take possession of the Barnes home felt much the same. They took time to take bayonets and stab Demah’s portraits of Christian and Henry Barnes through the heart. If Juliet had been sold to enslavers nearby and heard about this destructive gesture, she likely approved.

10 AMERICAN LIBERTY

WHEN CAPTAIN RICHARD MAITLAND and his crew on the Philippa set sail from London to Georgia, they had no idea war had come to Britain’s North American colonies. They set off across the Atlantic in May 1775, unaware of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, unaware that, in solidarity with conflict in New England, “the People of Georgia” had “become quite hearty in the common cause,” and unaware what a prize their cargo of gunpowder, firearms, and bullets would be for these hearty American patriots.¹ But when Maitland arrived off the Georgia coast in early July, it quickly became apparent that things had changed since he left England a few months before. The day after he dropped anchor, a heavily armed schooner called Liberty sailed out to meet the Philippa. The Liberty was a newly renamed ship, armed and repurposed as a privateer by Georgia’s Provincial Congress. It was just one of many steps the newly formed governing body had taken to wrest control from their royal governor. In Savannah, the Provincial Congress was aided by a Parochial Committee established to enforce the Continental boycott and otherwise monitor, violently if need be, Loyalist behavior. Controlling access to stores of gunpowder was crucial to this work. About a week after Maitland set sail from London, Savannah patriots seized the town’s gunpowder magazine in reaction to news of Lexington and Concord. And now, encouraged by their South Carolina counterparts, they wanted to seize the contents of a British gunpowder ship bound for Georgia. Maitland, of course, knew nothing of any of these developments. But as soon as he saw the Liberty approach his ship, he knew something was amiss. The Liberty was outfitted with ten cannons. Even more troubling, the ship’s flag boldly proclaimed that it did not sail under royal authority. Instead of Britain’s colors, it flew a white flag bordered in red, emblazoned with the words “American Liberty.” What the men on the Liberty did that day would result in the long imprisonment of Ebenezer Smith Platt, a Georgia Patriot who would become first a transatlantic cause célèbre and, eventually, Patience Wright’s son-in-law.²

The Liberty chased Maitland’s ship to a nearby island. There, men from Georgia and South Carolina boarded the Philippa and demanded its cargo on the orders of the Provincial Congress of Georgia. Although Maitland initially refused, he had little choice in the matter. He was outmanned and outgunned. He also surely was angry, and likely frightened, too. The previous June, then captaining the Magna Carta, Maitland had arrived in Charleston Harbor with a cargo that included—unbeknownst to him, he claimed—a few chests of tea. Although Maitland offered to throw the tea into the river rather than try to sell it, an angry mob, determined to stand against the Tea Act, threatened to board his ship and tar and feather him. Maitland managed to escape over the side of his ship and make his way to safety on another British ship, the Britannia, anchored nearby. Just over a year later, he must have cursed his luck and worried what might happen next, now that the Philippa was boarded by men sharing the same politics as those who threatened to tar and feather him in South Carolina.³

To add insult to Maitland’s injury, his ship was not even the original intended target, which was a British gunpowder ship. Because the Philippa was a private merchant’s ship, it carried dry goods, arms, and bullets, as well as gunpowder, intended to aid British trade with Indigenous people in Florida. Orders about what to do with the seized gunpowder were clear—it was immediately seized and sent ashore. But what to do with the rest of the unexpected cargo, notably the arms and bullets, was less clear. It was feared that the “Arms, and Musket Balls still remaining onboard” might “fall into the hands of People who were Inimicable to the Liberty of America.”⁴ And so a few days after the initial boarding, the local Patriot government ordered Maitland to sail to Savannah where three members of the Parochial Committee, including its head, Jewish merchant Mordecai Sheftall, went onboard to supervise the unloading of the rest of Maitland’s cargo. His cargo seized, a frustrated Maitland went ashore to appeal to Georgia’s royal governor for help with his losses. His complaint, however, was to no avail. The governor confessed he was powerless in the face of what he called the “Liberty People.” Late that fall, still uncompensated but also still physically unmolested, Maitland cut his losses, gathered a new cargo, and sailed to Jamaica.⁵

Over five thousand pounds of the gunpowder seized from Maitland’s ship traveled almost immediately to Philadelphia, care of the South Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress. It did so at the urging of South Carolina’s Council of Safety and its president, Henry Laurens, now back from London and doing far more for the American cause than his petitioning of Parliament and king in 1774. From Philadelphia, Congress sent it even further north, for General George Washington to use in his siege on British-occupied Boston. Washington’s gunpowder was perilously low. The gunpowder seized from Maitland was a boon to Washington and his troops that allowed them to continue their siege. Without it, they would have been in dire straits.⁶ If a severe loss for the Philippa and extremely damaging to the British military, from the Patriot perspective, the first privateering mission of the Liberty was a huge success.

Or so it seemed. For Patriot Ebenezer Smith Platt, the Liberty’s attack of the Philippa would have devastating effects. Platt, the Parochial Committee’s secretary, was among the committeemen of “Liberty People” sent to supervise the seizure of the arms and bullets from Maitland. Platt was a New Yorker from a well-connected family who had relocated to Georgia only a few months before. He moved to Georgia hoping to earn a more lucrative living as a plantation holder and slave importer than he had as a watch and clock maker in New York. While still living in New York, Platt was “intimately Acquainted” with Patience Wright and her children, particularly her oldest daughter, Elizabeth.⁷ Although he could not have guessed it when he stood on the deck of the Philippa helping to supervise the seizure of its cargo, that acquaintance would prove to be one of the most important of Platt’s life.

The seizure of the Philippa’s cargo was just the beginning of Georgia Patriots’ efforts to find weapon supplies. Islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the British Empire were among the best sources for purchasing rather than privateering such supplies. In January 1776, Platt and his partner outfitted two ships to sell produce in the French island of Saint-Domingue in exchange for arms and ammunition, or, as he put it, “War-like Stores.”⁸ Platt sailed aboard one of the ships—one that never arrived at its destination. Instead, his ship “unfortunately was taken within a few leagues of her destined Port by his Majestys Ship Maid-stone” and “carried into Kingston in Jamaica.”⁹ In Kingston, British authorities “obliged him to sell his cargo,” so he stayed in Jamaica for two months, purchased another ship, and filled it with cargo to sail back to Georgia.¹⁰ While in Jamaica, Platt encountered Richard Maitland. Despite the circumstances of their last meeting aboard the Philippa, the two men socialized, seemingly without incident, for weeks. In fact, as Platt later recounted to the Wrights in London, Maitland was “Exceeding Friendly to Him” and even “invited Him to Make his home on Board his Ship whilest He Staid in Kingston.”¹¹ Although Platt declined this offer, “they frequently fell in Company with Each other and allways upon the footing of Friendship.”¹²

One night, however, the two men happened to be at the same crowded coffee house and, as “Some of them had got a little heated with the Liquor,” one man offered “a Toast ‘Damnation to all Americans.’ ”¹³ In response, Platt “Reply’d that No Gentlemen of Honour or Goodness could drink such a Toast as it was Repugnant to the Rules of Society; on which the other grew warm as well as some of the Company, and Mr. Plat fearing A Quarrel imediately Withdrew.”¹⁴ After Platt left, “Captain Maitland, who by this time had grown warm with the Liquor and Conversation” cried out that “That Damnd fellow was one of them on Board my ship at Georgia with an order from the Congress and Landed the Powder and Arms for them.” The men who were there, many of whom were “Exceedingly Pleasd at the Discovery,” the “next Day reported it all over the town, not omitting the Governor Sir Bassil Keith who imediately sent word” for Maitland to come discuss the incident. Although Maitland “having grown sober again was Exceedingly Sorry for what he had said and sent word to Mr. Plat that He wish’d he would absent Himself or Leave the Place,” Platt disregarded his warning. He refused to leave until his cargo was ready and stood firm that he had done nothing wrong.¹⁵

Local British naval officers did not agree. Vice Admiral Clark Gayton stopped Platt’s ship from leaving Jamaica and seized the vessel, its crew, and Platt. The enslaved boy he had with him and his clothes were all he was allowed to keep from the ship. The vice admiral did not mince words when it came to his opinion about Platt’s wrongdoing. As soon as he got confirmation of his identity from Maitland and some of his men, he had no doubts that Platt was “a Committee Man at Georgia, and is the Man that Boarded the Phillipa” last year and “seized all the Government Gun Powder & carried it to the Rebels.” Gayton put him “in Irons” and sent word about his capture to local civil authorities in Jamaica since, he assumed, “he must be tried on this Island for the Robbery and Executed on this Island,” as well.¹⁶ Gayton’s assumption, as it turned out, was incorrect, although the Prohibitory Act gave Jamaican authorities an easy excuse to have his vessel seized and sold. Platt managed to hire an attorney, seek a writ of habeas corpus, and go before a judge. To finance his trial, Platt sold the enslaved boy who was with him, severing the child from any personal ties he had back home in Savannah and likely guaranteeing him what was a notoriously cruel fate laboring in Jamaica.¹⁷ Likely, but not certainly, for like Scipio Moorhead, and like Juliet and her babies, he too disappears from the historical record after being sold to accommodate their white enslavers’ troubles.

In Jamaica, Platt’s long and winding experience in the British legal system began to take what would be the first of many convoluted twists and turns. The Jamaican court set Platt free, noting that he could not be tried there when the alleged crime occurred in Georgia. The judge suggested that Gayton might send Platt to England on a naval ship for trial in England if he wished. Platt insisted that events happened before the king declared the colonies in open rebellion, but Gayton, who seems to have been genuinely outraged by what he considered Platt’s treasonous activities in Georgia, ignored him. Instead, Gayton seized him under the pretense of impressing him into naval service as an able-bodied seaman but kept him in shackles for months aboard his ship, where he was “treated with the greatest insolence and indignities by the Sailors.”¹⁸ Gayton eventually transferred Platt to another Royal Navy frigate, and then to a third, the Pallas. In late July of 1776, Gayton sent “several Affidavits” on Platt’s case to England, noting that he had sent the American to England “to take his Tryal for the Crime he has committed, which I hope their Lordships will approve.”¹⁹ Once again, however, Gayton’s hopes for Platt’s quick punishment were misplaced. Just as had happened with Maitland, while Platt was crossing the Atlantic, the politics of the British Empire had changed once again. By the time Platt reached England, the American Continental Congress had declared to a “candid world” that the colonies were “Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”²⁰ The colonies-turned-states had united and declared their independence. When his country declared itself free of British rule, it set in motion a political response that severely curtailed Platt’s liberty.

Americans like Platt were more susceptible to charges of treason now that American blame for the conflict with Britain had shifted from ministers and Parliament to the king. Nothing made this transferal clearer than the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence. After agreeing to declare independence, one of Continental Congress’s first priorities was to commission its official printer, John Dunlap, to create copies of the declaration. The document had to be shared with civilian and solider alike, and it had to be shared far and wide.²¹ Dunlap created a broadside version of it that was starkly straightforward in its appearance. It had no printer’s ornaments or designs on it. Here, the words were what mattered. Visually, it was dominated by its thirty-seven clipped lines of accusatory grievances against the king. Each grievance was separated from the other, set off by indents of capitalized versions of the words “he” or “for.” Type was set to make it easy to read, which in turn made it easier to listen to. In the hands of a skilled orator, the grievances rolled like wave after wave of accusation, reaching their final declarative crescendo.²² Copies of it were sent throughout the states to be read aloud in public.²³ On July 8 in Philadelphia “many thousand spectators” gathered at noon to hear “INDEPENDANCY” declared outside the State House and “testified their approbation of it by repeated acclamantions of joy.”²⁴ John Adams, who took a keen interest in how best to celebrate the declaration, reported that soldiers “paraded on the common, and gave Us the Feu de Joy, notwithstanding the Scarcity of powder. The Bells run all Day, and almost all night. Even the Chimers, chimed away.”²⁵ The exclamation mark on the end of the day came in the evening, when “our late King’s coat of arms was brought from the Hall in the State-House, where the said King’s Courts were formerly held, and burned amidst the acclamations of a croud of spectators.”²⁶

Similar public readings, celebrations, and destruction of visual reminders of the king occurred throughout the former colonies.²⁷ One of the most dramatic of these acts of iconoclasm occurred in New York, a short walk from where Patience Wright had operated her wax exhibitions. The day after the declaration was read in Philadelphia, George Washington ordered his Continental Army troops to muster in a field in Manhattan to hear it read aloud. As had happened in Philadelphia, the reading of the declaration inspired people to gather up and burn things related to the king or British royal authority. In New York, they had a particularly dramatic target in the larger-than-life statue of King George III that stood on the Bowling Green, at the southern tip of Manhattan near Fort George. One of only a few public statues that existed in the North American colonies, it was imposing as well as unusual. It was tall and sparkling, fixed atop a tall marble pedestal, and made of lead gilded with gold. Modeled after a famous statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it posed the king as a Roman emperor astride a horse. Joseph Wilton, the same British sculptor who made the statues of William Pitt erected in Charleston and New York, also crafted this statue of George III. And, like his statues of Pitt, colonists commissioned this one of the king from Wilton out of “Gratitude, and Reverence,” for “the innumerable and singular Benefits received from our most gracious sovereign,” which included, most recently, the repeal of the Stamp Act.²⁸

Although the statue had been subject to minor acts of vandalism over the last ten years—the chief reason it was protected by a ten-foot-high iron fence with posts surmounted by crowns—the night after the reading of the declaration it was completely toppled.²⁹ Led by the local Sons of Liberty, soldiers, and sailors, the crowd heaved it onto the ground and chopped it into pieces. In a gesture used to humiliate criminals and enact revenge since medieval times, they cut the nose off its face. They also beheaded it, a deeply symbolic act familiar from the regicide of King Charles I in the English Civil War as well as punishment and tribute practices in colonial North American and Indigenous warfare.³⁰ The head was carried to a local tavern to be displayed on a spike, in keeping with the British custom of fixing the heads of criminals and traitors on spikes for public display. With the exception of the head, the pieces of the dismembered statue were sent to Connecticut to be made into bullets. Over 42,000 bullets were made, many of them cast by Patriot women and girls and later used by Patriot forces against British troops. But not all of the statue made it into their hands—some pieces were stolen en route by Loyalists who secreted them in Connecticut swamps for safety.³¹ And the head did not stay on its pike long. A British officer sent a soldier to steal and bury it to keep it safe. Once the British took New York, the officer had it unearthed and “sent the Head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed Country.”³²

Boston’s reaction to news of the declaration was similar to that in Philadelphia and New York. The first reading there took place just over a week after the declaration was read in New York. Bostonians gathered to listen outside the State House on King Street, the same place where the Boston Massacre took place six years before.³³ It was a Boston artisan, Colonel Thomas Crafts, who read the declaration from the balcony of the building. Like Prince Demah, Crafts was a painter. His specialty was not portraits, however, but rather decorative painting, in particular the japanning of furniture, the same craft sometimes taught by Scipio Moorhead’s enslaver Sarah Moorhead. By summer 1776, Crafts had a long record of activism on behalf of the Patriot cause. A member of the Loyal Nine and the Sons of Liberty, he participated in the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor and, as a member of the Massachusetts militia artillery unit nicknamed “the Train,” fought against the British during the siege of Boston. Crafts’s regiment, which had his fellow artisan Paul Revere as its second in command, was well represented at the event. As Abigail Adams reported to her husband, “Field Pieces with the Train were brought there” and “the troops appeard under Arms.” As Crafts read, “great attention was given to every word.” Once he finished reading, the other men on the balcony with him cried out “God Save our American States” followed by three cheers from the crowd that “rended the air,” after which “the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannons were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeared joyful.”³⁴

That night, the destructive part of the celebration began. The unicorn and lion statues—royal emblems of the king’s authority—were toppled from the roof of the State House and, along with every sign that carried anything remotely signifying the British king, “whether Lion and Crown, Pestle and Mortar and Crown, Heart and Crown, & c. together with every Sign that belonged to a Tory” burned together in King Street.³⁵ Abigail Adams approved of the iconoclasm, finding religious as well as political justice in it. As she put it, “Thus ends royal Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen.”³⁶

Although the reaction in New York was perhaps the most dramatic, it had a life-changing effect on many of the people who heard it. White men may have been at the heart of the readings and the destruction that followed it, but the ceremonies and celebration moved women like Abigail Adams as well as her husband, and Black as well as white people.³⁷ In Philadelphia, a free Black boy of around eleven years old, James Forten, recalled “that he was in the State House yard, when the far-famed Declaration of Independence was read; and that he early engaged in the defence of his country’s rights, in the revolutionary conflict.”³⁸ Hearing the declaration inspired him, as soon as he was old enough a few years later, to enlist in service on an American privateer. Hearing or reading the declaration likely had a similar effect on Prince Demah. The next spring, he too would enlist to fight with the Patriots, and he would enlist in one of the companies within the Train, still under the command of Colonel Thomas Crafts.

News of the declaration inspired strong reactions among those who read it in London, too. News of the Declaration of Independence first appeared in the London Gazette as a front-page story on August 10, slightly over a month after it was read aloud in Philadelphia.³⁹ Six days later, the full text of the declaration (based on a manuscript copy with a few errors in it sent by a British officer in America) was printed in two different London newspapers. Although most London papers at the time skewed anti-ministry, these two papers occupied opposing ends of the political spectrum.⁴⁰ Summaries of the declaration and redacted, changed, and partial versions of it filled the London papers, which cautiously made changes to avoid printing a direct attack on the king. Passionate debates erupted over its significance, whether it was to be applauded or abhorred, and whether it was a declaration of war.

Much of the coverage in Britain, of course, viewed the Americans as rebels, traitors, or worse. “Pacificus” opined in a London newspaper that the king was a sovereign whom “none but the very worst of Rebels” would “ever think of stigmatizing with the name of tyrant.”⁴¹ One “R. Figg” had a more dramatic view of things. “Figg” wrote to a London newspaper that he had heard that “the Devil took Mr. Adams, Mr. Hancock, &c. upon a high mountain, and shewed them the glories of the world, and said Europe and America will I give if you will worship me, and they did so.”⁴² As they had before the Declaration of Independence, however, some in Britain continued to support what they viewed not as rebellious treason but righteous patriotism. When the historically antimonarchical publication The Crisis printed the Declaration of Independence in late August, it prefaced it with the opinion that it was a “Declaration of INDEPENDENCE of the BRAVE, FREE, and VIRTUOUS Americans, against the most dastardly, slavish, and vicious TYRANT, that ever disgraced a Nation.”⁴³

Readers of The Crisis were just the type of consumers who would also purchase standalone copies of the declaration. One British reader of The Crisis also bought and carefully kept for posterity what was likely the most artistic version of the Declaration of Independence printed in London.⁴⁴ An anonymous printer created a broadside version of the declaration, its words laid out in two columns. Above the text, a portrait of John Hancock floated below a liberty cap above and olive branches below. The image of Hancock was a recycled one, copied from a 1775 mezzotint portrait of him also printed in London.⁴⁵ Hancock’s 1775 image was part of a series of prints of American revolutionary and military leaders created by a London engraver using the pseudonym of “C. Shepherd.” Although the engraver claimed some were done from life, that claim was dubious. But veracity of likeness was not really the point. These prints would sell on the basis of the men’s names alone, names splashed in the London papers like those of officers who commanded American forces at the siege of Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill, men like Israel Putnam and George Washington. And, of course, John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress and a man who was perhaps more of a celebrity in Britain than he was in America. Particularly after the Declaration of Independence, British writers and newspapers speculated at length on Hancock’s current and future role, and wondered if he would reprise Oliver Cromwell’s role from the era of the English Civil War and become “Protector” of the United States.⁴⁶

The repeated use of Hancock’s portrait, and the fact that there was a market for his image as well as for news of political documents and military events, speaks to the fact that interest in the American war in Britain was due to economics as well as politics. Although Catharine Macaulay was right when she predicted that most Britons would not side with the American colonists, their political stance did not signal a lack of interest. News about America, and British response to it, filled not just individual letters to and from Britain, but also the London press. News about the American colonies helped newspapers sell copies, publishers sell pamphlets and books, and artists sell paintings and prints.⁴⁷ News about the declaration was just part of this broader picture.

Patience Wright understood this as well as anyone else. American protest and British political response to it was not just fascinating, it could be profitable. Patriotism and profit—whether pro- or anti-American—could go hand in hand. When at last she got her chance to make a wax portrait of the Earl of Chatham, she made two copies. One she kept on display in her Pall Mall galleries, where people could pay to come see it. The second one she sent across the Atlantic. Just as Joseph Wilton’s public statues of Pitt had been paid for by colonists in Charleston and New York, Wright’s copy of her wax portrait of Pitt was made on commission, “at the Request of meny Men of Emenence in America who all look up to Mr. Pitt as their gaurdin angel and in gratatud to him Insist on mrs Wright to send over to them a Bosto done in Wax of her Best Performance.”⁴⁸ Political conflict as well as cultural ties ensured that there was a market for her work on both sides of the Atlantic.

As she wrote to John Dickinson shortly before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, she not only had it on “good authority” from her contacts in government, she also believed that “the “peopel of England are opresd more than they cane any longer bare and the day you declare yourselves free men England will do so likewise.” In 1775, Wright was not alone in hoping that America’s fight for liberty would inspire widespread reform within Britain, as well. Like many, she hoped that America might be a beacon of hope so strong it shone across the Atlantic and inspired greater civil and religious liberty in Britain, too. She, like many pro-American voices on both sides of the ocean before America declared its independence, was in favor both of reforms that honored American liberty and a united British Empire. Even after America declared its independence, some radicals in England (Wright among them) continued to hope that the United States might be a model of how England might democratically reform its government. She wrote to Dickinson that she believed that “before next October Either a Revolution or Ruin will most seartainly take place” and “America will flourish and be a Blessing,” not just to the British Empire but “to the Whole World.”⁴⁹

For Patience Wright, however, her work—and America’s cause—were not solely about politics. And they would not just benefit the British Empire and the “Whole World.” They also served the highest purpose of all. She was one of many who from the start saw the conflict between Britain and its colonies in religious, even prophetical terms. Religion sometimes played an important role in inspiring steadfast loyalty to the American cause. In Britain, some of America’s staunchest supporters—before and after the Declaration of Independence—were religious dissenters like Nonconformist Welsh minister Richard Price, who published a wildly popular pamphlet called Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty: the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America in 1776. Other dissenting ministers in Britain delivered sermons on behalf of America and helped galvanize popular support through petitions. Wright herself, of course, was raised in a dissenting religious tradition, and she wholeheartedly saw America’s cause as a spiritual one. The opinions she shared with Dickinson came to her, she wrote, from a “spirit of propheise.” She hoped that he and the other “gentlemen of the Congress” would not only effect political reform but would be “the means undr god to set free the whole English nation on both sides the Water,” for the “sins of the Rich have Brot on the Curse of Babylon” to England. Unsurprisingly, given the religious conviction she brought to bear on the political crisis, one of the things Wright did in response to the deepening crisis between colonies and mother country was to install a biblical tableau in her Pall Mall galleries.⁵⁰

Her sister Rachel Wells did such tableaux with frequency, but Patience specialized in portraits of living (or recently deceased) people. For her, this installation was a new departure. It featured three Old Testament figures, that of the Jewish Queen Esther, her Persian husband King Ahasuerus, and her cousin Mordecai. Esther was one of the great heroines of the Bible, renowned for helping to save her people from destruction by her husband, who was a sovereign misled by an evil minister who wished to annihilate the Jews. It was a story that highlighted religious as well as political liberty, the dangers of a king given advice by wicked ministers, and the ability of women to influence the outcome of history. It resonated perfectly with Wright’s politics, spirituality, and her confident idea that, as she put it to John Dickinson, “Women are always usful in grand Events.”⁵¹

Wright became even more unabashedly pro-American and active on behalf of the cause, after learning news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Before, although she was “a genuine Republican and ardent Whig” and her “manners were not those of a courtier,” she “had the ear and favor of George the Third.” However, upon hearing news of the bloodshed in Massachusetts at the end of May 1775, she lost his favor “by scolding him for sanctioning the American war.”⁵² Although she would never regain royal favor, for others in Britain, her pro-American passions only added to her charms. There also was a market for pro-American news and art. Support for America likely was at its height in 1775. That year, Parliament and king alike received petitions from all over Britain on the imperial crisis with America. Half of them called for negotiations to end what one petition called a “ruinous civil war.”⁵³ In the spring and summer of 1775, there was considerable support for the American position in London in particular. In July, the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Commons of London petitioned the king for moderation in his treatment of the North American colonists. Although the king rejected it, it made a clear statement about the pro-American politics of many powerful Londoners at the time.⁵⁴ Her art was proof that the arts “never diminished by crossing the waves,” and that the “variety of emigrants, mechanics and artists of all denominations mixed in the ships that sailed for America” in reaction to “persecution in the reign of Charles the First,” including “the progenitors of Mrs. Wright,” were as talented as they were mindful of political and religious liberty. Wright’s art, “perfect as nature,” befitted someone from a place some idealized (as Wright herself did) for having “the free undefild air of a Blessed Climat and a Virtuous People.”⁵⁵

One of the widely popular symbols of this “undefiled” land was its Indigenous people, whose images were often used as symbolic representations of “America” on everything from ceramics to maps.⁵⁶ In 1775, Patience Wright took advantage of this popular symbolism to amplify the Americanness of her waxworks by adding what she called an “Indian man and squaw” to her collection. Wright, like all colonial Americans at the time, would have seen Indigenous people. And it is likely that Wright used the collection of Indigenous clothing and accessories that her friend Benjamin West had in London as models for their garments.⁵⁷ As with her biblical tableau of Esther, however, these new figures put on display in 1775 were in marked contrast to Wright’s norm of making portraits of real, usually living, people. Wright used these American Indian figures not to represent individual people but as iconographic symbols to stand in for “America.” The figures announced Wright’s American identity and her support of the American cause. They served as waxen reminders that she was “born in the Wilds of America.”⁵⁸ Politically symbolic, the figures contrasted with other Indigenous figures Londoners saw in art who were representations of real Indigenous people who had visited London.⁵⁹

Indigenous people had a long presence in London, in a variety of roles from enslaved captives to diplomats.⁶⁰ As early as 1501 or 1502, the first Indigenous people from the western lands across the Atlantic newly encountered by Europeans arrived in London. Some came willingly, others were brought as captives. Some, like the young Powhatan woman Amunute (or Matoaka, better known by her childhood nickname, Pocahontas, or as she was also called, Rebecca Rolfe) remain as famous today as they were when they visited London hundreds of years ago. Others, like the Inuk woman Arnaq and her infant son Nutaaq who were kidnapped by Sir Martin Frobisher, brought to London against their will, and died soon after their arrival, are not known to most people today. Diplomats and political envoys, like the Yamacraw delegation who visited London in the 1730s to negotiate terms for an English settlement in the colony of Georgia, met people like the Archbishop of Canterbury and sat for their portraits. Whether captive or diplomat, their presence fascinated Londoners of all classes, who flocked to see plays about them, listened to ballads sung about them, read stories about them, and, when possible, saw them in person. They also bought popular prints of their portraits, like the famous series the Four Indian Kings (based on paintings by John Verelst in 1710) and the print made of The Three Cherokee, came over the head of the River Savanna to London, 1762.⁶¹

Beginning in the 1760s, Londoners also could go to see representations in wax of living Indigenous people at Mrs. Salmon’s popular waxworks. Mrs. Salmon’s featured three new wax figures that year, of the three Cherokee men who “came over the head of the River Savana” and visited London in 1762. These men, Utsidihi, Kunagadoga, and Atawayi, were envoys on a diplomatic mission to London. The British viewed them as a “King” and “two chiefs.”⁶² Salmon could have based her waxworks on seeing the men herself or, more likely, on the print images of them. To meet contemporary stereotypes of the appearance of Indigenous people from North America, the wax figures required the application of different oil paint than the usual to their bleached heads, necks, arms, and hands to give them the “copper” skin tone that eighteenth-century Britons used to describe what they viewed as the “tawny” skin of Indigenous people from North America. Although figures of fascination, their wax figures also deliberately highlighted their racial distinction from white people.⁶³

When Patience Wright added an imaginary “Indian man and squaw” to her collection in 1775, they were not meant to be portraits of actual Indigenous people, like the Cherokee men still on display at Mrs. Salmon’s. Instead, Wright’s figures were iconographic symbols of “America” rather than examples of indigeneity. They tapped into the same cultural tradition employed by the men who dumped tea into Boston Harbor, who used American Indian disguises as symbolic visual shorthand for “America.”⁶⁴ Such symbolic figures, of course, populated prints more than they did ships in harbors during the era, for example, in a 1776 British print, The Parricide: A Sketch of Modern Patriotism.

The Parricide. A Sketch of Modern Patriotism, London, 1776.

In The Parricide, America is represented as an American Indian princess with standard feathered headdress (although she is, somewhat unusually, more clothed than not). America, with the semi-naked Medusa-like figure of “Discord” or “Faction” brandishing flaming torches behind her, stands on the broken spear and shield of Britannia. She lunges forward to stab the recumbent figure of Britannia, dagger in one hand, tomahawk in the other. Britannia, stripped naked to the waist, is restrained by the London alderman George Hayley and the Duke of Grafton. Grafton, a former prime minister, was known for his conciliatory views toward America, as was Hayley. In early 1775, Hayley presented a petition from merchants to the House of Commons, detailing the years of grievances America had endured under Britain and pleading for reconciliation.⁶⁵ John Wilkes (recognizable with his leering face and crossed eyes) directs America’s attack while William Pitt and Charles Fox (imaginatively represented as a fox) look on. An abyss looms beneath Britannia, hinting at the scale of the problem. A medallion with the image of a pelican feeding her young reminds viewers that America is murdering the parent who lovingly took care of her. It is not a flattering depiction of patriotism, but it is a memorable one.

Visitors to Wright’s wax museums, well accustomed to seeing America shown as American Indians in prints like The Parricide, would have known exactly what message she was sending with her new figures. In putting wax figures in her museum, Wright’s Indian figures did not chronicle an Indigenous diplomat mission; rather, they announced Wright’s support of the American cause.⁶⁶ Detractors of the American cause were quick to point out the hypocrisy of such symbolism, however. In the first published critique of the Declaration of Independence, the anonymous writer, bitingly satirical, noted how Indigenous people in North America, described in the document as “merciless Indian Savages,” “beheld with wonder, the ungrateful conduct of their enlightened visitants.”⁶⁷

Like many white Americans, however, Patience Wright seems to have had no such wonder about American Patriots. She was fiercely and unequivocally devoted to the cause. Wright’s daughter Elizabeth, who likely helped her sculpt these new Indian models as well as the biblical ones, seems to have had similar feelings. Elizabeth shared her mother’s politics as well as her profession. She also came to share the work that increasingly consumed their time outside the waxworks exhibition: seeking charity and release for rebellious Americans captured and brought to Britain to be imprisoned. Their most impassioned efforts were on behalf of Ebenezer Platt, who had finally reached the port city of Portsmouth, England, around the time news broke of the Declaration of Independence. With him were three of Maitland’s crew members from the Philippa, sent along to testify against him in court. His time aboard ship was not over yet, however. Instead of being sent ashore, he was transferred three times from royal naval ship to royal naval ship in Portsmouth Harbor primarily to sidestep his right to seek a writ of habeas corpus. Finally, in December, Platt managed to gain access to a sympathetic attorney, “in order to have the benefit of the Habeas Corpus Act, as I have been detained these Eight Months upon the accusation of one Capt. Maitland and want nothing but to be tried by the laws of my King and Country.”⁶⁸

When he finally made it ashore in December 1776, Platt became an international cause célèbre, a lightning rod in newspapers and Parliament alike for the legal issue of whether rebellious Americans captured by the British should be tried for treason or kept as prisoners of war. Celebrity, however, does not necessarily bring fortune. And after a brief stay in Clerkenwell Bridewell Prison, Platt, still in the shackles he had worn for months at sea, was sent in January 1777 to what was almost certainly the worst place to be incarcerated in Britain: Newgate Prison. He would spend fourteen months there, “Destitute of every Family Friend or Connection, and Depending for his Daily support, upon the Charity of a few Humane People.” Chief among them was Patience Wright, who found in his case a new reason to despise the tyranny of the king.⁶⁹

11 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S ARMY

LIKE HER MOTHER, Patience Wright’s daughter Elizabeth was an artist. Her fingers wielded wax and paint more eloquently than pen and ink. But also like her mother, she could write long, energetic letters when the spirit moved her, filled with emotion as well as information. And in the early winter of 1777, sentiment as well as politics “Enboldend” her to write a particularly impassioned letter to a fellow American, also formerly of London but now living in France. She felt emboldened in part because she believed that she wrote on a matter of life or death. The anonymously written pamphlet recently published in London that she sent along with her letter, “The CASE of Mr. EBENEZER SMITH PLATT, MERCHANT OF GEORGIA; Now confined in Irons, in NEWGATE, on a Charge of HIGH TREASON,” added weight to her pleas. As the punishment for treason was death, she wrote hoping that she might seek help for Platt, a “very Amiable young Man, and A Credit to His Country.” The man to whom she wrote was someone whose “known Goodness of Heart and Generosity in Releiving and Suckouring the injured or oppres’d” was becoming internationally famous. That man was her mother’s friend, Benjamin Franklin, who a few months before had moved to a suburb of Paris to persuade France to support the new United States of America.¹

Wright hoped that Franklin would use his “Means or influence” to alert Platt’s “Frinds” of his plight, so “that they may take some Precautions for his being acquited, or at least, that he may Receive some Remittances for his Support in His Disagreable Unhappy Confinement.”² Although Platt himself was “Exceeding cheerful” and willing to give his life for his country “with Pleasure,” as his friend from New York, Wright found his situation untenable. She deemed help particularly urgent as she feared a “new Act that is now passing” would make his imprisonment lengthy. She also worried that he would be “Confined in the Severeest Maner,” in jails or even dungeons. This proposed act of Parliament, she complained, seemed “allmost on Purpose to Detain Him” without bail or trial, as a prisoner of war. It made his trial at “the Kings Pleasure,” a notorious phrase that had long indicated indefinite incarceration. She worried that the impending act would prevent his release “during the Warr unless He could be Exchanged for some English Prisoner.” She worried also about Platt’s future and possible execution, confiding to Franklin that “God only knows where it may End.”³

As it turned out, Elizabeth Wright was wrong on several counts. Platt would not be hanged. Nor would he be treated as a prisoner of war. That was a status reserved for men fighting for enemy nations, and the king and his government were not willing to recognize the self-styled United States of America as a sovereign nation. Those who fought for American Patriots were still considered to be the king’s subjects, and rebellious ones at that. Platt was one of the first, and best publicized, of the hundreds of American prisoners in Britain who would not be granted the legal status of prisoners of war. Instead—and here Elizabeth Wright was correct—they would be kept imprisoned, without the right to bail or trial, just as she feared, entirely at “the Kings Pleasure.” She was also correct that the legal parameters for this harsh reality would be set by the act she feared would soon pass in Parliament.

She was right about the imminent danger for Platt’s case, too. The act that gave extra urgency to Elizabeth Wright’s fears passed a few days after she wrote to Franklin. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1777, also known as the Treason Act of 1777, was “An Act to Impower his Majesty to Secure and Detain Persons charged with, or Suspected of, the Crime of Treason, committed in any of His Majesty’s Colonies or Plantations in America.” It was but the latest of numerous Treason Acts passed over hundreds of years of English history, with the most recent being a 1746 act aimed at the Scottish Jacobite rebellion.⁴ Under the 1351 Treason Act, treason was described as making war on the monarch, working for his or her enemies, plotting or imagining his or her death, having sex with his or her consort, and killing or trying to kill his or her ministers, justices, and judges. Those accused of treason gained (and lost) certain rights over the centuries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the concept of treason itself—particularly “making war on the monarch”—broadened to include things like joining an army that fought against him or her. Conviction required the testimony of at least two witnesses, and the accused had a right to complete disclosure of their indictment and time to prepare a defense and call witnesses for that defense. But under a Treason Act passed during the reign of Henry VIII, the accused lost the right to trial where the alleged offense occurred (which essentially also negated the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers).⁵

The Treason Act of 1777 was notable, perhaps even notorious, for suspending habeas corpus for those accused under it, who were, for the first time, targeted based on the geographic origin of their alleged crime.⁶ It is hard to overstate how treasured the right to habeas corpus was in British law by the revolutionary era. It was the law that entitled every person arrested to have the ground of their arrest proven lawful. It was enshrined in the Magna Carta, although it predated it. It was fundamental to protecting people from unjust and indefinite imprisonment. When John Wilkes faced arrest the first time in 1763, his defendants urged his release based upon “that precious jewel of an Englishman,” the right to habeas corpus.⁷ The Treason Act of 1777 besmirched this constitutional jewel. A direct response to the American Revolution, it was aimed at those involved in the “Rebellion and War” that “have been openly and traitorously levied and carried on in certain of his Majesty’s Colonies and Plantations in America,” as well as “Acts of Treason and Piracy” committed “on the High Seas.”⁸ The result was that Americans accused of treason in the colonies or piracy could be imprisoned in Britain indefinitely, without benefit of a trial. Popular with a majority of those who governed, it easily passed into law. But people on both sides of the Atlantic were outraged by its passage. In an open letter that was printed for the public, member of Parliament Edmund Burke declared that although “We have made war on our Colonies, not by arms only, but by laws,” this act “has this distinguished evil in it, that it is the first partial suspension of the Habeas Corpus which has been made.”⁹ Now, for “the first time a distinction is made among the people within this realm.” Echoing Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset case, Burke argued that the Treason Act of 1777 was an enemy to British liberty, for, “Before this act, every man putting his foot on English ground, every stranger owing only a local and temporary allegiance, even a negro slave, who had been sold in the colonies and under an act of parliament, became as free as every other man who breathed the same air with him.” But this was no longer the case. Now, there “is no equality among us; we are not fellow-citizens.”¹⁰ This was, he warned, a dangerous precedent to set. Today it was Americans whose liberty was attacked—who could predict, now, whose liberty might be threatened tomorrow?

John Wilkes, back in Parliament after stints as alderman, sheriff, and Lord Mayor of London, also found the 1777 act horrific. Like many of his fellow radical British Whigs, Wilkes’s belief that American protest was just, that war against them was unfair, and that the cause of liberty was righteous, did not translate into his favoring American independence. He wanted the empire to remain intact.¹¹ Even so, it is perhaps unsurprising, not least given Wilkes’s own experience with accusations of treason, trial, and imprisonment, that when he stood to speak against the Treason Act in Parliament, he used the American Patriot Platt as exemplar of why the change in British law should serve as a warning against tyranny for all Britons.¹² Wilkes related how this “American merchant” was now “actually in Newgate” and “charged with high treason at Savannah,” despite having “before been tried on the same charge, at Kingston, Jamaica, and acquitted.” Wilkes recounted how Platt was transferred in shackles from ship to ship, first on the high seas and then, to avoid him seeking a writ of habeas corpus, in Portsmouth Harbor. When at last he appeared before a judge at the Old Bailey seeking release on the right of habeas corpus, Platt “was not allowed to see any of the witnesses against him, nor even to hear the affidavits read.” Instead, the judge agreed with the attorney general that the proper place for treason trials was not the Old Bailey (which dealt with crimes committed in its local jurisdiction) but rather the King’s Bench. He sent Platt back to Newgate. Platt’s case, Wilkes complained, was a clear “instance of another violation of the law, an evasion of the Habeas Corpus Act, that holy statute, which ministers hold in abhorrence, and are allowed in England to evade with impunity,” and “in America to suspend for nearly twelvemonth.” Like Burke, he too warned against the precedent being set, asking whether “ministers, Sir, who are capable of thus trampling on our most sacred laws” can “be too narrowly watched, too deeply suspected, too strongly guarded against?”¹³ The Treason Act may have been intended to bring rebellious colonists into line. But, Wilkes asked, was the loss of essential liberties a price worth paying? He thought not, and others agreed.¹⁴

With the passage of the Treason Act, Platt’s prospects of freedom went from bad to worse. Platt’s case, coinciding as it did with the act, was now particularly dire.¹⁵ Newspapers first in London and then in America reported that he was a test case for the act, the “first American that Government meddled with.”¹⁶ In part because of the newness of his case, he became a cause célèbre, and his case was widely publicized in newspapers as well as in the 1777 pamphlet Elizabeth Wright sent to Franklin. Much as Wilkes had stated in Parliament, that pamphlet emphasized the machinations taken to violate his right to habeas corpus, detailing how Platt was deliberately moved from ship to ship within Portsmouth Harbor to avoid their captains being served the writ to send him ashore. In one case, orders to move him “arrived in such a hurry, that he was not permitted to finish his dinner.”¹⁷ In part because of this orchestrated delay to violate his rights, Patience Wright, like Platt himself, was indignant that he was now subject to the new Treason Act for actions that took place, as she sarcastically put it, before the king in his “wondrful method taken to Convince us of our Safe Situation” declared the colonies in rebellion.¹⁸ Observers on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that, if “the Administration should proceed with rigour against him, then every active man, who has been foremost in American Congresses and Committees, or in executing the orders of such meetings, must take care how he comes to Great Britain.”¹⁹ But he was not the first American to be imprisoned for treason since war broke out between Britain and its North American colonies in April 1775. And this history also affected how his case unfolded.

In October 1775, a British officer born in America reported to the secretary of state, Lord Rochford, that another American living in London, the banker Stephen Sayre, approached him to seek his help in a plot to kidnap the king and force him to exile in Hanover.²⁰ Although no corroborating evidence or witnesses were found, the mere whiff of such a plot was alarming to the king and his ministers. Fall 1775 was a particularly fraught time, in London as well as in the colonies. As a French observer in London reported back to his own king, “War is kindled with more strength in London than in Boston.”²¹ This was a political war, for “the bitterness between parties has been carried to the greatest excess since the proclamation of the King of England which declares the Americans to be rebels.”²²

The king himself worried about pro-American efforts in Britain. In his 1775 proclamation declaring the American colonies to be in open rebellion, he also emphasized that their “rebellion hath been much promoted and encouraged by the traitorous correspondence, counsels and comfort of divers wicked and desperate persons within this realm.”²³ There was treason afoot in Britain as well as in America. In this political climate, the accusation against Sayre easily hit a nerve. Not only was Sayre an American, but he was also a friend of John Wilkes and a political ally close enough to be elected sheriff of London in 1774 when Wilkes served as mayor of London. Sayre also shared the pro-American politics of Catharine Macaulay and Patience Wright, with whom he socialized. Sayre was locked in the Tower of London but, as no other witness or evidence was found against him and his attorney petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, Lord Mansfield soon ordered him released on bail. His fellow American and attorney, Virginian Arthur Lee, successfully sued for Sayre to be discharged, and Sayre, in turn, sued a disgraced Lord Rochford for unlawful imprisonment. Sayre’s case sent the message loud and clear that, even in cases of treason—or perhaps, especially in cases of treason—it was paramount to adhere to the due process of law.²⁴

But a far more threatening context for Platt’s situation than the case of Stephen Sayre was the nearly concurrent one of James Aitken, an Edinburgh-born man also known as John the Painter.²⁵ In December 1776, just as Platt left, finally, the last of the many ships on which he had been imprisoned in Portsmouth Harbor, fire broke out in the dockyard rope warehouse there. The following month, fire also broke out in Bristol. Aitken was identified as the culprit, tried, and found guilty of arson. Aitken, a one-time painter’s apprentice who used his knowledge of chemicals used to mix paint to create incendiary devices, was also a wanted highwayman and burglar and a self-confessed rapist who spent years in America to evade capture for his crimes. While there, he claimed, he had become an American Patriot, noting that “I cannot deny being very active in the riots at Boston, particularly in sinking the tea.”²⁶ He decided to return to Britain from America to strike a blow at the British Navy through setting fire to its dockyards, ships, and supplies. He returned by way of France, where he went to seek the help and approval of the representatives for Continental Congress there. He met with Silas Deane, the first American representative sent to France. Although Deane gave him some funds, he did not get official American sanction for his plan and instead operated on his own. His crimes and planned crimes nevertheless alarmed the British government and fascinated the public. Perhaps to guarantee a predictable verdict, rather than being tried for treason, he was tried only for arson. He was executed, however, in a spectacular manner that emphasized the fear his crimes inspired. Despite being a civilian, in early March he was hanged in the style of the navy, hauled high up on a masthead near the scene of his crimes. His body was subsequently gibbeted. Thousands of people gathered to watch him die, and a flurry of pamphlets, many illustrated with his portrait, spread his story, including one he allegedly dictated for posthumous publication.²⁷ Among his motives for his crimes, he explained, was that Americans—of which he counted himself one—had to resort to such tactics because “our side cannot do things openly and above board, as the Ministry does” because “they are not strong enough.”²⁸

John the Painter’s sensational and widely publicized trial and self-created legend, especially as it culminated with his public execution less than a month after the passage of the new Treason Act, did not help Ebenezer Platt. As his friends agreed, “the present affair of John the Painter” had the ill effect of making all Americans in Britain “obnoscious.” Platt’s lawyers, on the advice of Lord Mansfield, encouraged him to petition for another trial at the Old Bailey and take the Oath of Allegiance. Platt told his lawyer that he could not do so, “upon which he went away—exceedingly affronted, and told me I must not blame him let what would happen; as he believed the Consequence would be the loosing my Life.” Platt’s attorney, John Alleyne, had represented clients facing similarly fraught situations before; he had been among those representing James Somerset and also had served as counsel for Stephen Sayre.²⁹

Perhaps this experience was part of what led to Alleyne’s exasperation, for, as he told Platt, he agreed with Mansfield, that if Platt were executed, it would be “my fault, and ten to one but they will not withstanding tender the Oath to me wich if they should, and I was to refuse it, the Consequences would be fatal.” Alleyne sought to persuade him, noting that “an Oath extorted from a Man where His Life’s at Stake, is of no Consequence, nor no ways binding, and they are surprized at my Hesitation.” Although Platt’s initial legal plea when he arrived in England had been to be “tried by the laws of my King and Country,” now, it seemed, he had decided to stand firm as an American Patriot.³⁰ Whether he embraced this identity out of convenience or conviction is unclear. But other men besides his attorney and Mansfield counseled him to abandon such convictions and take the oath, including “all the City Patriots,” who felt it would be preferable to standing trial for treason, for “they did not by any means Concieve it to be worth his while to loose his Life for that objection, or that it could be required of him by God or his Country, to So Eminently Risk it.”³¹ Despite this advice, Platt stood firm, although he was nervous enough about the consequences of standing on principle to write to Patience Wright seeking her opinion on what he should do.³²

Wright and her daughter Elizabeth were “exceedingly agitated” by his letter, “but beg’d him for the present to persist in a refusal.” They, in turn, sought the opinion of their fellow American and painter to the king, Benjamin West. To West, the situation “was as clear to him as the Sun—that Wee had best get him out by any means whatsoever.” Unlike Patience Wright, West did have the manners of a courtier, but in this case, he was blunt about sharing his unvarnished opinion. Even if Platt were “an angel,” he counseled, “the times was such, his situation was too Precarious to be trifled with that his having an Uncle in the Congress His Refusing the Oath & c were all Circumstances” that would be deemed treason. A principled stance made no sense, as “it was no means worth while to trifle with his Life as he was intirely in their Power—and they can bring or make evidences for any Purpose they Please.” Platt was “an intire Stranger here, without Money or Friends that could help him, understanding nothing of Law” and in particular danger because of “the present affair of John the Painter.” West’s dire assessment “partly made converts” of “us (weak women),” and “wee sent him Word” to sign the petition “immediately.”³³

Despite this decision, the Wrights, who seem to have been unequivocally principled in their political allegiances, worried whether they had done the right thing. They felt the weight of being “the only Family he was acquainted with on his arrivall in England,” and “what Friends he has was cheifly Recomended thro our means,” a fact that inspired him to place “all His Confidence in Us.”³⁴ As Elizabeth reported to Franklin, the petition was signed and Platt’s lawyer “said it was wrote in such a Manner that he did not think the Oath would not be required of him,” and that Mansfield “had given his word that he should be set at Liberty on those Conditions.” But, she fretted, if this tactic did not succeed, “wee shall justly Reproach ourselves for not acting with Courage and Honesty and haveing the Faith of a Daniel.”³⁵ Like her mother, Elizabeth Wright used biblical metaphors to describe politics. While her mother looked to the example of Esther, Elizabeth turned to that of Daniel, a Jewish visionary who kept his faith despite living in the court of the king of Babylon and facing a den of lions. Perhaps she thought of Daniel because of contemporary allusions that Britain, governed by a king whose royal insignia included a lion, was a modern Babylon. Using Daniel’s steadfast faith as her ideal, she worried that she and her mother had fallen short in their patriotism. As it turned out, the advice of West and “all the City Patriots” was likely well placed. Platt was not executed for treason. Nor, however, was he set at liberty as Mansfield had led his attorney to believe. His imprisonment—and his time in shackles—would continue for months.

