Throughout the Revolution, war news was conveyed through personal letters, as is evident by these two letters written by Timothy Bigelow (1739-90) to Stephen Salisbury (1746-1829). At this time Bigelow was a colonel in command of the Fifteenth Massachusetts and was engaged in the Battle of Saratoga in the autumn of 1777. In the first letter, dated October 7, he describes the high morale and comradery of the American forces. In the second he describes the death of the British general Simon Fraser (1729-77), and how this loss of a key commander resulted in American forces taking the field that day. Bigelow further accurately speculates that the Saratoga campaign will likely soon end with a British defeat.

Stephen Salisbury was a wealthy merchant in the central Massachusetts community of Worcester, which was also the hometown of Bigelow. The two men were friends, having served together on the town’s Committee of Correspondence before war broke out. As a storekeeper, Salisbury would have been in possession of plenty of sugar and capable of sending it to Bigelow as he requests in the first letter.

A transcription of the letters can be found here.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Transcription]]> This broadside, printed in Boston in April 1773, contains the text of a letter from the Virginia House of Burgesses informing Boston of the creation of a standing Committee of Correspondence and assuring the New Englanders of Virginia’s continued support in the constitutional crisis. The letter also asks that other Committees of Correspondence be maintained in the assemblies of the other colonies. As the rancor toward British policy grew, it became increasingly important for the colonies to show support for one another, share information, and expand the communication network. This letter, and the reprinting of it, was one means of accomplishing those goals.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The affordability of the carte-de-visite form meant that it was used in a wide variety of ways, including to reproduce works of art and photography. During and after the Civil War, this included the work of the most famous photographers of the conflict, Mathew Brady (1822-96) and his associates. This carte-de-visite, one in an “album” released by Brady, reads “Completely Silenced! Dead Confederate Artillery Men, As they lay around their battery after the Battle of Antietam.” Though the “authenticity” of Brady’s photography has been questioned throughout the years, due to the moving and placement of bodies and equipment to create a desired scene, there’s no doubt about the strong effect it had on viewers. Brady also knew the value of his work, putting a copyright disclaimer on the back to keep others from reproducing it. Reproduction without permission—often without even proper credit to the photographer—was a common practice in the early years of photography.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View larger image]]> The rapid expansion of new modes of transportation and communication technology that increasingly connected the American states is evident in this 1856 Disturnell’s New Map of the United States and Canada. Drawn by Henry A. Burr, the topographer to the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., and published by J. Disturnell (1801-77) in New York, this map highlights working railroads, telegraph lines, canals, and stagecoach routes, but also includes steamboats and unfinished railroad routes in its key. The increasing number of options for travel, as well as their speed and scheduled regularity, transformed the way news and information was disseminated, both publicly and privately. The fact that this map was drawn by the post office’s official topographer also speaks to the crucial part that office played in the development of these new networks.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View larger image]]> John Burt (1716-75) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1736. At the time he kept his diary, he was reading theology with a local minister in Boston. He later accepted a call to the pulpit in Bristol, Rhode Island, and spent his career there until his death. Burt’s diary for 1737 is written into an interleaved almanac, the same issue of the Ames Almanack that Thomas Prince used for his diary that year. Like Prince, Burt intermingled personal, professional, and public events in his entries. He wrote about dinners and church services as well as fires, accidents, and deaths—and the market riot in March, during which a mob tore down several of the city’s market sheds. Some of those events, such as the fire at John Brocas’s woodworking shop and the market riot, were reported in the local newspapers and discussed in sermons that Burt attended. At times, Burt probably learned about an event before it was written up in the newspapers; at other times, he may have gleaned his information from the papers.

Although the Prince diary and the Burt diary include some of the same events, they also have variations. As a young man not yet part of Boston’s elite, Burt had a slightly different perspective than Prince on the news of the day. In his entry for March 4, for example, Burt writes about a salacious bit of news he got by word of mouth: “I heard that there was a whore house kept by one Green broke & a list of those that frequented it carried to Major Savage. There were in it some of the greatest Gentlemen to live in town.” Brief reports of this news event did appear in a couple of the Boston newspapers, but without mention of a list of the brothel’s patrons. The event did not appear at all in Prince’s diary, though Prince and most of the people of Boston undoubtedly knew about it via the age-old news medium of gossip.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more pages from this diary]]> Just as the temperance movement harnessed the power of the printed word in newspapers, periodicals, tracts, and almanacs to spread statistics and facts about the effects of alcohol, it also utilized printed images. Temperance images were pervasive throughout early nineteenth-century publications as a particularly powerful way to convey the message that alcohol was destructive and should be moderated or—as some believed—prohibited for a healthy, functioning society.