Patience and Elizabeth Wright remained tireless in their efforts to raise funds and help for Platt. The two women, and Platt himself, continued to write to Franklin in France. He was seen by Americans in London, she confided, as “our Comon Father and we all look up to you.”³⁶ Especially now that he was in France, she had an even greater vision for him than she had when he was in London. Patience Wright saw herself as a biblical Esther, and her exertions on behalf of Platt as part of her larger purpose of helping the broader American cause, and of doing so through supporting Franklin. She confided that just recently, although Lord Dunmore (an old acquaintance from New York) had “Spent much time to Convince me” of the weak and “wicked” American rebellion, and predicted that America “will very Soon be tired of doct. Franklngs Condoct,” she continued to trust that providence intended Franklin to save them all.³⁷

But she did not leave Franklin’s role as savior to providence alone. Instead, buoyed by the (false) news she had heard of Jamaica joining the American patriots and the broad protest she predicted would erupt over Platt’s case, she thought it time to make it clear just how useful she could be. She shared another of her visions with him: “My dream is out now this 1777 will Bring the ways of god more Clear to MAN and Prove that women are usful” and should be “admitted into the Bond of usful Friendship wher the good of all men are Concernd.” To prove her worth to Franklin, in addition to intelligence about Jamaica, John the Painter, and Platt, she enclosed a pamphlet called The Patriot King as well as newspaper clippings of Wilkes’s speech that used Platt as an argument against the Treason Act. She wished them to become partners across the English Channel and asked him to write to her “with proper direction” how she could “the most honestly and most heartly Serve you by Serrving old ENGLAND.” She predicted that together, they could bring a new age to Britain as well as America, for “We Both Know London and wish well to mankind we have had many agreable Chatt on Publick afairs we well know what we can do and know of a truth that the great God has made us useful to our Contry.” She then made another, less predictable offer. It was one that must have shocked even someone as unflappable as Franklin. She offered to raise an army for him. In fact, she claimed, she already had at least 1,200 men ready to help him invade London. She informed him that Major Peter Labilliere “has Seven hundred men who have not bowd down to Baäll,” and that she herself had almost “five hundred in my Congregation.” Their forces combined and properly directed would “turn the balanc of Power much in old Englands favour yet.” She and Labilliere believed that Franklin “must be our Delivier our Salvation depends on you and you Sir have it in your Powr to Set us all in order.” They expected, “to See you COME in the Name of the Lord of host and gidion” that July.³⁸

As her biblical allusions hint, Wright was not offering Franklin just any army. Hers were no mercenaries like the often-scorned Hessian troops used by George III in the American conflict. Instead, she offered Franklin a righteous army, a “congregation” of Christian people dedicated to the American Patriot cause. People who, like the Old Testament hero Gideon, were willing to follow the command of God to destroy profane ways of life, like that embraced by worshippers of false idols, or devils, like Baal. Soldiers who, like Gideon’s, could overcome the much larger armies of the modern-day Middeonites, or the British military. Franklin’s army, in her vision, were militants working to overturn Britain’s current, corrupt political system for one that better adhered to the true principles of old English law. She could not have found a better fit for a partner in this endeavor than Labilliere.

Labilliere was as colorful an eccentric as Patience Wright.³⁹ Born in Ireland to a family of Huguenot descent, in 1777 Labilliere was about fifty years old, a former officer in the British marines whose income was supplemented by a small pension the fifth Duke of Devonshire gave him out of delight the ducal family took in his company. A self-described “Christian Soldier” and “Christian Patriot,” Labilliere shared Wright’s views on the providential meaning of the current conflict with America. He was also a millenarian, a firm enough believer in the imminent Second Coming of Christ that he asked to be buried headfirst, so that when the world “turned topsy-turvy” he “might be right at last.”⁴⁰

Despite (or perhaps because of) his eccentricities, Labilliere seems to have made friends easily. He shared a close personal relationship with Wright and her children, Joseph in particular. He found religious meaning in their personal intimacy as well as their shared politics, noting that “Providence has marked my very great Zeal and Attachment for America in my extraordinary sacred Friendship for that Family.”⁴¹ He believed that he was, along with the Wright family, among “the seven thousand” in Great Britain who “will not bow down to Baal.”⁴²

Labilliere was inspired to “enlist in the Service of the People at large as a Defender of their Civil & Religious Liberties” by his horror at what he called the “Bloody affair in St Georges Fields.”⁴³ This “Bloody affair,” of course, was the popular riot on the opening day of Parliament in the spring of 1768, when thousands gathered to protest John Wilkes’s imprisonment. Soldiers fired into the crowd of protestors, killing a few of them (and one nearby hapless man who found himself in the very wrong place at the wrong time). Angered by the events that day, Labilliere had an awakening that “first called forth my Public Spirit, & from that era I thought it my Duty as a Christian & an honest man” to devote himself to the cause of liberty.⁴⁴

He was a man whose identity conflated the spiritual and the political. In the prints made of his portrait by Joseph Wright, he is identified as a “Christian Patriot” and “Citizen of the World,” posed in front of a bookshelf whose spines are labeled the “Holy Bible” as well as “Sydney” and “Locke,” with both the “Magna Carta” and “St. Asaph’s Sermon” on his lap.⁴⁵ Labilliere regularly referred to himself as a “Prodigal” and to God as the “Prince of Peace and of Patriots.”⁴⁶ Patience Wright would have appreciated his identification with the prodigal son, which was a story she had spent a great deal of time thinking about herself. It was, in fact, one of the biblical scenes she and her sister Rachel Wells made into a wax tableau. In the spring of 1777, John Adams took a break from his congressional duties in Philadelphia to visit “Mrs. Wells’s, the Sister of the famous Mrs. Wright, to see her Waxwork.” Although he admitted that there was “Genius, as well as Taste and Art,” in the exhibition, he found it disagreeable, as he felt he was “walking among a Group” of corpses, figures who were dead yet eerily “standing, sitting, and walking, laughing, singing, crying, and weeping.” He reported to his wife that it had two rooms, one dedicated to the biblical scene of the prodigal son and the figure of “Elisha, restoring to Life the Shunamite’s Son.” The latter had only three figures in it, but the tableau of the prodigal son was a crowded scene. It included the prodigal himself, “prostrate on his Knees, before his Father, whose Joy, and Grief, and Compassion all appear in his Eyes and Face, struggling with each other,” a “Maid, at the Fathers command, is pulling down from a Closet Shelf, the choicest Robes, to cloath the Prodigal, who is all in Rags,” the “elder Brother, chagrined at this Festivity, a Servant coaxing him to come in” and a “large Number of Guests.”⁴⁷

Henry Kingsbury, mezzotint after Joseph Wright, Major Peter Labilliere, published by John Strongitharm, published by John Stockdale (December 1, 1780). In this portrait, Peter Labilliere is identified as “A Christian Patriot & Citizen of the World.” His republican politics and sympathy for the American cause are both on display through the reading material that surrounds him, including the pamphlet in his hand that he points to, “American Petition Presented by Penn.”

Although Wells’s space in Philadelphia featured far more religious figures than Wright’s in London did, both sisters’ waxworks immersed visitors in a spectacle that emphasized religion as well as politics. The second room in Wells’s waxworks, by contrast, had a decidedly political theme, dedicated to supporters of the American cause whose wax portraits Wright modeled in London and then shipped across the Atlantic to her sister, including “the Figures of Chatham, Franklin, Sawbridge, Mrs. Maccaulay, and several others.”⁴⁸ Although most visitors to the waxworks would have had no clue, Adams, as a member of Continental Congress, may have known that the heads of these wax figures were tools for espionage as well as realistic portraits. Some members of Congress, including “Mr Hancock & others” knew that the transatlantic intelligence they received “by the hand of her Sister Wells,” was hidden “in ye wax heads” Wright sent from London to Philadelphia.⁴⁹ Wright and Wells used wax heads to send political messages literally as well as figuratively.

Although Wright did not have a scene of the prodigal son in her London waxworks, the self-styled prodigal Labilliere was a regular fixture there. Labilliere warmly embraced the American Patriot cause. In part, he did so because he hoped America might provide an example of freedom for Britain to follow. As Virginian William Lee put it when he was elected a pro-Wilkes alderman in London in May 1775, many saw “the attempts of the present administration against American liberty, as a plain prelude to the invasion of freedom” in Britain, but he “trusted that the virtue of the Americans, aided by the friends of freedom here, would teach the Tories of this day, as their ancestors had been happily taught, how vain a thing it is to attempt wresting” liberties “from a people determined to defend them.”⁵⁰ Joseph Wright’s portrait emphasized the primacy of this allegiance—the one pamphlet Labilliere holds in his hand and points to is the Olive Branch Petition, labeled “American Petition Presentd by Penn.” Labilliere made a careful intellectual study of their ideology before sympathizing with American Patriots. As he confided to George Washington, it was only after “serious & Impartial examination & study of the American Cause, & of the Proceedings of the Congress,” that he found himself “called upon by the same Principles that had made me commence Patriot in these Kingdoms to exert my utmost efforts” in defense of America’s “Just & Glorious Cause of Universal Liberty.”⁵¹

Labilliere took early action to back up what he called his “zeal for the Glorious Cause.”⁵² When Stephen Sayre was accused of plotting to kidnap and depose the king in October 1775, Labilliere was accused of offering £1,500 in bribes to convince the King’s troops to look the other way.⁵³ Less dramatically but more effectively, he circulated pro-American literature and propaganda to people of all classes in London. He “distributed to the People at large the Declarations by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North America in General Congress,” perhaps the slim edition of just over thirty pages, titled, The Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies… Collected Together for the Use of Serious Thinking Men, by Lovers of Peace published in London in 1775. This pamphlet made a compelling case for the trajectory of the conflict, as it included “The Twelve United Colonies, by their Delegates in Congress, to the Inhabitants of Great Britain,” the address of Congress to the people of Ireland, the Olive Branch Petition rejected by the king, and the “Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms.” Labilliere also tried to influence members of the House of Lords by passing out copies of American propaganda to them as they entered Parliament. He wrote a letter to the king from a “Christian Soldier.” In addition, he “gave the Prefatory address from the London Association” before delivering “the Declaration.” The London Association, established in the summer of 1775 in reaction to the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, was the most radical pro-American group yet, viewed by its detractors as a group that existed to help further the American rebellion from within Britain.⁵⁴ It was a logical organization to approve of the declaration. While Labilliere does not specify where he delivered it, he told Washington that he had personally distributed a copy of the Declaration of Independence in Britain and introduced the document by sharing the London Association’s blessing of it. The London-made broadside of the declaration with Hancock’s portrait on it would have been an ideal vehicle for such an event.

Most important in the eyes of Washington would have been another pamphlet, the 1775 “Address to the British Soldiery,” that Labilliere wrote, according to Patience Wright, though he did not mention it in his letter. Although that pamphlet carried the anonymous authorial imprint of “An Old Soldier,” Wright later recalled “how active a part” Labilliere took “in the Cause” of America, notably his “Extrordaney pains to Set truth before” British soldiers that they should not fight Americans for “the Cause of America was the Cause of God.”⁵⁵ This address was popular and distributed around the Atlantic in a variety of ways. In the spring of 1775 William Lee distributed broadside copies of it to the military and sent a copy to a fellow American bound for home from London, asking him to distribute it widely.⁵⁶ The piece was a direct appeal from a British military veteran to his fellow military men “about to embark for America.” He wished them to engage in mass insubordination. The “Old Soldier” exhorted current enlisted men to remember that “the Glory of the British Soldier” was in the fact that “he is the Defender, not the Destroyer, of the Civil and Religious Rights of the People,” a figure “immortalized in History, for their Attachment to the Religion and Liberties of their Country.” Like Labilliere in his portrait by Joseph Wright, the author of this address connected current events in America to the Glorious Revolution. In this case, the Old Soldier recounted the history of when, as King James II “endeavoured to introduce the Roman-catholic Religion and arbitrary Power into Great Britain” using an army “to terrify the People,’ the soldiers instead laid down their arms and refused to fight. These men, he urged, should serve as a model. For the soldiers about to sail for America, too, “will soon have an Opportunity of shewing equal Virtue.” They would be “called upon to imbrue your Hands in the Blood of your Fellow Subjects in America, because they,” seeking the rights they deserved as the “Sons of Englishmen,” would “not admit to be Slaves, and are alarmed at the Establishment of Popery and Arbitrary Power.” They were being commanded “to compel your fellow subjects there to submit to popery and slavery.” They should disobey this command and remember “that your first Obedience is due to God, and that whoever bids you shed innocent Blood, bids you act contrary to his Commandments.”⁵⁷

This address soon made its way to America. There, it was slightly retitled as “An Address to the Soldiers” and reproduced by multiple printers in various iterations. One Massachusetts printer created a small, clever version of it on a handbill, for the American military to use as a propaganda tool to dissuade British soldiers from fighting against them in the siege of Boston. On one side of the handbill, approximately ten inches by four inches, was the “Address to the Soldiers.” The other side featured a satirical comparison of basic living conditions for those fighting on either side. The American forces at Prospect Hill enjoyed a pay of seven dollars a month, “Fresh Provisions, and in Plenty,” their health, “Freedom, Ease, Affluence and a good Farm.” By contrast, the British forces at Bunker Hill earned only three pence a day, while eating “Rotten Salt Pork” and suffering from scurvy, “Slavery, Beggary and Want.”⁵⁸ Newspapers in other colonies soon reprinted the piece, noting that it had “been printed at Cambridge, and dispersed among the ministerial troops.”⁵⁹ At least some of the copies were distributed to the British troops by American soldiers sneaking close to British sentries around Boston. They threw them where the troops would find them, sometimes wrapping the handbills around bullets to make them travel farther.⁶⁰

British soldiers did desert during the war; if any were inspired to do so by this handbill and Wright was correct in naming Labilliere as its author, Labilliere would have been proud. Once America declared its independence, he believed that victory for the United States would “lay the foundation of Universal Christian Liberty by which only Mankind can be made happy.”⁶¹ Perhaps some of the men who read the “Address to the British Soldiery” agreed. Certainly, many in Massachusetts shared his belief that there were more important ideological concerns behind the fight for liberty than merely establishing the United States as a new nation. Chief among these believers in the cause of liberty were enslaved and free Black people like Prince Demah. In the spring of 1777, as Ebenezer Platt languished in chains in Newgate, Prince Demah washed his identity clean of the last vestige of his enslavers once and for all. He dropped the name Barnes. Using the name his mother gave him to honor her West African roots, he enlisted under the surname Demah in the artillery regiment known as “the Train.”⁶²

12 CRAFTING FREEDOM

WHEN PRINCE DEMAH enlisted in the Train, he joined a regiment that prided itself on being filled with “Gentlemen Volunteers” who “prefer[ed] LIBERTY to SLAVERY” and were “hearty Friends to the GRAND AMERICAN CAUSE.”¹ It was a regiment whose officers’ dedication to that cause was famed in Massachusetts and beyond. Its troops had lined the streets while their commander, Colonel Thomas Crafts, read the Declaration of Independence aloud in Boston in July of 1776. Like Crafts, its second in command, Paul Revere, was a longtime Patriot and one of the Sons of Liberty who participated in the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor. Other officers in the regiment also participated in the Patriot protests of the 1760 and 1770s. One of its captains, David Bradlee, was embroiled in the violence in Boston surrounding nonimportation in the wake of the Townshend duties. Accused by the unlucky sailor George Gailer of being one of the men who tarred and feathered him in the fall of 1769, Bradlee was at the scene when young Christopher Seider died. He also braved British guns to help Dr. Joseph Gardner, who later became the Train’s surgeon, carry Crispus Attucks away from the scene of the Boston Massacre.²

Officers leading the regiment like Crafts, Revere, and Bradlee had something else in common besides their politics. They all made a living as artisans.³ Like Demah, Crafts was a painter, although he specialized in japanning furniture, a decorative art that fed early Americans’ love for Asian goods by using paint and varnish to mimic Asian lacquered furniture. Revere, a silversmith and sometime dentist, was widely known as the maker of incendiary propaganda prints about American politics, like “The BLOODY MASSACRE perpetrated in King—Street.” Bradlee was a tailor. The officer in charge of the company in which Demah enlisted, Captain Winthrop Gray, was a shoemaker. Lieutenant Joseph Dunckerley, a skilled miniaturist, had a successful career after the war, painting miniature portraits in watercolor, many of them surrounded by frames made by his former commanding officer, Revere.⁴

A skilled artisan himself, Demah had that in common with the officers of the Train. Practically speaking, however, while Demah was in the Train his identity as a former mariner was of far more use to him than his training as a painter. Sharing cramped quarters, eating rationed meals, enduring the discipline of monotonous labor, and learning to live alongside men and boys from a variety of backgrounds—all were common to life on board ship and translated well to life as an enlisted man in the military. Demah enlisted as a matross, the lowest rung on the hierarchical ladder of the corps, although the Train advertised the role as that of “a Gentleman Matross” and position in which to learn “the noble Art of Gunnery.”⁵ Matrosses were critical to the ability of gunners to fire their artillery, responsible for preparing cannons to be fired by loading, swabbing, and moving them as needed. Although the highest-ranking officers in the Train were all white men from Massachusetts, there was more diversity in the lower ranks. There were men from Britain who had previously served as British soldiers. Joseph Dunckerley, for example, had served in the British 38th Foot when it was stationed in Massachusetts before deserting it, “through Principle” once “hostilities” began.⁶ In addition to men from Britain like Dunckerley, there also were, as Revere put it, “foreigners” (by which he meant primarily men from Wales and Ireland) among their ranks.⁷ And there was, of course, Demah himself.

Although he was outnumbered by white soldiers in his own regiment, Prince Demah was but one of many thousands of Black men, enslaved and free, who enlisted to fight for the Patriot cause. In New England, Black men fought from the first days of conflict. At least forty men, many enslaved, fought against the British at Lexington and Concord. More than three times that number of Black men fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, with four hundred Black men fighting in New England regiments in the pivotal Battle of Saratoga in the fall of 1777.⁸ Like their white counterparts, they fought for a wide range of reasons. As freedom petitions made clear, enslaved and free Black men were attached to the same ideologies and emotions around liberty and natural rights that inspired white enlistment. When a Black man from Glastonbury, Connecticut, called Prince Simbo decorated his powder horn in 1777, along with the common features of his own name and a deer, and unusual repeating images of the all-seeing eye, was the central motif of a dove carrying a banner that read “LIBERTY.”⁹

Unknown maker in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Prince Simbo’s powder horn. On the other side of the horn, which is made of carved ox horn, wood, and copper nails, the name “Prince Simbo” and the date November 17, 1777, are engraved.

But liberty and freedom often held different meanings, and possible practical outcomes, for enslaved men. Pay and bounties were used to entice men of all races to enlist, but sometimes, for enslaved men, there was another, more important bounty offered: their freedom. Sometimes enslaved men were promised freedom if they enlisted to fight, as they were in Rhode Island according to the terms of the 1778 Act to Enlist Slaves.¹⁰ Sometimes they were promised freedom after being sold to serve a certain number of years in the place of white men who wished to avoid service. But sometimes, they fought without any promise of freedom whatsoever. And sometimes, white men did not want them to be fighting at all. The history of Black men fighting for New England Patriot military forces was neither uncontested nor straightforward. In part, this was because of white New Englanders’ long-held fears about slave insurrections and violent crimes against white enslavers by those they enslaved, like those for which Mark, whose gibbeted landmark Revere noted in his ride to warn of the approaching British, was hanged decades before.¹¹

Mark was executed two decades before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but as might be guessed by Revere’s proof of his continued hold on local memory, fears about uprisings by enslaved people were not a thing of the past in the revolutionary era. There were white people who feared arming enslaved and free Black men for battle in New England, just as there were in places like Virginia and South Carolina. The month before white, Indigenous, and Black men in Massachusetts responded to Revere’s warning, grabbed their weapons, and mustered to face British troops at Lexington and Concord, reports circulated about planned slave uprisings in New York and New Jersey. Two Black men were arrested, and one jailed in Concord, as rumors flew about similar uprisings they planned to start near Framingham, Massachusetts—the same town where Crispus Attucks was once enslaved. The men, it was reported, planned to capitalize on any armed conflict to stage their uprising, waiting only for “some Disturbance” to happen “that might occasion the Militia to turn out,” so that while the militia was away, the men might “Murder the defenceless inhabitants.”¹²

Such fears spread around the colonies and intensified as military conflict began. In Charleston, South Carolina, a few days before the town learned about Lexington and Concord, Henry Laurens received especially chilling news from London. The news was worrisome because its source was Arthur Lee. Lee, South Carolina’s agent in London, an American Laurens knew well from their time together in London, had considerable knowledge about British politics. In his letter, Lee informed Laurens that, if armed conflict began, the British were giving serious thought to granting “freedom to such Slaves as should desert their Masters and join the King’s troops.”¹³ Lee’s intelligence distressed him for visceral personal as well as political reasons. Laurens was not only president of South Carolina’s Provincial Congress but the enslaver of hundreds of people. Laurens immediately forwarded Lee’s letter to the South Carolina delegates, who were headed to the Continental Congress. When Congress convened in May 1775, this news from London shaped their response to the war. Later that fall, fears about arming enslaved and free Black men intensified when Virginia’s royal governor (and Patience Wright’s friend from New York), Lord Dunmore, issued his November proclamation offering freedom to “all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels)” who were “able and willing to bear arms” and join “his Majesty’s troops.” The text of the proclamation circulated throughout the colonies, prefaced by opinions that “Not in the legions / Of horrid Hell, can come a devil more damn’d / In evils” than Dunmore. Hundreds of men signed up to join his “Royal Ethiopian Regiment,” and thousands more enslaved women and children as well as men sought freedom with the British military throughout the war.¹⁴

As was the case with freedom suits and petitions in Massachusetts, however, Black people were not merely responding to white people’s threats and promises. They were deliberately shaping events, and inspiring many of these threats and promises with their own words and actions. One of the reasons that Laurens and other South Carolinians were so dismayed by Lee’s letter was that around the same time it arrived from London, David Margrett, a Black preacher who came to America from London the previous fall, had put Charlestonians in a panic. Margrett, who resided in Georgia, had not been in Charleston for months. But word of his preaching, and white fears that it would cause widespread rebellion in South Carolina as well as Georgia, had South Carolinians ready to travel to Georgia to hang him.¹⁵

They were not wrong about Margrett’s intentions. By the end of January 1775, from his residence at Bethesda College in Georgia, he declared that he had been sent to America “to be a second Moses” and “deliver his people from slavery.”¹⁶ Margrett traveled extensively around the Atlantic World to get to Georgia. Stolen from “the coast of Africa,” he ended up living as a free man in Britain. There, like Phillis Wheatley, he found a patron in the Countess of Huntingdon. The countess sent him to her evangelical college in Wales, and he became a popular preacher in London, one who found joy in the fact that many of his “own complection” came to hear him preach.¹⁷ He seems to have had a weakness for women as well as gambling, however, and claimed that London was too filled with temptations to suit him. He asked for another post, and in 1774, he agreed to let the countess send him across the Atlantic to Bethesda College in Georgia. Bethesda College, the orphanage the countess inherited from George Whitefield on the condition that it become a college to train preachers to evangelize among Indigenous people, was the same institution to which Rachel Wells donated a wax portrait of Whitefield. It was an institution run by enslaved labor, a fact that did not bother the countess despite her support of enslaved and formerly enslaved people like Wheatley and Margrett. But Margrett found the slavery in Georgia and South Carolina unconscionable. Margrett preached not just to enslaved people at Bethesda but also at surrounding plantations. Local white people soon found him and his message troubling indeed. One believed that “a great part of David’s wicked conduct arises from his pride” which was “so great, that he can’t bear to think of any of his own color being slaves.”¹⁸

His time in London was partly to blame, one of the countess’s white supporters confided to another, as Black people who “put their feet in England” were “totally spoiled and ruined, both in body and soul, through a mistaken kind of compassion because they are black.”¹⁹ Ultimately, however, white South Carolinians did not care why Margrett preached his message of liberation. They just wanted him hanged, especially now that there was the threat of the king offering freedom to enslaved people who would fight against the Patriots. It was too dangerous to have a free Black man in the area preaching messages that God would “send Deliverance” to slaves “from the power of their Masters, as He freed the Children of Israel from Egyptian Bondage.” Margrett’s fellow evangelicals managed to warn him and put him on a boat back to England before he could be captured and hanged, but not before this Black Londoner contributed to the conversation about liberty swirling through enslaved as well as free communities in America.²⁰

Whether from gossip and rumors about the king’s intentions to free slaves who chose to fight for him, or printed news about Dunmore’s proclamation, for many, freedom seemed more certain standing against the Patriots, self-proclaimed defenders of liberty though they were. Tens of thousands of Black people looked for freedom behind British military lines.²¹ Among them were some of the people General Washington himself enslaved in Virginia. This mass self-emancipation influenced Washington’s ideas about who should serve in the American armed forces. Initially, he could not countenance the idea of even a relatively small number of Black men serving in the American military. When he arrived in Massachusetts to take command of the army in the spring of 1775, he found the presence of Black soldiers in New England regiments jarring. Although the Massachusetts Committee of Safety mandated that only free Black men should be enlisted, practice on the ground was different than government mandate from the start of conflict. Enslaved as well as free Black men fought first at Lexington and Concord and then at Bunker Hill. Nevertheless, in July, Washington issued orders for new recruits that precluded deserters from “the Ministerial army” (American Patriots’ preferred terms for the British military at this point in time), any “Person who is not an American-born, unless such Person has a Wife and Family, and is a settled Resident in this Country,” and any “Stroller, Negro, or Vagabond, or Person suspected of being an enemy to the Liberty of America.”²²

At the end of October that year, Washington took an even firmer stance against allowing Black men in the military. He supported new Congressional policy that prevented not only new recruits but all Black men from enlisting or re-enlisting the following year. Then, at the end of the year, he exhibited one of his finer qualities as a leader: his ability to change his mind.²³ On December 30, 1775, he issued a general order mandating that “As the General is informed, that Numbers of Free Negroes are desirous of inlisting, he gives leave to the recruiting Officers, to entertain them.”²⁴ As Washington explained it to John Hancock, he changed his mind in part because, once it was “represented to me that the free negroes who have Served in this Army, are very much disatisfied at being discarded,” so much so “that they may Seek employ in the ministerial Army,” he “presumed to” allow them to be enlisted, pending Congressional approval.²⁵ Despite their former stance against it, Congress did approve, and Black men were formally allowed to serve in the Continental Army. Although the Rhode Island First was a famed all-Black regiment commanded by white officers, it was an outlier. Most regiments did not separate Black enlisted men into separate units, which meant that the first American military forces were integrated ones.²⁶

Washington did not change his mind on his own. He responded to the reaction of Black soldiers to government mandates. He also might have been influenced by another Black voice, that of Phillis Wheatley. In October of 1775, Wheatley sent a flattering poem to Washington from Providence, where she had gone to escape besieged Boston. She hailed him, in an accompanying letter, as “Generalissimo of the armies of North America,” and flattered Congress by calling it the “Grand Continental Congress.”²⁷ In much the same style as she once hailed Lord Dartmouth, she wrote a poem that praised Washington as a man “Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more.” The stakes for his leadership were high, with the fate of “The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!” in his hands, and “the eyes of nations” upon America. Wheatley encouraged him to stay the course: “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, / Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide. / A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading, Washington! be thine.”²⁸

In marked contrast to Jefferson’s reaction to reading Wheatley’s poetry, Washington was impressed enough that he sent copies of her letter and poem to other Patriots—although he took his time doing so.²⁹ They were published in the Virginia Gazette and The Pennsylvania Magazine with a note that they were “written by the famous Phillis Wheatley, the African Poetess, and presented to his Excellency Gen. Washington.”³⁰ He also replied to Wheatley herself. Given Wheatley’s history of cleverly timed flattery, it is entirely possible that she chose to praise him in a moment when many were calling for limits on Black participation in the American cause.³¹ It also is entirely possible that she did help sway his thinking. At the least, her poem undoubtedly contributed to what was certainly his changed mind about Black men fighting for American forces.

By the time Demah joined the Train in spring of 1777, he was one of thousands of Black men who enlisted to fight for the Patriots. Although the Train was overwhelmingly white, Demah was not the only Black artisan who contributed to its operations. Black men also helped the Train by supplying it with labor and materials. Among those was Prince Hall, a Boston leathermaker who submitted a bill for multiple orders of leather drumheads to the Train the same month Demah enlisted.³² Crafts, the commander of the Train, had the order placed with Hall. Crafts was an officer in the Boston Freemasons’ Lodge of St. Andrew (officers Revere and Dunckerley were also Masons), and Hall was one of the founding members of the African Lodge, an order of Black Freemasons established in Boston. Freemasonry created a network of shared traditions and respectability that tied men together across usual divides of social status or race.³³ Crafts may have placed his order for drumheads with Prince Hall in part because the two men were fellow Masons, and Masons were duty bound to patronize one another for business when they could.³⁴

Such networks of obligation were not enough to conquer the racism rampant in revolutionary-era America, however. The all-white Boston Masonic Lodge in which they sought initiation rejected Hall and his co-applicants. Because of that rejection, when Hall became a Freemason, he did so through the patronage of British soldiers. Hall was made a Freemason through traveling Military Lodge No. 441, in March 1775, while the British still occupied Boston. This lodge was registered in Ireland but attached to the 38th Foot Regiment, the same regiment from which Joseph Dunckerley deserted. The Master of Lodge No. 441 was Sergeant John Batt, who was friendly enough with Dunckerley to later join him in his unit in the Continental Army, making it likely that Dunckerley knew Hall as well.³⁵ Batt admitted Hall, along with fourteen other men, into the Military Lodge, and the African Lodge of Boston was born. Although Demah did not join the African Lodge, he had much in common with its early members. Like Demah, Hall himself and many other early Black Freemasons were craftsmen. Other early Black Masons in Boston were mariners like Demah, similarly citizens of the cosmopolitan world of the seagoing Black Atlantic.³⁶ The Masonic order was an international brotherhood, one steeped in symbolic, mystical rituals and Enlightenment ideals that transcended imperial and national boundaries. In America, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were Masons, as was Mohawk leader Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant). French Masons included Lafayette and Voltaire, and in England, both William Hogarth and John Pine, the father of Demah’s teacher Robert Edge Pine, were Masons.³⁷

For formerly enslaved and free Black men, Freemasonry was a logical way to capitalize on their cosmopolitan identity to further their goals for local emancipation.³⁸ Peter Bestes, one of the founding members of the African Lodge, put his name on multiple freedom petitions in the 1770s, including one Prince Hall helped author to the Massachusetts General Court in 1777.³⁹ Written six months after the Declaration of Independence, it referenced “the present glorious struggle for liberty” and used natural rights arguments to condemn slavery. Hall was one of eight men—four of whom were Masons—who submitted it on behalf of “a great number of blacks detained in a state of slavery in the bowels of a free and Christian country” who “apprehend that they have in common with all other men a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe has bestowed equally on all mankind.” Unlike the newly formed United States, they had no social contract to dissolve, for they “never forfeited” their freedom “by any compact or agreement whatever.” Instead, “they were unjustly dragged by the hand of cruel power from their dearest friends” and “torn from the embraces of their tender parents.” As Wheatley had done years before, they described Africa as a pastoral ideal, “a populous, pleasant, and plentiful country,” from which “in violation of laws of nature and of nations and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity” the petitioners had been “brought here to be sold like beasts of burden and like them condemned to slavery for life.” As previous petitioners had done, they also pointed out the hypocrisy of slavery in a land conceived in a fight for liberty, and “their astonishment that it has never been considered that every principle from which America has acted in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.”⁴⁰

Although only four of the early Black Masons signed this 1777 petition, it undoubtedly met with the collective approval of them all. Among those men was one called Prince Taylor, one of the fourteen men who joined the Masons alongside Prince Hall in 1775. A man called Prince Taylor, described as a cooper who stood 5′10″ with a black complexion from Lunenberg, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Continental Army in 1781.⁴¹ After the war, that Prince Taylor moved to Ticonderoga near Lake George. There, he became somewhat of a local legend. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson met him while touring New York and Vermont in 1791, and Madison noted that Taylor “possesses a good farm of about 250 Acres which he cultivates with 6 white hirelings.” Noted for “his industry & good management,” he also was “intelligent; reads writes & understands accounts, and is dexterous in his affairs,” with “no wife, and is said to be disinclined to marriage: nor any woman on his farm.”⁴² A man called Prince Taylor was the person Prince Demah, who also never took a wife, entrusted to be executor of his estate, and a man he called “my trusty friend.”⁴³ Whether that Prince Taylor was the same one who became a Mason in 1775, or the same who fought in the Continental Army and surprised James Madison, the lives of Prince Taylor remind us that Black men in Massachusetts like Taylor and Demah were part of a cosmopolitan community of freedom fighters who used their artisanal skills, literacy, and military participation to advocate for liberty.

While enlisted as a matross, however, Demah kept a low profile. He showed the same circumspection he had years ago, when Christian Barnes pushed him to admit that he shared his enslavers’ Loyalist politics. He kept silent then, and he kept silent in the Train. He did not sign a petition that circulated the regiment in September, gaining the support of many in his own company, that they refused to leave Boston “unless their bounty or wages, or both, were made equivalent to those allowed the soldiers of the Continental train of artillery.”⁴⁴ As a Black man in an overwhelmingly white regiment, Demah had better cause than most to be circumspect. Not least given his years at sea and his time enslaved, he likely also found conditions in the Train, which required little combat and had a commanding officer inclined to leniency, less onerous than many did.⁴⁵ He also might have been less swayed by arguments over pay because he easily could have supplemented his income by painting portraits of his fellow soldiers. And, as one of the locals who enlisted, he could spend his free time doing the same for residents of Boston.

During Demah’s enlistment, the men of the Train spent much of their time preparing for battles that never came. Responsible for protecting Boston from British attack, they practiced being in a constant state of readiness “for Quick firing.”⁴⁶ To ensure that they could “repell and Defeat the Enemy should they attempt to Invade this state,” they spent hours each day preparing artillery supplies and loading cannons.⁴⁷ At least for the first months of Demah’s service, boredom at repetitive tasks might have been the most difficult part of his service. During his initial time in the Train, it was run with kindness more than fear. Demah’s direct commanding officer, Captain Winthrop Gray, often served as the judge advocate in court-martials. Soldiers could be court-martialed for a wide variety of crimes, from disposing of their state-issued blankets to sleeping or being drunk at their posts, and, more rarely, violent crimes like threatening fellow soldiers with drawn knives.⁴⁸ Common sentences ranged from cleaning the barracks to “thirty-nine lashes” with “a Catt-of-Nine tales.”⁴⁹ Isaac Pilsberry, one of Demah’s fellow matrosses in Gray’s company, was court-martialed for being “Drunk on Guard and Not able to Do his Duty.” He pled guilty and was sentenced to “Receive Ten-Lashes on his Naked Back.”⁵⁰ Under Crafts’s leadership, however, punishment for those found guilty at court-martials was, at least for a time, waived completely. Such was his decision in Pilsberry’s trial. Crafts was steadfast in his distaste for corporal punishment. Even when another of Demah’s fellow matrosses, John Gowen, was found guilty at his second court-martial, Crafts pardoned him from punishment due to his “youth and inexperience,” merely warning that he would not pardon him a third time.⁵¹

Late summer of 1777, however, Crafts had to make a difficult decision, one that caused him “great uneasiness and Regret.” Noncommissioned officers and matrosses like Demah, he complained, “have almost lost every Idea of Military Subordination and Discipline,” with “many of them Totally” neglecting “their Duty” and making “the miserable Plea of Forgetfulness” as their Excuse. Although he found it “Extremely Disagreable,” he had to admit “the Necessity of the Military Laws being put in Execution.” From now on, he warned, military justice would be meted out “without favour.”⁵²

The unfortunate Gowen was one of the first cases to test Crafts’s new, harsher policy. Court-martialed “for Destroying the Barracks,” he pled guilty and was fined twenty-four shillings from his wages. Along with Gowen, John Grigory was also court-martialed, for “being in Liquor making a Disturbance in the Streets,” striking a sergeant, “Dammaging the Guard House,” and “Deserting from under Guard” before boarding a privateer ship and then “Threatening to kill the First Man who should come to take him.” Given a separate sentence for each in his long string of crimes, Grigory faced a total of 127 lashes. This time, Crafts approved both sentences, and ordered that Grigory would be punished with the entire regiment drawn up to watch.⁵³ However, when it came time for the punishment, Crafts caved and reduced the sentence to fifty lashes. He let the regiment know his decision with “An Address to the Non Commissioned Officer & Matrosses.”⁵⁴ He shared his “pain” that he “is at last Obliged to Consent to the Corporal Punishment of one in his Regiment,” as such punishments were “extremely erksom & disagreable to him.”⁵⁵

But at the end of August, when the men finally saw some action beyond drills, discipline increased. Crafts ordered the regiment dressed in their clean uniforms of blue coats turned up with red, with white waistcoats and breeches, and with their hair powdered.⁵⁶ After hearing a sermon, they were to march to Worcester, where they would take charge of prisoners of war captured at the Battle of Bennington in Vermont.⁵⁷ The detachment marched under Revere’s command. Revere was a harsher leader than Crafts, and somewhat unpopular with other captains in the regiment, including Demah’s direct commanding officer, Winthrop Gray.⁵⁸

In contrast to Crafts’s leadership style, as the Train set off for Worcester, Revere lectured them that “Strict Discipline, and Good Order is the life & Soul of a Soldier.” He expected “that there will be the best Order observed on the March,” with men refraining from destroying civilian property, abusing people, and “in everything behave like men Belonging to the Massachusetts State Train of Artillery.” Should any of the soldiers be foolish enough to “act Contrary to the Above directions they may depend upon being punished with the utmost Severity.”⁵⁹ Once in Worcester, they took several hundred prisoners captured after the battle—Canadians and Hessians as well as British soldiers—and escorted them to imprisonment in Boston.⁶⁰

Prisoners like these men escorted by the Train, men who were captured by both sides in North America, were luckier, in some ways, than Americans who found themselves shipped to Britain after capture, were captured on the high seas, or arrested in Britain for treason.⁶¹ Wives and children of men who traveled with the military in North America sometimes accompanied them into prison, which was not the case for men shipped to prisons in England and Scotland.⁶² The most important distinction, however, was that it was much more difficult for Americans imprisoned in Britain to gain their freedom through prisoner exchange. According to the Treason Act of 1777, the British government and king did not recognize the legality of the new American state. That meant that Americans seized under its terms could be imprisoned without the protections generally agreed to be due prisoners of war. Among those protections was the tradition of exchanging prisoners.⁶³ Under the terms of the new Treason Act, particular prisons were to be prepared where Americans could be held on charges of treason or piracy. With their rights to habeas corpus suspended, they, like Platt, would be imprisoned at the king’s pleasure. Although many escaped and some did manage to be exchanged after France entered the war, for most of these prisoners, the king’s pleasure, as it turned out, was to keep them imprisoned until after the Battle of Yorktown and a 1782 Act of Parliament designating these Americans as prisoners of war rather than rebels or pirates.⁶⁴

The predicament of these American prisoners of war concerned pro-American people in London, chief among them Patience Wright. Although Ebenezer Platt was of particular concern to her because of their friendship in New York, as well as a growing romance between Platt and her daughter Elizabeth, Patience Wright’s concern for American prisoners extended beyond his individual case. Wright saw a larger significance to his plight, “whos Case Calls on all America to See Justic done to a Inocent young man, now Lying in Iorns in Newgate for no other Crime then being Born in America.”⁶⁵ In the same letter in which she discussed the army of believers she and Labilliere were raising for Franklin, she sought his aid in the more prosaic project of helping American prisoners, who began filling the prisons set aside for them by the hundreds. She worried about the men imprisoned at Portsmouth, one of the sites set aside for Americans accused of crimes under the Treason Act. She fretted that they were stuck in “the Same perdiecterment of Mr. Platt” and asked for Franklin’s compassion for the prisoners “whos Property is all taken from them and they in Iorns No one to Comfort them, and it is not in the power of the People to help them without You.”⁶⁶

Echoing John the Painter, she emphasized the weakness of Americans in London, noting that “all the americans now in England are all poore” so “have it not in ther powr to do much” for Platt or the other prisoners. But she hoped that Franklin in France could, as he was “now the most happy Instrement and cane Save Both Contrys by your wisdom and Powr.”⁶⁷ Again, she used the popularity of her waxworks to benefit her intelligence work. A French couple, along with an interpreter, visited her exhibition and let her know “they would be much Pleasd to Carry a letter to doctr Frankling.” John Wilkes’s daughter Polly, a regular visitor to the exhibition, was also there and asked Wright to send Franklin “her Fathers most hearty wishes and a offer of his best Services to go to america if he could serve the glorious Cause of human nature, which is now in destress.” Ever eager to help the American cause, her concern for the growing number of American prisoners incarcerated in Britain increased the urgency of her pleas for Franklin’s help. She complained that none of her “honourable Contrymen now in France,” including Stephen Sayre as well as Franklin, had replied to her many letters, which gave her “no small mortification as I say with truth my asistanc has been more metereal then they can possable Imagien.”⁶⁸

Wright hoped that Franklin might use diplomatic channels to circumvent the “aCursed act that keeps poor Platt confind in Newgate with others of our Contry men” via a prisoner exchange. Franklin attempted to do just that, but his early efforts were hindered by France’s unwillingness to be directly involved and the British government’s refusal to recognize American prisoners as combatants from another country rather than rebellious traitors. In North America, British commanders on the ground circumvented this legality out of practicality and exchanged prisoners more readily. But in Britain, things were different. Franklin tried to negotiate his way around the legal hindrances to prisoner exchange by working with Britain’s ambassador to France, Lord Stormont. Stormont, who was Mansfield’s nephew, refused to budge. He disdainfully rejected Franklin’s correspondence with a note that the king’s ambassador did not consider requests from rebels unless they were to beg royal mercy.⁶⁹

As 1777 wore on, public disfavor with the treatment of American prisoners in Britain grew. The correspondence between Franklin and Stormont was published in the London Chronicle in November, and stories circulated about the horrible conditions and jailers’ brutality in Plymouth and Portsmouth, where hundreds of Americans were imprisoned. One American imprisoned in Plymouth described how the lack of food drove men to “pick up the grass in the yard and eat it,” while others would “pick up old bones in the yard that have been laying in the dirt a week or ten days and pound them to pieces and suck them,” and some ate snails found in “holes in the wall and from among the grasses and weeds.”⁷⁰ Even among reports of conditions like these, Platt remained the most famous of the incarcerated Americans. His case was reported in newspapers, and in May, a pamphlet on his most recent appearance at the King’s Bench, advertised as “a proper Supplement to Mr. Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol upon the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act,” with a “prefatory epistle to the Earl of Mansfield” appeared on the first page of The Public Advertiser.⁷¹ The fact that, despite urging from high-placed supporters like John Wilkes, he remained not only imprisoned but in chains, particularly rankled. His jailer refused to remove his shackles because although he “did not apprehend there wou’d be any danger” in doing so, since Platt’s “offence was against Government he might create himself a number of enemies thereby.”⁷² But the voices raised against mistreatment of American prisoners grew louder, especially once news of the British defeat at Saratoga inspired more Britons to call for peace. At the end of December, the Committee for the Support of American Prisoners formed and raised over four thousand pounds in just a few weeks.⁷³

In part because of public outcry against the ill treatment of American prisoners, and in part because the stakes of the war changed when France formalized its alliance with the United States in February, Ebenezer Platt was released from Newgate at last in mid-March of 1778. One of the first things he did upon gaining his freedom was marry Elizabeth Wright. Like other American prisoners who escaped British prisons, the two set off for France almost immediately, planning to go from there to America.⁷⁴

Patience Wright wrote to Franklin, asking him to help the newlyweds. Grateful for the help he gave her daughter and new son-in-law, she also shared her continued faith in his important role in the new world order. She was still attached to the idea she and Labilliere had for bringing him to London with an army. She believed that he had deeper support beyond the city, for “Irland love[s] you.” She confided that his “Publick Entry to the Court of France is a prelude to the same honour done you at the Court of London,” although the latter would hold the additional importance of him being their “Glorious” deliverer. She delighted knowing that she had “the Friendship of the greatest man in this whole World,” an honor she wished to repay by enhancing the fame of “the now great philosophic Doctr. Frankling acknowledgd so by all the Known Chrestian People.” She meant to honor him with her craft. She planned to follow in her daughter’s footsteps and go to France, for she was “determind to make you a Visit” to make a new bust portrait of him to send to “the Empror of Germany” and the queen of France. She also was toying with the idea of setting up an exhibition space there. As she had before, when she crafted her life-sized portrait of the late Earl of Chatham and hid intelligence for Philadelphia politicians in wax heads sent to her sister, she planned to use wax portraits in France to further the American cause. It was the best way she knew “to serve my Contry,” and she advised Franklin to accept her offer, for “the faithful in times of troubel and the women in all ages have been found Corospondans very Useful.”⁷⁵

As before, Franklin did not take her up on her offer of an army. He did, however, help her daughter. The previous year, he had contributed money for Platt’s support. Now, he helped arrange passage for Ebenezer and Elizabeth to cross the Atlantic and introduced them to John and Abigail Adams, who were also now in France. In April, John Adams reported that he and Abigail “dined home with Company,” including “Mr. Platt and his Lady.” All the Adamses’ guests were connected to Franklin, which did not necessarily endear them to Adams, who recorded that they “had some connection with Mr. Franklin, which I never understood and took no pains to investigate.”⁷⁶ Nevertheless, Adams found it in his heart to support the Platts’ case. The couple set sail for Charleston, intending to petition Continental Congress for compensation for Platt’s long suffering and imprisonment. The first of their petitions was not filed until the end of the year, however, as, in a bit of bad luck that must have made Platt wonder if he were cursed, their ship was seized by the British. The couple was forced to spend time in Glasgow before setting sail again. Making it home at last, Ebenezer enlisted, like Demah, to fight for the Patriots.⁷⁷

Demah’s military career was short lived. Like many soldiers who died during the American Revolution, Demah was not killed in conflict. The men of the Train fought smallpox more than they fought British troops. The summer Demah served in the Train, because of the number of people sick with smallpox at Boston’s Provincial Hospital, it was considered too “Dangerous to Continue in the Barracks.” All non-commissioned officers and matrosses had to leave the barrack, and “encamp in the Common in Tents.”⁷⁸ In March of 1778, almost the same time Platt was released from Newgate Prison, Prince Demah died. He likely was victim of another smallpox epidemic, as he had time to make a new will a week before he died, commending his “soul into the hands of Allmighty God my saveor and Redemer” and “the Kingdom of Haven,” entrusting his estate to his friend Prince Taylor, and giving his worldly goods to his beloved mother, Daphny Demah. He did not remember himself as a soldier. Instead, he proudly declared himself, “Prince Demah of Boston in the county of Sufalck and in the Masachuets state, Limner.”⁷⁹

13 ARTISTS AT WAR WITH THE KING

OUTSIDE LONDON AND AMERICA, another place where people were interested in news about Platt’s case—and his marriage to Elizabeth Wright—was the English spa town of Bath. Bath was a place where both marriage and gossip were always of interest, a charming place where people of all sorts congregated. Concerts and plays enlivened the town, with less elegant entertainments like cockfights held just outside town. Paved with flat stone and filled with newer stone houses as well as architectural evidence of its time as an ancient Roman spa, surrounded by hills, valleys, and on the banks of the River Avon, it was a pretty as well as a sociable spot. In the late 1770s, news of the happy final act of Platt’s time in Newgate would have been of interest because in addition to its many charms, Bath was also home to a surprising number of pro-American and American residents.¹

Among them were the radical and famous Catharine Macaulay and, some summers, Patience Wright. Virginian George William Fairfax and his wife Sally also lived there. The Fairfaxes were among George Washington’s closest friends (George William’s sister Anne had been married to Washington’s older brother) and owned a property near Mount Vernon. Washington managed the couple’s affairs in Virginia when they relocated to Britain to pursue a noble inheritance. The fact that Mount Vernon, like the Fairfaxes’ American home, was located in Fairfax County, Virginia, hints at the prominence of the Fairfax family. Fairfax was one of many Americans who blamed the ministry for the “unhappy difference between this Country and America,” and, before armed conflict began, assured Washington that America was “much Aplauded” by every well-wisher to “the Antient and Constitutional Right of Englishmen, whether on this, or the other side of the Atlantic; of which there are a great Majority in this County.”² Once war began, however, the Fairfaxes, unable to receive funds from Virginia, had “to retrench Expences greatly,” and had to leave their Yorkshire estate out of fears that “some Relations” would accuse Fairfax of treason and “hung me to gett my little Estate joining to theirs.”³ Advised due to poor health to take the waters, they went to Bath. There, “finding the Place beautiful & convenient,” as well as friendlier to Americans, “we were induced to take and Furnish a small House.”⁴

Washington and Fairfax continued to correspond during the war, although most of their letters written between 1774 and 1778 were intercepted. One from Washington reached Fairfax at last in 1778 only because British General Burgoyne, recently returned to England after his crushing defeat at Saratoga, hand delivered it to him in his “cottage” at Bath.⁵ Burgoyne’s gesture highlights how widely Washington, despite being the commander of the Continental Army, was admired in Britain.⁶ Such admiration was not confined to those who knew him personally. Among Washington’s many British admirers were the Fairfaxes’ fellow residents of Bath, the Pines. Prince Demah’s teacher, Robert Edge Pine, moved there with his family from St. Martin’s Lane in 1772.⁷ Pine, his wife, and bevvy of daughters lived in Hetling Court, a short walk from the Roman Baths. One of the Pine daughters had an illness that incapacitated her—whether physically, mentally, or both is unclear—and it is possible the curative properties of the spa drew them there.⁸ It is also possible that the elder Pines hoped it might prove a better marriage market than London for their five unmarried daughters.⁹ The Pines used the house as an exhibition space as well as a residence, where visitors could come to see paintings by a man deemed by some to be “the best Historical painter in England” as well as “one of our best Portrait Painters.” Works on display included portraits of Shakespearean actor David Garrick and other “well-known Persons of Distinction,” as well as his history painting of The Bourgeois of Calais, offering up their Lives to Edward III of England, to preserve their Fellow-Citizens and City.¹⁰

Among the “Persons of Distinction” Pine painted while living in Bath was the most high-profile pro-American living in Bath, a woman whose image Patience Wright sculpted in wax a few years before: “the great Historian” Catharine Macaulay.¹¹ In 1774, he painted a bust portrait of her dressed as Roman matron, a visual echo of the portrait Benjamin West painted of her brother the alderman wearing a Roman toga and standing next to a column inscribed “S.Q.P.R.”¹² Both portraits emphasized the siblings’ shared attachment to Roman republican ideals, with the quill in Macaulay’s hand making a nod to her career as a writer. Pine replicated his bust portrait into a full figure version in 1775, which, like West’s portrait of Sawbridge, was made into a popular print.¹³

In this larger version, Macaulay wears the purple sash of a Roman senator and rests one arm on a stack of the five volumes of her History of England. The books, in turn, are on top of a plinth chiseled with the words “Government / A power, delegated for the happiness of mankind, / conducted by / Wisdom, Justice and / Mercy.” Pine’s portrait captured her as she seemed to one American who spent time with her in London a few years before: “She is no Lover of Kings; but a pure Republican.”¹⁴

Painting a portrait of Macaulay with such overt republican symbolism in 1775 placed Pine firmly in the choir of pro-American voices calling out for better treatment of the colonists around Britain. Macaulay’s writings popularized the same stance against tyranny that American colonists claimed to be taking, and that English republicans took against King Charles I, whose “passion for power,” she wrote, was his “predominant vice.”¹⁵ Although he was among the worst kings, in her opinion, he was but a reminder of a universal truism, that “Kings, the servants of the state, when they degenerated into tyrants, forfeited their right to government.”¹⁶ And, sometimes, as her writings reminded her fellow lovers of republican government around the Atlantic, they forfeited their heads, too. But Charles I, as she shared in private conversation with an American visiting London in 1772, was not the worst of kings, for “no Time ever disgraced the Brittish Annals more than the Present.”¹⁷

Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge), circa 1775. This was initially a full-length portrait of Macaulay, as we know from a 1775 print made from it by engraver James Caldwell. The original painting was later cut down (somewhat awkwardly) to the truncated version seen here.

Her portrait by Pine was almost certainly a private commission by the man whose name is on the letter she holds in her hand, the Reverend Thomas Wilson.¹⁸ Wilson, a rector nearly thirty years her senior, shared his home in Bath with her and her daughter and, until Macaulay scandalized most of Britain by marrying a man twenty-six years her junior, was her greatest admirer. He admired her so much that in addition to commissioning her portrait, he also hired an artist to create a statue based on it, of Macaulay in the guise of Clio, the muse of History, for display in his church (although he removed it in his rage after her marriage). Other similar, small statues of Macaulay as represented by Pine were made by Derby Porcelain Works, with the addition of “Congress Pennsylvania” below the phrase about government. By 1778, Pine’s politically symbolic image of Macaulay was everywhere.¹⁹

As the war went on and some pro-American voices in Britain dimmed, particularly after the French officially entered the conflict, Pine grew more strident in using art to make political statements. In March 1778, he advertised that he was taking subscriptions for fine engravings of 24 by 19 inches, printed on the “best French paper,” to be made from his new painting, a large allegorical canvas titled “America.”²⁰ He laid out the symbolism of the allegorical work in the advertisement for subscriptions. America, “having suffer’d the several Evils of War, bewail’d its unhappy Cause, and lamented o’er her slaughter’d Sons—ruin’d Towns—destory’d Commerce, & c., & c. on the Appearance of Relief, is represented in an Extasy of Gratitude to the ALMIGHTY.”²¹ America’s reward for suffering was peace, liberty, and gains in agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, and population. Pine also helpfully explained the purpose of allegorical painting, noting that it “is the Mode of conveying much Meaning in little Space,” particularly suitable to the American Revolution, as “the Importance of this great Event, (unparallel’d in History) calls for the Arts to record it.” He also offered his opinion that in “well-regulated States, the Arts have been thought conducive to forming the Morals, and Manners of the People.” Among those who seemed to agree with his high hopes for this allegorical print was George William Fairfax, who paid him five guineas for five copies of the print.²²

Although he remained in England throughout the war, as might be guessed by his support of Pine’s engraving project, Fairfax shared some of Pine’s politics. He supported “the glorious cause of Liberty” and, after the war, when he felt safe to express his true feelings, wrote that, “I glory in being called an American, and trust, & hope the People who have raised their Reputation in the space of nine Years from obscruity, to the admiration of the World, will continue to Act with the same Wisdom & moderation in prosperity as they did in adversity, in which case, they may truly be said to have Enlightened Europe.”²³ During the war, when they both lived in Bath, he and Pine discussed their shared support for “the glorious cause of liberty” and admiration for George Washington. They had something else in common, too. Like Pine, Fairfax had a parent believed to be of African descent. Although related to a noble British family, Fairfax was born in the Bahamas, where his father was a member of the Governor’s Council. His mother was born on the island, daughter of a British army officer and, it was rumored, a mixed race or Black mother. When the elder Fairfax sent young George William to school in England, he wrote of his concerns for his son, “a poor W[est] India Boy” who “has the Marks on his Visage that will always testifie his Parentage.”²⁴

It no doubt pleased Robert Edge Pine to no end that Fairfax planned to give one of the five copies he purchased of the allegorical “America” to George Washington. Unlike many of their letters, the print made it safely to Washington, and he eventually put it on display at Mount Vernon, in the small green dining room where he and his family took many of their meals. Although Pine’s allegory focused on an imagined time of peace after the end of war, when he had finally realized his dream—one that he shared with Fairfax in Bath—to paint Washington from life, he emphasized war rather than peace. He portrayed him as a military man, dressed in his Continental Army regimentals.²⁵ It is intriguing to consider whether part of his desire to portray Washington as a military commander had to do with his pupil Prince Demah’s military service. If Pine ever heard of his pupil’s military service, he would have admired it. No letters between them are known to survive, but it is not difficult to imagine that Demah kept his teacher apprised of important life developments, like selling portraits in Boston, achieving freedom from slavery, and enlisting to fight for the Patriot cause they both supported. Demah was literate. Since Christian Barnes—never one to shy away from boasting of any magnanimous gestures toward those she enslaved—did not mention teaching him herself, he might have learned to read and write while in London, studying with Pine. Pine’s wife and some of her daughters had the skills and inclination to teach; they operated a school after the war teaching pupils who were among America’s most prominent girls—including the granddaughters of Benjamin Franklin and the Washingtons, and one of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters.

The Earl of Chatham died the same spring that Prince Demah did, a month after a dramatic collapse in the House of Lords, where the earl was debating whether Britain should seek reconciliation with America (Chatham’s position) or recognize its declared independence. He was buried in Westminster Abbey that June. In addition to the towering marble monument above his tomb, his image was captured for posterity by one of Patience Wright’s life-sized wax portraits that was placed in the Abbey’s Chapel of St. John the Baptist in 1779. The only one of her full-sized portraits to survive, an “admirable figure of the great Earl of Chatham in his parliamentary robes,” gives striking evidence of her skills. The waxwork was widely acknowledged to capture the earl’s likeness—one observer noted that it “seems to speak as you approach it.” It was so detailed that there were hairs on the surface of its veined hands. Although Patience Wright originally modeled Chatham’s wax head in 1775, this installation at the Abbey was a team production, with Phoebe Wright helping her mother to make the figure and its clothes.²⁶

Patience Wright, William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (c. 1775–1779).

Very little of the figure itself was made of wax. Besides the wax head and hands, everything else was of cloth, paper, glue, metal, and wood. The head and hands were affixed to the shoulders with strips of cardboard attached to a trunk carved out of wood, with one leg extending out from it and the other made of smaller pieces of wood held together by string. Held upright by a screwed-in piece of iron, the trunk had upper arms made of carved wood and forearms made of cardboard and glue. The bewigged wax earl was clothed in a mixture of real and staged clothing, including a purple velvet coat, green silk waistcoat, linen shirt, buckled leather shoes, strips of black cloth to imitate breeches, all surmounted by the actual red wool and silk parliamentary robes Chatham wore when he collapsed in the House of Lords. Some of the clothing and cloth were stiffened with paper, including one with the name “Miss Wright” as proof of Phoebe’s helping hand. The statue earned the Wrights a tidy sum, as it came at a “considerable expense.” It also earned Patience Wright even greater international fame, as the “eagerness of the connoisseurs and foreign artists to see this figure, and the satisfaction it affords them, justly places it among the first of the kind ever seen in this or any other country.”²⁷

Such a public exhibition of Wright’s work was particularly important because, unlike the work of artists like Robert Edge Pine, her life-sized portraits, like her figure of the Earl of Chatham, were deliberately excluded from exhibition at the Royal Academy. When the Royal Academy advertised forthcoming exhibitions and invited artists to drop off their work, they were careful to specify that “No Copies whatever,” or “any Imitations of Painting, will be received.” They also singled out whole categories of art commonly practiced by women by excluding “Needle-work” and “Artificial Flowers.” In 1776, for the first time, almost certainly thinking of Patience Wright, they added “Models in Coloured Wax” to that list.²⁸ But although she was prohibited from displaying what many considered her masterpiece at the Royal Academy, the year after it was installed in Westminster Abbey, she found herself at the center of one of the most dramatic controversies to rock the stately rooms of the academy.

Even before the controversy erupted, the 1780 Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art promised to be a memorable one. It was the first time the Royal Academy’s Annual Exhibition would be held in “the superb and stately mansion erected for the use of the Academy, on the scite of ground formerly occupied by Somerset House.”²⁹ The rooms took up “almost the whole front of that elegant building,” with a “grand room” up three flights of stairs at “the top, which received a fine refracted light from arch’d side windows above.” Below that room were additional rooms “appropriated for drawings, models, statues, busts, & c at the end of one of which are portraits of their Majesties by Sir Joshua Reynolds.”³⁰ Other artists exhibiting at the show included Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and Robert Edge Pine, who showed his fascination with Shakespeare by offering both a portrait of actor David Garrick and A Portrait of character of Jaques, Shakespeare’s as you like it.³¹

As a whole, the exhibition was well received, and the “tout ensemble of the present Exhibition is allowd” to “do infinite honor to the British arts; and certainly contains many pictures that will prove lasting monuments of the real genius of the several artists.”³² It also served as proof of the academy’s merit, for as “the present exhibition is the best we ever saw in England,” it offered “the best and most flattering proof of the rapid improvement of the arts of paintings, drawing, and sculpture in this country that ever was given.”³³ And it did so under the royal patronage of George III, who attended its opening along with his queen.

But a painting by Joseph Wright, a first-time artist at the annual exhibition, threatened to shatter the congratulatory mood and, no doubt, the satisfied complacency of its royal patrons. His was one of a handful of the 489 pieces in the exhibition consistently singled out in newspaper reviews: this was, of course, the portrait titled, Mrs. Wright modelling a head in wax. By 1780, Patience Wright’s image as well as her work were famous. A study of her done in 1777 by British artist John Downman shows how deeply her image became entangled with revolutionary politics. Echoing Hogarth’s famous portrait of John Wilkes holding a liberty cap, Downman shows her posed holding a liberty cap atop a pole across one shoulder. And, like other artists and commentators, Downman punned on Wright’s name to make a political point. The inscription below the portrait reads “LIBERTY I am, and Liberty is WRIGHT, / And Slavery do disdain, with all my Might.” Downman identified the portrait as that of the “famous Wax-Woman and Republican from America.”

But Joseph Wright’s 1780 portrait took Wright’s image as a proponent of liberty a step further. It did far more than show his famous mother hard at work on her craft. Instead of a liberty cap on a liberty pole, it depicted her holding “the bleeding head of the tyrant Charles the Ist,” a reminder of his regicide, an event that “was apt to give every King in Christendom an annual crick of the neck” on the anniversary of the execution. Along with Wright and Charles were “two striking figures in the back ground” who were “contemplating the execution of this celebrated Artist.” These busts were of George III and Queen Charlotte, whose recent likenesses by Benjamin West hung in the same room. It was, as one reviewer put it, a “most striking likeness of Mrs. Wright,” with “her wonderful art” in “terrific exhibition.”³⁴

It also was the likeness of a monarch executed by his own subjects. Some were shocked by its subject matter alone, much less its display at the Royal Academy. As a self-proclaimed “Lover of Decency” wrote in the Public Advertiser, he was “astonished to see” a “Picture of Mrs. Wright modelling in Wax the Head of Charles the First, attended by two Royal Personages.” It must have been commissioned by a “frantic Fanatic” who was “Rebel enough to design it, and pay for it.” Although such “a Piece in any public Exhibition would be an Insult to Decency; in a Royal one, so protected and encouraged by the Munificence of its Founder, it adds Ingratitude to Insult and Indecency.”³⁵

But other observers delighted in its symbolism. A “LOVER of the ARTS” celebrated it on general artistic principle. The “Sister arts” of poetry and painting were “too often prostituted to the most pompous purposes of pompous flattery, to varnish in false colours the splendid and the basest crimes of the most abandoned of mankind.” But here, in Joseph Wright, was that “rare artist” willing to “step forward” against “the utter extinction of all virtue, morality, and good government” in “the interest of liberty.” This reviewer delighted not just in Wright’s painting, but the dialogue between paintings it created at the exhibition. One of the other paintings most often mentioned in reviews, Gainsborough’s painting of the “figure of Satan shirking from the touch of Ithuriel’s spear” carried the eye “in the same line to that corner of the room” where Wright’s painting hung.³⁶

John Downman, “Study for a portrait of Mrs Wright, the famous wax-woman and Republican from America” (1777).

Unsurprisingly, given the American origins of its painter and subject, observers in London connected its message to the current conflict with Britain’s North American colonies as well as the English Civil War. The portrait of Wright modeling the head of “that incorrigible tyrant, Charles the First” while “the two first personages in this kingdom” looked on was an “instructive lesson” for the king and queen. If “properly attended to,” then Patience Wright should “merit the most magnificent rewards which royalty can bestow” and “the grateful and cordial applauses, not only of her injured compatriots in America, but likewise of every honest well-wisher to the liberties of this kingdom, and to the glorious privileges of the pure and genuine constitution of England.”³⁷ The timing could not have been better for Wright’s painting to make a stir. In the spring of 1780, the opposition to the government pushed an increasingly radical agenda in Parliament, political trouble was brewing in Ireland, and Britons were the most tired they had been yet of the long and uncertain war with its former colonies. It was a particularly fraught moment for such a painting to be so publicly displayed.³⁸

Like everyone else, the king and queen undoubtedly understood the intended message when they saw the painting. They had seen Patience Wright at work themselves. Her technique itself evoked thoughts of decapitation, “for while the head lies upon her knee it hath so strongly a human appearance, that, at the first sight, it looks like a fresh head severed from the body.”³⁹ Decapitated heads, long used in displays of power and punishment in New England as well as England, were referenced repeatedly during the revolutionary era.⁴⁰ They were not limited to that of Charles I. In 1771, the description of a “humorous vision of an Exhibition” in London was published, inspired by the fact that “at present the whole town is running helter-skelter after EXHIBITIONS.”⁴¹ It included pieces such as “Copy of a Head of Oliver Cromwell—by Lord Chatham,” and “Judith, with the Head of Holofernes” by Catharine Macaulay.⁴² Judith, the biblical heroine who helped save her people by sneaking into the enemy camp and cutting off the head of Holofernes, the leader of their armies, with his own sword, had long inspired art. In 1776, there were three Italian paintings of Judith and Holofernes in Windsor Castle alone, all in various rooms used by the queen.⁴³ In America, when Esther de Berdt Reed wrote her “Sentiments of an American Woman” to raise donations for the men of the Continental Army in 1780, she called upon her fellow patriotic women to show “the zeal and the resolution of Deborah, of Judith, of Esther!”⁴⁴ The decapitated head of George III himself, taken from his toppled statue in Manhattan, could be seen at the home of Lord Townshend, where it had been sent from New York by British troops.⁴⁵

When he created the portrait of his mother modeling the head of Charles I, Wright tapped into a popular trend. Decapitated heads of all sorts showed up in art, particularly those making political statements. One of these was a print that once more involved Patience Wright. Dated “May 1, 1780”—the opening day of the Royal Academy exhibition—it was titled “The Heads of the Nation in a Right Situation.”⁴⁶ The print was a crude view of Temple Bar, with three heads on spikes in the same place where heads from those deemed traitors during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 were once displayed. Men, women, and children are gathered, throwing stones and even a dead dog at the heads. A woman in the front of the crowd, meant to depict Patience Wright, cries out, “This is a sight I have long wish[ed] to see.” Other people’s comments reveal the identities of the heads: Lords North, Germain, and Sandwich. The printer, Mary Darly, was connected personally to the Wrights. Mary Darly was the widow of Matthias Darly, who died a few months before, and his partner in the printshop. The Darly’s onetime apprentice, John Williams, frequented the London waxworks, and often served as her secretary, writing “to Mr. Hancock, Mr. Adams, & c. at the express desire and suggestions” of Wright, who “maintained a correspondence, through me with the Chiefs of Congress.”⁴⁷ With its overlapping dates, subject matter, and creators’ social networks, this satirical print, on sale in the Strand, amplified the message of Joseph Wright’s portrait beyond the walls of the Royal Academy.

Patience Wright herself continued to speak her truth to any and all who would listen. In London, “her house” remained “the rendezvous for the Legislator and the Artist.”⁴⁸ In Bath as well as London, she “indiscriminately” disclosed “her political Sentiments” in an “open and honest Manner, to Persons of whatever Rank, Condition, or Party, they are of,” which “shews her to be a Native of a New World.”⁴⁹ Given this combination of volubility and visibility, it is somewhat amazing that she was never arrested for treason. The fact that she was a woman undoubtedly helped her avoid arrest and prosecution.⁵⁰ So too did the fact that, with the marriage of her daughter Elizabeth to Ebenezer Platt, she was inexorably linked in the public mind to the Treason Act’s most famous victim. She also likely was helped by the fact that her letters to Franklin were not perceived as a real threat. Although the intelligence she sent concealed in wax heads to Philadelphia made it there without incident, when some of her more damning letters sent to Franklin in France were intercepted, they “were carefully opened, & without any apparent alteration” sent on their way after intelligence was gathered from them, “as they did [not] to appear to contain any thing material.”⁵¹ In other words, she was not the best of spies. Nevertheless, her position was never entirely secure, for she continued throughout the war to communicate “much important information to Franklin” and “intercourse with him and the American government, by which she was placed in positions of extreme hazard.”⁵²

[M]ary Darly, “The Heads of the Nation in a Right Situation” (May 1, 1780).

But the clashing opinions about her son’s portrait of her, and the fact that it was on display in London’s Royal Academy, remind us that there was never universal support for the “American war” in Britain. After 1769, Londoners who were pro-American were motivated more out of sympathy for Americans’ arguments about constitutional rights and liberty than commercial or mercantile interests, in part because they saw them as part and parcel of despotic government attacks on John Wilkes and Whig politics. Such Londoners were not just powerful merchants, either. They were ordinary tradespeople and artisans, people whose socioeconomic status was more similar to the officers and men of the Train than to wealthy men like Henry Laurens or Arthur Lee. These people continued to support America after war began, seeing armed conflict as a further proof of government despotism, and maintaining their support even after Americans declared independence and formed the Franco-American Alliance.⁵³

As the war continued, some saw alarming impositions on constitutional rights in Britain, too. More than once, Labilliere made a direct connection between “the american War,” which was “fighting against God,” and proposed parliamentary reform, namely “the Plan of annual Parliaments and universal Representation, which has been circulated round the Kingdom and is much approved of by the real Friends to the People Under God.”⁵⁴ Labilliere was not alone. Others, including influential Whig politician Charles Fox (who showed his affinity for the republican cause America represented by wearing a waistcoat and suit that imitated the buff and blue regimentals Washington designed for the Continental Army) called for checks on despotism and reforms like annual parliamentary elections. A month before Joseph Wright exhibited his incendiary portrait at the Royal Academy, a motion passed narrowly in the House of Commons stating that “The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” Rather than bow to calls for republican reform, the king and his ministers kept to their positions on monarchical power, the war in America, and parliamentary reform. Political tensions were high and, that June, reached a breaking point with the Gordon Riots.

The riots were geographically confined to London, but they were inspired by the war with America. Not long after the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, Parliament passed the English Roman Catholic Relief bill. The resulting act eased some restrictions on the religious and political rights of English Catholics, and politicians planned to implement a similar version in Scotland, and a more restrictive version for Irish Catholics. Although the acts were enlightened in terms of greater tolerance for Catholics, they were motivated by fear and need. Britain feared French invasion, American naval attacks, and Irish rebellion, and needed more troops to fight in the now-expanded American war.⁵⁵ And, much as the Quebec Act had outraged Americans prone to anti-Catholicism like Patience Wright in London as well as New Englanders at home, the Catholic Relief bills enraged many ordinary Britons. Many in London drank from the same well of antipopery, anti-Catholic fear and hatred that animated Pope’s Day celebrations in Boston.⁵⁶ For many loyal to it, the British Empire was one ruled by Protestantism as much as commerce.⁵⁷

At the end of May 1780, the same month the Royal Academy’s Annual Exhibition opened to the public, Lord George Gordon, a member of Parliament and president of the Scottish and English Protestant Associations, both of which stood against the Catholic Relief Bills, proposed making a formal petition against them to the House of Commons. He asked thousands to go with him to Parliament the following Friday, the second of June. That day, between 40,000 and 60,000 people wearing blue cockades marched with him to deliver the petition. When Gordon was told to return the following week, his supporters exploded. Five days of bloody, fiery riots began. Rioters targeted Catholic chapels, destroyed valuable property owned by elite politicians and officials (including a house owned by Lord Mansfield), freed prisoners in debtors’ jails, burned effigies of the pope in the streets, and attacked Newgate Prison. They attempted to storm the Bank of England and were held back by soldiers led, somewhat astonishingly, by John Wilkes. Ignatius Sancho described the sensory horror of the experience, “the shouts of the mob—the horrid clashing of swords—and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion,” with ballad singers “exhausting their musical talents—with the downfall of Popery, S[andwic]h, and N[ort]h.”⁵⁸ Hundreds died and hundreds more were injured. It was the worst riot in London’s long history of riots.⁵⁹

And it did little to dampen suspicions about pro-American plots in Britain. The fires set during the riot were reminiscent of John the Painter’s intentions to cripple the British Navy to help the American cause. When Franklin heard the news in Paris that “the Mob have burnt several Houses of the Ministers,” he too connected the riots with the war in America, noting that “such a Taste of fire may make those Gentlemen sensible of the Wanton malice with which they have encouraged the Burning of Poor People’s Houses in America!”⁶⁰ Gordon was charged with high treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Later that fall, he was joined by a high-profile American prisoner, Henry Laurens, a former president of the Continental Congress and the newly appointed US ambassador to the Netherlands. En route to Europe, Laurens’s ship had been taken by the British, who bought Laurens to England as soon as they determined his identity. Because of his role in the American government, as well as his capture on the high seas, he was charged under the Treason Act both for treason in Philadelphia and for piracy on the high seas. Although charged under the same act, unlike Platt, Laurens was an important enough prisoner that he had what his compatriot John Adams once called “the honor of an Appartment in the Tower as a State Prisoner.”⁶¹ Despite that “honor,” he was welcomed into the Tower, mockingly, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” And his honorable imprisonment came at a high cost. Laurens’s health suffered, as did his finances, as he had to pay for his living expenses.⁶²

When American artist John Trumbull was arrested on charges of treason the month after Laurens was sent to the Tower, he too was deemed important enough to be sent to the Tower. But he eschewed it as too costly.⁶³ Trumbull was the son of the Patriot governor of Connecticut and a former colonel in the Continental Army. In the early days of the war, in Boston, he had served as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp. Eventually, he permanently resigned his commission to pursue an art career. He arrived in London the month after the Gordon Riots and began to study with Benjamin West. American Loyalists in London were immediately suspicious of this former Continental Army officer. His conduct was “carefully watched,” and he was suspected, like Patience Wright, of being a “dangerous person, in the service of Dr. Franklin.”⁶⁴

In the months he was in London before being arrested, he completed a painting that some might have seen as evidence of his continued pro-American loyalties. He painted a portrait of his former commanding officer, General George Washington, dressed in his formal Continental Army uniform. Alongside him Trumbull placed a uniformed, turbaned Black man meant to be Washington’s constant wartime companion, his enslaved valet, groom, and aide, William Lee. Despite the fact that Trumbull knew both men well from his time as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp in the Continental Army, he did not portray either man as they were. Lee is presented as an over-racialized stereotype. Washington is more romanticized than realistic. Their distinct uniforms (Lee’s imagined turban aside) are the most authentic thing about them. They are early examples of the heroic style that Trumbull would perfect for his postwar history paintings celebrating the great events of the American Revolution—paintings that continue to dominate popular perceptions of the war—a war largely devoid of violence, chaos, and blood. Trumbull portrayed a war captured in aesthetics that were very far indeed from heads on spikes atop London walls or an American wax sculptor holding the decapitated head of a king. Trumbull’s double portrait was made into a print by a London engraver and available for sale the January after he was arrested, enhancing Washington’s already heroic image and keeping Trumbull’s name in the public eye while he was imprisoned.⁶⁵

Trumbull’s arrest for treason affected other Americans in London, particularly his teacher Benjamin West. As Trumbull remembered it, West’s “love for the land of his nativity was no secret, and he knew the American loyalists” in London, “outraged at the kindness which the king” had “long shewn to him, and still continued” though they constantly lobbied against him. He also “dreaded the use which might be made to his disadvantage of the arrest for treason, of a young American who had been in a manner domesticated under his roof, and of whom he had spoken publicly and with approbation.”⁶⁶ Finally West, via Sir Joshua Reynolds, managed to appeal to Edmund Burke, whom Trumbull later recalled as a “patriot,” for help. Burke appealed to the King’s Privy Council, and in 1781 Trumbull was set free on bail and told he would be free from further prosecution if he left England immediately—which he promptly did.⁶⁷

Patience Wright left England that same year. At last, she was putting her plan to go to France into action. What finally inspired Patience Wright to abandon London for the uncertain world of Paris was something that most displeased the king in her war with him. It was not her son’s portrait at the Royal Academy, her intercepted letters to Franklin in France, her strident announcement of her pro-American politics, or even her daughter Elizabeth’s marriage to Britain’s most famous victim of the Treason Act. It was, instead, young love. In the summer of 1781, her younger daughter Phoebe married artist John Hoppner, a dashingly handsome rising star in the Royal Academy who met Phoebe through his fellow student, her brother Joseph. The king did not approve of the marriage because Hoppner was not just any young artist. The king had been his benefactor since childhood. The king showed him so much favor, in fact, that it was rumored he was his illegitimate son.⁶⁸

John Trumbull, George Washington and William Lee (1780).

14 QUEEN OF SLUTS, LADIES OF LIBERTY

THE FIRST PAINTING John Hoppner exhibited at the Royal Academy was of an American from Joseph Wright’s family. In Hoppner’s inaugural portrait, A Primrose Girl, his model was his future wife, Joseph’s sister Phoebe.¹ Although she was not named in the catalog, many viewers of the exhibition, especially Hoppner’s fellow artists, would have recognized the “primrose girl” as the daughter of the famous Patience Wright. The skilled hand behind many of the clothes worn by her mother’s wax figures and a witty fixture at the waxworks, Phoebe was also known for her beauty. In addition to sitting for Hoppner, her “beautiful form and face” were often used as models for Benjamin West’s historical paintings.² Since West was “Historical Painter to the King,” George III had seen the face of Phoebe Wright memorialized in paint before. And, although the portrait that Hoppner entered into the 1780 show was nowhere near as remarked upon as Joseph Wright’s, the king undoubtedly took notice of it. He had a vested interest in Hoppner’s career. It was the king himself who paid to enroll Hoppner in the Royal Academy five years before. He watched with interest as Hoppner excelled enough in his studies to earn a silver medal in 1778. But his role as art patron was not the sole reason for the king’s interest in Hoppner. He had been Hoppner’s benefactor for years before enrolling him in the academy.

As a young boy, Hoppner was “educated by His Majesty’s desire, with the greatest care and regardless of expense.” So generous was the king’s patronage of Hoppner that “it was generally believed” that he “was a natural son of the King,” a “suspicion” that became “almost a certainty owing to his affection for him, the interest he took in his studies,” constantly checking “his progress,” as well as “the carte blanche accorded for all his whims and expenses; and also the warm attention of the Prince of Wales, and Dukes of Kent and Clarence, whose constant companion he was.”³

Hoppner himself never claimed royal parentage. Born two years before the future George III ascended to the throne, Hoppner told people that his father was a surgeon attached to the court, his mother also had a place at court, and that he was recommended to the king as a “lad of Genius,” after which the king took on his education, placed him as a boy chorister at the Chapel Royal, allowed him “three shillings a week pocket money,” and “had him placed to board with Mr. Chamberlains Family.”⁴ John Chamberlaine was long attached to the king’s household as a keeper of the king’s drawings and medals in the Royal Library and then as a page of the backstairs.⁵ As a member of the choir, Hoppner was one of only ten boys in the group. They sang for the royal family at communion and Maundy services, wearing a uniform with a red cloak.⁶ It made for a childhood inexorably linked to the royal household and its pomp. But Hoppner did not wish to “follow the profession of music”; instead, “drawing and portrait-painting were the bent of his mind.”⁷ Eventually, he convinced the king to allow him to pursue an artistic career and George III enrolled him in the Royal Academy.

Hoppner continued living with the Chamberlaines when the king enrolled him in the Royal Academy. In his first two exhibitions at the academy, Hoppner gave his address as “at Mr. Chamberlaine’s, North Audley Street.” Once launched into his career as a painter, Hoppner enjoyed more royal patronage, from the Prince of Wales as well as the king. His only daughter was named Helena Clarence Hoppner in honor of her godfather, the Duke of Clarence (and future King William IV). Whether or not Hoppner was related to the king, his was a life indelibly shaped by royal patronage and his relationships with the royal family and their household.⁸

His background and prospects, in short, would seem to be antithetical to marrying the daughter of a famously pro-American and republican woman known by the British government to be a rebel spy, not to mention the sister of Joseph Wright. For rather than retreat in the face of criticism for his controversial painting of his mother, Joseph created a self-portrait that made him a memorable stand-in for rebellious Americans and their supporters. Titled “Yankee-Doodle, or the American Satan,” it pictured a defiant, slightly disheveled Wright, hands in pockets, with a caption that read “Ask me what provocation I have had / That strong antipathy good bears to bad.” An additional note appeared below the caption about the supposed publisher, “Ebeenezor Scalpp’em on the Banks of the Ohio,” a title that evoked treason, war, and America by referring to his brother-in-law Platt, Indigenous American warfare, and the Ohio country.⁹

Wright’s self-portrait, much like earlier prints such as “The Parricide,” simultaneously ignored actual Indigenous claims to sovereignty over colonized land while playing upon symbolic tropes of American Indians standing in for America and stereotyped views about “savage” Indigenous violence. It was but one in a long line of prints that used images of American Indians to illustrate violence—scalping in particular—during the American Revolution. Britons who were against the war used such violence as a reason to call for reconciliation, noting that it was unconscionable to subject fellow Britons to such barbarous warfare. Edmund Burke, for example, cited the death of American colonist Jane McRea by scalping at the hands of Indians and referred to Indigenous North Americans as “banditti” in a 1778 speech to Parliament.¹⁰ Such arguments played out visually and aesthetically as well as verbally in political speeches and pamphlets. One of the most famous is “The CLOSET” (1775), a multi-scene vignette which showed Indians feasting from skulls, holding decapitated heads, and scalping Jane McRea. Another, titled “The Commissioners” (1778), showed America as an Indian and claimed that her enemies had “Ravish’d, Scalp’d, and murder’d your People, even from Tender infancy to decrepid Age.”¹¹ This print, like “Yankee Doodle, or the American Satan,” was published by the Darly printing house, the same printers who made “The Heads of State in a Right Situation.” The Wrights used widely distributed print culture as well as paintings and wax to make their political stance against the king abundantly clear.

Despite the Wrights’ antimonarchical rhetoric, in July of 1781, John Hoppner and Phoebe Wright, still a minor at only seventeen, were married in Hanover Square.¹² Patience Wright gave her support to the marriage, and two witnesses added their support for the union of the king’s protégé and the daughter of one of the king’s most outspoken critics. One of these was that staunch republican and Wright family friend, “Christian Patriot” Peter Labilliere. The other witness was one of Phoebe’s friends, Juliet Ann Cozens. Cozens’s father, like Hoppner, was an artist with very real royal connections. A British landscape painter, Alexander Cozens exhibited at the Society of Arts, the Society of Artists, and the Royal Academy, and taught drawing to the Prince of Wales. Like Hoppner, he too was subject to rumors about royal parentage. Cozens was born in St. Petersburg, and although the emperor was in fact his godfather, gossip was that his father was Emperor Peter I of Russia. Juliet Ann Cozens’s mother, Charlotte Pine, was also from an artistic family with royal patronage. Charlotte was the daughter of John Pine and the sister of Robert Edge Pine. Much like the visitors to Patience Wright’s waxworks, this wedding party brought together artists, republicans, and people with rumored—and real—connections to royalty.

M[ary or Matthew] Darly, Yankee-Doodle, or the American Satan [Joseph Wright] (circa 1780).

Hoppner did not seek the king’s blessing for his marriage. One of his children later recalled having heard at a “very early age in consequence of his marriage without the Kings’s George III consent, to my Mother and at the instigation of Mr. West” he was “turned into the street with a half-crown in his pocket.” The bitterness the Hoppners felt at West’s advice to the king, or, as they framed it, “West’s hostility,” was strong enough to last in generational lore, in part because it was “thought the more iniquituous” as West “pretended to be a friend” of Phoebe Wright Hoppner, “an American like himself.” West’s thinking was perhaps not unwarranted, as “the reason he assigned” was that “young Hoppner was an idle fellow who would never do anything while the King supported him, and until he was forced by necessity to exert himself.”¹³ Although the rejection of the king, and West’s part in it, rankled the Hoppners, it did them little harm in the end. Through her years at the waxworks and her appeal as “a spirited, handsome woman,” Phoebe had a wide range of acquaintances with literary, artistic, and noble connections. The newlyweds moved into Patience Wright’s home at the waxworks, and, between the two of them, they soon found new patrons and clients in “the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, all the Whig nobility and most of the leading people of the day,” so that by the time the war ended, Hoppner “had overcome all difficulty.” By 1792, he had become Portrait Painter to the Prince of Wales, Portrait Painter to the King, and elected to the Royal Academy.¹⁴

But in 1781, the path ahead seemed less clear. Patience Wright decided it was an optimal time to leave England. Leaving Phoebe in charge of the waxworks, Wright found her way to Paris at last. She had entertained the idea of coming two years before, en route home to America. Franklin replied that “Friendship required” he let her know the many problems with that idea. He dissuaded her from traveling to America, cautioning her that although he would “certainly render you any of the little Services in my Power,” there were “so many Difficulties at present in getting Passages from hence, particularly Safe ones for Women, that methinks I should advise your Stay till more settled Times, & till a more frequent Intercourse is established.” He also doubted whether she would enjoy the same success in Paris that she had in London. “As to the Exercise of your Art here,” he cautioned, “I am in doubt whether it would answer your Expectations.” For although there were “two or three” wax workers in Paris who “make a Show of their Works on the Boulevards,” it “is not the Taste for Persons of Fashion to sit to these Artists for their Portraits.” Besides, he added, as if that weren’t dissuasion enough, “both House-Rent & Living at Paris is very expensive.”¹⁵

Nothing he said was untrue, but it was just as likely that he did not wish Patience Wright to come and create more delicate situations for him to manage. At some point, she almost certainly would stir up a fuss that required tactful diplomacy. Especially after the Gordon Riots, he might have worried about how her virulently Protestant vision of a republican revolution would come across in Catholic France. He already had his hands full managing the French alliance, charming fickle aristocrats, serving as a safe haven for American prisoners who escaped from across the Channel, and trying to negotiate large-scale prisoner exchanges with a recalcitrant British government. He also may not have wanted the competition for his role as the most charismatic American in France. In London, as the portraits painted of him there attest, Franklin had played the role of gentleman scientist, wearing fine suits and powdered wigs. In France, he changed that persona and adopted one similar to that used by Wright to such good effect in London: that of an extremely American figure, one whose eccentricities of dress and manner emphasized his closeness to nature and “New World” origins.¹⁶ He arrived at court dressed, as one aristocrat put it, like an “American farmer.” His unpowdered hair and homespun brown suit contrasted with the dazzling suits and elaborate, powdered coiffures of courtiers at Versailles. He wore a hat made of fur, a material that recalled the American beavers that so fascinated Europeans. His carefully calculated appearance was a novelty that completely charmed the French, particularly the women. From fur hat to homespun suit, everything about his appearance “announced the simplicity and innocence of primitive morals.”¹⁷

Franklin’s sartorial tactics were clever, not least because America was all the rage in France.¹⁸ Silas Deane, one of the first American envoys stationed in France, noted that “everything American is gazed at” and “the American contest engages the attention of all ages, ranks, and sexes.”¹⁹ French newspapers even reported on the case of Ebenezer Platt.²⁰ Queen Marie Antoinette was among those infatuated with all things American, and Deane believed that this fondness might benefit the young United States, as the queen “I believe wishes a war, and is our friend.” To capitalize on this interest, he suggested that Congress send gifts from America of things such as “a narrowhegansett horse or two,” “Rittenhouse’s orrery, or Arnold’s collection of insects,” or a “few barrels of apples.”²¹ John Adams sought his wife’s opinion on what to add to this request, suggesting that French ladies might also wish to see “Mooses, Wood ducks, Flying Squirrells, Redwinged Black birds, Cramberries, and Rattlesnakes,” but that he thought “We ought to consult the Ladies upon this Point.”²²

The French interest in all things American was not just good for the American war effort. It was good for French business, too, especially for those in artistic lines of work. And this booming business ensured that people far beyond the elite confines of the court became familiar with Franklin. French artists created portraits, prints, and wax profiles of Franklin. One of the most famous, painted in 1778 by Joseph Duplessis, was surrounded by a frame that was embellished with a rattlesnake, a symbol of America, and declared simply that, here, was the portrait of “VIR,” or “man.”²³ Many other portraits showed Franklin wearing his iconic spectacles and fur hat. To celebrate the Franco-American Alliance, the renowned Sèvres porcelain factory created small busts of him and coffee cups of gold and blue, painted with his portrait en grisaille (a painting technique that imitated marble). It became the fashion to display an engraving of Franklin over the mantelpiece, and his image also appeared on everything from snuff boxes to vases, handkerchiefs, clocks, rings, and medallions.²⁴ Portraits were readily reproduced as prints, of which, as he put it himself, “copies upon copies are spread every where.” This proliferation of Franklin-centered objects in France was what made his face, as he half-complained and half-bragged to his daughter, as well known as the moon.²⁵

American artists wished to capitalize on Franklin’s popularity, too. Back in Boston, Phillis Wheatley—now Phillis Peters—again proved her ability to blend savvy with dedication to liberty by advertising that the new book of poems and letters for which she sought subscribers would be dedicated to “the Right Honourable Benjamin Franklin Esq: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France.” It was, unhappily, never published, for she, like Prince Demah, died before she could fulfill all her creative promise. It would have featured patriotic poems, however, including the one she wrote for Washington, as well as one titled “Thoughts on the Times.” Even though unpublished, her work, as the proposal of an emancipated woman living with her own husband rather than the Wheatleys, provides invaluable insight into what mattered to Phillis herself, unfiltered through the controlling lens of her enslavers or the evangelical patron they encouraged her to find.²⁶

Patience Wright pinned similar artistic hopes to Franklin when she arrived in Paris. As she had done when she first arrived in London, she hoped to rely upon Franklin’s connections. One of the people she met through him was both his friend and one of the reasons her waxworks were not the success in Paris that they were in London: anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron.²⁷ Among Biheron’s many talents was sculpting in wax. Biheron made anatomical models touted as both instructive and fascinating. Her models were praised by men like Diderot, Buffon, and members of the Académie Royale des Sciences. French women also admired her, including the royal governess and the comtesse de Coigny, herself a student of anatomy with a reputation for keeping a corpse in the boot of her carriage “as one brings a book to read,” in case the urge to dissect struck her while traveling. While Patience Wright preferred to model from life, Biheron kept a cabinet in her garden that she called her “petit boudoir” where she stored the corpses she used to model her anatomical figures.²⁸

Wright and Biheron met, but their encounter was not a success. Elkanah Watson, a young American in Paris, helped to interpret for them. Biheron “entered with much grace, in which Mrs. W was no match for her.” Like Wright, Biheron had a flamboyant appearance, “with a sharp nose with broad patches of vermilion spread over the deep throws of her cheeks.” As Watson sat between these “two originals,” their “tongues flew with velocity the one in English and the other in French and neither understanding a word.” Biheron, dropping a curtsy, abruptly left, and Wright called her “an old painted fool.” There was little hope of Biheron easing Wright’s way into the world of Parisian waxworks.²⁹

Nevertheless, Wright stayed in Paris until 1782 and managed to gain valuable commissions, including one from a member of the royal family, the duchesse de Chartres. But she failed to achieve her desire to make a portrait of the French queen. Marie Antoinette was in confinement much of the time she was in Paris, and gave birth to a son and heir, the dauphin, in 1781. America celebrated the birth of the dauphin enthusiastically. Among other things, there was a market for images of the dauphin, as there was for other members of the French royal family, including the second son of the king and queen, Louis Charles, who became dauphin when his older brother died in 1789. A Nantucket whaling captain in France on business purchased a wax figure of the baby Louis Charles from a convent, where the nuns told him the (unlikely but compelling) story that it had been cast from life. He carefully brought it home across the Atlantic and kept it on display in his home, proving there was a market for wax figures for private as well as public display.³⁰

Like many other artists in France, Wright also continued to make money from portraits of Franklin. Her sometime translator Watson commissioned her to make a wax portrait of him. Having modeled a head from memory, she walked to Franklin’s home in Passy, carrying the sculpture in a napkin. It evidently was some of her best work. Returning home that evening to her Paris hotel, the guards stopped her and opened her bundle, which “to the astonishment of the officials, exhibited the head of a dead man, as appeared to them in the obscurity of the night.” They believed that “she was an escaped maniac, who had committed murder, and was “concealing the head of her victim.” Although they were determined to take her to the police for the murder of Benjamin Franklin, she managed to convince them to let her return to her hotel, where Watson intervened on her behalf and explained, at which everyone “except Mrs. W were highly amused at the singularity and absurdity of the affair.”³¹ It likely amused Franklin no end when he heard it, as well, as he once informed Wright that his grandson William, who was with him in France, suggested that she transport her figures, including one of Lord North, as if they were living people, although “they are so like Life & Nature, that the Master” of the packet ship to America “will not receive them on board without Passes,” and once they arrived in America, “all the World will wonder at your Clemency” that, “having it in your Power to hang” Lord North, “you had generously repriev’d him for Transportation.”³²

Watson continued to use Wright’s wax portrait of Franklin, and Franklin’s celebrity in France, to make a statement. Once settled in Nantes, a center for mercantile business between the United States and France, Watson asked Franklin’s grandson to send him some of his grandfather’s “old cloaths” to dress Wright’s “most striking likeness” of Franklin in wax.³³ Watson kept the figure of Franklin “placed in the corner of a large room,” seated at a table with “an open Atlas” with mathematical instruments “strewn upon it, a handkerchief was thrown over the arm stumps,” and “wires were extended to the closet” to allow him to move the body. Watson invited “some ladies and gentlemen” to “pay their respects to Dr. Franklin by candlelight, and for a moment “they were completely deceived and all profoundly bowed and curtsied.” He also brought the figure with him to London, where he repeated the trick, convincingly enough that the London papers erroneously reported the presence of Franklin in the city. His fellow Americans who came to pay their respects to Franklin were less amused than the French had been.³⁴

Watson’s joking aside, 1782 was a year of consequential importance for the United States, and Franklin played a serious role in the events of that year. Cornwallis’s defeat and surrender at Yorktown in the fall of 1781 had changed the course of the war for good. Labilliere, writing to Franklin in Paris, proclaimed that victory for America meant “Opening of the Gates of Freedom to the whole World.” Now, all could worship at the “Temple of universal, civil, and christian Liberty,” as “Pharaoh has gone out with all his Host against the Children of Israel and is overthrown.” Peace was now but a matter of time, he claimed. Britons understood that this was “the King’s War” and soon, London and surrounding counties would “petition the King in a spirited Manner against the american War.”³⁵ Although Labilliere was, as ever, overly dramatic in his assessment, he was not entirely wrong. A mood of reconciliation fell over London, and coverage of the American war in the British press fell dramatically.³⁶

In November of the following year, the warring nations signed a provisional Treaty of Paris. Watson went to the opening of the House of Lords to hear the king concede defeat. Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and a number of “American ladies” were also there.³⁷ As Watson listened to the king speak, he was overcome with emotion: “every artery beat high, and swelled with my proud American blood.” The “great drama was now closed. The battle of Lexington exhibited its first scene. The Declaration of Independence was a lofty and glorious event in its progress, and the ratification of our Independence by the King, consummated the spectacle in triumph and exultation.” The successful outcome of the American Revolution, he reflected, would “in all probability, influence eventually the destinies of the whole human race.”³⁸

Patience Wright agreed. And she wanted to commemorate the monumental event. She might have done so in Britain. America was still in fashion there, and a radical-leaning Whig government under Charles Fox came into power in 1783. As George William Fairfax reported to Washington from Bath, now with the “happy conclusion of the late diabolical War,” the “times are greatly altered, and I am now as much Courted, as I was before despised as an American.”³⁹ An intrepid John Trumbull, now that he no longer feared being imprisoned for treason, prepared to return to London to create history paintings chronicling events from the Revolution.⁴⁰

Wright’s waxworks remained a popular attraction, especially for Americans who were coming to London in the war’s aftermath, like the Adams family. Although he was far less impressed by art than by the natural history collections at the British Museum, John and Abigail Adams’s son John Quincy spent a morning going to “see the Paintings of Mr. Pine, and Mr. Copley,” where he particularly admired Copley’s painting The Death of the Earl of Chatham. He also viewed works by Reynolds and went “to see Mrs. Wright’s waxwork.”⁴¹ With the exception of Reynolds, John Quincy Adams’s artistic experience was tellingly skewed toward American and pro-American artists. Wright was delighted to hear that John Quincy Adams had visited the waxworks and wrote to his father to say how much she wished for the senior Adams, the new American ambassador to Britain, to return to the exhibition when she was there, so she might have “the pleasure of Seeing the Man who has undr God Saved his Coutry” and “Shew all Possable Respect” to him.⁴²

Soon after Abigail Adams and her daughter arrived in London to join the Adams men, they went to “see the celebrated Mrs. Wright.” Wright’s effusive welcome gives a sense of her continued American loyalties despite her fourteen years in Europe. As Adams recounted, “she ran to the Door, caught me by the Hand, ‘Why is it realy and in truth Mrs. Adams, and that your daughter? Why you dear Soul you, how young you look! Well I am glad to See you, all of you Americans! Well I must kiss you all.’ ” To the Adamses’ shock, she not only kissed Abigail and her daughter but gave the men with them “a hearty Buss” as well. Abigail Adams recoiled from the intimate gesture, “for her appearence is quite the slattern.” But Wright paid her reaction no mind, gushing that “I love every body that comes from America.”

Wright talked at them for half an hour, chatting about how John Adams was a “dear creature I design to have his Head,” sharing anecdotes about her childhood, and mentioning her own fame for being “ingenious.” Abigail Adams was shocked at her manner as well as her appearance, taking affront at Wright’s sense of her own celebrity and, ultimately, dismissing her as the “Queen of sluts.” Here, it should be noted, Adams was not casting judgment on Wright’s sexual habits but rather using the term in its common eighteenth-century meaning of slovenly or vulgar. The assessment was still distinctly unflattering. Nevertheless, despite Abigail’s negative first impression, an impression shared by her daughter—who once described Wright as “Crazy as usual” and full of gossip—Wright became somewhat of a fixture at the Adamses London home.⁴³ And despite her distaste for her fellow American’s manner and appearance, even Abigail Adams had to acknowledge Wright’s skill. She confessed that there “was an old Clergyman sitting reading a paper in the midle of the room, and tho I went prepaird to See strong representations of real Life, I was effectually deceived in this figure for 10 minuts, and was finally told that it was only Wax.”⁴⁴

Wright was as ambitious as she was skilled. Despite her success in London, she wished to make her mark again in America as well. Aided by Franklin and Watson, her son Joseph had gone back to America via France.⁴⁵ Although his ship had wrecked off the coast of Maine, sinking the paintings he brought with him from Europe, he was already making his mark in America as an artist.⁴⁶ In the fall of 1783, Congress authorized the construction of a statue of George Washington. The statue evoked the one of King George III that had been toppled and beheaded in Manhattan, as it too was meant to be an equestrian statue, with Washington dressed in Roman garb. It was going to be carved in Europe, but Congress needed a bust of Washington to send across the Atlantic to serve as a template. Joseph Wright, whose time in the waxworks as well as the Royal Academy made him more than familiar with making busts, was chosen to create this likeness.⁴⁷

Wright went to Washington’s military headquarters in New Jersey to take the cast and, while there, painted a portrait of him from life.⁴⁸ It was judged to be an excellent likeness. Washington himself, who admired that it had “more boldness than delicacy,” called Wright’s portrait of him “a better likeness of me, than any other painter has done.”⁴⁹ Others agreed. When Wright made another portrait of Washington for Thomas Jefferson the following year, Jefferson said he had “no hesitation in pronouncing” a “better likeness of the General than Peale’s.”⁵⁰ Wright painted a number of versions of his portraits of Washington, some in profile like a wax bust or the image on a coin. He also created a plaster cast of Washington’s face. Widely acknowledged by those who knew him to be among his best likenesses, Wright’s images do not always match contemporary images of Washington, images so often filtered through a romanticized lens like Trumbull’s 1780 portrait of him with William Lee.