This circa 1832 lithograph by Alexander Rider, based on an original sketch by Thomas Birch (1779-1851), illustrates this trend by depicting opposing scenes of temperance and intemperance. Like many images produced by the temperance movement—which co-opted and adapted the “liberty tree” symbol familiar to many—a tree serves as the central emblem of society and liberty. The image shows the effects of temperance and intemperance on society in a single frame, with the tree providing the contrast point between a healthy society and a society approaching ruin. The right side of the tree appears healthy with strong limbs and full foliage. It sits in fertile soil where grass and other healthy trees and flowers flourish. In contrast, the left side of the tree appears dead and barren. Its limbs are broken, and its branches are nearly absent of vegetation. The surrounding ground appears dry and cracked, and nothing is growing. Something (alcohol) is sapping this environment of its vitality and its ability to produce.

This metaphor is extended in the renderings of the people and structures of the illustration, and it becomes clear that intemperance is the culprit. On the left, a dilapidated structure hosts boisterous men waving bottles on its porch. One inebriated fellow slumps under a sign featuring a pig, suggesting a correlation between the drinking men and the pigs outside the tavern. A family walks away from what was perhaps their pig farm and livelihood, the father with downcast eyes and ragged clothes, a bottle in his hand. He walks separately from his family, the wife neatly but darkly dressed and the reluctant, shoeless child weeping and rubbing its eyes.

In contrast, alcohol appears to be absent on the right side of the illustration. Friends are gathered in small groups, with men and women socializing and eating in the verdant landscape. Across the river, a factory or mill is visible, representing employment and people engaged in fruitful labor. The husband and wife hold hands as they look at each other, and their well-dressed child plays nearby collecting flowers. The absence of alcohol and even the light-colored clothing of the couple suggest that the shadow of intemperance has not fallen on them as it has the family on the left. Temperance has kept this half of society healthy and productive.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Mid-nineteenth-century visuals of African Americans were largely characterized by satire, an overexaggeration of features, and stereotypes. This lithograph is one of several in an entire Amalgamation Series created by Edward Williams Clay (1799-1857). The series depicts white and black couples marrying, socializing, engaging in typical household activities, and dancing. These were all seen as forms of racial mixing, or what was first termed amalgamation and later miscegenation, and the implications would have been clear to a contemporary viewer.

This particular print, An Amalgamation Polka, is “Respectfully dedicated to Miss Abby Kelly [sic].” By 1845, Abby Kelley (1811-87), soon-to-be Foster, was one of the country’s most well-known abolitionists, speaking to large audiences of both men and women throughout the nation. In this lithograph, Kelley appears to be dancing with her friend and fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818-95). Also featured in this lithograph are abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) (in the center with arms raised), Theodore Weld (1803-95) (behind Garrison’s partner), Maria Weston Chapman (b. 1806) (to the right of Garrison), and Robert Purvis (1810-98) (with sideburns and his back turned). Garrison may be depicted twice in this image, perhaps as befitted his importance to abolitionism. He seems to be peeking out from the back of the image, just right of center, this time wearing glasses.

Though the print may appear innocuous to modern eyes, it would have preyed on the fears of many who may have disapproved of slavery but could not conceive of social equality for blacks, and certainly not of intermarriage. The over-caricatured features and the promiscuousness of those depicted suggest that immorality and mayhem would supposedly ensue from such practices. The Amalgamation Series sheds light on the attitudes of those who may have opposed slavery but would have been appalled at the depiction of blacks as members of the respectable middle class and as dancing partners and spouses of whites.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> A new sense of professional identity as journalists and writers emerged within the brotherhood of battlefield reporters during the American Civil War. More than a few newspaper correspondents imagined and then achieved careers in literature. One of those was Charles Carleton Coffin (1823-96), who covered the major battles of the war for the Boston Journal under the penname “Carleton.” Coffin’s celebrity as a war reporter helped him secure book contracts with Ticknor & Fields, a major literary publisher in Boston and the publisher of the leading lights of the American literary renaissance, such as Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the decades leading up to his death in 1896, Coffin published a long list of titles on history, biography, and travel. Perhaps his best-known work was his 1866 Civil War memoir, Four Years of Fighting, later republished in a new edition as The Boys of ’61.