Like her son, Patience Wright wished to make a portrait from life of the general. But she wished to make one in wax. As she told Thomas Jefferson, “my friends are anxious that I should make a likeness, a bust in wax,” of the “HERO” Washington for display “in the state house or some new public building by Congress.” Washington himself agreed, she confided—she had told him of her wish a few years ago.⁵¹ But she had a grander plan beyond creating an image of Washington. She wished to make an entire collection of wax busts of distinguished Americans to display at the State House in Philadelphia, with Washington but one of them. She was motivated by animosity toward the king as well as her own patriotism, noting that the “more public the honours bestowed on such men by their country, the better. To shame the English king, I would go to any trouble and expense to add my mite in the stock of honour due to Adams, Jefferson, and others, to send to America.”⁵² She also had her own reputation in mind. As she confidently wrote to John Adams and John Jay, she wished to “make a Colection of their Busts in wax work” for the State House “for a monument of their glory and my own good Judment.”⁵³

Joseph Wright, George Washington (1790).

To further her plans, she asked Jefferson, then in Paris, to pay her expenses to travel there. Jefferson was as keenly interested in promoting all things American in France as Franklin, though he did not have the same personal flamboyance, and the French never caught a fever for Jefferson the same way they had for Franklin.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, she wished to travel to France to model his likeness. She also wished to use Jefferson’s copy of her son’s portrait of Washington “which is said to be so like him,” to “make a likeness of the General.” Perhaps envisioning engaging in political conversations with Jefferson similar to those she enjoyed with Franklin, she also wished to go to Paris as she wished to “consult” with Jefferson on “how best we may honour our country, by holding up the likenesses of her eminent men, either in painting or wax-work.”⁵⁵ She envisioned that her wax portraits would be reproduced throughout the country, too, with artists traveling to Philadelphia “to Copy—by: in Marbel or Brunge” to be displayed in “the diferent States.”⁵⁶ Wright understood the symbolic and instructive importance of art and its political power. And she wanted to influence how the world pictured the new United States.

She also wanted to commemorate the Treaty of Paris, which had formally ended the American Revolution, and recognized the existence of an independent United States of America. Her interest was likely personal as well as patriotic. While in Paris, Wright had lodged at the Hotel de York, the same hotel where the Treaty of Paris was signed. Wright wished “not only to make the likeness of Washington but of those five gentlemen,” including former London residents Henry Laurens and Franklin, “who assisted at the signing of the treaty of peace, that put an end to so bloddy and dreadful a war.”⁵⁷ Perhaps as taken aback by her manner as his friend Abigail Adams Jefferson never replied to her offer.

Impatient to put her plan to commemorate the revolution in wax into action, Wright began planning to move back to America. But her plans never came to fruition. In the spring of 1786, she died in London, after a fall returning from a visit to John Adams. Her death notice in a New York newspaper focused on her work aiding American prisoners of war in Britain, noting that she would be missed particularly by the “brave fellows who during the late war were fortunate enough to escape from the arms of tyranny and take sanctuary under her roof.” With the death of Patience Wright in London, “America has lost” a “warm and sincere friend, as well as one of her first ornaments to the arts.”⁵⁸

Before she died, Robert Edge Pine painted her portrait.⁵⁹ The two artists, though from very different worlds, had much in common. The two had lived near one another, both in London and in Bath. They shared mutual friends and acquaintances among the artist and American communities in Britain, and friendship between their own families. They also both knew what it was like to use their art to show outspoken support for the American Revolution while living in England. Perhaps these commonalities explain why Pine’s portrait of Wright is one of his best, although it may not have been the work of his hands alone. Close examination reveals a halo effect around Wright’s head, reflective of the fact that Pine’s daughters often helped complete his work, filling in the backgrounds after he completed the face. Pine’s portrait captures Wright at work in her trademark fashion, though more subtly than her son’s earlier portrait of her. Whose head she has been molding on her lap is unclear, as it is hidden under a gauzy apron. The portrait captures her in a moment of thought, a break from her method of covering “the wax with a cloth, and while the wax is warm and soft, and equal to any impression,” molding it “at pleasure.”⁶⁰ It is a moody portrait that evokes his portraits of actors in Shakespearean roles more than his portraits of elite people—a fitting nod to Wright’s dramatic, flamboyant persona and his many Shakespeare-themed works.

Once the war was over, Pine decided to relocate again. But this time, he was going much farther than Bath. He planned to cross the Atlantic to the United States. In doing so, he proved that he was among the most stalwart of Britain’s American supporters, one who not only championed liberty in 1775 but continued to support the cause after independence was declared and even after the disruption of the Gordon Riots in 1780. Many of the loudest voices raised in support of America—people like Richard Price, Catharine Macaulay, and Peter Labilliere—did not relocate to the United States after the war. Pine’s decision to do so set him apart. He did not undertake the move lightly. He did his research before leaving, asking about “the present state of the country, with respect to the disposition and ability of its inhabitants for giving encouragement to Painting, either at Portraits or in perpetuating to Posterity the many glorious Acts which honours the name of an American.”⁶¹ Like Trumbull and Wright, he wanted to tell the history of the recent revolution, and he wanted to tell it through canvas and paint. He had begun the project in 1778, with his allegorical painting of “America,” in which his “Heroic virtue” was intended to represent Washington. He often consulted George William and Sally Fairfax, who lived “very near” him and his “very amiable wife” in Bath, about its design.⁶² Now that he was planning to move to America to paint the history of the American Revolution and portraits of its important leaders, he turned again to the Fairfaxes for help.

Robert Edge Pine (former attribution, John Hoppner), Patience Lovell Wright. Pine’s portrait of Wright was owned by Phoebe and John Hoppner until 1810, the year Hoppner died, making it likely that the Hoppners kept it in their home—a home they shared with Patience Wright in her final years.

Fairfax waxed poetic about his friend from Bath to his friend from Virginia. “Mr Pine,” he wrote, was not just “the ingenious Allegorical designer and executor of” the print he had sent Washington, but “as true a ‘Son of Liberty[’] as any Man can be.” Throughout the war, he “ever openly declared it, which with the great crime of publishing the Piece, lost him business, and made so many Enemies in this selfish Nation, that he is compelled to go to America to seek bread in his profession, tho he is certainly one of the first Artists in this Isle.” Fairfax asked Washington to help Pine, “whose only fault was his good wishes to our Country.”⁶³

Armed with this entrée to America’s most celebrated citizen, Pine packed up his “large and valuable collection of original historical paintings, drawings, and designs” and sailed to America.⁶⁴ By the end of October 1784, Pine’s collection had been installed in the “Congress-Chamber” of the State House.⁶⁵ From his “commodious apartment” in the state house, Pine announced that he was “painting the most illustrious scenes of the late revolution.” He hoped that the public would “not disapprove” of his request for a twenty-five-cent admission fee to his gallery, which was open daily, except Sundays.⁶⁶ In addition to displaying his collection of Shakespeare scenes, portraits, history paintings, his allegorical painting of “America,” and, somewhat scandalously, the first cast of the Venus de Milo exhibited in America, he also sold prints of his work. During his time at the State House, he began work on a series of large historical paintings that he had planned to memorialize the revolution, including the only one he came close to completing: Congress Voting Independence.⁶⁷

Less than a year after he set up shop in the State House, however, some were grumbling about Pine’s favorable treatment. A defender of Pine, using the name “Vandyke,” wrote to the Pennsylvania Packet to support Pine’s request to maintain his studio and gallery—rent free—in the State House. “Vandyke” argued that the United States government needed to be more supportive of the arts—as it was in France—and warned that Pine might leave for another state if Pennsylvania were not welcoming enough. This was a distinct possibility, as Pine was known for being “morbidly irritable.”⁶⁸ Perhaps the debate reminded Pine unpleasantly of debates in London nearly twenty years before about whether or not to establish a Royal Academy.

Pine’s most generous Philadelphia patron, merchant and revolutionary war financier Robert Morris, dissolved the controversy by offering up a large home for Pine’s use, the first space in the young republic purpose-built to be a museum.⁶⁹ At the time of the home’s construction, it was on the city’s edges, in a fashionable area for wealthy Philadelphians looking to escape the clamor of waterfront congestion near the Delaware River. There were relatively few buildings in the immediate neighborhood, and a pear orchard and meadow nearby. The second floor of the house held Pine’s studio and a room that ran fifty-five feet long, the length of the house with a high ceiling and skylight, evocative of the lighting in the top gallery of the Royal Academy. That room was the new exhibition space for what was the most important art collection the United States (or colonial America under British rule, for that matter) had seen.⁷⁰

In addition to Pine’s own work, it featured studies of Italian and French works of art. And when French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon traveled to the United States to make a bust of George Washington, he left samples of his work, including a marble bust of Franklin, on display for the public to see in “Mr. Pine’s Exhibition Room.”⁷¹ Pine even had an exhibition catalog printed for his museum, the first in the United States.⁷² When Pine set up shop in Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale also ran an exhibition space from his home, but in its early days it had nowhere near the quantity or quality of works in Pine’s space. Peale’s museum also soon became as much a natural history museum as an art exhibition.⁷³ Peale’s son Rembrandt recalled his wonder at visiting Pine’s exhibitions after being used to his “father’s small gallery of paintings.” By contrast, “when I entered Mr. Pine’s spacious saloon, I was astonished at its magnitude and the richness of the paintings which covered its walls.”⁷⁴

Pine traveled far from Philadelphia to paint portraits. Some, those of “Patriots, Legislators, Heroes and Beauties,” he intended as studies for the grand historical paintings he had planned.⁷⁵ He hoped in America to largely abandon portraiture for history painting, spending the rest of his career chronicling the American Revolution. But once he arrived, he took on portrait work in part because it helped to pay the Pine family’s bills and increased his reputation in America. As a painter of portraits, Charles Willson Peale was his primary competitor. Joseph Wright, who had trained at the Royal Academy, was less of a competitor to Pine than Peale because he lived in Manhattan until after Pine’s death. In addition to his portraits and plaster profiles of George Washington, which were acknowledged as capturing the general’s likeness wonderfully, one critic noted of Wright that “I do not recollect to have seen a more exact delineation of features, a more precise expression of character, or more elegant drapery in American paintings.”⁷⁶

Many of Pine’s portraits from America, by contrast, are neither exact nor precise. He was, however, prolific. He created more than ninety works of art in the four years he lived in the United States. And for that, he had his artist-daughters to thank. At least two of the Pine daughters were artists themselves, and in America, it became a regular practice for them to engage in a collaborative practice with their father that increased their collective efficiency and output. Pine would use “small, thin pieces of canvas, to paint the heads of his sitters, making on paper pencil sketches of their figures, so that on his return home, having pasted his heads upon larger canvases, he and his two daughters could rapidly finish them.”⁷⁷ Pine’s portraits were a family affair, much as many of Patience Wright’s wax figures were co-creations with her daughters.

In the fall of 1788, Robert Edge Pine died suddenly from “apoplexy” in his Philadelphia home.⁷⁸ When his widow wished to settle his large debt, the Pennsylvania General Assembly considered the importance of Pine’s art collection and passed an act empowering her to dispose of her husband’s property in a lottery. The lottery was meant, in part, to ensure that his works would not leave the United States. Pennsylvania politicians saw his work, in effect, as a national collection of art. As a notice for the lottery declared: “It is well the wish of this House as a number of respectable citizens that said collection of paintings should not be sent from this continent, in order to be sold, but that the same should be disposed of in the United States.”⁷⁹ The lottery was not successful, however, and in 1792, most of the paintings were sold to Daniel Bowen, a printer turned itinerant showman from New Haven, Connecticut, and his partner, artist Edward Savage.⁸⁰

The artistic Pine ladies, meanwhile, had been teaching as well as making art. The month after Robert Edge Pine died, his widow Mary announced her plans to open a “boarding school for young ladies.”⁸¹ The school ran until 1792, well situated to attract pupils from the most powerful families in the young republic. Among the Pine women’s students were granddaughters of Benjamin Franklin and George and Martha Washington, and Maria Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. The Pines did not stay in the United States, however. The Pine women closed the boarding school in May 1792, returning to England for good. There, two of Pine’s daughters exhibited in the Royal Academy, and Mary Pine enjoyed a pension, sponsored by the Academy president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, from the same institution that her husband had seen as antithetical to his egalitarian views.⁸²

Much of the collection of art Robert Edge Pine brought to the United States did stay in America, just as the Pennsylvania Assembly hoped it would. In 1792, Daniel Bowen moved into the Pines’ former home and exhibition space. He advertised for the public to come view his “exhibition of wax-work and paintings.”⁸³ Bowen’s museum space included over one hundred works by Robert Edge Pine, and he continued to sell Pine’s prints. The former Pine museum included something new under Bowen’s ownership, however: the former contents of Elizabeth Platt’s wax museum in Manhattan, including pieces made by her mother in London and Paris.

By 1785, Elizabeth Platt had set up shop in her mother’s former exhibition space on Queen Street in Manhattan. Platt was on her own at this point—the love affair that began in Newgate Prison had soured. The Platts were estranged, and Ebenezer, seeking to reinvent himself once again, had moved to Kentucky. There, he married another woman, although he was still legally married to Elizabeth, and died an obscure failure who owed a great deal of money to Daniel Boone.⁸⁴ Platt, meanwhile, had a successful career in waxworks. Her gallery was reminiscent of both her mother’s and her aunt’s exhibitions. It featured the Old Testament story of “Bel and the Dragon,” figures of “His Excellency George Washington, in his Military Dress,” and “The King and Queen of Great Britain, and the Prince of Wales, dressed in Clothes which were presented by his Majesty,” a bust of Lord Chatham, and one of the duchesse de Chartres.⁸⁵ It also featured a few more violent tableaux than those Wright featured in her London waxworks, including one of “King Herod’s wife” and her daughter “holding John the Baptist’s Head on a Charger” and an “Indian Chief, painted and dressed in his War Habit, holding in his Hand a natural Scalp.”⁸⁶

In 1786, Joseph Wright joined his sister in Manhattan, where he too practiced his art. His arrival was celebrated in the local press, which called him “a gentleman of abilities in painting and son of the celebrated modeler and patriotess Patience Wright of London.”⁸⁷ In addition to making portraits and sculptures, he created public art to celebrate the young republic. He created a transparency painting of George Washington for the city’s Independence Day celebrations.⁸⁸ Together, the two siblings shaped the popular and political culture of New York City. Platt also took her waxworks on tour in New England, including figures of “an Indian chief of the Mohawk Tribe” and George Washington.⁸⁹ Elizabeth’s wax figure of Washington may have been inspired in part by Joseph Wright’s profile bust and portrait of the general, as it showed him wearing a crown of laurels like the bust, and a military uniform like the portrait.⁹⁰

In 1788, she sold the waxworks to Daniel Bowen. She died in 1792 at her aunt Rachel Wells’s home in New Jersey.⁹¹ But her image as well as her art kept her reputation alive after her death, for both had an afterlife in the hands of Bowen. Bowen took the waxworks on tour, traveling them around North Carolina and Georgia before combining them with Robert Edge Pine’s art collection in Philadelphia.⁹² At Bowen’s museum, visitors could see wax figures made by Patience Wright, Rachel Wells, Phoebe Wright Hoppner, and Elizabeth Wright Platt, along with over one hundred works of art by Robert Edge Pine, art made in London, Paris, and America and all packaged together as “Bowen’s Exhibition of Wax-Works & Paintings.” Bowen eventually moved his museum, first to New York and then to Boston, where it continued to be wildly popular. He advertised that he had for viewing figures of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Martha Washington, and, intriguingly, a model of “Mrs. Platt, a late worthy descendant of the celebrated Mrs. Wright, the first founder of Wax-Work in America, whose ingenuity in that art has been much admired in Europe.”⁹³ Most of its contents—the majority of the life’s work of Robert Edge Pine, Patience Wright, Rachel Wells, and Elizabeth Wright Platt—went up in flames in 1803. But before it did, thousands of Americans of all ages, Black and white, women and men, had viewed it. And other museum proprietors and artists had copied their works in wax, paper, and paint. And those copies were seen by thousands more visitors who flocked to American museums for entertainment in the early republic.

Although his work did not have the same spectacular popular afterlife, Joseph Wright, too, made an important contribution to the political culture of the new nation. After his sister died and the Pines returned to England in 1792, he was the last surviving member of their artistic London circle living in America. When the capital moved from New York to Philadelphia, he followed. The United States Mint commissioned him to cast a commemorative medal for a Continental Army officer, Henry Lee, and he also designed one of the first coins issued by the Mint, the Liberty cent.⁹⁴ Wright’s design was evocative of the portrait of his mother as “Liberty” made in London during the war and of the many profiles in wax both his mother and his sister Elizabeth made, too. In his design, the goddess of Liberty is memorialized in profile, with a liberty cap behind her. This ancient symbol of freedom for enslaved people was adopted by American, French, and Haitian revolutionaries.⁹⁵ In 1793, Joseph Wright and his wife died from the yellow fever epidemic that consumed the capital city, leaving their three young children orphaned.⁹⁶ It was, as his sister Phoebe wrote to Benjamin Franklin’s daughter when she heard the news in London, a “calamity so unexpected” she was “little able to bare” it.⁹⁷ Joseph Wright’s death was but one of many in the 1790s. When he died, revolutions far more radical than the one he fought for spread like the fever that killed him through the Atlantic World. As a last piece of art by this transatlantic Patriot, a Lady Liberty coin was, perhaps, a fitting legacy for this Age of Revolutions.

EPILOGUE DAPHNY’S CLOAK

REVOLUTION DESTROYS as much as it creates. The narratives told about revolutions, too, are often shaped as much by what things were purposely torn down, what records were accidentally lost, and whose stories were deliberately hidden as by what things happened to be saved, whose tales were told, and what myths were glorified. The fire that swept through Bowen’s Boston Museum in 1803 and reduced much of the life’s work of Patience Wright and Robert Edge Pine to ash was not the only reason their creative patriotism has been overlooked. Both Wright and Pine, it will be recalled, died before they could achieve all they had set out to accomplish. At the time of her sudden death, Wright was busy planning what she hoped would be a triumphant return to America, where she hoped to model George Washington to join other Founders like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in a wax gallery of revolutionary heroes. Similarly, at the time of Pine’s sudden death, he was busy collecting portraits of these same men to include in the grand history paintings he planned to make to commemorate the great events of the American Revolution.¹ But their careers were cut short, just as Prince Demah’s was when he too suffered an untimely death during the war. Imagine how our understanding of the revolution and its Patriots might have been altered had more of their art survived and had the three of them continued to keep making art long after the war ended.

Had he lived, Demah—like Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull—would have been a London-trained Patriot artist who also was a military veteran. Although he would have faced the same uphill battle against racist discrimination and legislation that other free Black veterans of the era suffered, his unusual combination of credentials and experience would have made it much more probable that the art he created before and during the war either survived or was attributed to him. Meanwhile, one of the American history paintings of Pine’s that survives—his unfinished Congress Voting Independence, which Edward Savage copied into a print—offers a more realistic, less romanticized depiction of that event and its architectural setting than Trumbull’s more famous, widely reproduced version. And how different an impression of the Founders would be given by a gallery of their heads in lifelike colored wax, rather than the white marble images of them that dominate. The art of Wright, Pine, and Demah would have created a different visual lexicon and material memory of the American Revolution, and their life stories require us to reconsider who it was that created art in the revolutionary era.

But although they did not live to continue shaping visual and material memories of the American Revolution, and although much of their work was lost or destroyed, their art lived on in other ways. It lives on still—in written record, in visual or verbal sketches or reproductions in newspapers and magazines, in prints that reached much wider audiences than the paintings they copied, and, in a few rare cases, on the walls of museums. Moreover, the transatlantic stories of Demah, Wright, Pine, and their families did not end with the war, or even with their deaths. After Patience Wright died in London, her sister Rachel Wells sent an extraordinary albeit poorly spelled letter to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was back in Pennsylvania, and the letter (which Wells carefully kept anonymous) asked him to do a favor for his old friend from London, Patience Wright. “Remember well,” his correspondent wrote, “her faithfull Attention to us” in the “Peirilous hour” of war and revolution, when Wright’s espionage had been invaluable and her efforts tireless. The writer asked Franklin to speak to Congress so that it “would give her a Lott of ground” so that Wright’s body could be moved from London and buried, as she wanted it to be, in the ground of the nation that meant so much to her. “I’m often Asked,” the letter writer confided, “if aney thing has bin don for Mrs Wright Mr Pain has bin Considerd why not Mrs Wright.”²

Although none would argue, then or now, that Patience Wright’s patriotic or creative efforts had the same widespread influence as those of the author of the popular essay Common Sense, penned by her fellow transatlantic Patriot Thomas Paine, the letter writer raised an important point. How was the new republic to determine whose patriotism mattered and why?³ How was it to reward those who fought to create it, and compensate them for their losses? And who, ultimately, would it count among its founding Patriots? Rachel Wells, who had helped with the transatlantic espionage and given money to the war effort besides, grappled with these issues head on when she wrote to Franklin about her sister. She also did so when she petitioned the state of New Jersey on her own behalf, boldly asserting that she had “Don as much to Carrey on the Warr as Maney that Sett now at ye helm of government.”⁴

Edward Savage, after Robert Edge Pine, Congress Voting Independence, 1859–1906, stipple, engraving and etching in black on wove paper. The central figures of the painting represent the Committee of Five (John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson). Note the empty spaces where faces of other men were meant to go, an indication that Pine planned to work with his daughters in their typical collaborative method to complete the painting. Pine’s daughters, as much as Savage or Pine, should be considered co-creators of the work.

Rachel Wells was not willing, as she claimed her sister Patience Wright had been, simply “to be thankfull that I had it in my power to help on the war.” Although that was “well anough but then this is to be considerd that others git their interest &. why then” should “a poor old widow” be denied. Just as she had with Franklin, she asked the legislature for help with her sister’s burial, reminding them that all she asked was “only one quarter of an ackor of ground to have Laid her bones in,” something she desired and deserved as she made “her country her whole attention” and “her letters gave us ye first alarm.” None of these petitions, to Franklin or to the legislators, was successful. In Franklin’s case, his own history of often exasperating interaction with Patience Wright might have left him unwilling to wade into turbulent waters on her behalf, even if he did understand her patriotic contributions better than most. The legislators were in good company in refusing Wells’s requests. Deborah Sampson and Margaret Corbin were among the very few women whom American government honored with postwar pensions. And both of these women received pensions for bearing arms—Sampson disguised as a man and Corbin out of desperate urgency during battle. However, these women were exceptions, and America’s founding generation of leaders left the wax-making sister spies out of their story.

Prince Demah’s mother, Daphny, also received no recognition for her son’s wartime service.⁵ Left in precarious financial straits during and after the war, Daphny petitioned multiple times for support from Massachusetts. She did so not in honor of her son’s military service, however, but rather as compensation from the confiscated estates of her Loyalist enslavers, the Barneses. Some petitions were successful, although Daphny always lived on the edge of poverty. White observers noted that she would be better off if she did not choose to live in a “Negro house,” implying that servitude would make her lot better than her choice to live in a community with other Black people. But poverty never dimmed traits she passed on to her artist son—her love of beauty and her vision for grander things. For Daphny didn’t just ask the state for money. She also asked her former enslaver, Christian Barnes, who along with her husband Henry had relocated to Bristol, England, for compensation in unusual form. Christian Barnes had written to ask if Daphny would send her something she had kept from the Marlborough house, her niece and ward Chrissy’s picture done by Prince Demah. She hoped that Daphny would “not be so cruel as to refuse my request,” since she “always thought her possest of a large share of gratitude and if she reflects upon Mr. Barnes’s attention and great goodness to her son, I am sure she will not deny me what my heart is so much fixed upon.”⁶ Barnes made the request numerous times. Insensitive as ever, she could not understand why Daphny might fix her own heart on keeping a painting made by her dead son, whose death Christian coldly dismissed with a quip: “her son I hear is provided for and so shall we all be in time.”⁷

When Barnes conveyed her request for the portrait again, Daphny responded by asking for a silk cloak. Barnes laughed at her request but sent her a cloak nonetheless—an old one of hers, made of broadcloth instead of silk. Daphny got a cloak, but not the one she wanted, and only because she asked. She continued to push for what she wanted in the ways that she could, however. She refused to relinquish Prince Demah’s art to their former enslaver. It would remain her memento of a lost loved one, not one for Christian Barnes.

The story of Daphny’s cloak, Rachel Wells’s denied pensions, and the women’s continued attempts to recover some small compensation from the powerful for the sacrifices of their loved ones has been replayed many times in America. The historical invisibility of Demah, Pine, and Wright also illuminates the failures of the revolution to meet the promise so many hoped it would fulfill. Each of the three artists hoped that the revolution would bring more liberty. It did mean more liberty on some level. For Demah, it meant liberty from the tyranny of living with enslavers. For Pine, it meant liberty to emigrate to America and create the republican and pro-American art he wished, among patrons who would reward rather than punish him for his politicized images. For Wright, as for all of them, it meant liberty to break from a tyrannical monarch and a misguided government. But the Revolution also failed their dreams. Wright’s vision of a transatlantic messianic empire dedicated equally to religious and civil liberties never came to be. Nor did her hope that American politicians would reward women, as she wrote to John Adams that they should, for being “faithful Friends” and doing “wonders” in “all great Revolutions in Church and State.”⁸ Pine’s relocation did not bring him prominence nor the profit his family had hoped for. And Demah’s career as a free painter was dashed by the upheaval the war brought to Boston. For Demah and his mother, for Patience Wright, and for the Pine daughters, like many of the people living in the newly independent United States of America, the American Revolution did not provide a guarantee of what Jefferson called “unalienable rights.” The revolution did not provide much freedom or many rights for women. And the contentious question of what rights enslaved people should have, beginning with the right to be free, culminated nearly a century later in a civil war far bloodier than the American Revolution. The deep and bitter struggles over who counts as an American and who gets the freedoms they desire continued long past the revolution, and they continue still.

But although, ultimately, none of these transatlantic Patriots got exactly what they hoped for out of the American Revolution, their stories are inspiring as well as instructive. In the face of risks and setbacks, they persevered. The flame of their activism, their passion, their bravery, their creativity—all of the qualities that drove their idiosyncratic patriotism—that flame never died. The revolution, perhaps, did not make them into quite who they hoped it would, but they undeniably helped make the revolution. The intertwined lives of the Patriots in this book, whether famous, like Franklin and Wheatley, or less well known, like Prince Demah, Patience Wright, Robert Edge Pine, and their families, remind us that the popular image of a Patriot in the American Revolution—of a white man writing a political pamphlet or leading a battle charge within the continental United States—tells only part of the story. And not even, at times, the most interesting part.⁹

Not all Patriots were white. Not all Patriots were men. Not all Patriots wielded words or swords as their primary weapons. And not all Patriots fought the war in North America. Indeed, revolutionary-era patriotism was far more cosmopolitan, geographically broad, and diverse than it is often remembered to be. The Patriots who dedicated themselves to the cause of American liberty included Black and mixed-race people, women, people from outside what became the national borders of the United States, and people who practiced idiosyncratic politics outside the bounds of elected office, through art, popular culture, and espionage. Folding the transatlantic story of these creative Patriots into the wider story of the nation’s origins both complicates and enriches it.

The lives of these transatlantic Patriots intersected with those of more familiar figures—George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson—who themselves came to understand (some more than others) aspects of this more complicated narrative about supporters of liberty. George Washington came to recognize and appreciate the valor and value of Black men like Demah and William Lee, who fought for the American military. In fact, Lee was the only enslaved person he freed outright in his will, and he did so “for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.”¹⁰ Washington also recognized the patriotic promise of Wheatley’s poems. Although John Adams did not honor his wife’s famous request to “remember the ladies” in Continental Congress, he, like his wife, unabashedly admired British intellectual Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay as much or more than they did most pro-American British politicians. Jefferson eagerly sought art from Joseph Wright to broadcast American patriotism in France, and corresponded with his mother about her hoped-for wax pantheon. Each of these famous Founders remained in regular correspondence with transatlantic supporters in Bath, London, and Paris throughout the war. And they all understood the undeniable power of art and aesthetics to foment rebellion, wage war, and shape the mass political culture of revolution and the early republic. They understood the inspirational and persuasive power manifested in the figure of an American Indian or William Pitt in a wax museum, a portrait of Patience Wright holding the decapitated head of Charles I seen by King George and Queen Charlotte, an allegorical print of “America” hung on the wall of Mount Vernon’s dining room, and two enslaved Black Bostonians bearing witness to the bold achievements of “the painter’s and the poet’s fire.” They understood that it took more than pamphlets and muskets, soldiers and politicians, to “Carrey on the Warr.” It also took art, and passionate creativity by transatlantic artists and Patriots.

But although they understood these things, these familiar Founders did not always acknowledge these contributions, much less remunerate or commemorate them, in the way they deserved. For most women, people of color, and immigrants, the promise of liberty remained qualified. The lives of Demah, Pine, Wright, and the others traced in this book remind us that we must continue to revise our collective memory about who American Patriots were, what they looked like, where they fought, and with what weapons. We must seek to reimagine what patriotism meant during the American Revolution, and what that might mean for how we understand it today. And we must recognize, as Demah, Pine, and Wright did, that revolution is a creative act, a reimagining of the world that is fueled by artistic fire. By recovering these histories, we can ensure that “these shades of time are chas’d away,” and that, at last, by the blaze of their own lights, we give these transatlantic Patriots their due.¹¹

Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night

Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, MDCCLXXX. (1780). The Twelfth (London: Printed by T. Cadell, Printer to the Royal Academy, 1780), 6, 7, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/exhibition-catalogue/ra-sec-vol12-1780. Information on Wright and his education from Monroe H. Fabian, Joseph Wright, American Artist, 1756–1793 (National Portrait Gallery by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

2. Horace Walpole to William Mason, May 19, 1780, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with William Mason, ed. W. S. Lewis, Grover Cronin Jr., and Charles H. Bennett, vol. 2 (Yale University Press, 1955), 33, https://archive.org/stream/horacewalpolesco010121mbp/horacewalpolesco010121mbp_djvu.txt.

3. London newspaper clippings of Royal Academy reviews from May 1780 in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1 [likely compiled by J. Faringdon], 65–66, Library of the Royal Academy of Art, London.

4. The Boston Evening Post and the General Advertiser, November 30, 1782.

5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us of the power dynamics behind history, and that history making (or submersion) is an active choice. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).

INTRODUCTION

1. Benjamin Franklin to Sarah Bache, June 3, 1779, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 29, March 1 through June 30, 1779, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Yale University Press, 1992), 612–615, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-29-02-0496.

2. Joseph Wright to William Temple Franklin, [c. August 29, 1782], The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 38, August 16, 1782, through January 20, 1783, ed. Ellen R. Cohn (Yale University Press, 2006), 51–52, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-38-02-0040. The portraits Wright painted of Franklin (he made numerous copies) were based on the famous 1778 portrait of Franklin labeled simply as “VIR” by French artist Joseph Siffred Duplessis, as is evident from the pose. But Wright changed the clothes and aged Franklin’s face for his portrait. The aging plus the archival evidence of this letter make the case that although Wright copied the Duplessis portrait, his Franklin portraits also benefited from in-person observation of their subject.

3. My thinking about the American Revolution as a transatlantic event and its supporters as historical actors who were citizens of the Atlantic World is indebted to scholarship on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, including: R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1959–1964); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2001); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions in a Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York University Press, 2009); Francois Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2014); Janet L. Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2015); Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (W. W. Norton, 2016); Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2014); Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2018); Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard University Press, 2010); David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Picador, 2021); Patrick Griffin, The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Rise and Fall of a Connected World (Yale University Press, 2023); Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024).

4. Much of the foundational work on the motives, actions, ideologies, and identity of American Patriots focused overwhelmingly on white men in North America. This association, which continues to dominate popular stereotypes about Patriots, began with the first American history of the era: David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1789). It also can be found in more recent foundational work, especially that which is concerned with patriotism as a precursor to nation building, such as: Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Vintage, 2002); David McCullough, John Adams (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1991); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1967); Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: a History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (Hackett, 1968); Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, rev. ed. (Collier Books, 1963). Such work has always had its critics for lack of inclusivity; however, a sampling can be found in David Waldstreicher, “Founders Chic as Culture War,” Radical History Review 84 (2002): 185–194.

But some historians have paid attention to patriotism beyond white men almost from the start, beginning with Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Manning and Loring, 1805). Recognition of a more diverse patriotism continued with more recent foundational work that focused on contributions by women, including: Linda Grant De Pauw, Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 1980); William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Robert F. Wallcut, 1855); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Little, Brown, 1980); Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 1989); and Barbara Oberg, ed., Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World (University of Virginia Press, 2019). Similarly, scholars have focused on the importance of nonwhite, notably Black and Indigenous, historical actors in the era in works such as Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 1996); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton University Press, 1991); Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York University Press, 2014); Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Kathleen Duval, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Penguin Random House, 2015); Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2016).

A number of scholars include both women and Black people in their discussions of histories that shape our understanding of the origins of American patriotism, including: Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (Knopf, 1972); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Opposition, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1979); T. H. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004); Woody Holton, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 2022). Nearly all this historiography, regardless of how inclusive, focuses on political activity within the geographical bounds of North America. A recent exception is Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (Vintage, 2021), which makes a point to note what was going on in British politics simultaneous to events unfolding in North America.

During the era of the American Revolution, a patriot—woman or man—was commonly understood to be a “lover of one’s country.” Patriotism was an emotional connection, a sentimental—even passionate—attachment that could be far more inclusive than the type of ardent and often exclusionary nationalism that solidified in the nineteenth century. Although the American and French Revolutions are often used as temporal points of distinction, wars of independence and rebellion had changed ideas about patriotism before. The definition of patriot changed over time from its origins in the ancient Greece. Its shift from defining a “fellow-countryman” to “lover of one’s country” dated to its use in the Netherlands to describe followers of William of Orange in the Dutch War of Independence in the 1570s. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “patriot (n. & adj.),” June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4882786016.

5. On the transatlantic Loyalist experience, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011); Brad A. Jones, Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2021); Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan, eds., The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

6. On support for America in Britain and reasons for it, see Sheldon S. Cohen, British Supporters of the American Revolution, 1775–1783: The Role of the ‘Middling-Level’ Activists (Boydell and Brewer, 2004); John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769–1782 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987; John Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans of London, 1769 to 1782,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1978): 423–454; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a compelling study outlining reasons Britons did not support the American cause, see Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On popular opinion in Britain, see James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (University of Georgia Press, 1986).

On connections between English radicalism and American patriotism, see Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Alfred F. Young, “English Plebian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (Allen & Unwin, 1984): 185–212. On Thomas Paine in particular, see Jack Fruchtman, “Thomas Paine’s Early Radicalism, 1768–1783,” in Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf (University of Virginia Press, 2013), 49–70; and Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7. On Washington’s choice of buff and blue, see Philip C. Mead, “George Washington’s Disappearing Ribbon,” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life 15, no. 2 (Winter 2015), https://commonplace.online/article/george-washingtons-disappearing-ribbon/; Carol Borchert Cadou, The George Washington Collection: Fine and Decorative Arts at Mount Vernon (Hudson Hills, 2003); James L. Kochan, “ ‘As plain as blue and buff could make it’: George Washington’s Uniforms as Commander-in-Chief and President, 1775–1799,” catalog for the 44th Washington Antiques Show.

8. Peter Rushton and Gwenda Morgan, Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 1685–1800: Legal Responses to Threatening the State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Amanda L. Tyler, “Habeas Corpus and the American Revolution,” California Law Review 103, no. 3 (2015): 635–698; Amanda L. Tyler, Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay (Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 3, 63–98. The British government had denied the assumed applicability of the universality of the right of habeas corpus, specifically, whether it applied in its North American colonies, soon after protests against the Townshend Act began, a stand with which colonists took immediate issue.

9. For representative studies of these three artists, see Richard Brookhiser, Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2024); Paul Staiti, Of Arms and Artists (Bloomsbury, 2016); Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (Norton, 2016); Carol Eaton Soltis, The Art of the Peales in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Adaptations and Innovations (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017).

10. On the power of emotion and sentiment in the American revolutionary era, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Like the people who made and used them during the revolutionary era, the objects and art themselves formed transatlantic networks. I look at them using a frame of analysis theoretically indebted to actor-network theory and ideas about the social lives of things, for examples of which see, respectively: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007); and Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1986). Objects and art also helped create transatlantic communities, a methodological framework for which see Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016); Jennifer van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2017).

On using objects and art to make revolution, see Ashli White, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2023); Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (University of California Press, 2009); Michal Jan Rozbiki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011); Joan E. Cashin, ed., War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018).

11. Each of these Patriots has received scholarly attention (some, like Franklin, of course, far more than others). Much more limited attention has been paid to Demah, Pine, and Wright. Notable scholarship on Demah and Pine is almost exclusively by art historians more concerned (quite understandably) with their artistry than with the broader history of their lives and times. For excellent work on Demah’s artistic practice, see Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022); Jennifer Van Horn, “Prince Demah and the Profession of Portrait Painting,” in Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture (Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 2018); Amelia Peck and Paula M. Bagger, “Prince Demah Barnes: Portraitist and Slave in Colonial Boston,” Magazine Antiques, February 13, 2015. On the same for Pine, see Robert G. Stewart, Robert Edge Pine: British Portrait Painter in America, 1784–1788 (Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1979); on the political symbolism behind Wright’s work, see Wendy Bellion, “Patience Wright’s Transatlantic Bodies,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early National America, ed. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (University of Virginia Press, 2011); and, for a wonderful introduction to her biography as well as her art, Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976).

12. George Washington to John Dickinson, May 16, 1785, RP 8905, British Library.

13. Many of these individual people, including those both famous and less well known, were people from the edges of empire who helped shape British politics and identity during the revolutionary era, in similar ways to those described in larger terms in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale University Press, 1992).

1. DAPHNY’S SON

1. The painting described is Prince Demah Barnes, Portrait of William Duguid (1773), Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2010, acc. no. 2010.105, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Though we know he painted many more, Duguid’s portrait is one of only three known surviving works by Demah. The brooch is also in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooch, ca. 1770, Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2010, acc. no. 2010.106. For more on this portrait, see Amelia Peck and Paula M. Bagger, “Prince Demah Barnes: Portraitist and Slave in colonial Boston,” Magazine Antiques, February 13, 2015. On Black colonial artists, see Eric Slauter, “Looking for Scipio Morehead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89–116; Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022); Emelie Gevalt, R. L. Watson, and Sade Ayorinde, eds., Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (American Folk Art Museum, 2023), 122–141. On colonial portrait painting practices writ large, see Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (W. W. Norton, 2016); Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Susan Rather, The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (Yale University Press, 2016).

2. In the label next to Demah’s portrait of Duguid in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the museum chooses to focus on the white people in Demah’s life as benefactors rather than recognizing how Black people, including Demah himself, shaped his life. This choice is symptomatic of a broader, longstanding tendency to credit white rather than Black people for shaping the trajectory of enslaved and free Black lives, particularly when it comes to abolition or Black creative work. This book aims to avoid that tradition.

3. Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions: Passed Resolves: Resolves 1790, c.127, SC1 / series 228, Massachusetts Archives, Boston, available through Collection Development Department, Widener Library, HCL, Harvard University, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:fhcl:12208676. On the difficulties of telling the histories of enslaved women using archives that by their nature seek to silence their voices, see Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was first published in 1789.

4. On the Middle Passage, see Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2007); Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016). On African origins, see Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, “ ‘Canniball Negroes,’ Atlantic Creoles, and the Identity of New England’s Charter Generation,” African Diaspora 4, no. 1 (2011): 76–94. On African-descended people’s mobility in the broader Atlantic world, see Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2018).

5. My choice of terminology used to refer to Native peoples, as described in the “Note on Terminology,” is indebted to methodologies beautifully explained by Brooke Bauer and Elizabeth Ellis, “Indigenous, Native American, or American Indian? The Limitations of Broad Terms,” Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 1 (2023): 61–74; and Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (April 2018): 207–236. On slavery in New England, see Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015); Jared Ross Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York University Press, 2016); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (W. W. Norton, 2016).

6. On the rape of enslaved women, see Wendy Warren, “The Cause of Her Grief: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (2007): 1031–49; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

7. The white Barnes family never used the name Demah in reference to either Prince or Daphny. The name “Dema” occurs only three times in a search of the 600,000 plus names of people recorded in the Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (enslaved.org), each time in reference to a female enslaved person. The name “Demah” does not occur at all, nor does “Dimah.” By way of contrast, the name “Prince” is linked to at least 250 people.

8. Baptism of Daphny and Prince in May of 1745 recorded in Trinity Church records, 1730–1998. There is no exact record of Prince’s birth date, just as there is no exact record of Daphny’s. Many children were baptized around two years after their birth, and infants were usually listed as such. Prince was not listed as an infant at baptism, which might mean he was born around 1743. On the other hand, he might have been an infant and not recorded as such, or he might have been older than two or three, if Daphny made the decision to baptize them after a conversion of her own or for some other reason of timing, such as Henry Barnes courting his future wife, Christian Arbuthnot. Prince gives both of them the last name of “Demah” in the Last Will and Testament of Prince Demah, March 11, 1778, admitted to probate, April 2, 1778, docket no. 16505, Suffolk County Probate Records, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston.

9. Appendix A: List of Black Baptisms from Trinity Church Records, Baptisms and Marriages, 1730–1830, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 56.

10. The likelihood of Prince being enslaved by William Arbuthnot is inferred from his sister Christian’s letters.

11. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, Marlborough, October 21, 1769; Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, Marlborough, December 23, 1769, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress (hereafter Barnes Correspondence). On West African mothering meaning and practices, see “The Violent Limits of Black Motherhood,” in Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea, 90–94.

12. “Chrisy” was not, as has sometimes been erroneously assumed, Christian Barnes, the daughter of Henry and Christian Barnes. Rather, she was Christian Arbuthnot, the daughter of Christian Barnes’s brother William Arbuthnot. Chrisy became the Barnes family’s ward when her widowed father died in Hingham in the late 1760s. See Paula Bagger for J. L. Bell, “Paula Bagger with More on Marlborough,” in Boston 1775, August 12, 2020, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/search/label/Christian%20Barnes.

13. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November [undated] 1770, Barnes Correspondence; Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, October 21, 1769, Barnes Correspondence.

14. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November [undated] 1770, Barnes Correspondence. Information on enslaved people in Marlborough and the Barnes household is from the Massachusetts 1771 Tax Assessment; information on Barnes’s distillery is from Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1765.

15. Christian Barnes’s visit to Copley’s studio is found in Christian Barnes to Dolly Murray Forbes, September 25, (and October) 1769; on Prince: Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, December 23, 1769, both in Barnes Correspondence. On Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, see Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

16. Gilbert Stuart, “Anecdote of Gilbert Stuart,” Boston Musical Gazette 1, no. 24 (March 20, 1839): 187–188, reprinted from the newspaper Newport Herald of the Times, quoted in Rather, The American School, 7.

17. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1771, Barnes Correspondence.

18. Christian Barnes to Janette Barclay, May 11, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

19. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1771, Barnes Correspondence. “Caty” was likely Catherine Goldthwaite, Henry Barnes’s niece.

20. “William Jackson, an Importer; at the Brazen Head,” Broadside 39.9 cm × 23.9 cm (Boston, between 1768–1770), Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/database/365.

21. Boston Non-Importation Agreement, August 1, 1768.

22. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 20, 1769, Barnes Correspondence.

23. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1770, Barnes Correspondence. On Loyalists, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011).

24. On empire, identity, and belonging in colonial North America, Britain, and the British Empire, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale University Press, 1992); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2003); Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jack P. Green, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (University of Georgia Press, 1987); Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016); Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British (Oxford University Press, 2011). For a more general approach to ideas about belonging to particular polities, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983).

25. For the radical politics of mariners, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a history of the event that traces how the politics of the Boston Massacre were entangled with mariners and family relationships both, see Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Houghton Mifflin, 2020).

2. A TARRED AND FEATHERED HORSE

1. Boston Gazette, January 22, 1770. For more on revolutionary-era boycotts, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004); on revolutionary-era nonimportation crises in Boston, see John W. Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Northeastern University Press, 1986).

2. The meanings attached to them shifted over time, but use of the terms Tories and Whigs dated back to the 1670s. Then they were pejorative terms used during the Exclusion Crisis to designate whether one backed the right of King Charles II’s Catholic brother James to inherit the throne (Tories, named after Irish Catholic highwaymen) or not (Whigs, named after Scottish Presbyterians with a tendency toward riot). The division between the two largely disappeared during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which both parties came together in favor of constitutional monarchy limited by parliamentary rule rather than a more absolutist version. See Steven Pinkus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Yale University Press, 2009). The two names came back into prominence as bona fide political parties in the mid-1780s, after the conclusion of the American Revolution.

Through much of the eighteenth century, however, Tories and Whigs in Britain were less formal political parties than they were shorthand for certain types of politics and culture. Although there were, of course, nuances behind both the following broad descriptions, Tories tended to be more conservative and less tolerant of religious diversity—country squires and Oxford Anglican priests, for example. Whigs, on the other hand, included both members of the wealthy middle class and aristocrats, many of whom favored more religious tolerance and other less conservative policies than their Tory counterparts, including more parliamentary authority over the monarch. Radical Whigs, a subset within this broader group, believed in Lockean concepts of the social contract, sovereignty resting by mutual consent with the people, and a particular blend of English liberty they saw rising from a British Constitution that allowed for monarchy and aristocracy as well as republican government. When Whigs were called “patriots,” it was usually to designate that they were particularly leery of overreaching executive (or monarchical) power. See Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford University Press, 1995); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2000); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975). On how 1760s Whig radicalism differed from previous iterations, see Isaac Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (1982): 629–664.

In the late 1760s, the terms began being used in the colonies as shorthand for those who favored first protest and then rebellion against the king (Whigs, or as we more commonly know them today, Patriots), while those who disapproved of much of that protest and, certainly, the break from Britain were called—often sneeringly by colonists on the other side of the political equation—Tories (or as we more commonly know them today, Loyalists). On Whigs and Tories in America during the revolutionary era, see Robert Middlekauf, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, rev. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005); Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).

3. Elizabeth Cuming to Elizabeth Murray, Murray-Robbins Family Papers, Ms N-1157, box 1, November 20, 1769, Massachusetts Historical Society. For detailed accounts of the experiences of both Mein and Gailer on October 28, 1769, see J. L. Bell’s blog Boston 1775, which is also an exemplar of historical detective work. See, for example, “If he appeared abroad he should be made an example,” Boston 1775, October 30, 2019, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2019/10/if-he-appeared-abroad-he-should-be-made.html. On Mein’s publication of ships’ cargo lists, see Hannah Farber, “Early American Commercial Property Marks: Reading According to Code, and Beyond,” Early American Literature 57, no. 1 (2022): 43–84.

4. See Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” New England Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2003): 197–238, 199; Barry Levy, “Tar and Feathers,” Journal of the Historical Society 11, no. 1 (March 2011): 85–110; Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Beacon Press, 1999); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1979); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1981); Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Indiana University Press, 1996); Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (Garland, 1997); Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972); and Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

5. Boston Evening-Post, October 30, 1769.

6. Gailer’s attack is described in the newspapers, as well as Elizabeth Cuming to Elizabeth Murray, November 20, 1769; and in “TRESPASS, Assault, Battery, Wounding, Imprisonment tarring and feathering. Gailer vs. Trevett,” in “The Pleadings Book, 1771–73,” in Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 1, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/ADMS-05-01-02-0002-0001-0002. An example of the needlework produced by students who studied with the sisters survives at the Concord Museum in Massachusetts, its crest a reminder of aesthetic ties to Britain. It was in the Cuming’s house the night Gailer was tortured, its decorous aesthetic in marked contrast to the visual violence of a tarring and feathering.

7. Elizabeth Cuming to Elizabeth Murray, November 20, 1769.

8. See Francis D. Cogliano, “Deliverance from Luxury: Pope’s Day, Conflict and Consensus in Colonial Boston, 1745–1765,” Studies in Popular Culture 15, no. 2 (1993): 15–28; Pierre Eugene Du Simitière, Pope Day in Boston, sketches, 1767, The Library Company of Philadelphia.

9. “Description of the Pope,” 1769, Province of Massachusetts-Bay, The Honorable Harrison Gray, Esq; Treasurer and Receiver-general of His Majesty’s said Province (Boston, 1769), Printed Ephemera Collection, portfolio 36, folder 32, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020776863/.

10. “The Badge of Slavery,” Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, number 569, February 24, 1766, 3.

11. Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2016).

12. Revere recalled seeing this familiar landmark when recounting his famous ride to Lexington in 1775. Paul Revere to Jeremy Belknap, c. 1798, Revere Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. The gibbeted body of an enslaved man does not make it into the standard narratives long told of that ride—nor into Longfellow’s poem. But the fact that, over twenty years later, it was one of a handful of landmarks that Revere noted in his description testifies to its familiarity and its hold on the popular imagination. On the pivotal role ideologies about Blackness and slavery played in the revolutionary era, see Parkinson, The Common Cause.

On Mark’s case, see Abner Cheney Goodell, The trial and execution for petit treason, of Mark and Phillis, slaves of Capt. John Codman: who murdered their master at Charlestown, Mass., in 1755, for which the man was hanged and gibbeted, and the woman was burned to death: including, also, some account of other punishments by burning in Massachusetts (J. Wilson, 1883).

13. On the long history of rituals behind Pope’s Day and Stamp Act protests, from pagan to Christian, see Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1981). On enslaved people being banned from protests and the uptick of slave conspiracy rumors in the late 1760s and 1770s, see Jared Ross Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds (Bright Leaf, 2019), 128–129.

14. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 20, 1769, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress (hereafter Barnes Correspondence).

15. “A LIST of the Names of those who AUDACIOUSLY continue to counteract the UNITED SENTIMENTS of the BODY of Merchants thro-out NORTH-AMERICA; by importing British Goods contrary to the Agreement,” Edes & Gill’s North-American almanack, and Massachusetts register, for the year 1770.… (Boston: Printed (upon paper manufactured in this country) and sold by Edes & Gill, in Queen-Street; and T. & J. Fleet at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill, 1770); also published in the Boston Gazette, February 12, 1770.

16. Boston Chronicle, January 15, 1770.

17. Boston Chronicle, January 15, 1770.

18. Boston Evening-Post, February 26, 1770.

19. Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, March 5, 1770.

20. Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, March 5, 1770.

21. Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, March 5, 1770.

22. Phillis Wheatley, “On the death of Mr. Snider / Murder’d by Richardson,” 1770 poem (not included in her 1773 London publication), cited and discussed in Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 71–72.

23. On the Boston Massacre, see Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Houghton Mifflin, 2020); and Eric Hinderaker, Boston’s Massacre (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). On marriages between Boston women and British soldiers, see Zabin, The Boston Massacre. Woody Holton argues that historians need to remember the economic roots of the Boston Massacre. Holton, Liberty Is Sweet (Simon and Schuster, 2021).

24. On Indigenous slavery in North America, see Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Andres Resendes, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010). On Indigenous slavery in New England, see Linford Fisher, “ ‘Why Shall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves’: Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (2017): 91–114; Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015); Wendy Warren, New England Bound (Liveright, 2016).

25. Boston-Gazette, October 2, 1750.

26. An iteration an unknown artist based off of Pelham’s version, for example, appeared in A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston… (Printed by order of the town of Boston: London: Reprinted for E. and C. Dilly, in the Poultry; and J. Almon, in Picadilly, 1770).

27. William Weems, John Adams, Frederic Kidder, History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770: Consisting of the Narrative of the Town, the Trial of the Soldiers: and a Historical Introduction, Containing Unpublished Documents of John Adams, and Explanatory Notes (J. Munsell, 1870), 255; Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, March 12, 1770.

28. Joshua Henshaw to William Henshaw, Boston, November 2, 1768, “Letters to Col. William Henshaw, 1768–69,” Massachusetts Historical Society; Zabin, Boston Massacre, 61–63.

29. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 13, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

30. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

31. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, June 13, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

32. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, June 13, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

33. Letter reproduced in E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts: Their Memorials, Petitions, and Claims (Clearfield, 1930), 20–21.

34. Massachusetts Gazette: and the Boston Weekly News-Letter, July 5, 1770.

35. Massachusetts Gazette: and the Boston Weekly News-Letter, August 1770.

36. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1770, Barnes Correspondence; Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, Fall (no date), 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

3. BLACK LONDON

1. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November [undated] 1770, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress (hereafter Barnes Correspondence).

2. Captain R. G. Bruce to Copley, August 4, 1766, in Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776, ed. Guernsey Jones (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 41. On Copley’s career, see Jane Kamensky, Revolution in Color (W. W. Norton, 2016).

3. On Hogarth, see David Bindman, Hogarth (Thames & Hudson, 2021); Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

What is known about John Pine’s ancestry is scant: he was the son of John and Sarah Pine, baptized in St. Nicholas Acons Church in the City of London in 1690, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1812, London Metropolitan Archives. He died in London in 1756. Unlike other Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms at the College of Arms, John Pine neither created his own family coat of arms nor recorded information about his lineage. And he left no papers related to his family at the College. Despite living at the College of Arms, a place whose existence was dedicated to researching and perpetuating genealogy, Pine kept silent about (or did not know) his family origins. On Pine’s lack of genealogical registry at the College of Arms, see Robert G. Stewart, Robert Edge Pine: British Portrait Painter in America, 1784–1788 (Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1979), 21.

Without archival documentation about his race, scholars have differed over whether they believe John Pine was of African descent. His mixed race is generally accepted, or at least noted as a possibility, by Masonic historians. The Masonic embrace of Pine’s mixed race makes sense not least as eighteenth-century European Freemasons (unlike their colonial American counterparts) had a history of accepting Black and mixed-race members into their lodges. The accomplished Joseph Bologne de Saint-George (1745–1799), born in Guadeloupe to a white man and an enslaved woman, became one of the most famous French Masons. For support of Pine’s African descent see, for example, Andrew Prescott, “John Pine: A Social Craftsman,” Masonic Quarterly 10 (July 2004); Prescott, “John Pine Noted Masonic Engraver was Black,” Phylaxis Journal 2, no. 3 (September 1975), article 88, in The Phylaxis Collection One, January 1974–September 1976 (Phylaxis Imprint Book Publishing, 2017). For a less convinced but still ambivalent take on the subject, see Oscar E. Alleyne, “The Role of Men of Colour in the Early Period of Freemasonry,” Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, Freemasons in the Transatlantic World (September 2018), 303–331, https://www.1723constitutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Oscar-Alleyne-Alexandria-Paper.pdf. Jennifer Van Horn argues against Pine’s mixed-race heritage, largely because she believes Robert Edge Pine’s depictions of Black people in his work, such as Mrs. Reid in the Character of a Sultana (1763), show them as servants or enslaved people and that this argues against his own African descent. Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022), 52–53. Amelia Peck and Paula M. Bagger are open to the possibility that Pine was of African descent. Amelia Peck and Paula M. Bagger, “Prince Demah Barnes: Portraitist and Slave in Colonial Boston,” Magazine Antiques, February 13, 2015, https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/prince-demah-barnes-1.

4. On the popularity of the Black page boy and the symbolism of pearl earrings, its use by Hogarth, and Hogarth’s ambivalent, satirical use of Black figures as a form of social critique, see Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Harvard University Press, 2012), on pearls, 39, 182; on Black Betty, 183; on Hogarth’s broader use of Black figures, chap. 6, “Hogarth’s Atlantic London,” 178–218. See also David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in English Art (Manchester University Press, 1987).

5. Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2016); Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (Oneworld, 2017); David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016).

6. Olusoga, Black and British, 110.

7. Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

8. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London: Printed by J. Reeves for the author, 1753), 188.

9. Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony, 206–207.

10. Reynolds on Macardell from Sam Smiles, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius (Sansom, with the University of Plymouth and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 2009), 94n1. Macardell’s name is spelled as MacCardell in some sources. I use Macardell, the spelling used by London’s National Portrait Gallery.

11. On attitudes toward blackness in different parts of the British Empire, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 33–102; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 1968); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Block, Colonial Complexions. On Granville Sharp and Strong, see Olusoga, Black and British, 113–117.

12. Oxford English Dictionary, definition of “precarious,” online at https://www.oed.com.

13. Henry Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, February 12, 1771, Murrary-Robbins Family Papers, Ms. N-1157, box 1, Massachusetts Historical Society.

14. Brown, Moral Capital, 36–37. On runaway enslaved people in Britain, see Simon P. Newman, Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (Institute of Historical Research, 2022), and Newman, “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780,” English Historical Review 134, no. 570 (2019): 1136–1168.

15. On cosmopolitanism, see Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2008); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995). On early American Black cosmopolitanism, see Chernoh Momodu Sesay Jr., “Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770–1807” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2006); David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 56, no. 2, African and American Atlantic Worlds (April 1999): 243–272. For the foundational work on the Black Atlantic, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993). On seamen and enslaved people as worldly citizens of the Atlantic World, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard University Press, 1998).

16. Jeffrey Brace as told to Benjamin F. Prentiss, Esq., The Blind African Slave: Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, ed. Kari J. Winter (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 152.

17. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997), 19. See also Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many Headed Hydra.

18. Olusoga, Black and British, chaps. 3 and 4.

19. Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020), 177–178.

4. BLACK GENIUS

1. Other American men of science experienced similar judgment of their genius vis-à-vis their colonial origins. For example, Franklin’s friend Peter Collinson, a Londoner, viewed Franklin’s fellow Pennsylvania resident, botanist John Bartram, as a “wonderful Natural Genius” made all the more remarkable “considering his Education & that He was never out of America.” Collinson to Cadwallader Colden, March 7, 1742, in Alan W. Armstrong, ed., Forget Not Mee & My Garden…”: Selected Letters, 1725–1768 of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. (American Philosophical Society, 2002), 96. Quote from Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1733. An Almanack For the Year of Christ 1733… By Richard Saunders, Philom[ath] (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by B. Franklin, at the New Printing-Office near the Market), www.founders.archives.gov.

2. Henry Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, February 12, 1771, Murray-Robbins Family Papers, Ms. N-1157, box 1, Massachusetts Historical Society. As will be discussed later in this book in relation to women including Phillis Wheatley and Patience Wright, eighteenth-century understandings of genius employed distinctions by gender as well as by race, with both female and nonwhite genius acknowledged but seen as aberrant by some and exceptional by most. On genius and gender, see Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic Books, 2013); Christine Battersby, Genius and Gender: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic (The Women’s Press, 1989); Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Routledge, 2004). On eighteenth-century genius and gender, see Wendy Bellion, “Patience Wright’s Transatlantic Bodies,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early National America, ed. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

3. R. E. [Robert Edge] Pine to the Directors, June 15, 1769, SA / 36 / 30, Society of Artists Collection, Royal Academy of Art, London.

4. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016); Olivette Otelle, African Europeans: An Untold History (Basic Books, 2021); Stefan Goodwin, Africa in Europe, vol. 1, Antiquity into the Age of Global Exploration (Lexington Books, 2008). On Ignatius Sancho see G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023); Brycchan Carey, “ ‘The extraordinary Negro’: Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, no. 1 (2003): 1–13; Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. In Two Volumes. To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life (London: J. Nichols, 1782); Vincent Carretta, ed., An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2004); portrait by Thomas Gainsborough, Ignatius Sancho, 1768, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

5. Brychhan Carey, “Ignatius Sancho’s Friends and Family,” https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/friends.htm.

6. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Richard & Hall, 1788), 150–151.

7. Alexander Hamilton, Gentlemen’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1948), 210–211. On Williams’s life and work, see Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature 38, no. 2 (2003): 213–237.

8. Fara Dabhoiwala used high-resolution analysis of the painting to determine that Newton’s Principia is open to page 521, and that the sky shows the return of Halley’s Comet. He argues that the portrait celebrates its subject’s calculation of the return of Halley’s Comet above Jamaica, using Newton’s Principia as a guide. Fara Dabhoiwala, “A Man of Parts and Learning,” London Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 22 (November 21, 2024), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/fara-dabhoiwala/a-man-of-parts-and-learning.

9. “Francis Williams—A Portrait of a Writer,” Victoria & Albert Museum, n.d., https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/francis-williams-a-portrait-of-a-writer. On satirical prints, see Allison Stagg, Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023); and Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (Paul Mellon Centre, 1998).

10. “Francis Williams—A Portrait of a Writer.”

11. Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?”; David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, part 1 (1748), 242n6. Fara Dabhoiwala posits that the portrait is the work of William Williams, who worked in Jamaica in the 1760s and, while in Britain’s North American colonies the previous decade, painted a portrait of Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay (now at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery) with a similar disproportionately large head and spindly legs. See Dabhoiwala, “A Man of Parts and Learning.”

A note on Hume’s reference to “ingenuity”: in the eighteenth century, one meaning of the word was in fact genius, although that meaning became obsolete in the nineteenth-century; see Oxford English Dictionary Online at www.oed.com.

12. James Beattie, Essay on Truth (1770), III. ii. For more on Black writers and white Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, see Surya Purek, Black Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2023).

13. Anonymous editorial, “Supplement to the Gentleman’s Magazine: For the Year 1771,” 595–596.

14. Janette Barclay to Elizabeth Murray Smith, [no date] 1770, James Murray Robbins Papers, Ms. N-801, box 2, Massachusetts Historical Society. On Jannette (aka Jane Day) Barclay, see Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), advertisement detailing Barclay’s work and skill on p. 80.

15. Sir Joshua Reynolds, “A Discourse Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy, January 2nd, 1769, by the President,” Seven Discourses on Art, by Joshua Reynolds, at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2176/2176-h/2176-h.htm.

16. Reynolds, “A Discourse.” For more on Reynolds, see Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020).

17. Joyce H. Townsend, “Painting Techniques and Materials of Turner and Other British Artists 1775–1875,” in Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice (J. Paul Getty Trust, 1995), 176–185.

18. Charles Saumarez Smith, The Company of Artists: The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (Modern Arts Press in association with Bloomsbury, 2012); Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford University Press, 2003); James Fenton, School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Art (Royal Academy of Art, 2006); Reynolds, “A Discourse.”

19. The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds… (London, 1798), Copious MS. Notes by William Blake, British Library, C.45.e.18–20.

20. Hamilton, Gentlemen’s Progress, 101–102. On Feke’s career, see Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016).

21. I am grateful to Stacy Sloboda for sharing her work on St. Martin’s Lane and its neighborhood, as well as architectural features of its shops and houses. Correspondence with the author, May 15, 2023. See also Stacy Sloboda, “St. Martins Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatan,” in Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, ed. Stacy Sloboda and Michael Yonan (Bloomsbury Press, 2019), 245–265; Stacy Sloboda, “St. Martin’s Lane: Neighborhood as Art World,” in Journal18 issue 15, https://www.journal18.org/issue15/st-martins-lane-neighborhood-as-art-world/; Eamonn Carrabine, “Low Life: William Hogarth, Visual Culture and Sociologies of Art,” British Journal of Sociology 72, no. 4 (2021): 909–929.

22. Sloboda, “St. Martin’s Lane.” Additional information on Pine’s house (and its contents) on St. Martin’s Lane is deduced from his testimony in the case of Jonathan Gibson for theft, September 12, 1759, at the Old Bailey. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0), September 1759, Trial of Jonathan Gibson (t17590912-1), https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17590912-1?text=%22robert%20pine%22.

23. Robert Edge Pine married Mary Fulford in London on December 23, 1749, when he was twenty-three years old. They married at St. Sepulchre in Holborn. There were seven children born to Robert and Mary Pine who were baptized at St. Martin-in-the-Fields: Thomas (b. 1750, who seems to have died as an infant), Rose Mary (born 1753), Ann Charlotte and Elizabeth (both b. 1755), Wilhelmina (b. 1757), Jane (b. 1761), and Francis Henry John (b. and d. 1765). Only five daughters appear by name in the London records, but contemporary observer George William Fairfax, who knew the Pines, wrote to Washington that there were six rather than five daughters. Genealogical information is taken from London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1812, London Metropolitan Archives. That Mary Pine also painted portraits is detailed in the reminiscences of Joseph Hopkinson, May 6, 1833, to William Dunlap, printed in Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in America, vol. 1 (George P. Scott and Co., 1834), 377.

24. Entry for “Pine, Robert Edge, History and Portrait Painter,” in “Masters and Professors of the Liberal and Polite Arts and Sciences, viz. Painting, Architecture, Sculpture, Drawing, Modelling, Engraving,” in Thomas Mortimer, The Universal Director; or, the Nobleman and Gentleman’s True Guide to the Masters and Professors of the Liberal and Polite Arts and Sciences; and of the Mechanic Arts, Manufactures, and Trades, Established in London and Westminster and Their Environs, 1763 (London: Printed by J. Coote, 1763).

25. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, May 11, 1770, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress; Janette Barclay to Elizabeth Murray Smith [no date] 1770, James Murray Robbins Papers Ms. N 801, box 2, Massachusetts Historical Society. On Waller & Bridgen, see Cleary, Elizabeth Murray. On Strange and the Society of Artists, see Matthew Hargraves, Candidates for Fame: the Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 (Yale University Press, 2006).

26. Quote from Robert Edge Pine to Society of Artists, April 16, 1772, SA39 / 37, Royal Academy of Art.

27. On Pine’s antimonarchical paintings, see John Sutherland, “Mortimer, Pine and Some Political Aspects of English History Painting,” Burlington Magazine 16, no. 855 (1974): 317–326. Robert Edge Pine to Society of Artists, October 5, 1771, SA / 39 / 26, Royal Academy of Arts; quote from Robert Edge Pine to Society of Artists, April 16, 1772.

28. See Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Stephen Small, “Patriotism in the Age of the American Revolution, 1776–1780,” in Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798: Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism (Clarendon Press, 2002).

29. On John Wilkes and his effect on radical popular politics, see Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (Yale University Press, 2006); Peter D. G. Thompson, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1996); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Pelican Books, 1980). Quote from James Peller Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century; Including the Charities, Depravities, Dresses, and Amusements, of the Citiziens of London, during that Period; with a Review of the State of Society in 1807. To Which is Added, a Sketch of the Domestic Architecture, and of the Various Improvements in the Metropolis, vol. 2 (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Reeds, and Orme, Paternoster Row, 1810), 72, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/48066/pg48066-images.html#Page_11.

30. Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London, 76.

31. Peter D. G. Thompson, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1996); Sean Harris, “The Massacre of St George’s Fields and the Petition of William Allen,” news article, UK Parliament, October 2016, https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/326/petitions-committee/news/99182/the-massacre-of-st-georges-fields-and-the-petition-of-william-allen/.

32. Quotes found in “From Benjamin Franklin to John Ross, 14 May 1768,” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 15, January 1 through December 31, 1768, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1972), 128–130, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-15-02-0073.

33. Quotes found in “From Benjamin Franklin to John Ross, 14 May 1768.” For more on the weavers’ destruction of looms and its connection to transatlantic politics, see Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, chap. 16, “1763: Unraveling Empire,” 297–309; for more on sailors’ protests and its connections to transatlantic politics, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000).

34. John Wilkes to the Committee of the Sons of Liberty in Boston, March 20, 1769, British Library Add. MSS 30,870, 135.

35. In 1764, both James Watson and James Wilson released mezzotint prints of John Wilkes after Robert Edge Pine: NPG D37526 and NPG D8508, National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1768, Mary Darly copied a print by Kitchemer of Pine’s portrait and published it on May 23, 1768, NPG D37524, National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1768, William Dickinson also released a mezzotint based on Pine’s portrait, NPG D4799, National Portrait Gallery, London.

36. Sutherland, “Mortimer, Pine and Some Political Aspects.”

37. “Spring Gardens Exhibition, 1771,” in Observations on the Pictures Now in Exhibition at the Royal Academy, Spring Gardens, and Mr. CHRISTIE’s, by the author of the Remarks on the English Language (London: printed for John Bell, near Exeter-Change, in the Strand; and G. Riley, in Queen Street, Berkeley-Square, 1771), 23, in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1 [likely compiled by Faringdon], Archives, Royal Academy of Art, London.

38. “Spring Gardens Exhibition, 1771.” Quote from Boston Gazette, March 16, 1769; Boston Chronicle, March 16, 1769, and March 13, 1769.

5. A COLONIAL WOMAN TAKES LONDON BY STORM

1. On Jane Franklin Mecom and her relationship with her famous brother, see Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Vintage, 2014).

2. For a lively biography of Patience Wright, which remains the fullest exploration of her life, see Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976). Will of Patience Wright: Ancestry.com. New York, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1659–1999 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: New York County, District and Probate Courts. Benjamin Franklin to [Jane] Mecom, 1772 March 30, Mss.B.F85.m. Miscellaneous Benjamin Franklin Collections, Mss.B.F85.misc. American Philosophical Society; to his sister [Jane Mecom], 1772 April 13, Mss.B.F85.m. Miscellaneous Benjamin Franklin Collections, Mss.B.F85.misc. American Philosophical Society. Wright’s voyage was announced in the press; see, for example, the New-York Journal; or, the General Advertiser, January 30, 1772.

3. Adam Bridgen, “Thomas Tryon (1634–1703): A Theology of Animal Enslavement,” in Animal Theologians, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey (Oxford University Press, 2023). David Waldstreicher discussed Tryon’s contributions to Atlantic world antislavery ideologies in his Benjamin Franklin Distinguished Lecture Series, University of Pennsylvania, November 2024.

4. Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, July 6–30, 1784, The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 5, October 1782 – November 1784, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Harvard University Press, 1993), 358–386, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-05-02-0204.

5. Philip Thicknesse, New Prose Bath Guide for the Year 1778 (London: printed for the author), 51–53, 53, at https://archive.org/details/newprosebathguid00thicuoft; Thomas Tryon, Wisdom’s Dictates (London, 1691), 139, 13, 29, Early English Books Online, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A63820.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

6. Coba is mentioned in Will of Joseph Wright, May 16, 1769, Register of Wills, County of Philadelphia, 1769, no. 277. Account of Patience Wright’s biography in Thicknesse, New Prose Bath Guide, 53.

7. On the rights of widows, including the tradition of them inheriting a “dower portion” (generally one-third) of their late husband’s estate, see Vivian Bruce Conger, The Widows’ Might: Widowhood and Gender in Early British America (New York University Press, 2009); Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Single Women in Colonial Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Will of Joseph Wright, May 16, 1769.

8. On the history of anatomical waxworks in Europe, see Lucia Dacome, “Women, Wax, and Anatomy in the ‘Century of Things,’ ” in Spaces, Objects, and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine, ed. Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore (Blackwell, 2008), 53–63. On the history of waxworks in the British Empire, European techniques of waxwork making, and a detailed look at Mary Salmon and her waxworks, see Laura Earls, “Mundane Monstrosities: Gender, Reproduction, and Embodiment in the British Atlantic World, 1585–1815” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2023). On the history of waxworks in the early American republic, and techniques of waxwork making, see Ryan Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations represented as perfect as possible’: Museum Mannequins and Constructions of Race in the Early American Republic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2023). On traveling waxworks, see Peter Benes, For a Short Time Only: Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in Early America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Countess of Henneberg discussed in “This is to give notice,” Boston Weekly News-Letter, December 13, 1733. Vaughan’s display of Salmon’s waxworks advertised in South Carolina Gazette, August 13, 1737.

9. Willian Shippen, Junior, to Benjamin Franklin, May 14, 1767, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-14-02-0079.

10. Sellers, Patience Wright, 34–35.

11. The Massachusetts Spy, September 5, 1771.

12. Quotes from New-York Journal; or, the General Advertiser, August 1, 1771.

13. Thicknesse, New Prose Bath Guide, 51–53.

14. Thicknesse, New Prose Bath Guide, 51.

15. Thomas Tryon, Some Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Tho. Tryon, late of London, Merchant… (Philadelphia, 1761), 61–62.

16. Thomas Tryon, A New Method of Educating Children (London, 1695), 30–31.

17. Dough quote from William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in America, vol. 1 (George P. Scott and Company, 1834), 151; latter quotes from Thicknesse, New Prose Bath Guide, 51.

18. Thicknesse, New Prose Bath Guide, 53. Wright notes in her 1772 will that Wells taught her to sculpt wax figures.

19. For descriptions of the process of historical wax sculpting, I am indebted to the research and analysis of Earls, “Mundane Monstrosities”; and Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations.’ ”

20. See Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations”; and Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

21. Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations,’ ” 133. Thomas Tryon, The Way to Health, 3rd ed. (London: Printed for H. Newman, 1697), 156–157.

22. On the component parts of making wax figures, see Earls, “Mundane Monstrosities”; and Bachman, “Characters of… several nations.’ ”

23. On turpentine leaching, see Earls, “Mundane Monstrosities”; and Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations.’ ” One reason the wax baby dauphin in the collections of the Nantucket Historical Society on display at the Whaling Museum had new clothes made for him is that leached turpentine ruined the previous textiles. I am grateful to Curator Michael Harrison for sharing his knowledge of this figure with me in August 2023.

24. First and last quotes from account published in London on July 2, 1772, printed in The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, vol. 7, 378. Quote about reviving Whitefield from the grave from Massachusetts Spy, September 5, 1771.

25. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress, 1:154. Wendy Bellion discussed the connotations of monstrous birth in this practice (and the 1775 depiction of Wright) in Bellion, “Patience Wright’s Transatlantic Bodies,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early National America, ed. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

26. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress, 1:154.

27. Winslow Watson, ed., Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with His Correspondence with Public Men and Reminiscences and Incidents of the Revolution (New York: Dana and Company, 1856), 117.

28. Watson, ed., Men and Times of the Revolution, 118.

29. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress, 1:154. Wright was not the only artist to cultivate a personal reputation, or brand, as compelling as her art. Her contemporary Angelica Kauffman—one of few women who were members of the Royal Society of Art—also created a fascinating personal brand, as argued in Amanda Vickery, “Branding Angelica: Reputation Management in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 1 (2020): 3–24.

30. Tailor Hercules Mulligan was one of the handful of witnesses to the will Wright drew up before setting sail to London. Providence Gazette; or, Country Journal, June 15, 1771.

31. New-York Journal; or, the General Advertiser, January 30, 1772.

32. Sellers, Patience Wright, 47–50. Quote from Virginia Gazette, December 3, 1772.

33. Benjamin Franklin, Chapter 11, “Interest in Public Affairs,” in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Frank Woodworth Pine (Henry Holt and Company, 1916), at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm#X.

34. London Chronicle, June 4–7, 1772.

35. Sellers, Patience Wright, 47–50. On the importance of location in London for politics, see Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery, “The Political Day in London, c.1697–1834,” Past and Present 252, no. 1 (2021): 101–137.

36. Joshua Reynolds, “The Eleventh Discourse,” in The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. John Burnet (James Carpenter, 1842), 188.

37. Royal Academy of Arts, Abstract of the Constitution and the Laws of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, established December 10, 1768 (B. McMillan, 1815), 42.

38. See Ianna Recco, “In the Flesh at the Heart of Empire: Life-Likeness in Wax Representations of the 1762 Cherokee Delegation in London,” British Art Studies 21, https://pdf.britishartstudies.ac.uk/articles/issue-21-wax-representations-of-the-1762-cherokee-delegation-in-london.pdf; and Alison Yarrington, “Art in the Dark: Viewing and Exhibiting Sculpture at Somerset House,” in Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836, ed. David H. Solkin (Paul Mellon Centre, 2001), 174.

6. BLACK BOSTON

1. On the lives of Somerset and Stewart, see Mark S. Weiner, “Notes and Documents: New Biographical Evidence on Somerset’s Case,” Slavery & Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 121–136; Nathaniel Coffin to Charles Steuart, August 7, 1769, Charles Steuart Papers, 1758–1798, Microfilm Collection, Library of Virginia, originals in National Library of Scotland, reel I, part I, [153], quoted in Weiner, “Notes and Documents,” 123. For ease of reading, I have kept the spellings of “Somerset” and “Stewart” in the text rather than quote their various iterations from the original sources.

2. Weiner, “Notes and Documents.” On the dreadful mortality of enslaved people in the Caribbean, see Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2010).

3. On the Somerset case, see David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016); Miranda Kauffman, “Somerset Case,” Encyclopaedia of Blacks in European History and Culture, vol. 2 (Greenwood Press, 2008), 504–505; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2006), 105–154. For broader context, see also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Cornell University Press, 1975); Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (De Capo Press, 2005).

4. “Appendix A: Decision of Lord Mansfield in the Somerset Case, 1772,” at https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/AppenA.pdf. On the legal foundations of slavery in the British Empire before the Somerset case, see Holly Brewer, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and Its New World Empire,” Law and History Review 39, no. 4 (2021): 765–834. But as Dana Y. Rabin notes, in addition to looking at legal precedent and procedure, it is necessary to look at how enslaved people drove abolition through their “constant resistance and attempts to free themselves.” Rabin, “Slavery, Law, and Race in England and Its New World Empire,” Law and History Review 40, no. 3 (2022): 581–590, 589.

5. The portrait of Lindsay and Murray used to be attributed to circa 1778, but Kenna Libes argues convincingly, based on the style of their hair and clothing, that it was done about a decade before then, when both its subjects were still children rather than teenagers. See Libes, “1778–David Martin, Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray,” Fashion History Timeline, August 3, 2020, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1778-martin-dido-elizabeth/.

6. “Extract of a Letter from London, dated July 2,” Pennsylvania Gazette, August 26, 1772; Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter, July 23, 1772. American coverage of the Somerset case is traced in Chernoh M. Sesay Jr., “The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery’s Abolition in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 87, no. 1 (March 2014): 99–131. See also Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “Nothing but Liberty: ‘Somerset’s Case’ and the British Empire,” Law and History Review 24, no. 3 (2006): 647–657.

7. Boston Gazette, September 22, 1772.

8. The advertisement for his services ran in the Boston News-Letter at least nine times in 1773 (January, March, and November), the first on January 7, 1773.

9. Henry Marchant, “Journell of Voyage from Newport in the Colony of Rhode Island to London, Travels thro’ Many Parts of England & Scotland: began July 8th, 1771,” 122–123, Henry Marchant diary, 1771–1772, Mss.B.M332, vol. 1, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

10. Sesay argues that the Somerset case made it clear “the problem of bondage was an imperial and, thus, also a provincial issue.” Sesay, “Revolutionary Black Roots,” 108.

11. A petition circulated on Adam’s behalf in 1700 and was one of the chief inspirations for Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph (1700), the first antislavery publication in New England. Adam’s enslaver Saffin, in turn, published a rebuttal to Sewall: John Saffin, “A Brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet, Entitled, the Selling of Joseph” (1701). Mark A. Peterson, “ ‘The Selling of Joseph’: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689–1733,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 1–22. Various abolitionist tactics adopted by Black New Englanders and their change over time are outlined in Sesay, “Revolutionary Black Roots.”

12. Between the mid-1760s and 1776, the number of enslaved people in the entire colony remained at around 5,200, increasing by only fourteen people during that time. By contrast, the white population of Massachusetts increased dramatically from 218,950 to 343,845. Population numbers from Sesay, “Revolutionary Black Roots,” 105–106. Jared Ross Hardesty gives Boston’s enslaved population as slightly over a tenth of the total in Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds (Bright Leaf, University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), 76. In 1764 the Gentleman’s Magazine estimated up to 20,000 black people in London; during the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield gave an estimate of 15,000, Somerset v. Stewart, 1 Lofft 1, 20 Howell’s State Trials 1, 98 Eng. Rep. 499 (1772, G. B. King’s Bench), 509. On the relationship between print culture, petitions, and their connection to the trust in other people that develops in close-knit communities, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004). Although Breen’s subjects are (mostly) white Patriots, his argument is applicable to the close-knit Black communities living in places like Boston at the same time. On the many occupations of enslaved people and their constant presence in New England, see Wendy Warren, Slavery in New England (Liveright, 2016); and Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds. The swiftness and ubiquity of oral communication about current events in the revolutionary era among enslaved and free Black communities in the Atlantic World is well documented. For example, see Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2018); Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York University Press, 2014); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton University Press, 1991).

13. The petition’s authors were likely Felix Holbrook, a free Black Bostonian, along with his fellow free Black Bostonians Peter Bestes, Chester Joie, and Sambo Freeman, all of whom later formed a “Committee” to petition for freedom on behalf of their fellow Black New Englanders who were enslaved. Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds, 126–128. Gary Nash suggests Phillis Wheatley might have composed the petition: Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (Penguin, 2006), 127. Although there is no direct evidence for this, and it does not seem typical of Wheatley’s erudite style, Nash’s premise deserves mention. It points both to the importance of women in antislavery networks and activism, as well as the fact that there were multiple possible candidates among Boston’s literate Black community, enslaved as well as free, who could author such petitions. Petition of Felix printed in, Lover of constitutional liberty, The appendix: or, Some observations on the expediency of the petition of the Africans, living in Boston, &c. lately presented to the General Assembly of this province. To which is annexed, the petition referred to. Likewise, thoughts on slavery. With a useful extract from the Massachusetts spy, of January 28, 1773, by way of an address to the members of the assembly. (Boston: Printed and sold by E. Russell, adjoining the cornfield, in Union-Street, 1773), 9–11.

14. For more on the history of this and other petitions and pamphlets in 1773, see Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, esp. 124–128. Petition of Felix, petition on 9–11, quotes from 13–14, 11, 4.

15. Petition to Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage, His Majesty’s Council, and the House of Representatives, May 25, 1774, Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=549&img_step=1&mode=transcript#page1. “A Lover of True Liberty,” in Lover of Constitutional Liberty, The Appendix, 5. Sesay points out this connection in “Revolutionary Black Roots,” 111, as does David Waldstreicher in his take on the “Mansfieldian Moment” in Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang, 2009).

16. Boston Post-Boy, December 21, 1767. For the newspaper trail on McLean, I am indebted to the scholarship of Carl Keyes, “The Adverts 250 Project: An Exploration of Advertising during the Era of the American Revolution, 250 Years Ago This Week,” online at www.adverts250project.org.

17. See Keyes’s essay on McLean in “Adverts 250 Project,” October 23, 2019, https://adverts250project.org/2019/10/23/october-23-4/.

18. Boston-Gazette, October 23, 1769.

19. See William Dickinson after Robert Edge Pine, Brass Crosby, published September 17, 1771, acc no. NPG D1605, Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Pilgrim Trust, 1966, National Portrait Gallery, London. Quote, Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1770, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress (hereafter Barnes Correspondence).

20. On the concept of “unfreedom,” see Jared Ross Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York University Press, 2016).

21. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers, 2nd ed. (1808; Burt Franklin, 1874), 1:99. For more on enslaved printers in early America, see Jonathan Senchyne, “Under Pressure: Reading Material Textuality in the Recovery of Early African American Print Work,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 75, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 109–132. Senchyne also discussed Fleet’s career in his talk, “American Book History’s Black Mirror: Peter Fleet and Isaiah Thomas,” University of Pennsylvania’s Workshop in the History of Material Texts, September 23, 2019.

22. On Cuffee and Smibert, see Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022), 35–36.

23. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 20, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

24. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, May 11, 1770, Barnes Correspondence. Regrettably, the self-portrait is not known to survive.

25. On Hume’s opinion of Franklin’s genius and the importance of its American origins, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, 2004), 139–140; quote, “To Benjamin Franklin from David Hume, 10 May 1762,” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 10, January 1, 1762, through December 31, 1763, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1959), 80–82, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-10-02-0043. Quote, Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1955), 64.

26. Janette Barclay to Elizabeth Murray Smith, [no date] 1770, James Murray Robbins Papers, Ms. N-801, box 2, Massachusetts Historical Society.

27. Boston Gazette, March 16, 1769; Boston Chronicle, March 16, 1769, and March 13, 1769.

28. On Wheatley’s attempts to publish in America, see David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 138–143.

7. LADIES OF GENIUS

1. Belinda Sutton’s Petition to the Massachusetts General Court, February 14, 1783, Massachusetts Archives, at https://royallhouse.org/belinda-suttons-1783-petition-full-text/. Gambia reference is from Phillis Wheatley’s poem, “Philis’s Reply to the Answer in our last by the Gentleman in the Navy,” in Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin, 2001), 87. On the life of Phillis Wheatley, see David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2011). For a poetic imagining of her life see Honorée Fanonne Jefers, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020).

2. Phillis Wheatley, “Ocean,” in Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin, 2001), 79. Wheatley composed this poem on her return trip from London to Boston in 1773 and it remained unpublished.

3. On Franklin in London, see George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of American’s Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2016). As discussed in Chapter 4, many eighteenth-century people qualified genius as having distinctions by gender as well as by race, with both female and nonwhite genius viewed as odd or remarkable rather than a normal state of genius (which was defined according to a singular white male model). However, even if they were not the norm, women and nonwhite geniuses were acknowledged to exist. On genius and Wheatley, see Tamika Nunley, “The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius,” Journal of Women’s History 36, no. 1 (2024): 105–128; on genius and gender, see Christine Battersby, Genius and Gender: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic (The Women’s Press, 1989); on eighteenth-century genius and gender, see Wendy Bellion, “Patience Wright’s Transatlantic Bodies,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early National America, ed. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (University of Virginia Press, 2011); Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022), esp. 289–299. Spies-Gans found more than fifty instances of women visual artists being called genius or ingenious in her time period (344n23). Also on women and genius and the dismissal of women as geniuses due to art historical ideas about the solitary male genius and his biography, see Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Alexa Greist, and Theresa Kutasz Christensen, eds., Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 (Baltimore Museum of Art, 2023), esp. Andaleeb Badiee Banta, “Not Seen, Not Heard: In Search of the Unexceptional Woman Artist,” 14–29. Quote from the first advertisement publisher Archibald Bell placed for Wheatley’s book, in the London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, September 9, 1773.

4. Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Faith and Society (Durham Academic Press, 1997).

5. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As related by himself (S. Hazard, c. 1772), iii, 39. See Vincent Caretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (University of Kentucky Press, 2001); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews, eds., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment 1772–1815 (Counterpoint, 1998); Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), esp. 99–119; Joseph Rezek, “Early Black Evangelical Writing and the Limits of Print,” in African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800, ed. Rhondda Robinson Thomas (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 17–41.

6. Kirstin Wilcox, “The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley,” American Literature 71, no. 1 (1999): 1–29, 3.

7. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, October 18, 1773, Hugh Upham Clark Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society. Wooster was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War (and future Patriot military officer) in Connecticut. Wheatley wrote to him in part to ask him to spread word about her book of poems and in part to not let any New Haven printers copy it, as that would eat into her profits.

8. Phillis Wheatley, “AN ELEGEIC POEM, On the DEATH of that celebrated DIVINE, and EMINENT Servant of JESUS CHRIST, the late Reverend and pious GEORGE WHITEFIELD…,” Broadside printed by Ezekiel Russell (Boston, October 1770), reproduced in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 113–115, 113. An additional element to these transatlantic networks of women was that Wheatley’s fellow colonial poet and evangelical Sarah Parsons Moorhead likely influenced Wheatley’s elegy of Whitefield as well. See Wendy Raphael Roberts, “Sarah Parsons Moorhead and Revival Poetry,” Resources for American Literary Study 42, no. 2 (2020): 215–224; and Roberts, “Phillis Wheatley’s Sarah Moorhead: An Initial Inquiry,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107, no. 3 (2013): 245–354. Wheatley’s elegy thus spoke both to women refusing to remain silent and gave a voice to Black voices that Whitefield himself had tried to silence, as argued in Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 50.

9. The New-York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury, November 9, 1772.

10. Virginia Gazette, December 3, 1772.

11. Carla H. Hay, “Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution,” Historian 56, no. 2 (1994): 301–316.

12. Edward Dilly to John Adams, September 24, 1774, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-02-02-0049.

13. Karin Wulf cites this family history and its names—including their particular orthography—on her Instagram account @vernaculargenealogy, July 3, 2023. I am indebted to her detective work for this telling historical tidbit. For the original source, see “Nathaniel Barber” in entry for Catherine Macaulay Barber, April 15, 1770, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, vol. 7, 54–55; FHL microfilm 592,866, cited in “Massachusetts Births and Christenings, 1639–1915,” database, FamilySearch, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FHM6-SFF : 11 March 2018.

14. John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, April 17, 1813, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6000.

15. “To the PUBLICK,” Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Archibald Bell, 1773), reproduced in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 8. The political range of the signatories is particularly intriguing given the similarities the “attestation” had to one of the most popular political devices of the revolutionary era, the petition. Waldstreicher notes its similarities to both petition and subscription list in David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” Early American Studies 9, no. 3 (2011): 522–551, 531.

16. John Andrews to William Barrell, February 24, 1773, Andrews-Eliot Correspondence Ms N01774, no. 16, Massachusetts Historical Society.

17. Proposal for Phillis Wheatley’s book of poems, Boston Censor, February 29, March 14, and April 11, 1772.

18. Letter to the editor, the London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, July 1, 1773, reproduced in Wheatley, Complete Writings, xvii.

19. On Woolridge and Dartmouth, see Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 165–174. Waldstreicher argues compellingly that here another network of women operated behind the scenes to manufacture the scene, with Susanna Woolridge working in tandem with Susannah and Phillis Wheatley to get Wheatley’s poem in front of the earl (174–178). Bell also argues for Susanna Woolridge’s importance in J. L. Bell, “Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Mrs. W—’: Identifying the Woman Who Inspired ‘Ode to Neptune,’ ” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life (May 2023), at https://commonplace.online/article/phillis-wheatleys-mrs-w/.

20. This scenario about Susannah Woolridge is laid out in Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 175–178. Phillis Wheatley, “Ode to Neptune. On Mrs. W—’s Voyage to England,” in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 41.

21. Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” in Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Archibald Bell, 1773), 73.

22. Lyttelton is quoted by Dr. Wilson on the base of a statue of Catharine Macaulay erected in the Church of St. Stephen Walbrooke in London.

23. Some scholars assume that Dartmouth also gave her these books or instructed her to get them. I read her letter differently. Given the care with which she differentiates who is telling her to get what (or presenting her with things), it seems to me that while Dartmouth specified she buy Pope, he did not tell her to get Butler, Cervantes, and Gay. The original reads: “Dartmouth made me a Compliment of 5 Guineas, and desir’d me to get the whole of Mr. Pope’s Works, as the best he could recommend to my perusal, this I did, also got Hudibrass, Don Quixot, & Gay’s Fables—was presented with a Folio Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost.” The humor in the books Wheatley purchased reminds us that we need not always take this classical poet so seriously, nor define her solely by the terrible realities of her enslavement. This aspect of Wheatley’s personality is in keeping with recognizing that Wheatley and other Black writers had inner lives of friendship and pleasure, as Tara A. Bynum so beautifully traces in Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press, 2023), esp. 23–51.

24. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, October 18, 1773. Brooks Watson’s ordeal with the shark was later made famous by John Singleton Copley in his painting, Watson and the Shark (1778), and Watson himself later became Lord Mayor of London. Advertisement for Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in the London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, September 11 and 17, 1773.

25. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, October 18, 1773.

26. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, October 18, 1773.

27. A number of scholars share this belief that the two must have discussed Somerset and Wheatley’s potential freedom. See, for example, Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 209; and Wheatley, Complete Writings, xxvi.

28. Kate Fullagar offers a compelling analysis of how Pacific, Atlantic, and global cultures came together in London, and how white eighteenth-century viewers elided over differences in the cultures they exoticized. Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020). See also Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (Fourth Estate, 2005); [Robert Dodsley], The General Contents of the British Museum: With Remarks; Serving as a Directory in Viewing that Noble Cabinet, 2nd ed. (London, 1762); A Companion to Every Place of Curiosity and Entertainment in and about London…, 3rd ed. (London, 1772).

29. See Fullagar, The Warrior, The Voyager, and the Artist; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992); Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978); Beth Fowkes-Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Duke University Press, 1999).

30. See Charlotte Johnson, “James Cox’s magical clocks,” at “The V & A Blog,” Victoria & Albert Museum, https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/james-coxs-magical-clocks; quotes from “Journell of Voyage from Newport in the Colony of Rhodes Island to London, Travels thro’ Many Parts of England & Scotland: began July 8th, 1771 by Henry Marchant,” entry for April 17, 1772, Henry Marchant diary, 1771–1772, Mss.B.M332, vol. 1, American Philosophical Society.

31. “Mr. Cox’s Perpetual Motion, A Mechanical and Philosophical Time Piece, So Capital a Performance,” Rare Books Collection, Princeton University Library, May 24, 2008, https://blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/2008/05/mr-coxs-perpetual-motion-a-mec/. See also Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 69–72, 350–351.

32. Wheatley, “AN ELEGEIC POEM,” 113.

33. The elegy’s reception and its many iterations are discussed in Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 115–120.

34. As recounted in Franklin’s Autobiography, he became acquainted with Whitefield in Philadelphia in 1739 but also saw him while in London.

35. Phillis Wheatley, “An Ode of VERSES on the much-lamented Death of the REV. MR. WHITEFIELD, Late Chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon; Who departed this Life, at Newberry near Boston, in New England, on the Thirtieth of September, 1770, in the Fifty-seventh Year of his Age, Compos’d by a Negro Girl Seventeen Years of Age, and sent over to a Gentleman of Character in London,” Broadside printed by Ezekiel Russell (Boston, October 1770), Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, reproduced in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 115–117, 116.

36. As a resident of King Street herself, it made sense that Wheatley would focus her attention there, not least as it also was the street where “Caldwell, Attucks, Gray, and Mavrick fell,” as some scholars argue she elegized in an anonymous poem, “On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March 1770,” published a week after the event, Boston Evening-Post, March 12, 1770. On Wheatley’s intimate relationship to events like the Boston Massacre, see Betsy Erkkila, “Phillis Wheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the Atlantic World,” Early American Literature 56, no. 2 (2021): 351–372.

37. David Waldstreicher has identified at least fourteen poems that he thinks are Wheatley’s work, published anonymously, most of them in 1773–1774. Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 261–363, Appendix Table 2, 379–380, and list of poems, 477–478.

38. As David Waldstreicher notes of Wheatley, “She helped change the dialogue over slavery and America in ways we can actually see if we pay attention, as historians do, to who was who, who did what, what happened when, and why,” and do this beginning with her poems themselves. Waldstreicher, “Wheatleyan Moment,” 531.

39. Benjamin Franklin to Jane Mecom, March 30, 1772, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-19-02-0069.

40. Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Williams, Sr., July 7, 1773, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0158.

41. Benjamin Franklin, Last Will and Testament, April 28, 1757, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-07-02-0085. On Franklin and slavery, see Gary B. Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150, no. 4 (2006): 618–636. David Waldstreicher argues that it was the father, while the editors of the Franklin Papers and Kevin J. Hayes argue that it was the son. See David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, 2004), 144; Kevin J. Hayes, “New Light on Peter and King, the Two Slaves Benjamin Franklin Brought to England,” Notes and Queries 60, no. 2 (2013): 205–209.

42. Benjamin Franklin to John Waring, January 3, 1758, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-07-02-0147.

43. Goodwin, Franklin in London, 78–79.

44. John Wheatley, “LETTER sent by the Author’s Master to the Publisher,” November 14, 1772, in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 7.

45. Waldstreicher provides a persuasive analysis of Franklin’s motivations about downplaying his meeting with Wheatley. Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 204–209.

46. “The Sommersett Case and the Slave Trade,” printed in the London Chronicle, June 18–20, 1772, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-19-02-0128.

47. London Chronicle, April 13, 1762.

48. Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, June 27, 1760, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-09-02-0046.

49. Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Williams, Sr., July 7, 1773, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0158.

50. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, October 18, 1773.

51. The choice both Demah and Wheatley made to return home to Boston and the complicated personal relationships and emancipation issues behind it resonates with the choice Sally Hemings made to return to Virginia from France, with promises from Thomas Jefferson that their children would be freed. See Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W. W. Norton, 2008).

52. Possible scenarios by which Wheatley finally gained her freedom in 1774 are detailed in Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 214–222. Vincent Carretta notes that the Somerset decision likely played a role in her successful bid for freedom. Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 118, 137. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, October 18, 1773.

53. Phillis Wheatley, “Ocean,” in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 78–80.

54. Julian Mason, “ ‘Ocean’: A New Poem by Phillis Wheatley,” Early American Literature 34, no. 1 (1999): 78–83. Mason points out her use of Pope’s translation of The Iliad (81).

55. The Boston Gazette, September 20, 1773.

56. She details both concerns about unauthorized copies and hopes for the October arrival of her books in her letter to David Wooster, October 18, 1773.

8. AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE

1. Benjamin Franklin, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” Public Advertiser, September 11, 1773, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0213; Franklin, “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” Public Advertiser, September 22, 1773, reprint in the London Chronicle, September 21–23, 1773, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0223.

2. See George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of American’s Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2016), 238–252. My interpretation of the history of events in this chapter owes a great deal both to Goodwin’s book and to Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (Vintage, 2020).

3. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, December 2, 1772, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-19-02-026.

4. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, December 2, 1772.

5. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, December 2, 1772.

6. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, December 2, 1772.

7. Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

8. News from Boston, June 17, 1773, Pennsylvania Gazette, June 30, 1773.

9. News from Boston, June 17, 1773.

10. On Hutchinson’s career, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974).

11. News from Boston dated June 21, 1773, Pennsylvania Gazette, July 7, 1773.

12. London Chronicle, December 23–25, 1773.

13. London Chronicle, December 23–25, 1773.

14. Someone using the pen name of “Veritas” referred to Franklin with this nickname in the London Gazetteer, August 23 and October 17, 1770. The editors of the Franklin Papers posit that Veritas was customs official John Robinson, who left Boston in March 1770. See Benjamin Franklin to Lord Le Despencer, July 26, 1770, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-17-02-0115.

15. London Chronicle, February 3, 1774. On tea protests throughout the colonies, and the British response to it, see Norton, 1774, 47–83.

16. On the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor that later became known as the Boston Tea Party, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Beacon Press, 2000); Benjamin Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (Northeastern Classics, 1979); Benjamin L. Carp, The Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (Yale University Press, 2011).

17. On the long history of representing America as an American Indian figure, see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2006); and Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998). On America as an American Indian figure during the American revolutionary era, see E. McClung Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess 1765–1783,” Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965): 65–81.

18. Quote from Peter Oliver, Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (Stanford University Press, 1961), 103.

19. J. L. Bell, “How ‘Mohawk’ Conquered ‘Narragansett’ in Reports of the Boston Tea Party,” Boston 1775, December 19, 2016, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-mohawk-conquered-narragansett-in.html; Roger D. Abrahams, “Mohawks, Mohocks, Hawkubites, Whatever,” Common-place 8 (July 2008), https://commonplace.online/article/mohawks-mohocks-hawkubites-whatever/.

20. For an excellent discussion of the interconnected histories of North America and India and British imperial interests, see Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2016), esp. 168–226. As Eacott points out, the Regulating Act was “in a sense, under Parliament and the crown’s influence, similar to Townshend’s hopes for America” (204). See also Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford University Press, 1991); Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Developments in the Extended Politics of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (University of Georgia Press, 1986); H. V. Bowen, “Perceptions from the Periphery: Colonial American Views of Britain’s Asiatic Empire, 1756–1783,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (Routledge, 2002), 284–295.