Coffin also frequently wrote books for boys and girls, both fiction and nonfiction. This book, My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field: A Book for Boys, appeared in 1864, while war was still raging. The bulk of the book is battle narrative, but the opening chapter is Coffin’s take on “How the Rebellion Came About.” For Coffin, a faithful son of Puritan New England, the root cause of the war was obvious: slavery. In a historical account that reaches back to the frugal, enterprising colonists of Massachusetts and to the indolent, tyrannical tobacco planters of Virginia, Coffin sets the scene for his young readers: “Climate, trade, commerce, common schools, and industry have made the North different from the South; but there was nothing in these to bring on the war,” he writes. “When the slaveholders saw that they had lost their power in Congress to pass laws for the extension of slavery, they determined to secede from the Union. When the North elected a President who declared himself opposed to the extension of slavery, they began the war.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> In New England, even in the age of newspapers, which began modestly in 1704 with the launch of the Boston News-Letter, the sermon remained a vital public communication medium for the discussion of news. Though most sermons, especially Sunday sermons, dealt with piety and theology, some sermons were linked directly to public events. For New Englanders the news of the day often carried religious meaning. Preachers discerned in natural and political occurrences the providential hand of God. These event-related sermons sometimes focused on routine and scheduled events such as elections, funerals, or executions. They also commented on unexpected events such as earthquakes, comets, storms, crimes, shipwrecks, and military victories and defeats.

In Boston in 1737 one of the most influential ministers was Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), who had assumed the pulpit of the new Brattle Street Church in 1699. Early in the morning of March 4, 1737, a fire swept through the workshop of cabinetmaker John Brocas. The fire was quickly extinguished, but in a crowded, wooden city such as Boston, a building fire was always a terrifying hazard and, therefore, compelling public news. Diarists such as John Burt and Thomas Prince noted the Brocas fire in their diaries, and over the following week all the Boston newspapers, including the Weekly Journal, carried reports of it. And on the very morning of the fire, the Reverend Colman preached a sermon on it. “It is of the Lord’s Mercies that we are not consumed,” Colman declared, quoting from Lamentations, chapter three, “because His Compassions fail not; they are new every Morning.” One of Colman’s listeners was John Burt, who mentioned in his diary that he attended services that day at the Brattle Street Church.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> From 1716 until his death in 1743, William Cooper (1694-1743) was Benjamin Colman’s colleague in ministry at Boston’s Brattle Street Church. Like Colman and like Thomas Prince at Old South Church, Cooper frequently preached on current events, including natural occurrences, which he believed were laden with religious significance. Cooper shared Prince’s fascination with the natural sciences as well as his devotion to the doctrine of divine providence.

The most striking natural occurrence in Boston in 1737 was the extraordinarily cold weather. Cooper took the “Irresistable Power of God’s Cold” as his subject in a sermon preached in January. In the sermon, Cooper struggles to explain the science of cold to his shivering listeners; the published version of the sermon even includes a footnote to Robert Boyle’s 1665 Experimental History of Cold. But the physical causes of cold—“frigorisick particles,” Cooper hypothesizes—were but “second causes only.” God was the “first cause,” and “these particles are of God’s making.” And what message did God send with his cold? According to Cooper, the frigid winter was a display of God’s restraint as well as his power. Yes, some Bostonians had frozen to death, but the city so far had been spared the communal judgment of a major fire, which, he said, loomed as a serious threat with town pumps and docks frozen. But perhaps most important, God’s cold called people to charity. “Next to the love of God,” Cooper declares, “we shou’d keep up a warm love to our neighbour . . . . Therefore the colder the season is, the warmer shou’d our charity be; for then the needs of the poor are greatly increased.”

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