21. Benjamin Franklin to Massachusetts House Committee of Correspondence, February 2, 1774, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-21-02-0023.

22. Benjamin Franklin to Massachusetts House Committee of Correspondence, February 2, 1774.

23. See Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London, 238–252; Sheila L. Skemp, The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit (Oxford University Press, 2013).

24. Parliament of Great Britain, Anno Decimo Quarto Georgii III. Regis., “An Act to discontinue in such Manner, and for such Time as are therein mentioned, the landing and discharging, lading or shipping, of Goods, Wares, and Merchandise, at the Town and within the Harbour of Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in North America” (1774).

25. Neil L. York, “Imperial Impotence: Treason in 1774 Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 657–701; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot: Britain, America and the Law, 1770–1777,” History 100, no. 341 (July 2015): 374–391.

26. Stephen Sayre, William Lee, Arthur Lee, Benjamin Franklin, et al., Petition to the King, Henry Laurens Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Accessions 13612, https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/amerrevsc/id/1843; “The Petition to the House of Lords against the Massachusetts Government and Administration of Justice Bills,” [before 11 May 1774], The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 21, January 1, 1774, through March 22, 1775, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1978), 214–216, résumé, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-21-02-0102.

27. See Woody Holton, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 2021), 133–145; and Norton, 1774, 47–83. Norton provides an excellent succinct analysis of the British government’s response to the tea protests. On the (often underappreciated) Quebec Act, see Kate Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2021); and Carté, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” in The Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 132–149; Vernon P. Creviston, “ ‘No King Unless It Be a Constitutional King’: Rethinking the Place of the Quebec Act in the Coming of the American Revolution,” The Historian 73 no. 3 (2011): 463–479.

28. London Magazine, November 1775.

29. Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 31.

30. William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in America, vol. 1 (George P. Scott and Company, 1834), 154.

31. “Item from London,” London Magazine, January 10, 1774, reprinted in New-York Journal, March 17, 1774, and Pennsylvania Gazette, March 23, 1774.

32. William Forster to his sister Elizabeth, October 7, 1773, excerpted in Journal of the Friends Historical Society 20 (1923): 95.

33. “Item from London,” London Magazine, January 10, 1774.

34. “Item from London,” London Magazine, January 10, 1774. For more on what politicians did in London to pass their time, and how important social networks were to their work, see Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery, “The Political Day in London c. 1697–1834,” Past and Present 252, no. 1 (August 2021): 101–137.

35. “Item from London,” London Magazine, January 10, 1774.

36. Patience Wright to John Dickinson, April 6, 1775, transcribed in Sellers, Patience Wright, 81–84, 84.

37. Patience Wright to William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, June 27, 1774, Chatham Papers, National Archives, Kew, UK, transcribed in Sellers, Patience Wright, 67–69, 68.

38. Patience Wright to Reverend Dr. John Rodgers, September 3, 1774, Mss.Ms.Coll.200, box 5, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

39. Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, 6 April 1773, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-20-02-0085. The draft of the letter included a sentence not sent: “Some Folks Friendship is of such brittle Stuff, it costs more than it is Worth to keep it in repair.”

40. The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury, February 15, 1773.

41. Pennsylvania Gazette, September 29, 1773. For a sample of Lady Juliana’s administrative governance, see William Allen, William Smith, and Richard Peters, “Letters from the ‘Penn Papers,’ ” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 31, no. 4 (1907): 452–460.

42. On the origins of the antagonism between Penn and Franklin (and the debate over proprietary power versus local rule that formed its larger context), see Jessica Choppin Roney, “ ‘Ready to Act in Defiance of Government’: Colonial Philadelphia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747–1748,” Early American Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 358–385; Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, January 1, 1745, through June 30, 1750, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1961), 180; James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 1746—1770: The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences (Princeton University Press, 1972); Richard Bauman, For the Reputation of Truth: Politics, Religion, and Conflict among the Pennsylvania Quakers, 1750–1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). For its continued unfolding in London, see Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London.

43. Benjamin Franklin to Isaac Norris, January 14, 1758, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-07-02-0153.

44. Thomas Penn to Richard Peters, June 9, 1748, Penn Letter Book II: 232, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

45. Patience Wright to Richard Peters, June 24, 1773, quoted in “Votes of Pennsylvania Assembly, p. 461, September 24, 1773,” in “Notes and Queries,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 15 (1891), 122. Sellers discussed the Penn bust in Patience Wright, 54–55.

46. Thomas Tryon, A treatise of dreams & visions wherein the causes, natures, and uses, of nocturnal representations, and the communications both of good and evil angels, as also departed souls, to mankind. Are theosophically unfolded; that is according to the Word of God, and the harmony of created beings. To which is added, a discourse of the causes, natures, and cure of phrensie, madness or distraction (London, 1689), 50–51.

47. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress, 1:134.

48. Wright notes that her ideas “began with the Boston Port Bill” and her visions of him began about five years before. Patience Wright to Benajmin Franklin, March 29, 1778, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-26-02-0140.

49. William Pitt’s speech on the Stamp Act, House of Commons, January 14, 1766.

50. Peale published a broadside to accompany the mezzotint copies he made of his portrait of Pitt. “A Description of the Picture and Mezzotinto of Mr. Pitt done by Charles Willson Peale of Maryland,” image of broadside reproduced in Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (Scribner, 1969), 69.

51. South Carolina Gazette, July 5, 1770. For more on the South Carolina statue and its larger significance, see Wendy Bellion, “Pitt on a Pedestal: Sculpture and Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” European Journal of American Studies 14, no. 4 (2019), https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/15410.

52. See Carol Eaton Soltis, The Art of the Peales in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Adaptations and Innovations (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), 26–30; Paul Staiti, Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes (Bloomsbury Press, 2016); Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); J. Patrick Mullins, “ ‘That Great Sacrifice Was Made through Necessity’: Charles Willson Peale’s William Pitt and the Emblemology of Tyrannicide,” Age of Revolutions, January 11, 2021, https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/01/11/that-great-sacrifice-was-made-through-sad-necessity-charles-willson-peales-william-pitt-and-the-emblemology-of-tyrannicide/.

53. Patience Wright to the Countess of Chatham, May 11, 1774, Chatham Papers, National Archives, UK, reproduced in Sellers, Patience Wright, 66.

54. On Wright and Chatham and the early stages of their relationship, see Sellers, Patience Wright, 61–88.

55. At one point, Lee was the secretary of the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. It was established in 1769 to support John Wilkes, a close friend of Lee’s, and to raise funds for him, but its purpose broadened into a general defense of constitutional rights. See John Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans of London, 1769 to 1782,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July 1978): 423–454.

56. On pro-American pamphlets in Britain, see C. C. Bonwick, “An English Audience for American Revolutionary Pamphlets,” Historical Journal 19, no. 2 (June 1976): 355–374. On pro-American sentiment more generally, see Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans of London.” On connections between weavers’ and colonists’ protests, see Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016), 297–309. On the importance of gossip and rumor, see Julius Scott, This Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2018); Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University of Virginia Press, 2000); Cristina Soriano, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2005); Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (Walker & Company, 2006).

57. Patience Wright to William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, n.d. [Spring 1774], Chatham Papers, The National Archives, UK, reproduced in Sellers, Patience Wright, 64–66.

58. Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with His Correspondence with Public Men and Reminiscences and Incidents of the Revolution, ed. Winslow C. Watson (Dana and Company, 1856), 118.

59. Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, 118.

60. On pro-American support in Britain, see Sheldon S. Cohen, British Supporters of the American Revolution, 1775–1783: The Role of the ‘Middling-Level’ Activists (Boydell & Brewer, 2004); John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, I769–1782 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans of London,” 423–454. For a view of the bigger picture of British politics in the eighteenth century more broadly, see Linda Colley, “The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (1986): 359–379.

61. John Wilkes’s daughter Polly, who visited Wright’s galleries more than once, reported on people of interest (American as well as British) to her father, while Caroline Howe played chess with Franklin, discussing politics with him and serving as a communication node between him and her brothers who were commanding British military operations in North America. For a sample of such communications between Mary “Polly” Wilkes and John Wilkes, see MSS 30 879, British Library. On Caroline Howe, see Julie Flavell, The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America (Liveright, 2021).

62. On Macaulay’s American correspondence, and her importance in information networks back and forth across the Atlantic, see Carla H. Hay, “Catharine Macaulay and the American Revolution,” The Historian 56, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 301–316.

63. Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay to John Adams, September 11, 1774, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-02-02-0042.

64. Abigail Adams to Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, 1774, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0119.

65. Abigail Adams to Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, 1774. On pro-American sentiment in Britain in fall 1774, see Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots; James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Mercer University Press, 1986).

9. BAYONETS THROUGH THE HEART

1. Quote from Connecticut Gazette, March 11, 1774. For more on Wheatley and Occom’s relationship and their writing, see Joseph Rezek, “The Racialization of Print,” American Literary History 32, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 417–445.

2. Phillis Wheatley to Reverend Samson Occum, February 11, 1774, printed in Connecticut Gazette, March 11, 1774.

3. Makhtar Ali Isani, “The Contemporaneous Reception of Phillis Wheatley: Newspaper and Magazine Notices during the Years of Fame, 1765–1774,” Journal of Negro History 85, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 260–273.

4. Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination,” in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Archibald Bell, 1773).

5. Lover of constitutional liberty, The appendix: or, Some observations on the expediency of the petition of the Africans, living in Boston, &c. lately presented to the General Assembly of this province. To which is annexed, the petition referred to. Likewise, thoughts on slavery. With a useful extract from the Massachusetts spy, of January 28, 1773, by way of an address to the members of the assembly (Boston: Printed and sold by E. Russell, adjoining the cornfield, in Union-Street, 1773).

6. Monthly Review (London) 49 (December 1773): 458–459.

7. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Richard & Hall, 1788), 150.

8. Advertisements for Wheatley’s book, London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, September 9, 1773.

9. Marcia Pointon, “Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 56–58.

10. As pointed out in Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “ ‘On Deathless Glory Fix Thine Ardent View’: Scipio Moorhead, Phillis Wheatley and the Mythic Origins of African-American Portraiture in New England,” in Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Addison Gallery of American Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2006), 31. See, for example, Artist unknown, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, 1770?, National Portrait Gallery, London.

11. As Shaw argues, the image of the poet at work at her desk presents her as “an empowered wielder of agency.” Shaw, “On Deathless Glory,” 29. For an opposing point of view, see Jennifer Y. Chuong, “Engraving’s ‘Immoveable Veil’: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique,” Art Bulletin 104, no. 2 (2022): 63–88. Some scholars argue that the empowered agency Shaw sees in Wheatley’s portrait is not possible at all for portraits of enslaved people. See David Bindman, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Portraiture: From Courtly to Commercial Societies,” in Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World.

12. Phillis Wheatley, “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. And from a View of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson,” in Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects; David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) 244–245. On Wilson, see Charles Saumarez Smith, The Company of Artists: The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (Modern Arts Press in association with Bloomsbury, 2012), 38, 84.

13. Susanna Wheatley to the Countess of Huntingdon, April 30, 1773, Cheshunt Foundation, A3 / 5 / 3, cited in Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2011), 95.

14. Captain Robert Calef to Susanna Wheatley, January 5, 1773, quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 93.

15. On the rarities of Wheatley’s frontispiece portrait, see Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 100–102; Shaw, “On Deathless Glory,”27–29.

16. Evidence that the portrait was created in Boston and engraved in London comes from a letter Captain Robert Calef wrote to Susanna Wheatley about the Countess of Huntingdon’s desire for Wheatley’s image. Calef noted that: “She [the Countess] is fond of having the Book dedicated to her; but one thing She desir’d which She said She hardly tho’t would be denied her, that was to have Phillis’ picture in the frontispiece. So that, if you would get it done [in Boston] it can be Engrav’d here [in London]. I do imagine it can be Easily done.” Captain Robert Calef to Susanna Wheatley, January 5, 1773, quoted in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 93.

17. Chuong calls attention to the skill of the engraver and the importance of analyzing his or her technique. Chuong, “Engraving’s ‘Immoveable Veil.’ ”

18. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady [Janet] Anstruther, 1761, Bequeathed by Viscountess D’Abernon 1954, N06243, Tate Museum, London.

19. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell), 1772, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

20. A rare exception is found in Agosto Brunias’s Caribbean paintings of Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, c. 1770–96, Brooklyn Museum, New York. Some of the women—both free women and enslaved women servants—wear black ribbons around their neck.

21. On Black portraits, see Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Harvard University Press, 2012); Guy McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940 (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990); The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 5 vols. in 10 parts (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010–2014).

22. On Wheatley’s portrait and its attribution to Moorhead, see Shaw, “On Deathless Glory”; Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, David Bindman, Romita Ray, Stephanie Pratt, Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700–1850 (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2007), 41–43; Pointon, “Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture”; Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 1989); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written about the Moorhead attribution on numerous occasions, including in Gates, America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (Basic Civitas Books, 2003). See also Jonathan Michael Square, “ ‘I Like She Should Be Dressed Plain’: Deference and Defiance in the Many Representations of Phillis Wheatley,” in Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North, ed. Emelie Gevalt, R. L. Watson, and Sade Ayorinde (American Folk Art Museum, 2023), 122–141.

23. On the widespread nature of this practice, see Wendy Warren, “ ‘Thrown upon the world’: Valuing Infants in the Eighteenth-century North American Slave Market,” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 4 (2018): 623–641. See also William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). For an excellent biography of Scipio [Sarahson] Moorhead, see Eric Slauter, “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” in Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, 89–116. Slauter identifies four children advertised in the newspapers “To be given away” in Boston from January to June (when Scipio was baptized) of 1760, 112n7.

24. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 91, The Colonial Records of Kings Chapel, 1686–1776, vol. 2, “Register of Baptisms, 1703–1777,” https://www.colonialsociety.org/publications/3648/register-baptisms-1703-1777.

25. For information on the Moorheads I am indebted to Eric Slauter’s detective work. Slauter, “Looking for Scipio Moorhead.”

26. Phillis Wheatley, “To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works,” in Poems on Various Subjects (1773), reproduced in Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin, 2001), 59–60, 59.

27. Wheatley, “To S.M. a young African Painter,” 60.

28. Wheatley, “To S.M. a young African Painter,” 60.

29. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 9, 1772, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress (hereafter Barnes Correspondence).

30. Waldstreicher points out that Wheatley’s praise of S. M.’s “artistic vision” highlights what Black people might achieve with encouragement, a singular praise with broader implications for other Black creatives in the Atlantic World. Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, 185–186.

31. Slauter argues for the primacy of concern for the afterlife over the permanence of art in “Looking for Scipio Moorhead,” 100.

32. Wheatley’s poem to S. M. (and, if it is indeed to Scipio Moorhead, its meanings for him) aligns with June Jordan’s argument that Wheatley’s poems come from a place of profound tension, a tension between her own genius and consciousness, freedom and unfreedom. See June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America; or, Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” August 15, 2006, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68628/the-difficult-miracle-of-black-poetry-in-america.

On Sarah Moorhead, see Wendy Raphael Roberts, “Sarah Parsons Moorhead and Revival Poetry,” Resources for American Literary Study 42, no. 2 (2020): 215–224; and Wendy Raphael Roberts, “Phillis Wheatley’s Sarah Moorhead: An Initial Inquiry,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107, no. 3 (2013): 345–354.

33. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, July 22, 1773, Barnes Correspondence. The original portrait is that of John Singleton Copley, Mrs. James Smith (Elizabeth Murray), 1769, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

34. These enslaved artists were part of what scholars call (usually referring to a print culture phenomenon) a “Black counterpublic.” See Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 62, no. 1 (January 2005): 67–92; Tamika Nunley, “The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius,” Journal of Women’s History 36, no. 1 (2024): 105–128. Jennifer Van Horn also places Demah’s visual culture within this context. Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022).

35. Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature 82, no. 1 (2010): 1–28, 8.

36. Deborah Cushing to Thomas Cushing, September 19, 1774, Cushing Family Papers II, Special Collections, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

37. Joanna Brooks traces these networks in “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” 9. For an expanded understanding of networks of readers (and copyists) of Wheatley’s poems, see Wendy Raphael Roberts, “ ‘On the Death of Love Rotch,’ A New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and a Speculative Attribution,” Early American Literature 58, no. 1 (2023): 155–184. For women’s networks in Philadelphia, see Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Cornell University Press, 2000), 45–46; Karin Wulf, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

38. Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, October 30, 1773, March 21, 1774, and May 6, 1774, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS).

39. Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, May 6, 1774. For a discussion of the friendship between Wheatley and Tanner, see Tara Bynum, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press, 2023), esp. 41–50.

40. Circular Letter of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, May 13, 1774, Writings of Samuel Adams, collected and ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing… (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–1908), at The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/circ_let_boston_1774.asp. For a timeline of reaction to learning the news of the Boston Port Act, see Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (Vintage, 2020), esp. 78–122.

41. “From George Washington to George William Fairfax, 10–15 June 1774,” The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 10, 21 March 1774 – 15 June 1775, ed. W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig (University Press of Virginia, 1995), 94–101, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0067.

42. Melatiah Bourn, Estate, Bills relating to children, 1752–1774, box 8, folder 9, Mss 733 1728–1803 B775, Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, Harvard University.

43. Worthington C. Ford et al., eds., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (US Government Printing Office, 1904–1937), 1:75–80; the text was also reprinted in papers throughout the colonies, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, November 2, 1774.

44. Abigail Adams to Catharine Macaulay, [no date] 1774, The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, December 1761 – May 1776, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield (Harvard University Press, 1963), 177–179, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0119. On the boycotts writ large, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004).

45. Boston Gazette, January 2, 1775. See Slauter, “Looking for Scipio Moorhead,” 108–111.

46. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, September 9, 1769, Barnes Correspondence.

47. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, December 1769, Barnes Correspondence.

48. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, February 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

49. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 24, 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

50. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, March 6, 1774, Barnes Correspondence.

51. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 1770, Barnes Correspondence.

52. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 1770.

53. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 1770.

54. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith, November 1770.

55. On women enslavers, see Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2020).

56. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, July 22, 1773, Barnes Correspondence.

57. On mixed race children in the British Empire, see Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

58. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS, Of 22d February 1775, To Captain Brown and Ensign D’Bernicre, (of the army under his command) whom he ordered to take a sketch of the roads, passes, heights, &c. from Boston to Worcester, and to make other observations: With a curious NARRATIVE OF OCCURRENCES during their mission, Wrote by the Ensign, Together with an ACCOUNT of their doings, in consequence of further Orders and Instructions from General Gage, of the 20th March following, to proceed to Concord, to reconnoitre and find out the state of the provincial magazines; what number of cannon, &c. they have, and in what condition. ALSO, An ACCOUNT of the Transactions of the British troops, from the time they marched out of Boston, on the evening of the 18th, ’till their confused retreat back, on he ever memorable Nineteenth of April 1775; and a Return of their killed, wounded and missing on that auspicious day, as made to Gen. Gage.[Left in town by a British Officer previous to the evacuation of it by the enemy, and now printed for the information and amusement of the curious.] (BOSTON: Printed, and to be sold, by J. GILL, in Court Street. 1779); 6. See also J. L. Bell, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War (Westholme, 2016).

59. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS…, 10.

60. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS…, 11–12.

61. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS…, 12.

62. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS…, 13.

63. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS…, 14.

64. GENERAL GAGE’S INSTRUCTIONS…, 14–15.

65. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, n.d. [April], 1775, Barnes Correspondence.

66. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, n.d. [April], 1775.

67. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, n.d. [April], 1775.

68. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, April 9, 1775, Barnes Correspondence.

69. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, April 9, 1775.

70. Christian Barnes to Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman, April 9, 1775.

71. Broadside, King George III, “By the King, a Proclamation, For suppressing Rebellion and Sedition,” August 23, 1775 (Boston: printed by John Howe, 1775), MHS, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=818&pid=2.

72. “An Inventory of the Real and Personal Estate of Henry Barnes as he left it at Marlborough in the County of Middlesex New England Ap[ril] 17th 1775, Loyalist Henry Barnes Petitions for Compensation, 1784, Loyalist Claims Commission, A.O. 13 / 43, 379-81, Public Records Office, UK.

73. Province Laws 1775, ch. 350, November 7, 1775, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston; E. F. to Christian Barnes, June 9 and 16, 1776, James Murray Robbins Family Papers, MHS.

10. AMERICAN LIBERTY

1. Connecticut Gazette, July 28, 1775. For work that centers how important time and timing of communication was to the revolutionary era, see Helena Yoo Roth, “American Timelines: Imperial Communications, Colonial Time-Consciousness, and the Coming of the American Revolution” (PhD diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2024).

2. On the Philippa and Maitland’s experience with American protests, see Sheldon S. Cohen, “The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt,” Journal of American Studies 18, no. 2 (August 1984): 255–274; Robert S. Davis, Jr., “A Georgian and a New Country: Ebenezer Platt’s Imprisonment in Newgate for Treason in ‘The Year of the Hangman,’ 1777,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 106–115; Robert Scott Davis, “Ebenezer Smith Platt: An American in Newgate Prison in 1777,” Journal of the American Revolution, November 28, 2017, https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/11/ebenezer-smith-platt-american-newgate-prison-1777/; Joseph Cummins, Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot (Quirk Books, 2012). On the Parochial Committee in Savannah, see Kenneth Coleman, American Revolution in Georgia, 1763–1789 (University of Georgia Press, 1958).

3. Cohen, “The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt”; Cummins, Ten Tea Parties, 88–90.

4. Ebenezer Smith Platt to the Commissioners, April 21, 1778, Papers of John Adams, vol. 6, March–August 1778, ed. Robert J. Taylor (Harvard University Press, 1983), 44–46, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-06-02-0035.

5. Sir James Wright to Lord Dartmouth, July 18, 1775, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, III, 196–199, https://georgiahistorytps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pss1_ss8h3_jwrightletters.pdf.

6. Cohen, “The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt,” 260–261.

7. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 23, October 27, 1776, through April 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1983), 321–326, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0204.

8. Ebenezer Smith Platt to the Commissioners, April 21, 1778. They sailed without the required bonds; however, Henry Laurens and the South Carolina Council of Society expressly judged this, noting: “From the character of Mr. Platt, we have no doubt of the uprightness of his intentions. But if he has cleared out at the custom-house in Savannah, he has certainly erred, and in so far acted contrary to the resolutions of the Continental Congress of the 1st of November [the Restraining Act].” Henry Laurens, “Minutes of the South Carolina Council of Safety,” December 25, 1775, Journal of the South Carolina Council of Safety, vol. 3, at Naval Documents of the American Revolution, at https://www.ndar-history.org/?q=node/19999.

9. Ebenezer Smith Platt to the Commissioners, April 21, 1778.

10. Ebenezer Smith Platt to the Commissioners, April 21, 1778.

11. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

12. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

13. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

14. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

15. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

16. Vice Admiral Clark Gayton to Philip Stephens, March 30, 1776, PRO, Colonial Office, 5 / 124, 71b.

17. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2010).

18. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

19. Vice Admiral Clark Gayton to Philip Stephens, July 25, 1776, PRO, Admiralty 1 / 240.

20. Declaration of Independence, 1776.

21. On the declaration and its dissemination, see Emily Sneff, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News” (PhD diss., William & Mary, 2024); Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard University Press, 2007); Richard R. Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774–1776 (Basic Books, 2013); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage Books, 1997).

22. Zara Anishanslin, in “Fresh Takes on the Declaration of Independence,” Declaration Resources Project, Harvard University, at https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/files/declaration/files/fresh_takes.pdf.

23. For discussion of this process, see Emily Sneff, “July Highlight: George Rejected and Liberty Protected,” Declaration Resources Project, Harvard University, July 4, 2016, at https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/blog/july-proclamations.

24. Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 9, 1776.

25. John Adams to Samuel Chase, July 9, 1776, The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, February–August 1776, ed. Robert J. Taylor (Harvard University Press, 1979), 372–373, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0155.

26. Dunlap’s Maryland Gazette, July 16, 1776.

27. On the destruction of the images and artifacts of the king and the meaning of this iconoclasm, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2006).

28. New York Gazette, June 30, 1766.

29. See Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); and Bob Ruppert, “The Statue of George III,” in Journal of the American Revolution, September 8, 2014, https://allthingsliberty.com/2014/09/the-statue-of-george-iii/.

30. Paula Sampson Preston, “The Severed Head of Charles I of England Its Use as a Political Stimulus,” Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 1–13; Andrew Lipman, “A Means to Knitt Them Together: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2008): 3–28.

31. The horse’s tail, for example, survived destruction this way and is in the collections of the New-York Historical Society.

32. “Journals of Capt. John Montresor, 1757–1778,” in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1881, vol. 14 (New York: Printed for the Society, 1882), 123–124.

33. Emily Sneff details Crafts reading of the Declaration: Sneff, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” 205–206. She notes that he was not originally intended to read it, but the Sheriff of Suffolk County, William Greenleaf, who should have done it, had a voice too weak to carry across the crowd. Greenleaf’s descendant later recalled that Sheriff Greenleaf read each sentence first, with Crafts, whose voice seems to have carried very well by contrast, repeating it so it could be heard. See also J. L. Bell, “Sheriff Greenleaf and Col. Crafts Read the Declaration,” Boston 1775, July 2007, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2007/07/sheriff-greenleaf-and-col-crafts-read.html.

34. Abigail Adams to John Adams, July 21, 1776, The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, June 1776 – March 1778, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Harvard University Press, 1963), 55–57, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0033.

35. New-England Chronicle, July 25, 1776

36. Abigail Adams to John Adams, July 21, 1776.

37. Pauline Maier, American Scripture.

38. William C. Nell, “Great Men,” North Star (Rochester, NY), March 10, 1848.

39. London Gazette (London: Printed by Thomas Harrison), 6–10 Aug 1776, 1. For its initial distribution and reception in London, see Sneff, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” ch. 11. See also Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press, 1775–1783 (University of Missouri Press, 1967).

40. The two newspapers were the antiministry Public Advertiser (London: Printed by H. S. Woodfall), August 16, 1776, 1–2; and the proministry Lloyd’s Evening Post (London: Sold by W. Nicoll), August 14–16, 1776, 6. Sneff, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” 260.

41. Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser (London: Printed for William Woodfall), August 26, 1776, 1.

42. Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser (London: Printed for William Woodfall), August 17, 1776, 2.

43. The Crisis (London: T. W. Shaw), no. 84, August 24, 1776, 527–531.

44. Here I am indebted to Emily Sneff’s detective work. Sneff identified the printed residue on the one known surviving (and complete with portrait) copy of the broadside, indicating that it had been folded and pasted into the copy of The Crisis that printed the declaration. Sneff also noted the inky fingerprint stains that indicate production of a large number of copies at once. See Sneff, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” 271–272.

45. Broadside, Declaration of Independence, anonymous, London 1776, bDB.U58 1776 DW17, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.

46. Sneff, “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” ch. 11.

47. Troy Bickham argues that news about America was a reliable source of income for the British press because it “captured audiences’ interest; if the subject did not sell copies, editors would have changed topics.” Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 249–250.

48. Patience Wright to the Countess of Chatham, May 11, 1774, Chatham Papers, National Archives, UK, reproduced in Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 66. Similarly, although he had painted it years before, 1774 was when the savvy Charles Willson Peale chose to offer a second copy of his portrait of the Earl of Chatham to the Maryland legislature. Chatham was having another moment in the transatlantic spotlight as a champion of liberty, and Peale’s allegorically unsubtle portrait celebrated him as such. The Maryland legislature, in turn, paid Peale the “compliment” of £100—a considerable sum.

49. Patience Wright to John Dickinson, April 6, 1775, transcribed in Sellers, Patience Wright, 81–84, 83. As Eliga Gould points out, the Society for Constitutional Information, which continued to operate into the 1780s, was an example of this idea that American government might inspire British reforms and that the “antient friendship” between the two polities might be preserved. See Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 177.

50. Patience Wright to John Dickinson, April 6, 1775, transcribed in Sellers, Patience Wright, 81-84, 83.

51. Patience Wright to John Dickinson, April 6, 1775, transcribed in Sellers, Patience Wright, 81-84, 84. The biblical tableau is described in The London Magazine, November 1775. Wells and Wright were not the only women to use artistic renderings of biblical scenes to make political points. Wright’s tableau of Esther has interesting resonance with a needlework piece, The Hanging of Absalom (1770), by painter John Trumbull’s mother, Faith Robinson Trumbull. Elaine Forman Crane argues that Trumbull’s embroidery uses religious symbolism to make a political statement, with King David a stand in for King George and Absalom representing the colonists. Elaine Forman Crane, “Religion and Rebellion: Women of Faith in the American War for Independence,” in Religion in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1994), 52–86.

For more on women’s political activism, see also Linda K. Kerber, “ ‘I have Don… much to Carrey on the Warr’: Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology after the American Revolution,” in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (University of Michigan Press, 1993). Further evidence of Wright’s religious devotion is found in the fact that she was among the subscribers to the second edition of Mary Deverell’s Sermons on various subjects, published in London in 1776. Although most subscribers only ordered one copy, “Mrs. Wright, at the Wax-Work Exhibition, Pall Mall,” ordered four.

On the importance of evangelical and millenarist religion in the Founding Era, see Jonathan Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (Oxford University Press, 2001); Spencer McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2016). On rethinking the role of religion in the era and in republicanism in particular, see Nathan R. Perl-Rosenthal, “The ‘Divine Right of Republics’: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2009): 535–564.

52. Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with His Correspondence with Public Men and Reminiscences and Incidents of the Revolution, ed. Winslow Watson (Dana and Company, 1856), 118. It is intriguing to consider the fact that, despite documentation of her making multiple wax portraits of the king and queen, not one attributed to her survives in the Royal Collection. There are numerous anonymous waxworks from the eighteenth century, however. While researching the wax portraits in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, I could not help but wonder if her name was deliberately dropped from some of these works during the revolutionary era, an act of iconoclasm against a “traitor” in the historical record.

53. Quote from Edmund Burke, “PETITION FROM THE CITY OF BRISTOL: Petition presented to His Majesty on Wednesday, the 11th of October, from the City of Bristol, by Mr. Burke, one of the Representatives of that City. To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” The humble Petition of the Merchants, Traders, Manufacturers, and others, citizens of BRISTOL,” Document S4-V3-P01-sp16-D0379, Northern Illinois Digital Library, at https://digital.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-amarch%3A80193. For support for America (and its limits) in Britain, see James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Popular Opinion (University of Georgia Press, 1986); Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire, especially 150–164, 176–177.

54. The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, of the Year… 80 vols. London, 1759–1838 (1775), “State Papers,” 255–256.

55. The London Magazine, November 1775; Patience Wright to John Dickinson, April 6, 1775.

56. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998); E. McClung Fleming, “From Indian Princess to Greek Goddess the American Image, 1783–1815,” Winterthur Portfolio 3 (1967): 37–66; Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006); Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (Princeton University Press, 2009).

57. On West’s collection of Indigenous materials, and his and other artists’ depictions of Indigenous people within the context of the British Empire, see Arthur Einhorn and Thomas S. Alber, “Bonnets, Plumes, and Headbands in West’s Painting of Penn’s Treaty,” American Indian Art Magazine 21, no. 3 (1996): 44–53; J. C. H. King, “Woodland Artifacts from the Studio of Benjamin West 1738–1820,” American Indian Art Magazine 17 (1991): 34–42; Troy Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); J. Sienkewicz, “Beyond the Mohawk Warrior: Reinterpreting Benjamin West’s Evocations of American Indians,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 9 (2009); Stephanie Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).

58. Philip Thicknesse, The New Prose Bath Guide, for the year 1778 (London: Printed for the author, 1778), 50.

59. The figures are listed in The London Magazine, November 1775; Charles Coleman Sellers makes this argument about their political meaning in Patience Wright, 89–90.

60. Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2016); Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020); Timothy J. Shannon, “ ‘This Wretched Scene of British Curiosity and Savage Debauchery’: Performing Indian Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832, ed. Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke (University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 221–247.

61. On Amunute / Matoaka / Pocahontas, see Camilla Townshend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (Hill and Wang, 2004); on Arnaq and her son, see Peter C. Mancall, “The Raw and the Cold: Five English Sailors in Sixteenth-Century Nunavut,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2013): 3–40; on eighteenth-century diplomatic delegations, see Thrush, Indigenous London, 68–102.

62. See Ryan Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations represented as perfect as possible’: Museum Mannequins and Constructions of Race in the Early American Republic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2023); Ianna Recco, “In the Flesh at the Heart of Empire: Life-Likeness in Wax Representations of the 1762 Cherokee Delegation in London,” British Art Studies 21 (2021).

63. Recco, “In the Flesh at the Heart of Empire.”

64. See Brückner, The Geographic Revolution; Deloria, Playing Indian; E. McClung Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess 1765–1783,” Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965): 65–81.

65. Alderman Hayley, “Petition from the Merchants, Traders, and others, of the City of London, concerned in the Commerce of North America… to the House of Commons,” January 23, 1775, Document S4-V1-P04-sp05-D0002, Northern Illinois Digital Library, https://digital.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-amarch%3A99569.

66. The figures are listed in The London Magazine, November 1775.

67. Morning Post, and Daily Advertiser (London: Printed by R. Haswell), August 20, 1776, 1–2. Sneff points out the contemporary jab at American hypocrisy in “When the Declaration of Independence Was News,” 265–266.

68. Ebenezer Platt to Captain Hughes of the Centaur, October 4, 1776, TNA PRO TS 11 / 1057 / 4710, cited in Peter Rushton and Gwenda Morgan, Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 1685–1800: Legal Responses to Threatening the State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 156.

69. Ebenezer Smith Platt to the Commissioners, April 21, 1778.

11. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S ARMY

1. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 23, October 27, 1776, through April 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1983), 321–326, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0204. Anonymous, “The CASE of Mr. EBENEZER SMITH PLATT, MERCHANT OF GEORGIA; Now confined in Irons, in NEWGATE, on a Charge of HIGH TREASON” (London: 1777), 77, 22 (OS), Mss.B.F85, Benjamin Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter Franklin Papers). The pamphlet itself is curious. It is printed in a size common to broadsides but has an additional title page that indicates that, despite its size, it might have been intended to be folded in the style of a pamphlet. In some places, the pamphlet echoes Wright’s letter to Franklin closely, although it adds other details and presents a more bland and blameless view of Platt and the events in Georgia and Jamaica. It also emphasizes the injustice of his detention, despite his identity as a merchant, as an “able bodied seaman,” a phrase repeated a few times and always in capitals (the only phrase capitalized other than the title).

2. Elizabeth Wright hoped in particular that Franklin would alert Platt’s uncle, Zephaniah Platt, a New York attorney and Patriot who was a member of the New York Provincial Congress and New York’s Council of Safety. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

3. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1777.

4. Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot: Britain, America and the Law, 1770–1777,” History 100, no. 341 (July 2015): 374–391, 382–383.

5. Morgan and Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot,” 376–377; Lisa Steffen, Defining the British State: Treason and National Identity, 1608–1820 (Palgrave, 2001).

6. Peter Rushton and Gwenda Morgan, Treason and Rebellion in the British Atlantic, 1685–1800: Legal Responses to Threatening the State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 158; Amanda L. Tyler, “Habeas Corpus and the American Revolution,” California Law Review 103, no. 3 (2015): 635–698; Amanda L. Tyler, Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay (Oxford University Press, 2017), 63–98. The British government had denied the assumed applicability of the universality of the right of habeas corpus, specifically, whether it applied in its North American colonies, soon after protests against the Townshend Acts began, a stand with which colonists took immediate issue.

7. An Authentick account of the proceedings against John Wilkes, Esq; Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, and late colonel of the Buckinghamshire militia. Containing all the papers relative to this interesting affair, from that gentleman’s being taken into custody by His Majesty’s messengers, to his discharge at the Court of Common Pleas: With an abstract of that precious jewel of an Englishman, the Habeas Corpus Act.: Also the North Briton no. 45. Being the paper for which Mr. Wilkes was sent to the Tower.: Addressed to all lovers of liberty, Great Britain. Court of Common Pleas. [Philadelphia]: London, printed. Philadelphia, re-printed: and to be sold by W. Dunlap, in Market-Street, 1763.

8. “An Act to Impower his Majesty to Secure and Detain Persons charged with, or Suspected of, the Crime of Treason, committed in any of His Majesty’s Colonies or Plantations in America…” (London: Printed by “Charles Eyre and William Strahan, Printers to the King’s most Excellent Majesty,” 1777).

9. Edmund Burke, “A letter from Edmund Burke: Esq; one of the representatives in Parliament for the city of Bristol, to John Farr and John Harris, Esqrs. sheriffs of that city, on the affairs of America” (London, 1777), 18, at Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004804912.0001.000/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.

10. Burke, “A letter from Edmund Burke.” See also Morgan and Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot,” 382–383.

11. On Wilkes’s thoughts on America and its independence, see Peter Thompson, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Clarendon, 1996), 159–175.

12. Rushton and Morgan, Treason and Rebellion, 155–162 for Platt’s case.

13. Wilkes’s speech printed in Morning Chronicle, London, February 25, 1777.

14. In the 1970s, scholars debated over who in Britain supported America at various points during the revolutionary era, and whether support for Wilkes and support for America, for example, occurred in the colonies as well as in Britain merely as a matter of timing or out of real political solidarity. While George Rudé argued that pro-American sentiment “seems to have been confined to higher social circles and does not appear as an expression of popular opinion,” see Rudé, “The London ‘Mob’ of the Eighteenth Century,” in Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (Viking, 1971), 315, other scholars disagree. See Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 20, no. 3 (1963): 373–395; John Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans of London, 1769 to 1782,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July 1978): 423–454.

15. Case of Ebenezer Smith Platt, February 19, 1777, supplemental material, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/o17770219-1.

16. Virginia Gazette, May 9, 1777; Continental Journal, May 8, 1777, datelines London January 18, 1777.

17. Anonymous, “The CASE of Mr. EBENEZER SMITH PLATT.”

18. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, March 7, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 23, October 27, 1776, through April 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1983), 445–447, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0290.

19. Virginia Gazette, May 9, 1777; Continental Journal, May 8, 1777, datelines London, January 18, 1777.

20. James Lander, “A Tale of Two Hoaxes in Britain and France in 1775,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 995–1024; Morgan and Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot,” 390–391.

21. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais to King Louis XVI, September [before 21], 1775, in Louis de Loménie, Beaumarchais and His Times: Sketches of French Society in the Eighteenth Century from Unpublished Documents, trans. Henry S. Edwards, vol. 1 (Harper and Bros., 1857), 264.

22. Beaumarchais to King Louis XVI, September 1775.

23. King George III, “By the KING, A PROCLAMATION, For suppressing Rebellion and Sedition,” August 23, 1775, Broadside (Boston: printed by John Howe, 1775), Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS).

24. Amanda L. Tyler, “Habeas Corpus and the American Revolution,” California Law Review 103, no. 3 (2015): 635–698, 658–660. As Tyler also discusses, the case of Patriot officer Ethan Allen, imprisoned for a brief time in Cornwall in early 1776 before being sent back to America to languish on a British prison ship, also played into the desire of the British government to suspend habeas corpus as he too pled for release while on land on the basis of that right.

25. Morgan and Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot.”

26. James Aitken, “The Life of James Aitken, commonly called John the Painter…” (London: Printed by J. Wilkes, 1777), 18. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Verso, 2002), discuss him in this context of protest (221), although he is not confirmed by other sources as a Tea Party participant.

27. Jessica Warner, John the Painter: The First Modern Terrorist (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004); Morgan and Rushton, “Arson, Treason and Plot.”

28. “A Short Account of the Motives which determined the man called John the Painter and justification of his conduct, written by himself and sent to his friend Mr A. Tomkins, with a request to publish it after his execution” (London, 1777), 9.

29. And for Ethan Allen, as well.

30. Ebenezer Platt to Capt. Hughes of the Centaur, October 4, 1776, TNA PRO TS 11 / 1057 / 4710, cited in Rushton and Morgan, Treason and Rebellion, 156.

31. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, March 10, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 23, October 27, 1776, through April 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1983), 457–459, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0299.

32. Ebenezer Platt to Patience Lovell Wright, copy made by Elizabeth Wright for BF, March 5, 1777, addendum by Elizabeth Wright, Mss B. F 85, XL VII, Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society (hereafter APS).

33. Ebenezer Platt to Patience Lovell Wright, March 5, 1777.

34. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, March 10, 1777.

35. Elizabeth Wright to Benjamin Franklin, March 10, 1777.

36. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, May 7, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 24, May 1 through September 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1984), 43–45, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-24-02-0025

37. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, March 7, 1777,

38. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, [after March 7,1777], The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 23, October 27, 1776, through April 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1983), 447–450, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0291.

39. For biographical notes on Labilliere and more details on his friendship with the Wrights, see Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976), esp. 114–116.

40. James Lander, Peter Labilliere: The Man Buried Upside Down on Box Hill (Chertsey, 2000). Some who knew Labilliere in his old age offered another theory, however, and thought “it far likelier that, possessed of the same spirit of humility as led (according to tradition) to the crucifixion of the Apostle Peter, with his head downwards, the Major desired to imitate, as to the position of his body in burial, his namesake’s example,” recollection of “Mrs. Taylor,” in Charles Rose, Recollections of Old Dorking, 1878, reprinted in Memories of Old Dorking, ed. Margaret Kohler (Kohler and Coombes, 1977). In either case, Labilliere chose an eccentric burial style to accommodate his zealous religious beliefs.

41. Peter Labilliere to Benjamin Franklin, December 8, 1781, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 36, November 1, 1781, through March 15, 1782, ed. Ellen R. Cohn (Yale University Press, 2001), 222–225, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-36-02-0147; Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 12, 26 October 1777 – 25 December 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard Jr. and David R. Hoth (University Press of Virginia, 2002), 119–123, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-12-02-0109.

42. Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777

43. Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777.

44. Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777.

45. “Major Peter Labilliere,” mezzotint by H. Kingsbury, London, December 1, 1780, after painting by Joseph Wright. “St. Asaph’s Sermon” was given in the wake of the Glorious Revolution by Bishop William Lloyd. Lloyd’s “A sermon preached before the King & Queen at White-Hall,” March 12, 1689, was filled with Old Testament cautionary tales about nations and kings and discussion of Judgment Day.

46. See, for example, Peter Labilliere, Christian Political Beehive (1794), 25.

47. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 10, 1777, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, June 1776 – March 1778, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Harvard University Press, 1963), 235–237, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0182.

48. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 10, 1777.

49. Unidentified [Rachel Wells] to Benjamin Franklin, November 16 [labeled as such in the finding aids though the letter itself is dated December] 1785, XLIV, 76, Mss.B.F85, Franklin Papers, APS.

50. London Chronicle, June 14, 1775; William Lee, Letters of William Lee: Sheriff and Alderman of London; Commercial Agent of the Continental Congress in France; and Minister to the Courts of Vienna and Berlin. 1766–1783, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, vol. 1 (Historical Printing Club, 1891), 26–27; Sainsbury, “Pro-Americans in London,” 426–428.

51. Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777.

52. Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777.

53. As was the case with Sayre, there was insufficient evidence to try much less convict him. Lander, Peter Labilliere, 24.

54. See Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans in London”; A. R. Riggs, “Arthur Lee, a Radical Virginian in London, 1768–1776,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78, no. 3 (July 1970): 268–280.

55. Patience Lovell Wright to John Adams, June 5, 1785, Papers of John Adams, vol. 17, April–November 1785, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Sara Georgini, Hobson Woodward, Sara B. Sikes, Amanda A. Mathews, and Sara Martin (Harvard University Press, 2014), 155–156, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-17-02-0086.

56. Lee enclosed it with a letter to Josiah Quincy Jr. that the British intercepted. See Sainsbury, “The Pro-Americans in London,” 437.

57. Different versions were printed in America. See, for example, An Old Soldier, “Address to the Soldiers” (Boston: 1775), Broadside, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.0380300a; Old Soldier, Salem, Tuesday, July 19, 1775. This Day, at Noon, Captain John Derby, in a Schooner, arrived here in Six weeks from London… and brings Advices… among which is An Address to the British Soldiery (Salem: Printed by E. Russell, [1775]). Compare Evans 14517, Ford 1810, Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 42936. This version prefaced the address with a note of its origins and timing: “Salem, Tuesday, July 19, 1775: This day, at noon, Captain John Derby, in a schooner, arrived here in six weeks from London, which he left the third of June, and brings advices to the second, among which is an Address to the British soldiery.” Other versions in this same genre also circulated in America and in London. See, for example, “Part of an Address to the British Soldiery, dated at New York, & Circulated throughout the Army in the Neighborhood of Boston,” Gentleman’s Magazine, London, July 1775.

58. “Prospect Hill. Bunker’s Hill,” Handbill, 26.5 cm × 10.9 cm [Cambridge or Watertown, Mass: unidentified printer, 1775?], MHS. For analysis of its making and use, see its feature article as the MHS “Object of the Month: Prospect Hill. Bunker’s Hill. Pyschological [sic] Warfare During the Siege of Boston,” April 2009, https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/prospect-hill-bunker-s-hill-pyschological-warfare-during-the-siege-of-boston-2009-04-01.

59. The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 16, 1775.

60. The Diary of Henry Bedinger, cited in MHS “Object of the Month.”

61. Peter Labilliere to George Washington, November 4, 1777.

62. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War: A Compilation from the Archives vol. 4 (Wright and Potter, 1898), 658.

12. CRAFTING FREEDOM

1. Independent Chronicle, December 19, 1777.

2. For more on Bradlee, see J. L. Bell, “David Bradlee: Windows Broken When I Got There,” Boston 1775, November 14, 2019, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/search/label/George%20Gailer.

3. As J. L. Bell aptly describes the Train under Crafts’ leadership, “Basically that regiment was how middle-aged Sons of Liberty from Boston’s mechanics class helped to fight the war.” Bell, “The Debate Over Newman and Pulling,” Boston 1775, April 18, 2018, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-debate-over-newman-and-pulling.html.

4. On Gray, see Kimberly S. Alexander, Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). On Dunckerley and Revere, see Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (Yale University Press for Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, 2000), 77–78.

5. Independent Chronicle, December 19, 1777. The same advertisement seeking volunteers for the Train was also published as a broadside, “To all gentlemen volunteers, who prefer liberty to slavery, and are hearty friends to the grand American cause” (Boston: Powars and Willis, 1777), New-York Historical Society.

6. Dunckerley enlisted in the Train in May 1776 and then, beginning in March 1777, joined the Continental Army in Colonel David Henley’s Additional Continental Regiment. He resigned in 1778 out of fear that, since he was never formally discharged from the British military, he would face execution “according to the Laws of Nations” if he were captured in battle. Joseph Dunckerley to George Washington, May 3, 1778, US National Archives, RG 93, manuscript file no. 20166, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-15-02-0168.

7. List of Deserters, The Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser, March 18, 1779.

8. On Black military participation in the American Revolution, see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); David Hackett Fisher, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (Simon and Schuster, 2022), 78–81; George Quintal Jr., Patriots of Color.… African Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road and Bunker Hill (National Park Service, 2002); Michael Lee Lanning, “African Americans and the American Revolution,” Routledge Handbook of the History of Race and the American Military (Routledge, 2016), 45–54; Gary B. Nash, “The African Americans’ Revolution,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford University Press, 2012), 250–270; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton University Press, 1992); Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2008); Douglas Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (Oxford University Press, 2009); Edward Countryman, Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

9. Powder Horn of Prince Simbo, no. 2009.14.1, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is unknown whether Simbo carved these decorations or someone else did it for him.

10. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light, 95–141.

11. Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2016); Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2006).

12. Norwich Packet, March 9, 1775. On Framingham and its larger context, see Robert Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 68–81.

13. Arthur Lee’s letter was quoted by Alexandre Innes in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, May 16, 1775, Naval Documents of the American Revolution, vol. 1 (Naval History Division, Department of the Navy, 1964), ed. William Bell Clark and William James Morgan, 346–348, 347.

14. Text of proclamation and poem introducing it from The Pennsylvania Journal; and the Weekly Advertiser, December 6, 1775.

15. T. J. Lockley, “David Margrett: A Black Missionary in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 3 (2012): 729–745; Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835 (University of Georgia Press, 2008); Joseph Rezek, “Early Black Evangelical Writing and the Limits of Print,” in African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800, ed. Rhondda Robinson Thomas (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 17–41. Lockley refers to him as Margrett rather than Margate, and I do the same. White people referred to him as Margate, but in his surviving correspondence, he refers to himself as Margrett.

16. William Piercy to the Countess of Huntingdon, January 24, 1775, A4 / 2 / 13, American Papers of the Countess of Huntingdon, Westminster College, Cambridge (hereafter Countess of Huntingdon Papers).

17. Lockley, “David Margrett.” David Margrett to the Countess of Huntingdon, n.d. (c. April 1774), F1 / 1221, Countess of Huntingdon Papers.

18. William Piercy to the Countess of Huntingdon [May 6, 7 & 8, 1775], A4 / 2 / 16, Countess of Huntingdon Papers.

19. James Habersham to Robert Keen, May 11, 1775. James Habersham, Letters of the Hon. James Habersham (Savannah Morning News Print, 1904), 244.

20. James Habersham to Robert Keen, May 11, 1775. Margrett was luckier than another free Black man, Thomas Jeremiah, who fell victim to white South Carolinians’ fears. See J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009). On Laurens and the reaction in Charleston to news of Lexington and Concord, see Parkinson, Common Cause, 85–87; Frey, Water from the Rock, 55–67. Among those who would have heard of his preachings was the then still-enslaved John Marrant, who became a much more famous Black preacher with close ties to Prince Hall and Black Freemasonry. On Marrant and Hall, see Joanna Brooks, “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 197–216.

21. Frey, Water from the Rock; Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 273–306; Sean Gallagher, “Black Refugees and the Legal Fiction of Military Manumission in the American Revolution,” Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 1 (2022): 140–159; Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

22. Massachusetts (Colony) Adjutant General Horatio Gates, “Instructions for the officers of several regiments of the Massachusetts-Bay forces, who are immediately to go upon the recruiting service… Given at the headquarters at Cambridge, this 10th day of July 1775” (Watertown, 1775), portfolio 38, folder 25, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.03802500.

23. For more on this same quality, particularly as it pertained to his stance on the issue of slavery, see Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (37Ink / Atria, 2017); François Furstenberg, “Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom: George Washington, Slavery, and Transatlantic Abolitionist Networks,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 247–286.

24. General Orders, December 30, 1775, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, 16 September 1775 – 31 December 1775, ed. Philander D. Chase (University Press of Virginia, 1987), 620, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0575.

25. George Washington to John Hancock, December 31, 1775, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, 622–626, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0579.

26. On Washington and his thinking, see Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington (Viking, 2020).

27. Phillis Wheatley to George Washington, October 26, 1775, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, 242, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0001.

28. Enclosure: Poem by Phillis Wheatley, October 26, 1775, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, 242–244, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0002.

29. David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 292–302.

30. The Pennsylvania Magazine: or, American Monthly Museum 2 (April 1776), 193.

31. Woody Holton argues for this interpretation in Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 2021), 210–211.

32. Bill of Sale for drumheads, Prince Hall to the Regiment of Artillery, April 24, 1777, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, https://honoringourpatriots.dar.org/e-pluribus-unum/african-americanpatriots/.

33. On class and politeness, see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Steven C. Bullock, Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1993). On respectability, class, and Masons, see Susanna Smith, “Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, and Material Culture in Boston, 1775–1870” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2021), 21.

34. Smith, “Reimagining Prince Hall,” 42.

35. In addition to Prince Hall, the founding members of the African Lodge were Cyrus Forbes, Bristol Stenzer, Thomas Sanderson, Prince Taylor, Cato Gardner, Boston Smith, Peter Bestes, Fortune Howard, Prince Reed, John Carter, Peter Freeman, Benjamin Tyler, Cuff Bufform, and Richard Tilledge.

36. On Black sailors, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2007); and W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997). On trades common to early Black Masons in Boston, see Smith, “Reimagining Prince Hall,” 40.

37. Countryman, Enjoy the Same Liberty, 91–92; Charles H. Wesley, Prince Hall: Life and Legacy (The United Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction, Prince Hall Affiliation, 1977); Chernoh Momodu Sesay Jr., “Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770–1807” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2006); Peter P. Hinks, “John Marrant and the Meaning of Early Black Freemasonry,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2007): 105–116; Chernoh M. Sesay, “The Dialectic of Representation: Black Freemasonry, the Black Public, and Black Historiography,” Journal of African American Studies 17, no. 3 (2013): 380–398; Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “Hidden in Plain Sight: African American Secret Societies and Black Freemasonry,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 622–637; Brooks, “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy”; Smith, “Reimagining Prince Hall.”

38. As Sesay eloquently puts it, “Freemasonry, an outgrowth of a black cosmopolitan consciousness, illustrated not a kind of autonomous cultural imperative but rather, a pragmatic recognition that mobility mattered and that the process of emancipation took place in local, regional, and international contexts.” Sesay, “Freemasons of Color,” 24–25.

39. To the Honorable Counsel & House of [Representa]tives for the State of Massachusetts Bay in General Court assembled, January 13, 1777, Massachusetts Archives, vol. 212: 132.

40. “Petition for freedom (manuscript copy) to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives,” [13] January 1777, Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/database/557; Sesay, “Black Roots of Abolition,” 127–129.

41. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War: A Compilation from the Archives, vol. 6 (Wright and Potter, 1899), 449.

42. “Notes on the Lake Country Tour, [31 May–7 June] 1791,” The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, 6 April 1791 – 16 March 1793, ed. Robert A. Rutland and Thomas A. Mason (University Press of Virginia, 1983), 25–30, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-14-02-0023.

43. Last Will and Testament of Prince Demah, March 11, 1778, admitted to probate, April 2, 1778, docket no. 16505, Suffolk County Probate Records, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston.

44. The men of Gray’s company who signed were John Adams, matross, gunner; Joshua Bates, matross, drummer; Ephraim Bullard, sergeant; Jonathan Hollis, corporal; Benjamin Hollis, matross; Joy Noah, gunner; John Spooner Barret, drummer; William Loring, matross; William Sadler, matross; Arthur Thomas, matross; Comfort Bird, fifer, Orderly Book of the Regiment of Artillery Raised for the Defence of the Town of Boston, Commanded by Col. Thomas Crafts from June 1777 to Dec 1778, Also Called the “Massachusetts’s State’s Train,” ed. James Kimball, Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, MA, vol. 13 (1876), 1876), 146–147.

45. The regiment did march to Rhode Island to fight the British at Tiverton in 1777, while Demah was enlisted, but it is likely he was among those who stayed behind to protect Boston, as he did not get the special bonus for going to Rhode Island that others in his regiment received.

46. Orderly Book, 13:127.

47. Orderly Book, 13:128–129.

48. Orderly Book, 13:117.

49. Orderly Book, 13:130.

50. Orderly Book, 13:134.

51. Orderly Book, 13:130.

52. Orderly Book, 13:137.

53. Orderly Book, 13:139.

54. Orderly Book, 13:141.

55. Orderly Book, 13:141.

56. Uniforms described by Paul Revere in his advertisement seeking the return of deserters from Crafts’s regiment, The Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser, March 18, 1779.

57. Orderly Book, 13:142.

58. In early 1779, late pay and low provisions inspired several officers of the regiment, including Crafts and Gray, to offer their resignation to the Massachusetts Council. Revere did not join them, which Michael Greenburg argues they took as a mark of his selfish ambition. Greenburg, The Court-Martial of Paul Revere (ForeEdge, 2014), 68–69.

59. Orderly Book, 13:143.

60. On American treatment of prisoners of war and its shifting nature over the course of the war, see Susan Brynne Long, “ ‘The Disagreeable Situation’: Prisoners of War and Local Governance in the American Revolution” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2024).

61. On the revolutionary-era prisoner of war experience in North America, see T. Cole Jones, Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Ken Miller, Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence (Cornell University Press, 2014).

62. For more on women and children as POWs, see Long, “The disagreeable situation.”

63. By the time war began between Britain and its North American colonies, ideas about “just war” and the proper conduct of it, including the treatment of prisoners of war, were centered on ideas about the law of nations, as disseminated, for example, in the work of Emerick de Vattel, The Law of Nations: Or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758). For more on proper conduct in just war as understood by British, French, and American forces (though not on Indigenous or African conceptions of the same) during the revolutionary era, see Glenn A. Moots and Philip Hamilton, eds., Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence, vol. 1 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018); Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865 (Oxford University Press, 2011).

64. Catherine M. Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Prisoners of War in England during the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 2 (April 1975): 261–294; Bob Ruppert, “Benjamin Franklin: ‘Our Salvation Depends on You,’ ” Journal of the American Revolution, May 23, 2017, https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/05/benjamin-franklin-salvation-depends/#_edn6.

65. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, May 7, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 24, May 1 through September 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1984), 43–45, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-24-02-0025.

66. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, [after 7 March 1777], The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 23, October 27, 1776, through April 30, 1777, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1983), 447–450, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-23-02-0291.

67. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, May 7, 1777.

68. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, November 10, 1777, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 25, October 1, 1777, through February 28, 1778, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1986), 149–151, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-25-02-0102.

69. Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Prisoners of War”; Ruppert, “Benjamin Franklin: ‘Our Salvation Depends on You.’ ”

70. Gardner Weld Allen, A Naval History of the American Revolution (Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 2:642–643. Among the ordinary seamen imprisoned in Old Mill Prison in Plymouth were two of Betsy Ross’s three husbands, Joseph Ashburn and John Claypoole. Ashburn died in prison, and when Claypoole was freed, he went to inform Ashburn’s widow, who soon became his own wife.

71. Public Advertiser, May 22, 1777, 1.

72. Ebenezer Platt to John Wilkes, July 23, 1777, John Wilkes Correspondence, vol. 6, 1776–1785, Add MS 30 872, British Library; Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Prisoners of War”; Ruppert, “Benjamin Franklin: ‘Our Salvation Depends on You.’ ”

73. Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Prisoners of War”; London Chronicle, November 4–6, 1777; Gentleman’s Magazine, XLVII (1777), 607–608.

74. Public Advertiser, March 16, 1778. Their marriage was also reported in Bath, although they mistakenly referred to Elizabeth Wright as “Miss Smith,” The Bath Chronicle, April 30, 1778.

75. Patience Wright to Benjamin Franklin, March 29, 1778, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 26, March 1 through June 30, 1778, ed. William B. Willcox (Yale University Press, 1987), 190–192, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-26-02-0140.

76. John Adams, [April 17. Fryday.], Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 4, Autobiography, Parts Two and Three, 1777–1780, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Harvard University Press, 1961), 62–63, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-04-02-0001-0050.

77. Sheldon S. Cohen, “The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt,” Journal of American Studies 18, no. 2 (August 1984): 255–274, 270–271.

78. Orderly Book, 13:129. On smallpox and its devastating effects during the Revolution, see Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (Hill and Wang, 2002).

79. Last Will and Testament of Prince Demah, March 11, 1778.

13. ARTISTS AT WAR WITH THE KING

1. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 2010); Trevor Fawcett, Voices of Eighteenth-Century Bath: An Anthology of Contemporary Texts Illustrating Events, Daily Life, and Attitudes at Britain’s Leading Georgian Spa (Ruton, 1995).

2. George William Fairfax to George Washington, March 2, 1775, The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 10, 21 March 1774 – 15 June 1775, ed. W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig (University Press of Virginia, 1995), 281–286, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0213.

3. George William Fairfax to George Washington, March 26, 1783, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-10930.

4. George William Fairfax to George Washington, August 3, 1778, The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 16, 1 July–14 September 1778, ed. David R. Hoth (University of Virginia Press, 2006), 234–236, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-16-02-0251.

5. George William Fairfax to George Washington, August 3, 1778.

6. Troy O. Bickham, “Sympathizing with Sedition? George Washington, the British Press, and British Attitudes during the American War of Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2002): 101–122.

7. The Pines temporarily moved to Bath when Robert Edge Pine inherited property there after his brother Simon, who had worked there as a miniature painter, died. The Bath Chronicle, September 3, 1772, 3.

8. Will of Robert Edge Pine, England and Wales, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills, 1384–1858; Class PROB 11; Piece: 1186, Probate Date 23 Dec 1789.

9. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors.

10. Philip Thicknesse, The New Prose Bath Guide, for the Year 1778 (London: Printed for the author), 48–49.

11. Thicknesse, The New Prose Bath Guide, for the Year 1778, 64.

12. Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge), circa 1774, NPG 1357, National Portrait Gallery, London; Benjamin West, Alderman John Sawbridge, 1772 portrait was destroyed but not before it was replicated in print form. See Thomas Watson, mezzotint after Benjamin West, Alderman John Sawbridge (London: Samuel Hooper, Walter Shropshire, Thomas Watson, 1772), no. 04 / 1914, Royal Academy of Art, London.

13. Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge), 1775, NPG 5856, National Portrait Gallery, London; James Caldwell, engraving after Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge), 1775, NPG D18086, National Portrait Gallery, London.

14. “Journell of Voyage from Newport in the Colony of Rhodes Island to London, Travels thro’ Many Parts of England & Scotland: began July 8th, 1771 by Henry Marchant,” May 31, 1772, facsimile, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

15. Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings, ed. Max Skjönsberg (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 4:26.

16. Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings, 4:32–33.

17. “Journell of Voyage from Newport.”

18. Thicknesse, The New Prose Bath Guide, for the Year 1778, 64.

19. Figure (Catharine Macaulay), Porcelain, Derby Porcelain Works (Probable maker), after Robert Edge Pine and James Caldwell, 1777–80, no. 1957.1393, Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont, Winterthur Museum, Delaware.

20. “Proposal for Engraving by Subscription, A Print,” Prospectus, Robert Edge Pine to George William Fairfax, April 16, 1778, broadside printed and signed by R. E. Pine, with G. W. Fairfax Esq name filled in and order details, in ink, BATH, March 25, 1778, box 6, folder: 1778.04.16, Identifier: 2016-SC-006, Historic Manuscripts Collection, The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.

21. “Proposal for Engraving by Subscription.”

22. “Proposal for Engraving by Subscription.”

23. George William Fairfax to George Washington, March 26, 1783.

24. William Fairfax to Anne Harrison Fairfax, May 24, 1731, Fairfax of Cameron MSS, Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm, Library of Virginia (location of originals currently unknown).

25. George Washington by Robert Edge Pine, 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

26. David Henry, An historical account of the curiosities of London and Westminster (London, 1785), 51.

27. Henry, An historical account, 51.

28. London newspaper Royal Academy notice, March 11, 1776, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1 [likely compiled by Joseph Faringdon], 55, Library of the Royal Academy of Art.

29. London newspaper Royal Academy review, May 2, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1, 65.

30. London newspaper Royal Academy review, May 2, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793 vol. 1, 66.

31. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, MDCCLXXX. (1780). The Twelfth (London: Printed by T. Cadell, Printer to the Royal Academy, 1780), 6, 7, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/exhibition-catalogue/ra-sec-vol12-1780.

32. London newspaper Royal Academy review, May 2, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793 vol. 1, 65.

33. London newspaper Royal Academy review, May 2, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793 vol. 1, 66.

34. The London Courant, May 3, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1, 74; Holger Hoock, “George III and His Geographical Collection,” in The Wisdom of George III: Papers from a Symposium at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace June 2004, ed. Jonathan Marsden (Royal Collection Publications, 2005), 254–261.

35. “A CARD,” for the Public Advertiser, June 2, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1, 65.

36. “A LOVER of the ARTS,” May 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1, 70.

37. London Courant, May 3, 1780, clipping in Royal Academy Critiques & c. 1769–1793, vol. 1.

38. On British politics and sentiment about the war in spring 1780, see Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 148–180.

39. Virginia Gazette, May 26, 1772.

40. Paula Sampson Preston, “The Severed Head of Charles I of England Its Use as a Political Stimulus,” Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 1–13; Andrew Lipman, “A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2008): 3–28.

41. “Observations on the Pictures Now in Exhibition at the Royal Academy, Spring Gardens, and Mr. CHRISTIE’s, by the author of the Remarks on the English Language” (London: printed for John Bell, near Exeter-Change, in the Strand; and G. Riley, in Queen Street, Berkly-Square. 1771), 37.

42. “Observations on the Pictures Now in Exhibition,” 37.

43. “A Catalogue of Pictures in His Majesty’s Palace at Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, Taken in the Year 1776,” GEO / ADD / 19 / 28, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Georgian Papers Online, https://gpp.rct.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=ADD19%2f30, cited with permission of His Majesty King Charles III. They were by Guido or the School of Guido, and listed as being in The Queen’s Presence Chamber, The Queen’s Audience Chamber, and The Queen’s Bed Chamber. At some point, Charlotte moved one of them to Kensington Palace, where it was in her bedchamber, above her Chinese writing desk. See RICHARD CATTERMOLE (1795?–1868), The Queen’s Bed Chamber, Kensington Palace. c. 1818 (Prepared for one of the plates in William Henry Pyne’s History of the Royal Residences (1816–1819). Engraved by R. Reeve, the print published 1.8.1818, RCIN 922159, Royal Collections, cited with permission of His Majesty King Charles III. For more on the queen’s Chinese furniture, see Kelly Fu, “From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Making in China’: The Hidden Ecologies of an Eighteenth-Century Chinese Export Shrine-Desk” (MA thesis, University of Delaware, 2022).

44. Esther deBerdt Reed, “Sentiments of an American Woman” (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1780).

45. “Journals of Capt. John Montresor, 1757–1778,” in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1881, vol. 14 (New York: Printed for the Society, 1882), 123–124.

46. “The Heads of the Nation in a Right Situation,” Etching, Pub. by M[ary] Darly (39) Strand, May 1, 1780, no. 1868,0808.4675, British Museum. Although they do not make the point for this print, elsewhere in their collection, the British Museum curators note that Matthias or Matthew Darly died in January 1780, which means that his wife was the one creating these May 1780 prints. See “Curator’s comments,” Yankee-Doodle, or the American Satan, no. 1868,0808.13339, British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0808-13339.

47. John Williams (“Anthony Pasquin”), Memoirs of the Royal Academicians (London, 1796), note on entry on John Hoppner, 92. See Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 131–133.

48. Williams, Memoirs of the Royal Academicians, note on entry on John Hoppner, 92. See Sellers, Patience Wright, 131–133.

49. Thicknesse, The New Prose Guide to Bath for the Year 1778, 50–51.

50. Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Macmillan, 1999).

51. The interceptors recorded that “the following extracts were taken” including “Doctor Franklin from Mrs. Wright, The Wicked Ministry have endeavored to pretend that 5000 provincials had come over,” ADD MSS 34 413, Auckland Papers, vol. IIB, folios 238–480, 423 [1779], British Library.

52. Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with His Correspondence with Public Men and Reminiscences and Incidents of the Revolution, ed. Winslow Watson (Dana and Company, 1856), 118.

53. John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), 19–20. For a look at similar support for America outside the metropolis that did not persist after 1775 (at least in terms of formal petitions to the king), see James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Mercer University Press, 1986).

54. Peter Labilliere to Benjamin Franklin, December 8, 1781, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 36, November 1, 1781, through March 15, 1782, ed. Ellen R. Cohn (Yale University Press, 2001), 222–225, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-36-02-0147.

55. Brad A. Jones, “ ‘In Favour of Popery’: Patriotism, Protestantism, and the Gordon Riots in the Revolutionary British Atlantic,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 79–102.

56. See Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2006), 56–70.

57. Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

58. Ignatius Sancho to John Spink, June 6, 1780, https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/letter2.htm.

59. Jones, “In Favour of Popery”; Ian Goodwood and John Seed, eds., The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

60. Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan, June 15, 1780, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 32, March 1 through June 30, 1780, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Yale University Press, 1996), 528–530, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-32-02-0376.

61. John Adams, “Travels, and Negotiations,” December 1777 and / or December 1, 1806, The Adams Papers, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 4, Autobiography, Parts Two and Three, 1777–1780, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Harvard University Press, 1961), 1–6, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-04-02-0001-0001.

62. “The Journal of Capture and Confinement in the Tower of London from August 13, 1780, to December 6, 1781,” The Papers of Henry Laurens, ed. David C. Chesnutt and C. James Taylor (University of South Carolina Press, 2000); Bob Ruppert, “Henry Laurens’ 15 Months in the Tower,” Journal of the American Revolution, September 23, 2015, https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/09/henry-laurens-15-months-in-the-tower/.

63. Amanda L. Tyler, “Habeas Corpus and the American Revolution,” California Law Review 103, no. 3 (2015): 635–698, 687–688.

64. John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminiscences, and Letters of John Trumbull, from 1756 to 1843 (Wiley and Putnam, 1841), 75–76.

65. For more on this portrait, and a painting that more realistically depicts William Lee, see Zara Anishanslin, “Intertwined Lives: Artists Employed Specific Styles When Depicting Enslaved Manservant William Lee,” Trend & Tradition Magazine, Colonial Williamsburg, Summer 2023.

66. Trumbull, Autobiography, 75–76; Paul Staiti, Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Artists’ Eyes (Bloomsbury Press, 2016), ch. 4, esp. 68–70.

67. Staiti, Of Arms and Artists, 70; Trumbull, Autobiography, 320.

68. William Roberts, “Type-Written Copy of Mrs. Cromarty’s Notes Concerning Her Grandfather John Hoppner, R.A.,” 5, Add MS 38510 N, British Library. On the long history of Americans of genius desiring to go to Paris (albeit one set later in time), see David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (Simon and Schuster, 2011).

14. QUEEN OF SLUTS, LADIES OF LIBERTY

1. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, MDCCLXXX. (1780). The Twelfth (London: Printed by T. Cadell, Printer to the Royal Academy, 1780), 7, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/exhibition-catalogue/ra-sec-vol12-1780.

2. William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in America, vol. 1 (George P. Scott and Company, 1834), 135.

3. William Roberts, “Type-Written Copy of Mrs. Cromarty’s Notes Concerning Her Grandfather John Hoppner, R.A.,” 5, Add MS 38510 N, British Library, 3–4.

4. Hoppner related these details of his childhood to fellow artist Joseph Farington in 1795. The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. 2, ed. Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1978), 286.

5. John Chamberlaine (or Chamberlain, as it is also spelled in sources) was a page of the backstairs, 1783–1799. John Christopher Sainty and R. O. Bucholz, compilers, Officials of the Royal Household, 1660–1837: Department of the Lord Chamberlain and Associated Offices, vol. 1 (University of London, Institute of Historical Research, 1997), 84.

6. The typical life of such choir boys and the group’s history is described in David Baldwin, The Chapel Royal Ancient & Modern (Gerald Duckworth, 1990).

7. Memoirs of the Court of George III, vol. 1, The Memoirs of Charlotte Papendiek (1765–1840), ed. Michael Kassler (Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 97.

8. Hoppner was appointed Portrait Painter to the Prince of Wales in 1789, Portrait Painter to the King in 1792 (the same year he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy), and made an academician in 1795. Jane Roberts, ed., George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting, and Court Taste (Royal Collection, 2024). Hoppner family memory comes down both for and against the story of John Hoppner’s kingly parentage, and there is no evidence for the story of his parentage by the king. One descendant noted, in a convenient blending of two popular legends about the king’s love life, that “it was generally believed that John Hoppner was a natural son of the King” and that “Hannah Lightfoot, the Quakeress was his Mother.” Roberts, “Type-Written Copy of Mrs. Cromarty’s Notes,” 4–5. His son Belgrave Hoppner, however, dismissed the rumor, noting that “You ask if I have ever heard that my father was, as you express it, a very near relation of George III. I don’t remember to have heard this amongst other ridiculous reports circulated respecting him arising from the fact of his having been brought up in the Palace. I always heard he was the son of the Physician to the Household who in that capacity had accompanied George II to England, and that he was born only a month after the arrival of his parents into this country.” Roberts, “Type-Written Copy of Mrs. Cromarty’s Notes,” 11–12. However, an interesting side note comes up in the medical history of one of Hoppner’s own children, Wilson Lascelles Hoppner, who was like his father a portrait painter. He experienced mental illness after suffering sunstroke in France. Exposure to extreme sunlight can trigger certain forms of porphyria, the same often genetically inherited disease that afflicted George III.

9. Joseph Wright, Yankee-Doodle, or the American Satan (London: M[ary] Darly, 1780), no. 1868,0808.13339, British Museum.

10. Blake Z. Grindon, “The Death of Jane McCrea: Sovereignty and Violence in the Northeastern Borderlands of the American Revolution” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2023).

11. “The CLOSET” (1775), Colonial Williamsburg, https://emuseum.history.org/objects/16049/the-closet; “The Commissioners [of the 1778 Carlisle Peace Commission]” (1778), Graphic Arts Collection, Special Collections, Finestone Library, Princeton University, https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2021/01/28/the-commissioners-of-the-1778-carlisle-peace-commission/.

12. J. H. Chapman, ed., The register book of marriages belonging to the parish of St. George, Hanover Square, in the county of Middlesex, vol. 1, 1725 to 1787, Harleian Society Register Section, 11 (1886): 324.

13. Roberts, “Type-Written Copy of Mrs. Cromarty’s Notes,” 10–11. Hoppner’s “Address to the Public” printed in the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, July 2, 1785, publicized his assertion that West was responsible for Hoppner’s temporary loss of royal patronage when he married Phoebe Wright.

14. Memoirs of the Court of George III, vol. 1, The Memoirs of Charlotte Papendiek, 97–98; Roberts, ed., George III & Queen Charlotte.

15. Benjamin Franklin to Patience Wright, May 4, 1779, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 29, March 1 through June 30, 1779, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Yale University Press, 1992), 431–433, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-29-02-0364.

16. For Franklin’s persona in London, see George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of American’s Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2016). As Jennifer Kokai puts it, “When Wright moved to England, she began performing the very qualities that colonists found objectionable, creating a renowned image of a savage American savant” (52–53). Jennifer A. Kokai, “Molding a Heroine: Patience Wright and Transatlantic Notions of American Female Patriotism,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 21, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 49–66.

17. “Franklin avait paru a la cour avec le costume d’un cultivateur américain: ses cheveux plats sans poudre, son chapeau rond, son habit de drap brun, contrastaient avec les habits paillets, brodes, les coiffeures poudrées et embaumantes des courtesan de Versailles. Cetter nouveauté charma toutes les tetes vives des femmes francaises.” Madame Campan’s Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette: reine de France et de Navarre, ed. Fs. Barriere (Baudouin frères, 1823), 232. Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, quoted in Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (Yale University Press, 1962), 73. This image of Franklin’s primitive morals, of course, also appealed to a nation captivated by the ideas of Rousseau. For fashion at the French court, see Kimberley Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (Yale University Press, 2015).

18. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Octagon Books, 1966). Grindon, “The Death of Jane McCrea,” details the fascination the French had with all things American and how it permeated their popular culture (in this case via the death of Jane McCrea).

19. Silas Deane to John Jay, December 3, 1776, The Papers of John Jay, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/jay/ldpd:79328.

20. “A la Chambre de la Police dans Bow-Street Convent-Garden, on examina Mercredi dernier le nommé Ebenezer Platt, Américain, qui, sur une accusation de trahison intentée contre lui, sont envoyé en prison,” Le Courier, January 28, 1777.

21. Silas Deane to John Jay, December 3, 1776.

22. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 10, 1777, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, June 1776 – March 1778, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Harvard University Press, 1963), 235–237, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0182.

23. Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Benjamin Franklin (1778), no. 32.100.132, The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

24. Edward Everett Hale, Franklin in France (Roberts Brothers, 1887); James A. Leith, “Le Culte de Franklin en France avant et pendant la Revolution Française,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 48, no. 226 (1976): 543–571, Franklin’s portrait above mantels, 558.

25. Benjamin Franklin to Sarah Bache (Sally), June 3, 1779, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 29, March 1 through June 30, 1779, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Yale University Press, 1992), 612–615, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-29-02-0496.

26. June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America; or, Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” Poetry Foundation Online Journal: Features, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68628/the-difficult-miracle-of-black-poetry-in-america; David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 331–333.

27. G. Boulinier, “Une femme anatomiste au siècle des Lumières: Marie Marguerite Biheron (1719–1795),” Histoire des sciences medicales 35, no. 4 (2001): 411–423; Nina Rattner Gelbart, Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021).

28. Margaret Carlyle, “Artisans, Patrons, and Enlightenment: The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge in Paris, St. Petersburg, and London,” in Bodies Beyond Borders: Moving Anatomies, 1750–1950, ed. Kaat Wils, Raf De Bont, and Sokhieng Au (Leuven University Press, 2017), 23–49, anecdote about carriage and garden, 29–30. See also Comtesse de Mme de Genlis, Mémoirs inédits de Madame la Comtesse de Genlis, pour servir à l’histoire des dix-huitième et dix-neuvième siècles, vol. 1, ed. Stéphanie Félicité (Paris: Imprimerie G. Schulze, 1825), 253–254.

29. Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with His Correspondence with Public Men and Reminiscences and Incidents of the Revolution, ed. Winslow Watson (Dana and Company, 1856), 119–120. The incident is discussed in Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 156–158.

30. On celebrations for the dauphin in America, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 1997). That wax baby dauphin, in the collections of the Nantucket Historical Society, on display at the Whaling Museum, Nantucket, and is the second figure found in Chapter 5 in this book.

31. Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, 120–121.

32. Benjamin Franklin to Patience Wright, May 4, 1779.

33. Elkanah Watson to William Temple Franklin, December 25, 1782, Mss.B.F86, William Temple Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

34. Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, 121–122.

35. Peter Labilliere to Benjamin Franklin, December 8, 1781, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 36, November 1, 1781, through March 15, 1782, ed. Ellen R. Cohn (Yale University Press, 2001), 222–225, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-36-02-0147.

36. Troy Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 158–182.

37. Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (W. W. Norton, 2016); Paul Staiti, Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Artists’ Eyes (Bloomsbury Press, 2016).

38. Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, 178–179.

39. George William Fairfax to George Washington, March 26, 1783, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-10930.

40. Staiti, Of Arms and Artists, 161–197.

41. John Quincy Adams, entry for [November 1783], Diary of John Quincy Adams, vol. 1, November 1779 – March 1786, ed. Robert J. Taylor and Marc Friedlaender (Harvard University Press, 1981), 198–206, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/03-01-02-0005-0012.

42. Patience Wright to John Adams, November 1, 1783, The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 15, June 1783–January 1784, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert F. Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Mary T. Claffey, and Karen N. Barzilay (Harvard University Press, 2010), 337, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-15-02-0166.

43. Abigail Adams 2d to John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1785–August 11, 1785, The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 6, December 1784 – December 1785, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Harvard University Press, 1993), 204–223, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-06-02-0072.

44. Abigail Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, July 6–30, 1784, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 5, October 1782 – November 1784, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Harvard University Press, 1993), 358–386, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-05-02-0204.

45. Franklin sat for his portrait by Joseph Wright, and Watson “had extended aid to her son [Joseph Wright] at Nantes, and given him a free passage in one of our ships to America. Her gratitude was unbounded.” Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, 119.

46. Monroe Fabian, Joseph Wright, American Artist, 1756–1793 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 41–42.

47. Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Powel Portrait of Washington by Joseph Wright,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, October 1972, 420.

48. Joseph Wright, Portrait of George Washington (1783), Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

49. George Washington to Solms, January 3, 1784, The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 1, 1 January 1784 –17 July 1784, ed. W. W. Abbot (University Press of Virginia, 1992), 8–9, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0005.

50. Thomas Jefferson to Isaac Barre, July 11, 1785, Series 1: Correspondence, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib001153/.

51. Patience Lovell Wright to George Washington, December 8, 1783, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-12156.

52. Patience Wright to Thomas Jefferson, August 14, 1785, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 8, 25 February–31 October 1785, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton University Press, 1953), 380–381, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0303.

53. Patience Lovell Wright to John Adams and John Jay, March 8, 1783, The Selected Papers of John Jay, vol. 3, 1782–1784, ed. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll (University of Virginia Press, 2013), 332–333, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jay/01-03-02-0117.

54. Echeverria, Mirage in the West.

55. Patience Wright to Thomas Jefferson, August 14, 1785.

56. Patience Lovell Wright to John Jay, December 8, 1783, The Selected Papers of John Jay, vol. 3, 529–530, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jay/01-03-02-0217.

57. Patience Wright to Thomas Jefferson, August 14, 1785.

58. Daily Advertiser (New York), May 16, 1786, cited in Sellers, Patience Wright, 220–221.

59. Robert Edge Pine, Patience Wright, c. 1782, no. NPG.86.168, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.86.168. Originally attributed to John Hoppner, it was in his possession until 1810, when he died.

60. Virginia Gazette, May 26, 1772.

61. Robert Edge Pine to John Vaughan, April 29, 1784, Ferdinand J. Dreer Collection, 85.2 Volume: Painters & Engravers III, 113–114, box 178, folder 31, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

62. George William Fairfax to George Washington, August 23, 1784, The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 2, 18 July 1784 – 18 May 1785, ed. W. W. Abbot (University Press of Virginia, 1992), 51–55, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0050.

63. George William Fairfax to George Washington, August 23, 1784.

64. “State of Pennsylvania in General Assembly,” Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), September 25, 1789.

65. “Mr. Pine,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), October 25, 1784.

66. “Mr. Pine,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), November 15, 1784.

67. Pine’s friendship with Samuel Vaughan, who was landscaping the State House square at the time, may have helped facilitate the deal, according to Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 61–62. Congress Voting Independence was later finished by Edward Savage. Charles Willson Peale’s popular Philadelphia Museum would not be installed in the State House until 1802.

68. “Postscript,” Pennsylvania Evening Herald (Philadelphia), September 3, 1785; “morbidly irritable” quote from John Hopkinson, quoted in Charles Henry Hart, “ ‘The Congress Voting Independence,’ a Painting by Robert Edge Pine and Edward Savage in the Hall of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 29, no. 1 (1905): 9.

69. Ryan K. Smith, Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder (Yale University Press, 2014), 90.

70. Joseph Jackson, Market Street, Philadelphia: The Most Historic Highway in America, Its Merchants and Its Story (Joseph Jackson, 1918), 223–224.

71. Jean Antoine Houdon, “Benjamin Franklin,” marble sculpture, 1788, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/208578; ‘ “Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser (Philadelphia), June 2, 1786. Jackson, Market Street, Philadelphia, 106–109; “Mr. Pine’s Pictures,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), December 18, 1786. The house is described in “To Be Sold,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), October 21, 1790. On Pine, see Robert G. Stewart, Robert Edge Pine: British Portrait Painter in America, 1784–1788 (Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1979).

72. A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures Painted by Robert Edge Pine (Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1784).

73. On Peale and his museum, see Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (W. W. Norton, 1908); David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). On museum culture more broadly in the early republic, see Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Ryan Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations represented as perfect as possible’: Museum Mannequins and Constructions of Race in the Early American Republic” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2023).

74. Rembrandt Peale, Reminiscences. The Crayon 1 (1855), 22.

75. Robert Edge Pine to George Washington, December 16, 1785, George Washington Papers, Series 4, General Correspondence, 1697–1799, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw4.095_0968_0970/?st=gallery.

76. “Mr. Greenleaf,” New-York Journal, March 12, 1788.

77. Rembrandt Peale, Reminiscences. The technique does not hold up well over time without help. In some of Pine’s portraits, at the Maryland Historical Society, for example, the smaller canvas of the head is peeling away from the background.

78. Hart, “The Congress Voting Independence,” 9.

79. “State of Pennsylvania in General Assembly,” Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), September 25, 1789.

80. Hart, “ ‘The Congress Voting Independence,’ ” 9; “By Virtue of a Writ,” Federal Gazette (Philadelphia), March 20, 1792.

81. “Boarding-School for Young Ladies,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), December 16, 1788.

82. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2, ed. Charles T. Cullen et al. (Princeton University Press, 1986), 233; Maria Jefferson (Eppes) to Martha Jefferson Randolph, June 3, 1792, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/556.

83. “Bowen’s Exhibition of Wax-Work & Paintings,” Federal Gazette (Philadelphia), August 31, 1792; Daniel Bowen, “A Descriptive Catalogue of Bowen’s Exhibition of Wax-Work and Paintings,” September 4, 1792, Broadside Cb4a 1792, Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

84. Sheldon S. Cohen, “The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt,” Journal of American Studies 18, no. 2 (August 1984): 255–274.

85. “Wax Work, Large as Life,” Georgia Gazette (Savannah), March 26, 1789; “Wax-Work,” Daily Advertiser (New York), October 19, 1785. Some of the figures are gleaned from the 1789 catalog of Bowen’s Savannah tour as he toured with Platt’s figures, since he did not make his own until later in the 1790s. For more on Bowen, see Bachman, “ ‘Characters of… several nations represented as perfect as possible.’ ”

86. These two tableaux were advertised by Daniel Bowen when he took Elizabeth Wright Platt’s waxworks on tour in the South. “Wax Work, Large as Life,” Georgia Gazette (Savannah), March 29, 1789.

87. “New-York,” Daily Advertiser (New York), April 7, 1786.

88. “New-York,” Daily Advertiser (New York), July 5, 1788.

89. “Wax-Work,” Connecticut Journal (New Haven), October 3, 1787.

90. New-York Journal, and Weekly Register, September 17, 1789.

91. Cohen, “The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt,” 273.

92. “Wax Work,” Daily Advertiser (New York), May 22, 1788; Loyd Haberly, “The Long Life of Daniel Bowen,” New England Quarterly 32, no. 3 (September 1959): 320–332, 321.

93. “Bowen’s Exhibition of Wax-Work & Paintings,” Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), March 2, 1793; “Demolition of the Wax Work,” Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser (Philadelphia), October 22, 1791.

94. Fabian, Joseph Wright, 59–61.

95. Ashli White, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2023).

96. “Died,” National Gazette (Philadelphia), September 14, 1793.

97. Phoebe Hoppner [mislisted as Hoffner] to Sarah Franklin Bache, January 1, 1794, Sarah Franklin Bache Papers, B B1245, American Philosophical Society.

EPILOGUE

1. Many more of Pine’s paintings, mostly his portraits from both Britain and America, survive than do Wright’s sculptures, as they were in private hands rather than in his museum collection. For example, his portraits of four of Martha Washington’s grandchildren were hanging on the wall at Mount Vernon when Washington died. They hang there still. But the artist who made them is not a familiar name to most people who see them today.

2. Unidentified [or, as is recorded on the back of the letter, “anonyme”] to Benjamin Franklin, November 16 [labeled as such in the American Philosophical Society (APS) finding aids though the letter itself appears to be dated December instead] 1785, XLIV, 76, Mss.B.F85, Benjamin Franklin Papers, APS. Pennsylvania gave Paine money and New York gave him land in recognition of his contributions and to help him with his financial situation. My certainty that it was Rachel Wells who wrote the anonymous letter stems from the similarities in the wording and pleas (including a reference to the same biblical story in Ecclesiastes) that also appear in Wells’s petition to the Continental Congress, cited below.

3. On defining women’s patriotism, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997).

4. Petition of Rachel Wells, May 18, 1786, Papers of the Continental Congress, M-247, roll 56, item 42: VIII, 354–355.

5. On compensation and pensions for Black soldiers, see Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

6. Christian Barnes to unknown correspondents [“My dear good girls”], before July 1784, vol. 1 “Legends & Letters,” Murray-Robbins Family Papers, Ms N-1157, Massachusetts Historical Society.

7. Christian Barnes to Mrs. Robbins, March 17, 1784, Christian Arbuthnot Barnes Correspondence, MSS 11841, Library of Congress.

8. Patience Lovell Wright to John Adams and John Jay, March 8, 1783, The Selected Papers of John Jay, vol. 3, 1782–1784, ed. Elizabeth M. Nuxoll (University of Virginia Press, 2013), 332–333, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jay/01-03-02-0117.

9. One has only to look at most state public school curriculum guidelines to see the overwhelming emphasis on exactly this idea of a Patriot / Founder. As pointed out in the notes to this book’s Introduction, there always has been scholarship complicating this popular image, beginning with the three-volume publication by Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805).

10. “George Washington’s Last Will and Testament, 9 July 1799,” The Papers of George Washington, Retirement Series, vol. 4, 20 April 1799 – 13 December 1799, ed. W. W. Abbot (University Press of Virginia, 1999), 479–511, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-04-02-0404-0001.

11. Phillis Wheatley, “To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works,” in Poems on Various Subjects (1773), reproduced in Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin, 2001), 59–60.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE IDEA for this book began with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the company of graduate students from the City University of New York and historian Peter Mancall back in 2015. It is only fitting that my acknowledgments begin here, too. Thank you to all the students—not just at CUNY but at the Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and the University of Delaware—who sharpened my thinking and listened to me process my research in lectures and seminars. It was partly my wish to write the type of history I hoped you would want to read that inspired this project. And thank you to my brilliant friend Peter Mancall, who suggested that my next book might start with Prince Demah’s portrait of William Duguid hanging in the American Wing at the Met. How right (as usual) he was. I am grateful for his insight and support along the way. I also have immense gratitude for the talented museum staff at the Met and the other museums and caretakers of art and objects critical to this work.

These include (but are not limited to) the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery of London, the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of African American History (also at the Smithsonian), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Winterthur Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Collections of the Ladies Association of Mount Vernon, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, the Concord Museum, Hingham Historical Society, Colonial Williamsburg, the Nantucket Historical Association, the Royal Academy of Art, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and the John Carter Brown Library. Without their curatorial, exhibitions, conservation, and collections management skills, historians like me who study history through things would have very few things to research. If you have enjoyed this book, please consider supporting a museum or historic site—many are critically underfunded today, and the work they do uplifts us all.

The same should be said for archives, libraries, and culturally oriented not-for-profits writ large. I owe thanks for support in the form of both funding and generous sharing of staff expertise to many such institutions. I thank the New-York Historical Society (especially Valerie Paley), the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library (especially Emily Guthrie and Catharine Dann Roeber), the David Library for the American Revolution, the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon (especially Samantha Snyder), the Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library Company, the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Library at the Victoria & Albert, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (especially Glenda Goodman, Whitney Martinko, Karin Wulf, and the other participants of our Scholars’ Workshop), the Royal Oak Foundation and the Attingham Trust (especially Rita Grudzien, Elizabeth Jamieson, and the Class of 2017), and the American Antiquarian Society (especially Paul Erikson and the library staff who graciously pulled every almanac published in America between 1765 and 1783 without batting an eye). I also got inspired anew while working on this project from talented people doing public history. Among these are the editors of the “Made by History” series, the editors of Colonial Williamsburg’s Trend and Tradition magazine (who gave me a place to publish longer thoughts on William Lee than fit into this manuscript), and to Lin-Manuel Miranda and the production team that brought me on to serve as Material Culture Consultant for “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”

Fittingly, a transatlantic fellowship program was critical to the development and research of this book. I am grateful to the Mount Vernon–Georgian Papers Programme Fellowship at Mount Vernon, the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, and Department of History, King’s College London, with special thanks to Doug Bradburn, Adam Erby, and Susan Schoelwer at Mount Vernon; Andrew Brown, Kate Heard, and Oliver Walton at Windsor Castle; and the late Arthur Burns at King’s College. I initially started thinking about the broad historical context for this book while on a Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, where Toby Ditz modeled what an inspiring female mentor looks like. My intellectual thinking about what revolution means and why owes much to a fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, with heartfelt thanks to David Bell and gratitude to Michael Blaakman, Divya Cherian, Wendy Warren, and my cohort of fellow Fellows. I found much inspiration in my time as a Barra Sabbatical Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and thank the multigenerational community there (especially Daniel Richter, Laura Keenan Spero, and all of my fellow Fellows) for modeling how to decolonize the study of early America while retaining your sense of humor at the same time. I enjoyed an invigorating stint as a Mellon Fellow in the Visual Culture Seminar at the Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Center, City University of New York. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Mellon / ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship grant in tandem with the Museum of the American Revolution. Special thanks to Hannah Boettcher and Scott Stephenson, and to one of my favorite people to talk to about the American Revolution, Philip Mead. The Mellon / ACLS Fellowship also funded elements of my Revolutionary Atlantic graduate course, and I am grateful to all of the smart and passionate graduate students who took it with me. And finally, as I write this, I do so from the comfort of the American Philosophical Society, where I am on a generous fellowship through the David Center for the American Revolution. Thanks to the staff here (especially Brenna Holland, Adrianna Link, and Patrick Spero), my fellow Fellows, and to Benjamin Franklin for the excellent idea to found the institution in the first place.

Unlike too many of my fellow humanities scholars in an age of rising contingent employment, I was privileged to research and write this book as a tenure-track and then tenured faculty member. I am grateful to my wonderful colleagues in the History Departments at the College of Staten Island–CUNY (especially John Dixon, Eric Ivison, and Jonathan Sassi) and the University of Delaware (UD) for their unwavering support and modeling of generous collegial and intellectual behavior, with thanks to Eve Buckley, Rebecca Davis, Dael Norwood, Ram Rawat, David Suisman, and Owen White for especial camaraderie, and to Alison Parker for championing my fellowship causes. I also thank the Art History Department at UD for letting me be part of their world, with particular gratitude to my fellow early Americanists Wendy Bellion and Jennifer Van Horn. And thanks to my co-professor Sarah Wasserman, who inspired me anew in all things material culture. I benefited from the work of graduate research assistants who are brilliant early Americanists in their own right: Ryan Bachman, Laura Earls, Blake Grindon, and Susan Brynne Long. I also benefited over the years from friendship, discussions, and sage suggestions from Joe Adelman, Andaleeb Banta, Denver Brunsman, Christian Crouch, Flora Fraser, Marisa Fuentes, Amanda Glesmann, Emma Hart, Amy Henderson, Amanda Herbert, the late Bernie Herman (my forever mentor), Woody Holton, Christopher Lukasik (a special shout out for making the point that this is about the whole museum itself), Anna Marley, Timothy McCall, Michelle and Roderick McDonald, Jill Pederson, Susan Holloway Scott, T. K. Smith, Christina Snyder, Nora Slonimsky, and Serena Zabin. Jessica Roney, thank you for talking about early America and helping me to sing again. Many other people helped me with this project in ways big and small. If I encountered you while researching this book and thanked you, that gratitude came from my heart.

Researching a book is the unequivocally fun part. Writing one has more ups and downs. I am grateful to the many smart and insightful people who helped me with the writing stage. Parts of this book were discussed at: the Princeton University Davis Seminar (special thanks to Sarah Knott for her insightful comments), the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn (special thanks to Sarah Barringer Gordon for her generous and generative follow-up conversation), and a private workshop funded by the David Center and the American Philosophical Society and kindly hosted by Brendan McConville. In that workshop, I had the privilege of hearing comments from some of the most brilliant scholars in my field(s) today. Christopher L. Brown, Scott Heerman, Amanda Vickery, and David Waldstreicher all offered thoughts that made this book much better. My first editor at Harvard University Press, Kathleen McDermott, was also there, and I can’t thank her enough for “getting” this project from the start. I am grateful to my fabulous agent, Christopher Rogers, for connecting me to her and for helping my ideas shine. At Harvard University Press, I have had the pleasure of working with another talented editor, Emily Silk, whose insights and edits have wowed me from the start (special thanks to Emily for solving the title problem that stumped so many smart people before you). Gratitude to designer Madeline Partner for the stunning cover design. The eagle eyes of editors Kate Brick and Anne McGuire made this a much sharper book. Also at HUP, Sana Mohtadi, Jillian Quigley, and Stephanie Vyce were models of efficiency. I am grateful for everyone at the press who helped bring this book to publication. The two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press offered insightful critiques and gratifying encouragement: thank you. Without in any way diminishing the contributions made by these smart, insightful readers, however, there is one reader without whom (it is no exaggeration to say) this book would not exist, and that is my amazing writing partner, Joanna Cohen. I will say no more because my gratitude to you, Jo, is inexpressible.

I dedicate this book to my father and stepmother, both talented artists themselves, for the years of practical and emotional support that enabled me to travel so often to Europe to research this book. I will forever cherish our adventures together both there and on our favorite Bainbridge Island beach. Thanks to my brother, Jason, for his support. I would not make my way through this world without the support of my Delta Loves—I love y’all. Meg and John Bristow, Abby Thompson, and Deborah Wilkens, I am grateful for our long friendships and your hospitality over the years. Thank you to the two people who make life meaningful and happy every day, my children who are children no more, Bryson Andrew Bernhardt and Catherine Hamilton Bernhardt. I love you with my whole heart and hope we get many more years of travel and adventure together. (I promise not to make them all research trips.) And finally, a thanks to all of you who read this book—I feel privileged to share the stories of these transatlantic Patriots with you.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Page:

  14   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2010

  14   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2010

  39   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1910

  48   © National Portrait Gallery, London

  50   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Sarah Lazarus, 1891

  61   Gift of Viscount Bearsted M.C. and Spink and Son Ltd. through the National Art Collections Fund, 1928. © The Victoria & Albert Museum, London

  68   The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

  74   © The Trustees of the British Museum

  76   © The Trustees of the British Museum

  81   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Glenn Tilley Morse Collection. Bequest of Glenn Tilley Morse, 1950

  89   Gift of Mary C. Wyer (1920.0011.001a), Nantucket Historical Association

  91   © National Portrait Gallery, London

150   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949

154   Hingham Historical Society, Hingham, Massachusetts

155   Hingham Historical Society, Hingham, Massachusetts

183   John Carter Brown Library

197   © National Portrait Gallery, London

204   Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

222   © National Portrait Gallery, London

225   © Dean and Chapter of Westminster, London

229   © The Trustees of the British Museum

232   © The Trustees of the British Museum

237   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924

242   John Carter Brown Library

252   The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924

255   National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

264   Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Mary E. Maxwell Fund), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

abolitionists, 62, 289n11, 296n4; Black activists, 103; in Britain, 53, 58, 97, 99‒100; court cases as standard tactic of, 100

Académie Royale des Sciences, 246

Act for the Impartial Administration of Justice, 135

actor-network theory, 275n10

Act to Enlist Slaves (1778), 204

Adam (enslaved man), 100, 297n11

Adams, Abigail, 144, 145, 146, 217, 268; on boycotts of British goods, 160; on independence celebrations, 176, 177; visit to Patience Wright in London, 250

Adams, John, 11, 113, 129, 144, 235, 262, 266, 268; as ambassador to Britain, 249; on American image in France, 245; in Congress Voting Independence, 264; Declaration of Independence and, 174; Patience Wright and, 231, 250, 252‒253, 262; Platt supported by, 217–218; visit to waxworks of Rachel Wells, 196, 198

Adams, John Quincy, 249

Adams, Samuel, 129, 144

“Address to the British Soldiery” (Labilliere, 1775), 200–201, 328n57

Aitken, James. See John the Painter

Alleyne, John, 192

American Philosophical Society, 106, 138

American Revolution, 1, 2, 6, 10, 257; Battle of Bennington, 213; Battle of Bunker Hill, 201; Battle of Saratoga, 203, 216, 220; Battle of Yorktown, 214, 248; Battles of Lexington and Concord, 167, 169, 178, 179, 180, 201, 205; conclusion of war, 248–249, 253; desertion of British soldiers, 201, 203; failed hopes of Black and female Patriots, 266–269; Gordon Riots and, 234, 235; hope for reform in Britain and, 179, 321n49; prisoners of war, 6, 12, 187, 213, 214–216, 335n63; pro-American sentiment in Britain, 5, 180–181, 191, 199–200, 233, 325n14; transatlantic history and geography of, 3, 12

Anabaptists, 62

Analysis of Beauty, The (Hogarth, 1753), 51–52

André, Major John, 6

Anstruther, Lady, 151

anti-Catholicism, 31, 32, 135, 234

Antigua, 17, 56

Apthorp, Grizzell, 36, 37

Arabella (ship), 17

Arbuthnot, Christian. See Barnes, Christian

Arbuthnot, “Chrisy,” 21, 25, 165, 168, 266, 279n12

Arbuthnot, William, 20, 278n10, 279n12

Argo (ship), 3

Arnaq (Inuk woman), 182

Ashburn, Joseph, 335n70

Associates of the Bray Schools, 123, 125

Atawayi, 182

Attucks, Crispus, 27, 37, 39, 40–41, 107, 202, 205

Banks, Joseph, 118

Baptists, 80

Barbados, 53, 55, 111

Barber, Catherine MacAulay, 113

Barber, Francis, 51, 56

Barber, John Wilkes, 113

Barber, Nathanial and Elizabeth, 113

Barber, Oliver Cromwell, 113

Barclay, Janette, 64, 70, 106–107

Barnes, Christian, 10, 70, 152, 224; Daphny’s request of cloak from, 265–266; discontent with domestic life and social limitations on women, 162; disdain for and fear of Patriots, 34–35; enslaved families broken up by, 19–20, 162–163; flight from Marlborough, 167–168; genius of Prince Demah and, 106; Juliet–Jack relationship and, 161–163; as Loyalist, 25, 26, 104; marriage to Henry Barnes, 19, 278n8; observations of Prince Demah, 21; personality of, 24; politicization of, 26; Prince Demah’s portrait of, 153, 154; on Prince’s artistic activities, 23–24, 42, 44, 64, 163; Susanna Wheatley compared with, 112, 115; on violence and threats against Barnes household, 42, 43; visit to Copley’s studio, 22

Barnes, Henry, 10, 15, 265; business interests of, 20–21; effort to sell Marlborough home, 43–44; as enslaver of Daphny, 17, 18; feared prospect of Prince’s run to freedom in London, 99; flight from Marlborough, 167–168; horse tarred and feathered in name of, 27, 28, 42–43, 103, 132; increasing danger from Patriot crowds, 41–42; as Loyalist, 26, 104, 164; marriage to Christian Arbuthnot, 19, 278n8; Pine’s tutelage of Prince and, 57–58, 70; Prince purchased by, 20, 22, 25; on Prince’s potential freedom-seeking in London, 54, 55; public condemnation of, 35; spies of General Gage and, 165; targeted for importing British goods, 26, 37

Bartram, John, 287n1

Bath, England, 6, 219, 220, 253

Beattie, James, 63

Bell, Archibald, 114, 150

Bestes, Peter, 210, 297n13, 332n35

Bickham, Tony, 320n47

Biheron, Marie-Marguerite, 246–247

Black Atlantic, 55, 56, 97, 210

Black genius, 58–59, 62, 78; recognition of, 63, 106; sponsorship of, 107

Black New Englanders: abolitionists, 103; British army appeal to, 41; enslaved population of Massachusetts, 297n12; history of seeking freedom, 100; white American’ fears about, 33

Black people, as Patriots, 5, 7, 8, 267; Black soldiers in Continental army, 203–204, 207–208, 209; Freemasonry and, 209–211, 332n35

Black people, in art: black ribbons and, 151, 313n20; depicted as slaves or servants, 58, 151; pearl earring motif, 47, 52, 15; racism against, 33, 51, 53, 62, 111, 148, 209

Black people, in London: Black Atlantic world and, 56‒60; depicted by Hogarth, 49, 50; interracial relationships and marriages, 51; as servants, 55; status of enslaved people in Britain, 53–54

Blake, William, 65–66

“Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King—Street, The” (Revere), 39, 40, 121, 202

“Body of Liberties,” 17

Boone, Daniel, 259

Boston: Committee of Correspondence, 159, 166; Daphny in, 16–17; Declaration of Independence and, 176; as epicenter of political turmoil in 1760s, 25–26; Liberty Tree, 36, 37, 129; occupied by British troops, 164, 167, 171; Pope’s Night celebrations, 31; Somerset in, 96; “tea party” (1773), 127, 128, 131–132; Trinity Church, 18–19, 278n8

Boston Chronicle (Tory newspaper), 29, 35

Boston Massacre (1770), 27, 37–41, 72, 107, 176, 283n23; Revere’s engraving of, 39, 40, 121; trials of British soldiers involved in, 121; Wheatley’s reference to, 121, 122, 304n36

Boston Massacre, The (Revere, after Pelham, 1770), 39, 40. See also “Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King—Street, The”

Boston Port Act (1774), 137, 139, 141, 158, 307n24, 309n48; alternate plans to enforcement of, 142; passage of, 159; plan to reimburse East India Company for losses, 134

Bourgeois of Calais, The (Pine), 220

Bourn, Melatiah, 160

Bowen, Daniel, 258, 259, 260, 262, 348n85

boycotts, against British goods, 29, 42, 105, 113, 159, 169; Continental Association, 160; Loyalists’ refusal to participate in, 32, 160; protests in London and, 142; as response to Townshend Acts, 25, 103, 159

Boy with a Flying Squirrel, A (Copley, 1765), 45

Bradlee, David, 202–203

Brinch, Boyrereau, 55

British Empire, 56, 60, 67, 68, 79, 97, 118; African-descended people in, 55; America as political model for, 179, 266; American declaration of independence and, 179; art and, 60, 67‒68; Black genius in, 58, 63, 78, 106; colonial attachment to, 26; global reach of, 49, 87; imperial family crisis in, 25; Mansfield ruling and public opinion in, 99; political crisis in, 139, 145, 173; slavery questioned in, 100, 101

British Museum, 118

Browne, Captain William, 164, 316–317n58

Buffon, Comte de (Georges-Louis Leclerc), 246

Bufform, Cuff, 332n35

Burgoyne, General John, 220

Burke, Edmund, 188–189, 236, 241

Bute, Lord (John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute), 71

Butler, Samuel, 117, 302n23

Calef, Captain Robert, 313n16

Camden, Lord (Charles Pratt), 94

caricatures, 60–61

Carretta, Vincent, 305n52

Carter, John, 332n35

Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) (R. E. Pine, c. 1775), 221, 222

Cervantes, Miguel de, 117, 302n23

Chamberlaine, John, 240

Charackteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Earl of Shaftesbury), 66

Charles I, King, 221; decapitated head of, 1–2, 3, 4, 175, 228, 230, 268; execution of, 9, 140; Patience Wright modeling head of, 228, 230

Charles II, King, 280n2

Charleston, city of, 2, 25, 84, 131; statue of William Pitt in, 141; tea confiscated or destroyed in, 134

Charlotte, Queen, 1, 228, 339n43

Chatham, Earl of. See Pitt, William

Cherokee people, 182

Chippendale, Thomas, 67

Chovet, Dr. Abraham, 85

Christian Barnes (Prince Demah, 1773?), 153, 154

Christianity, 18, 19

Civil War, English, 9, 71, 140, 175, 178

Claypoole, John, 335n70

“Closet, The” (1775), 241

Coba (enslaved woman), 83, 293n6

Codman, John, 33–34

Coercive Acts, 134, 135, 144

Coffin, Captain Jonathan, 89

Coigny, Comtesse de (Anne-Françoise-Aimée de Franquetot de Coigny), 246

Colden, Cadwallader, 80, 93

Collinson, Peter, 287n1

“Commissioners, The” (1778), 241

Common Sense (Paine, 1776), 5, 263

Congress Voting Independence (Savage, after R. E. Pine, 1859–1906), 256, 263, 264, 347n67

constitutional monarchy, 280n2

Continental Army, 5, 6, 211, 220, 224, 235; Black soldiers’ service in, 203‒205, 207‒208, 209; buff and blue regimental colors of, 233

Continental Congress, 144, 160, 171, 198, 268, 318n8; Hancock as president of, 178; renunciation of allegiance to British Crown, 173–174

Cook, Captain James, 118

Copley, John Singleton, 7, 11, 22, 46–47, 77, 249; refusal to train Demah, 45, 64, 107; regarded as America’s best portraitist, 106; Royal Academy of Art and, 227

Copley, John Singleton, works: A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (1765), 45; The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 249; Skinner portrait (1772), 151, 157; Watson and the Shark (1778), 302n24

Corbin, Margaret, 265

Cornwallis, Lord (Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess), 248

Cox, James, 119

Cox’s Museum (London), 118, 119

Cozens, Alexander, 46, 243

Cozens, Juliet Ann, 243

Cozens, Elizabeth Pine, 46

Crafts, Colonel Thomas, 176, 202, 212–213, 329n3

Crisis, The (antimonarchical publication), 177–178, 320n44

Cromwell, Oliver, 178, 230

Crosby, Brass, 104

Cuffee (enslaved man), 105

Cuming, Ame, 28, 30–31, 35

Cuming, Elizabeth, 28, 30–31, 35

Cushing, Deborah, 158

Cushing, Thomas, 129, 158

Dabhoiwala, Fara, 289n11

Darly, Mary, 73, 231, 232, 241, 242, 292n35, 339n46

Darly, Matthias (Matthew), 241, 242, 339n46

Dartmouth (ship), 126–127, 131

Dartmouth, Earl of (William Legge), 115, 117, 126, 302n19, 302n23; Tea Act protests and, 134; Wheatley and, 153, 208

Daughters of Liberty, 25

Deane, Silas, 192, 245

Death of the Earl of Chatham, The (Copley), 249

De Birniere, Henry, 164, 316–317n58

Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies, The (1775), 199

Declaration of Independence, 103, 174–178, 179, 200, 210, 249, 320n33

Demah, Daphny, 9, 15–16, 34, 43, 44, 78, 218; African origin of, 96; awareness of Attucks’s death in Boston Massacre, 40; Barneses’ flight from Marlborough and, 167; connection to West African roots, 20; enslavement of, 16–18, 109, 161, 166–167; fearlessness of, 22; influence with Christian Barnes, 112; petitions of, 15, 16; request of cloak from the Barneses, 265–266; separated from her child by enslavers, 19–20, 21, 162–163; Somerset case and, 100; worldly experiences of, 55

Demah, Prince, 9–10, 43, 53, 110, 262–263, 267; awareness of Attucks’s death in Boston Massacre, 40; Barneses’ flight from Marlborough and, 167; birth and baptism of, 18, 278n8; as “Black Hogarth” of the Barneses, 44, 45, 162; career launch from McLean’s shop, 105; death of, 218, 246, 262; emancipation of, 161; enlistment with Patriot cause, 11, 177, 201, 202, 211–212; genius of, 57, 78, 106; initial contact with Pine, 69; as mariner / sailor, 21, 27, 40, 55; meanings of “Prince” name, 18; mentors of, 103–104; political views of, 26, 75; as possible painter of Phillis Wheatley portrait, 156; separated from and reunited with mother, 19–20, 21; Somerset case and, 99–100; transatlantic network of, 8; trip to London with Henry Barnes, 44, 45; Wheatley’s situation in London compared with, 126

Demah, Prince, works: Christian Barnes (1773?), 153, 154; “Chrisy” Arbuthnot portrait, 168, 266; copies of Copley portraits, 153; Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman portrait, 156; Henry Barnes (1773?), 155; portrait of Melatiah Bourn’s son, 160; Portrait of William Duguid (1773), 13, 14, 15, 107, 153, 156–157, 276n1, 277n2

Desire (ship), 17

Deverell, Mary, 321n51

devil, in Patriot political culture, 33, 34

Dialogues of the Dead (Lyttelton and Montagu), 116

Dickinson, John, 85, 92, 113, 143, 179

Dickinson, William, 292n35

Diderot, Denis, 246

Discourses Concerning Government (Sidney, 1698), 75

Dodd, Dr. William, 94

Don Quixote (Cervantes), 117, 302n23

Downman, John, 228

Duguid, William. See Portrait of William Duguid

Dunckerley, Lieutenant Joseph, 203, 209, 210, 329n6

Dunlap, John, 174

Dunmore, Lord (John Murray, 1st Earl), 194, 205–206

Duplessis, Joseph Siffred, 245, 272n2

East India Company (EIC), 25, 105, 127, 131, 133, 134

“Edict by the King of Prussia, An” (Franklin, 1773), 128

Edward I, King, 76

English Roman Catholic Relief bill, 234

Equiano, Olaudah, 16, 51

Essay on Truth (Beattie), 63

Exclusion Crisis, 280n2

Fables of John Gray, The (1727), 117, 302n23

Fairfax, Anne, 219

Fairfax, George William, 159, 219, 223–224, 249, 254–256

Fairfax, Sally, 219, 254

“Farewel to America, A” (Wheatley), 111, 115

Feke, Robert, 23, 66, 80, 82, 85

Felix (enslaved man), 101, 147

Fleet, Peter, 105

Fleet, Thomas, 105

Forbes, Cyrus, 332n35

Forten, James, 177

Four Indian Kings (after Verelst, 1710), 182

Four Times of Day, The: Noon (Hogarth, 1738), 49, 50

Fox, Charles, 233, 249

Franco-American alliance, 3, 122, 186, 216–217, 233, 234, 244, 245

Franklin, Benjamin, 8, 12, 85, 110, 276n11; “Boston Tea Party” and, 133; Bowen’s museum and, 260; British Whigs and, 116; in Congress Voting Independence, 264; Dartmouth’s appointment to Board of Trade and, 115; Duplessis portrait of, 272n2; as Freemason, 210; French portraits of, 245–246; friendship with Patience Wright, 4, 93, 136, 139, 217, 244; genius of, 106; on the Gordon Riots, 235; Joseph Wright’s portrait of, 345n45; letter of introduction for Patience Wright, 78, 79, 95; Patience Wright’s portraits of, 4, 81, 93, 112–113, 120, 247–248, 272n2; Penn family and, 138–139; Platt treason trial and, 186, 190, 193, 194, 215–216, 324nn1–2; on political unrest in London, 72; Poor Richard’s Almanack, 57; scandal over Hutchinson letters and, 128–131, 137–138, 158; self-presentation at French court, 244–245; Somerset case and, 123–124, 147; Treaty of Paris and, 253; views on slavery and abolition, 123; Wheatley and, 10, 121, 122–123

Frederick Prince of Wales, 71

Freeman, Peter, 332n35

Freeman, Sambo, 297n13

Freemasons, 46, 52, 209, 211, 285n3, 331n20

French Revolution, 261, 274n4

Frobisher, Sir Martin, 182

Gage, General Thomas, 164, 165, 316–317n58

Gailer, George, 29, 30, 32, 34, 202, 282n6

Gainsborough, Thomas, 58, 60, 151, 227, 230

Gardner, Cato, 332n35

Gardner, Dr. Joseph, 202

Garrick, David, 68, 93, 137, 141, 220, 227

Gayton, Vice Admiral Clark, 172–173

Gentleman’s Magazine, 63, 297n12

George II, King, 9, 47, 104

George III, King, 1, 9, 71, 120, 239; Hessian troops of, 195, 214; North American colonies in rebellion against, 167; Patience Wright and, 1‒2, 136‒137, 180, 228; Royal Academy of Art and, 227; statue toppled and beheaded in New York, 174–176, 231, 251

George Washington and William Lee (Trumbull, 1780), 235–236, 237, 251

Georgia, 8, 169, 182; Bethesda College, 90, 206; first maps of Georgia colony, 46; patriot movement in, 170–171; turpentine produced with enslaved labor in, 87

Glorious Revolution (1688), 71, 280n2, 328n45; American Revolution connected to, 200; rights restored to City of London, 77

Goldthwaite, Catherine (“Caty”), 25, 279n19

Gordon, Lord George, 234, 235

Gordon Riots (1780), 233–235, 244, 254

Gowen, John, 212, 213

Grafton, Duke of (Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd Duke), 183–184

Gray, Captain Winthrop, 203, 212, 213

Greenleaf, William, 320n33

Grigory, John, 213

Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw (James Albert), 111

habeas corpus, 97, 173, 185, 275n8, 324n6

Habeas Corpus Act (1777). See Treason Act [Habeas Corpus Act] (1777)

Haitian Revolution, 261

Hall, Prince, 209, 210, 211, 331n20, 332n35

Halley’s Comet, 60, 288n8

Hamilton, Alexander, 260

Hamilton, Dr. Alexander, 59, 66, 80

Hampden, John, 75, 140

Hancock, John, 114, 129, 178, 198, 200, 208

Hanging of Absalom, The (F. R. Trumbull, 1770), 321n51

Hardesty, Jared Ross, 297n12

Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth, 1732), 49

Hayley, George, 183–184

“Heads of the Nation in a Right Situation, The” (Darly, 1780), 232, 241

Henry Barnes (Prince Demah, 1773?), 155

Henry VIII, 188

History of England (Macaulay), 113, 221

History of Jamaica, The (Long, 1774), 60

Hogarth, William, 9, 23, 47, 94, 157; Black people represented by, 49; as a founder of St. Martin’s Lane Academy, 67, 130; as Freemason, 210; views on race, 51–52

Hogarth, William, works: The Analysis of Beauty (1753), 51–52; The Four Times of Day: Noon (1738), 49, 50; A Harlot’s Progress (1732), 49; John Pine portrait (c. 1740–65), 47, 48, 52–53, 151; Marriage A-la-mode (1738), 49; The Painter and His Pug (1745), 52; A Rake’s Progress (1732–33), 49; Taste in High Life (1746), 151; Wilkes portrait, 75, 228

Holbrook, Felix, 297n13

Hoppner, Helena Clarence, 240

Hoppner, John, 9; George III and, 8, 239‒241, 341‒342fn8; career highlights of, 243; marriage to Phoebe Wright, 238, 241, 243; A Primrose Girl, 239

Hoppner, Phoebe Wright, 9, 83, 92, 93, 135–136, 261; assistance in mother’s waxworks, 226; Bowen’s museum and, 260; as Hoppner’s “primrose girl,” 239; marriage to John Hoppner, 238, 241, 243, 342n13; model to West, 136, 239

Hoppner, Wilson Lascelles, 342n8

Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 257

Howard, Fortune, 332n35

“Hudibras” (Butler), 117, 302n23

Hume, David, 62–63, 106

Huntingdon, Countess of (Selena Hastings), 115, 117, 148; evangelical Christian network of, 112; as Margrett’s patron, 206; portrait of Phillis and, 149, 150, 313n16; Wheatley’s elegiac poem dedicated to, 120; as Wheatley’s patron, 110, 111, 122, 137, 206

Hutchinson, Thomas, 101, 114, 129, 130; “Boston Tea Party” and, 131; petition to remove from office, 133; replacement as governor, 164; scandal over letters to British officials, 128–131, 137–138, 158

Indigenous people, 17, 146; British trade with, 170; enslavement of, 38; presence in London, 181–182; stereotyped “savage” violence of, 241; as symbol of America, 181–184, 183–184, 241; white American’ fears about, 33

Inman, Elizabeth Murray Smith, 22, 54, 70, 106, 163; Copley’s portrait of, 156; as enslaver of Jack, 161

Inman, Ralph, 156

Intolerable Acts, 135, 137, 144

Islam, 18

Jack (enslaved man), 161–164

Jacobite Rebellion (1745), 187, 231

Jamaica, 59, 62, 64, 172

James II, King, 200

Jay, John, 252

Jefferson, Maria, 224, 258

Jefferson, Thomas, 11, 106, 209, 211, 253, 262, 266; Black genius grudgingly acknowledged by, 59, 148; in Congress Voting Independence, 264; education of his daughter, Maria, in Mary Pine’s Philadelphia school, 254, 258; Patience Wright’s planned portrait of Washington and, 251, 252; patriotic art sought by, 268

Jenings, Edmund, 140

Jeremiah, Thomas, 331n20

John de Warenne (1231–1304), 6th Earl of Warren and Surrey (Basire, after Pine, c. 1771), 75–77, 76, 104

John Pine (Macardell, after Hogarth, c. 1740–1765), 47, 48

John Pine portrait (Hogarth, c. 1740–65), 52–53

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 56, 123

John the Painter (James Aitken), 191–192, 193, 194–195, 215, 235

John Wilkes Esqr (Watson, after R. E. Pine, 1764), 73, 74, 75

Joie, Chester, 297n13

Jordan, June, 314n32

Judith and Holofernes paintings, 231

Juliet (enslaved woman), 19, 21, 168; birth and loss of first child, 162‒164; disappearance from historical record, 173; marriage to Jack, 161‒163; mixed-race child of, 163–164

Kauffman, Angelica, 227, 295n29

Keith, Governor Bassil, 172

Kelly, Susannah, 115

King, John, 124–125

King Philip’s War (1670s), 38

Knox, General Henry, 168

Knox, Lucy, 168

Kokai, Jennifer, 342–343n16

Kunagadoga, 182

Labilliere, Major Peter, 195–200, 201, 215, 217, 254, 327n40; on American victory in war, 248–249; as Christian millenarian, 195‒196; on parliamentary reform, 233; as witness to Hoppner / Wright marriage, 243; Wright’s portrait of, 196, 197, 199, 200

Lafayette, Marquis de, 210

Laurens, Henry, 6, 134, 137, 171, 233, 318n8; arrested and imprisoned in Britain, 235; as enslaver, 205; Treaty of Paris and, 253

Lay, Benjamin, 62, 289n11

Lee, Arthur, 134, 137, 141, 143, 205, 233, 310n55

Lee, Henry, 260

Lee, Richard Henry, 140, 144

Lee, William, 134, 137, 143–144, 198, 200, 268

Letters from an American Farmer (Dickinson, 1767–68), 85, 144

Liberty (schooner), 169–170

Liberty caps, 140, 178, 228, 261

Libes, Kenna, 296n5

Lillie, Theophilus, 35–37, 42

Lindsay, Dido Elizabeth Belle, 98, 151, 296n5

Lindsay, John, 98

Linnaeus, Carolus, 51, 52

Livingston, Robert R., 264

Lloyd, Bishop William, 328n45

London, 6, 40; Franklin in, 4, 8, 57, 80, 244; museum collections, 118–120; Old Slaughter’s Coffee House, 47, 67; as racially diverse city, 49; rights restored in Glorious Revolution, 77; Wright (Patience) in, 79–80, 82, 93–95. See also St. Martin’s Lane (London)

London Chronicle, The (newspaper), 111, 115, 128, 216

London Magazine: on genius of Wright children, 135–136; portrait of Patience Wright in, 90, 91

Long, Edward, 60, 62

Louis Charles, Dauphin of France, wax figure of, 89, 247, 294n23, 344n30

Lovell, John, 80, 81, 86

Lovell, Patience Townshend, 80, 81

Loyalists, 5, 12, 169, 175; as enslavers, 7, 10, 265; refusal to participate in anti-British boycotts, 32. See also Tories

Lyttelton, Lord (George, 1st Baronet), 116, 117, 302n22; as trustee of British Museum, 118; Wright’s wax portrait of, 137, 141

Macardell, James, 52–53, 286n10

Macaulay, Catharine Sawbridge, 9, 141, 142, 145, 254, 268; Abigail Adams correspondence with, 160; in Bath, 219; on Britons’ attitude toward rebellious colonies, 178; as genius, 116; A History of England (1763–71), 113; “Judith, with the Head of Holofernes,” 231; Pine’s portraits of, 221, 222, 223; pro-American politics of, 191; republican politics of, 113, 144, 221; Wright’s portrait of, 93, 113

Magna Carta, 71, 75, 140, 188

Magna Carta (ship), 170

Maitland, Captain Richard, 169–172, 184, 185

Major Peter Labilliere (Kingsbury, after J. Wright, 1780), 196, 197, 199, 200

Mansfield, Lord, 97–99, 102, 124, 188, 193, 216, 234

Margaret, Countess of Henneberg, 84, 93

Margrett, David, 206–207, 331n15, 331n20

Marie Antoinette, Queen, 245, 247

Mark (enslaved man hung in chains), 33–34, 41, 204–205, 282n12

Marrant, John, 331n20

Marriage A-la-mode (Hogarth, 1738), 49

Martin, David, 98–99

Massachusetts, 34, 55, 205; Committee of Safety, 207; enslaved population of, 297n12; slavery and charter of, 102

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 17

Massachusetts Government Act, 135

Massachusetts Militia (the “Train” Artillery Regiment), 202–203, 209–214, 329n3, 329nn5–6, 334n45, 334n58

Mauduit, Israel, 126

McLean, John, 103, 105, 107

McRea, Jane, 241, 343n18

Mecom, Jane Franklin, 79, 122

Mein, John, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 103

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 11, 15, 107

Middle Passage, 16, 109, 158

Milton, John, 117, 302n23

Mint, United States, 260

mixed-race people, as Patriots, 5, 7, 8, 27, 38, 40, 267

Mohawk people, 62, 210

Mohegan people, 110, 146

Monckton, [Lieutenant] General Robert, 137

Montagu, Duke and Duchess of, 58

Montagu, Elizabeth, 116

Moorhead (Sarahson), Scipio, 155–156, 164, 314n32; artistic talent of, 152‒153; disappearance from historical record, 173; sold as slave property, 161

Moorhead, Reverend John, 152, 160

Moorhead, Sarah Parsons, 152, 156, 160, 176, 301n8

Morris, Robert, 256

Mortimer, John Hamilton, 46, 58, 78

Mrs. Reid in the Character of a Sultana (R. E. Pine, 1763), 285n3

Mrs. Wright Modelling a Head in Wax (J. Wright), 1–3, 4, 227–231, 233

Mulligan, Hercules, 92, 295n30

Murray, Lady Elizabeth, 98–99, 151, 296n5

Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A (Gronniosaw), 111

Nash, Gary, 297–298n13

National Portrait Galleries (London), 11

“Negro’s Complaint, The” (Tryon, 1684), 81

New England, 25, 27, 53, 121, 134; anti-British boycotts in, 25; anti-Catholicism in, 31–32; Black men fighting for Patriot cause, 203, 204, 205, 207; Daphny’s arrival in, 16, 18; decapitated heads in displays of power / punishment, 230; enslaved populations in, 17, 34, 38, 102, 152, 158; news of Somerset verdict in, 100; outbreak of war in, 167, 169; white fears of slave insurrections, 204; Wright’s waxworks in, 259

New Method of Educating Children, A (Tryon, 1695), 86

Newport, Rhode Island, 23, 66

Newton, Isaac, 60, 288n8

New York, 59, 142, 143; Bowen’s museum in, 260; Council of Safety, 324n2; George III statue toppled in, 174–176, 231, 251; Patience Wright’s social network in, 186, 194, 205; planned slave uprising in, 205; Platt in, 171, 214; slavery in, 17, 111; Wrights and political culture of, 259; Wright sisters’ exhibitions in, 85, 92, 93, 94, 120, 137

“Nibobe in Distress for her Children” (Wheatley), 149

Noble, John, 67, 68

nonimportation agreements, 28, 29, 35

North, Lord (Frederick, 2nd Earl of Guilford), 132, 141, 142, 248

North Briton, The (publication), 71–72

Nutaaq (Inuk child), 182

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (Price, 1776), 179–180

Occom, Reverend Samson, 110, 146, 148

“Ode to Neptune. On Mrs. W—‘s Voyage to England” (Wheatley, 1772), 115

Oglethorpe, James, 46

Olive Branch Petition, 199

Oliver, Andrew, 129, 130

“On Imagination” (Wheatley), 146

Othello (boy enslaved by Franklins), 123

Paine, Thomas, 5, 264, 349n2

Painter and His Pug, The (Hogarth, 1745), 52

Palmer, Mary Reynolds, 116

Paradise Lost (Milton), 117, 302n23

Parliament, British, 6, 33, 71, 104, 129, 145; recognition of captured American rebels as POWs, 214; response to colonial protests, 134–135, 141. See also specific Acts of

Parricide, The: A Sketch of Modern Patriotism (British print, 1776), 183–184, 183, 241

Patience Lovell Wright (R. E. Pine, c. 1782), 253–254, 255

patriarchal society, 7

patriotism, 3, 4, 12, 194; antislavery and, 102; beyond white men, 11, 267, 273n4; British propaganda against, 183, 184; changing definitions of, 274n4; cosmopolitan and expansive, 5; of Patience Wright, 145, 251, 262; slavery and patriarchy challenged by, 7; transatlantic, 8, 177, 264, 267, 268; visual representations of, 6, 262–264

Patriot King, The (pamphlet), 195

Patriots, 4, 11, 175; arrested and imprisoned in Britain, 6; Barnes home in Marlborough taken by, 168; Olive Branch Petition and, 199; post-Independence efforts to gain recognition, 264–269; stereotyped as white men, 272n2; transatlantic networks of, 5–6, 10. See also Whigs, American

patronage, 10, 110

Peale, Charles Willson, 7, 11, 257, 262, 347n67; early career as sign painter, 23; portrait of Pitt (Earl of Chatham), 140, 309n50, 321n48

Peale, Rembrandt, 257

Pelham, Henry, 39, 40

Penn, Lady Juliana, 138–139

Penn, Thomas, 138–139

Penn, William, 138

Pequot War (1630s), 38

Peter and Jemima (couple enslaved by Franklin), 123

Peter I, tzar of Russia, 46, 243

Peters, Phillis. See Wheatley, Phillis

petitions, 100–103, 297n11, 297n13

Philadelphia, 82, 93, 142; Declaration of Independence and, 174, 176; first Bray school in, 123; Mary Pine’s school in, 258; Pine daughters art and teaching in, 9, 224, 254, 258, 264; Pine in, 256–258; tea confiscated or destroyed in, 134

Philippa (ship), 169, 170, 171, 173, 184

Phillis (enslaved woman), 33–34

Phillis (slave ship), 109, 158

Phoebe (enslaved woman), 33–34

Pilsberry, Isaac, 212

Pine, Charlotte, 243

Pine, Jane, 69, 78

Pine, John, 9, 46–47; as Freemason, 52, 210; Hogarth’s portrait of, 47, 48, 52–53, 151; as mixed-race man, 48, 51, 52, 53, 285n3; printshop on St. Martin’s Lane, 67

Pine, Mary Fulford, 68, 69, 258, 290n23

Pine, Robert Edge, 6, 9, 56, 94, 154, 267, 276n11; artistic circle of, 149; in Bath, 220, 224, 253, 337n7; Bowen’s museum and, 260; in city directories, 69; daughters of, 69, 290n23; death of, 258; mixed race of, 9; Prince Demah trained by, 45–47, 57–58, 64, 70, 77–78, 106, 156; relocation to America, 254–258; republican politics of, 70–71, 104; residence in St. Martin’s Lane, 68; Royal Academy of Art and, 227; transatlantic network of, 8

Pine, Robert Edge, works: The Bourgeois of Calais, 220; Congress Voting Independence (finished by Savage, 1859–1906), 256, 264, 347n67; Garrick portrait, 220, 227; George II portrait, 104; John de Warenne (1231–1304), 6th Earl of Warren and Surrey (c. 1771), 75–77, 76, 104; Macaulay portraits, 221, 222, 223; Mrs. Reid in the Character of a Sultana (1763), 285n3; Patience Lovell Wright (c. 1782), 253–254, 255; Portrait of character of Jaques, Shakespeare’s as you like it, 227; Washington grandchildren portraits, 349n1; Wilkes portrait, 73, 74, 75, 104

Pine, Simon, 46

Pitt, William (Earl of Chatham), 11, 139–141, 142, 268; death of, 224; Peale’s portrait of, 140, 309n50, 321n48; Wilton’s statues of, 175; Wright’s statue of, 11, 179

Platt, Ebenezer Smith, 6, 171–174, 184–185, 201; death of, 259; French newspaper accounts of, 245; imprisonment of, 8–9; marriage to Elizabeth Wright, 217–218, 219, 232; release from Newgate (1778), 217, 218; as slave trader in Georgia, 8; treason trial of, 186–187, 192–193, 324nn1–2; Wilkes’s support for, 189–190, 216; Wrights’ support of, 184, 185, 194–195, 214–215

Platt, Elizabeth [Betsy] Wright, 9, 83, 92, 93, 135–136, 261; death of, 260; devotion to Patriot cause, 184; Manhattan wax museum of, 259; Platt supported by, 171, 186–187, 190, 193–194; romance / marriage to Platt, 8, 214, 217–218, 219, 232, 238; waxworks on tour in New England, 259–260

Platt, Zephaniah, 324n2

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Wheatley, 1773), 110, 114, 158

Polly (ship), 131

Poor Richard’s Almanack, 57

Pope, Alexander, 46, 117, 126

Pope’s Night [Day] celebrations, 31–33, 34, 132, 234

Portland, Duchess of (Margaret Cavendish Bentinck), 118

Portrait of a Black Man (Reynolds, 1770), 56

Portrait of character of Jacques, Shakespeare’s as you like it (R. E. Pine), 227

Portrait of William Duguid (Prince Demah, 1773), 13, 14, 15, 107, 153, 156–157, 276n1, 277n2

Powell, Edward and Martha, 67

Price, Richard, 179–180, 254

Primrose Girl, A (Hoppner), 239

Prince Simbo, powder horn of, 204, 204

Principia (Newton), 60, 288n8

privateers, 3, 171

Prohibitory Act, 173

public opinion, 2, 99, 101, 134, 144

Putnam, General Israel, 166, 178

Quakers, 62, 80, 83, 136, 158, 289n11

Quartering Act, 135

Quebec Act, 135, 137, 234

Rabin, Dana Y., 296n4

Rake’s Progress, A (Hogarth, 1732–33), 49

Reed, Esther de Berdt, 231

Reed, Prince, 332n35

Regulating Act, 133, 307n20

republicanism, 9, 29

Revere, Paul, 34, 40, 176, 282n12; “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King—Street,” 39, 40, 121, 202; as Freemason, 209; gibbeted landmark of Mark’s body in chains mentioned by, 33, 34, 204; as second commander of the “Train” Regiment, 202, 213–214, 334n58; “Wilkes and Liberty” slogan of, 73

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 45–46, 52, 66, 116, 157, 236; black ribbons in art of, 151; on copying masterpieces of other artists, 64–65; disdain for portraits in wax, 95; formerly enslaved servant of, 56; on genius, 64‒66; pension for Mary Pine, 258; Portrait of a Black Man (1770), 56; Royal Academy of Art and, 67, 227, 258

Richardson, Ebenezer, 36

Rittenhouse, David, 106

Robinson, John, 306n14

Rochford, Lord, 190, 191

Roque, John, 46

Ross, Betsy (née Elizabeth Griscom), 335n70

Royal Academy of Art, 1, 2, 5, 8, 66, 243, 257; Annual Exhibition, 227, 234; annual exhibitions, 94; curriculum at, 65; first attempt to organize, 47; Hoppner enrolled at, 239, 240; Joseph Wright enrolled at, 1, 8; lowbrow art disdained by, 95; Patience Wright’s wax portraits excluded from, 226, 227; Reynolds as first president of, 64, 67, 258; training of genius and, 64; West as charter member of, 136

Royall family (Isaac junior), 17

Royal Society, 63, 85

Rubens, Peter Paul, 52

“Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” (Franklin, 1773), 128

Rush, Benjamin, 158

Rush, Julia Stockton, 158

Saffin, John, 100, 297n11

Saint-Domingue, 171

Saint-George, Joseph Bologne de, 285n3

Salmon, Mary, 84, 85, 93, 95, 119, 182

Sampson, Deborah, 265

Sancho, Ignatius, 58, 59, 60, 148, 234

Sanderson, Thomas, 332n35

Savage, Edward, 258, 347n67

Sawbridge, John, 113, 137, 141, 221, 337n12

Sayre, Stephen, 134, 143–144, 190, 191, 199

Scholar of Jamaica, The (Unknown Artist, c. 1759‒1762), 59–60, 61, 288n8

Seider, Christopher: funeral procession for, 40; as martyr for Patriot cause, 35, 36–37, 73, 103, 202; Wheatley’s ode to, 122

Selling of Joseph, The (Sewall, 1700), 297n11

Sermons on various subjects (Deverell), 321n51

Seven Years’ War, 132, 139

Sewall, Samuel, 297n11

Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl), 66

Shakespeare, paintings of imagined scenes from, 1, 68, 227, 256

Sharp, Granville, 53, 54, 97, 117

Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, 312n11

Sheftall, Mordecai, 170

Sherman, Roger, 264

Shippen, William, Jr., 85

Sidney, Algernon, 75

Skinner, Dorothy Wendell, 151, 157

slavery, 7, 63, 96, 123; conversion of enslaved people to Christianity, 19; enslaved persons as artisans and craftspeople, 22; freedom offered to enslaved people fighting for Britain, 205–206, 207; genius and state of enslavement, 120; petitions against, 100–103; slave narratives, 111; slavery practices codified in legislation, 17; slave trade, 53, 158; Somerset case and, 97–103; unresolved by American Revolution, 267; in the West Indies, 54, 100; white fears of slave insurrections, 204–205

Smibert, John, 105

Smith, Boston, 332n35

Smith, Elizabeth Murray. See Inman, Elizabeth Murray Smith

smuggling, 132

Sneff, Emily, 320n44

Snow, Captain John, 19

Snow Mercury (ship), 80

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 19

Society of Artists, 46, 58, 70, 71, 77, 149, 243

Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, 141, 310n55

Solander, Doctor, 118

Somerset, James, 95–96, 108, 117, 118; antislavery connections of, 97–98; court case deciding freedom of, 97–103, 123–124, 188; lawyers representing, 192; travels of, 97

“Sons of Africa,” 102, 147

Sons of Liberty, 25, 26, 35, 36; “Boston Tea Party” and, 131; threats to Barnes, 43; toppling of George III statue and, 175; Wilkes and, 73

South Carolina, 2, 6, 17; Council of Safety, 171; Provincial Congress, 205; turpentine produced with enslaved labor in, 87

Spies-Gans, Paris A., 300n3

Stamp Act (1765), 25, 29, 75, 102, 159; enslaved people barred from protests against, 34; Pitt’s opposition to, 140; protests against, 129

St. Asaph’s Sermon, 196, 327–328n45

Statira (enslaved child), 19

Stenzer, Bristol, 332n35

Sterne, Laurence, 58

Stevenson, Margaret, 124

Stewart, Charles, 96

Stewart, Somerset. See Somerset, James

St. George’s Field (London), massacre of (1768), 72–73

St. Martin’s Lane (London), 46, 47, 94; artistic community centered on, 66–67; availability of art supplies in, 77; Noble’s bookshop, 67, 68, 69

Stormont, Lord, 216

Strange, Robert, 70

Strong, Jonathan, 53–54, 97, 117, 118

Stuart, Gilbert, 23

“Study for a portrait of Mrs. Wright, the famous wax-woman and Republican from America” (Downman, 1777), 228, 229

Sydney, Algernon, 140

Systema naturae (Linnaeus, 1758), 51

Tanner, Obour, 158

tarring and feathering, 28, 29–32, 34, 170, 282n6

Taste in High Life (Hogarth, 1746), 151

Taylor, Prince, 211, 218, 332n35

Tea Act (1773), 105, 131, 132, 133, 159, 170

Temple, Lord (Richard Grenville-Temple, 2nd Earl Temple), 94, 141

Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), 210

Theyanoguin, Hendrick, 62

Thurston, Neptune, 23

Tilledge, Richard, 332n35

Tories, 26, 29, 198, 280n2. See also Loyalists

“To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works” (Wheatley), 12, 152–153, 314n30, 314n32

“To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” (Wheatley), 116

Townshend, Lord (Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount), 176, 231

Townshend Acts (1767), 25, 37, 75, 85, 102, 129, 275n8; boycotts of British goods in response to, 159; habeas corpus right and, 324n6; unrepealed portion of, 132

Treason Act (1351), 187

Treason Act [Habeas Corpus Act] (1777), 6, 8, 187–190, 192, 195, 214, 215, 232, 235, 238; Platt’s case as evasion of, 189–190; suspension of, 216; Wilkes’s speech against, 195

Treatise of Dreams & Visions, A (Tryon, 1689), 139

Treaty of Paris (1783), 249, 253

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 271n5

Trumbull, Faith Robinson, 321n51

Trumbull, John, 6, 7, 11, 235–236, 249, 321n51; George Washington and William Lee (1780), 235–236, 237, 251; as military veteran, 262

Tryon, Thomas, 62, 80, 82; on creating colors, 87–88; female education encouraged by, 86; “The Negro’s Complaint” (1684), 81; A New Method of Educating Children (1695), 86; A Treatise of Dreams & Visions (1689), 139; The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness (1683), 80, 88; Wisdom’s Dictates (1691), 80–81

Tyler, Benjamin, 332n35

United States of America, 6, 9, 12, 178, 210, 248, 267; establishment of, 12, 201; French alliance with, 186, 216, 245, 246; king’s unwillingness to recognize sovereignty of, 187; as model for reform in Britain, 179; Pine’s relocation to, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259; wax museums in, 8; Wright’s plans for image of, 253

Utsidihi, 182

Van Horn, Jennifer, 285n3

Vaughan, John, 84

Vaughan, Samuel, 346n67

Verelst, John, 182

View of St. Martin’s Court, A (Sandby, c. 1765), 68–69, 68

Virginia, 5, 17, 140, 144, 205, 220, 255; enslaved labor in, 17, 96, 97, 207; Fairfax home in, 219; Mount Vernon (Washington home), 11, 219, 224, 268, 349n1; white fears of free Black men in arms, 205

Waldstreicher, David, 302n19, 304n38

Waller, James, 70

Walpole, Horace, 94

Wampanoag people, 27, 38

Warenne, John de, 75–77, 76

Warren, Mercy Otis, 144

Washington, George, 9, 11, 159, 167, 171, 224, 259; on Black men in American military, 207–208, 268; Declaration of Independence and, 174–175, 178; Elizabeth Wright Platt’s wax figure of, 259–260; as enslaver, 207; Fairfax family and, 219–220; as Freemason, 210; Houdon’s bust of, 257; Joseph Wright’s bust and portraits of, 251, 252, 252, 259; Labilliere and, 199, 200; Patience Wright’s planned portrait of, 251–253, 262; Pine’s portraits of and for, 9; Trumbull’s portrait of, 235–236, 237; Whig colors in military uniform of, 5–6, 233

Washington, Martha, 9, 258, 260, 268

Watson, Brooks, 117, 302n24

Watson, Elkanah, 246–247, 248, 249

Watson, James, 74, 292n35

Watson and the Shark (Copley, 1778), 302n24

wax figures, 87–88, 89; flammability of, 92; history of, 84; intelligence concealed in wax heads, 198, 217, 232; realism and popularity of, 94–95

Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness, The (Tryon, 1683), 80, 88

Wells, Rachel, 79, 83–84, 180, 206, 260; biblical tableaus, 196, 198; Bowen’s museum and, 260; decision to remain in America, 93; denied petition to state of New Jersey, 264–265, 266; letter to Franklin, 265‒264; wax figures of, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90

West, Benjamin, 9, 62, 136, 181, 235, 249; as “Historical Painter to the King,” 239–240, 341–342n8; hostility to Hoppners, 243, 342n13; on Platt treason trial, 193, 194; portrait of John Sawbridge, 221, 337n12; Royal Academy of Art and, 227

Westmoreland (Virginia) Association of Patriots, 140

Wheatley, John, 114, 122, 148

Wheatley, Nathaniel, 122–123, 126

Wheatley, Phillis, 10, 37, 130, 268; antislavery petition and, 297–298n13; attestation of authenticity signed by white patrons, 114, 301n15; book collection of, 116–117, 302n23; debates over slavery and, 122, 123, 304n38; enslavers of, 107, 109; Franklin’s ambivalence toward, 122–123, 125; letter to Reverend Occom on natural rights of Africans, 146–148; London museums visited by, 118–120; networks of women in colonies and, 157–158; portrait of, 148–152, 150, 312n11, 313n16; return to Boston, 126–127; sense of humor, 115, 117; Somerset case and, 125–126, 305n52; unpublished book of poems and letters dedicated to Franklin, 246; visit to London, 107–110

Wheatley, Phillis, works: “A Farewel to America,” 111, 115; “On Imagination,” 146; “Nibobe in Distress for her Children,” 149; “Ode to Neptune. On Mrs. W—‘s Voyage to England” (1772), 115; poem for George Washington, 208, 209; Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), 110, 114, 158; “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” 116; “To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works,” 12, 152–153, 314n30, 314n32; Whitefield elegy (1770), 112, 121–122, 301n8

Wheatley, Susanna, 111, 112, 122, 148; ambitions for Phillis, 153; cared for by Phillis, 126; Phillis’s book of poems supported by, 114–115, 302n19; portrait of Phillis and, 149, 150, 154, 313n16

Whigs, American, 29, 71, 142; Hutchinson letters and, 129; Wilkes as hero to, 73. See also Patriots

Whigs, British, 5, 6, 9, 71, 233, 243, 280–281n2; Lyttelton, 116; Radical Whigs, 144, 281n2; support for American protests, 189

Whitefield, Reverend George, 80, 93, 206; Georgia orphanage operated by, 110; Wheatley’s elegy for, 112, 121, 301n8; Wells’s portrait of, 89‒90; Wright’s portrait of, 89–90, 92, 94, 112–113, 120, 121

white male artists, 11, 300n3

Wilkes, John, 9, 73, 94, 113, 141, 215, 310n55; British caricature of, 183, 184; Gordon Riots and, 234; habeas corpus and, 188; Hogarth’s portrait of, 75, 228; imprisonment of, 71–72, 196; The North Briton published by, 71; Pine’s portrait of, 73, 74, 75, 104; Platt defended by, 189–190; pro-American friends and allies of, 191; Wright’s bust of, 137

William of Orange, 274n4

William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (P. Wright, c. 1775–1779), 225

Williams, Francis, 59–64, 61

Williams, John, 231

Williams, William, 61, 62, 289n11

Wilmot, Richard, 36

Wilson, James, 292n35

Wilson, Reverend Thomas, 221, 223

Wilson, Richard, 149

Wilton, Joseph, 140, 174–176

Winthrop, John, 17

Wisdom’s Dictates (Tryon, 1691), 80–81

women, as geniuses, 300n3; Lyttelton’s support for, 116; Macaulay, 112; scrutiny and criticism of, 113–114; Wells, 84; Wheatley, 110, 120, 130; Wright (Patience), 78, 80, 85, 86

women, as Patriots, 5, 7, 8, 180, 267, 273n4

Woolridge, Susanna, 302n19

Woolridge, Thomas, 115

Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, The, 65

Worthy of Liberty, Mr. Pitt scorns to invade the Liberties of other people (Peale, 1769), 140–141, 309n50

Wright, Elizabeth. See Platt, Elizabeth [Betsy] Wright

Wright, Joseph, 92, 135–136, 238, 239, 257; death of, 261; paintings lost in shipwreck, 3, 4, 250; return to America after revolutionary war, 250–251, 259; at Royal Academy of Art, 1, 8

Wright, Joseph, works: Franklin portrait, 345n45; George Washington (1790), 251, 252, 252; Liberty cent design for U.S. Mint, 260–261; Major Peter Labilliere (1780), 196, 197, 199, 200; Mrs.Wright Modelling a Head in Wax, 1–3, 4, 227–231, 233; self-portrait as Yankee-Doodle, or the American Satan, 240–241, 242

Wright, Mary, 83

Wright, Patience, 1–2, 6, 171, 178–179, 267, 276n11; in Bath, 219, 231, 253; biblical allusions of, 194, 195, 196; Biheron’s meeting with, 246–247; Bowen’s museum and, 260; conclusion of war and, 249; daughters as co-creators of waxworks, 136, 184, 226, 257; death of, 253, 262; departure from England to Paris (1781), 236, 238, 244; dissenting religious tradition of, 179–180; Downman’s portrait of, 228, 229; early life and family background, 80, 81–82; education of, 85–86; exhibitions of, 94, 95; friendship with Franklin, 4, 93, 136, 139, 217; as genius, 78, 80, 85, 86; on the Intolerable Acts, 137, 142, 309n48; life of conventional domestic duty, 82–83; London social network of, 142–143; London wax museum of, 119, 120; open wartime declaration of political opinions in Britain, 231–232; Pall Mall galleries of, 10, 136, 179, 180; as Patriot spy, 11–12, 198, 232, 263; persona and performances of, 91–92, 294n29; Pine’s portrait of, 253–254, 255; planned portrait of George Washington, 251–253; Platt supported by, 184, 185, 194–195, 214–215; relocation to London, 79–80, 82, 93–94, 110; sexually suggestive method of producing wax figures, 90, 91; symbolism of Indigenous people and, 181, 182–183; transatlantic network of, 8; wax figures created with sister, 85, 87, 88–89; wax sculptures destroyed in fire, 11, 92; Wheatley compared with, 112

Wright, Patience, works: American Indian figures, 181; biblical tableaus, 180, 181, 196, 321n51; Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay portrait, 113, 137, clay figures of, 86–87; Countess of Huntingdon bust, 137; Duchesse de Chartres portrait, 247, 259; Franklin portraits, 4, 81, 93, 112–113, 272n2; Garrick portrait, 137, 141; General Monckton bust, 137; John Sawbridge portrait, 137; King George III bust, 136–137; Lord North bust, 136–137; Lyttelton portrait, 137, 141; Pitt (Earl of Chatham) statue, 11, 179, 225, 226; Whitefield portrait, 89–90, 92, 94, 112, 120, 121; Wilkes bust, 137

Wright, Phoebe. See Hoppner, Phoebe Wright

Wright, Sarah (Sally), 83–84

Wright, Susanna, 158

Yamacraw people, 182

Yankee-Doodle, or the American Satan (Darly, after J. Wright, c. 1780), 241, 242