For the last few years people wandering through the county courthouse in White Plains, New York, could stop for a moment and take a look at what appeared to be a dingy reproduction of an early copy of the Declaration of Independence. The copy had been turned over to the county by the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It hung on a pillar and was regularly drenched with water by cleaning women. It did not look like much, and nobody paid it a great deal of attention.
But last year, when the old courthouse was replaced by a new one, the County Executive, Alfred DelBello, suggested that it might be a good idea to have the copy checked by experts; perhaps it was valuable.
It was. The document is one of the oldest existing copies of the Declaration of Independence and is worth about a quarter of a million dollars.
In early July of 1776 there was a British fleet off Manhattan, and the New York Provincial Congress had fled to White Plains. Loyalist sentiment was strong in the colony, and the congress paltered and hesitated before finally adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 9; New York was the last colony to do so. At that time five hundred copies of the Declaration were run off and posted on trees, fences, and taverns, where they stayed until time or the Tories destroyed them. The White Plains copy is one of only three known to have survived.
A few days later the Declaration was read aloud from the steps of the court-house in White Plains by John Thomas, the sheriff of Westchester, and was seconded by Michael Varian and Samuel Crawford of Scarsdale. Within a year those three men were dead, victims of the violence that the war unleashed in Westchester.
CREDIT DUE
Through a printer’s error the credit line was dropped from Childe Hassam’s painting of Boston at dusk that ran on page 32 of our April issue. The painting belongs to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
MYSTERY PISTOL
A half dozen readers responded to a rather puzzling picture that appeared in August, 1975, in our article on the Hamilton-Burr duel. Among them was Robert Thaden of Golden, Colorado, a man who knows his shooting irons:
The illustration on page 50 shows a pair of pistols. The one on the right is a full-stocked flintlock pistol; the one on the left is a half-stocked cap-and-ball (percussion-lock) pistol.
The point is that it is, I think, impossible that both of these pistols were used in the Hamilton-Burr affair. The one on the right, perhaps. The one on the left, I think not. In the first place, pistol duels ordinarily were fought with very well made, very plain and unornamented full-stocked pistols, either flint or percussion, depending on the date of the duel. In the second place, the Code Duello would not sanction the use of pistols of mixed types. In the third place, the participants would not have accepted the use of pistols of mixed types, because the fellow choosing the flintlock would be at a considerable disadvantage, not only because of the relative unreliability of ignition of the flintlock in comparison with the percussion lock, but also because of the slower “lock time” of the flintlock. In the fourth place, memory seems to tell me that percussion locks were not developed until a few years after 1804, the year of the Hamilton-Burr duel.
The above comments, if correct, prompt questions. …
We addressed these questions to Mrs. Annchen T. Swanson, the public-relations officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, in whose collections the pistols reside. Mrs. Swanson, who said that Mr. Thaden was “absolutely correct in his observation,” gave us the following authoritative explanation:
During the Civil War, Richard Church, the grandson of the original owner of the pistols, Alexander Hamilton’s brother-in-law John B. Church, organized a volunteer company. Having no other arms at hand, he changed the lock on one of the pistols from the old flintlock to the then more modern percussion cap. The frizzen of the original lock can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. Both pistols have a hair trigger without the set trigger behind it. This was unusual in 1796, when the pistols were purchased.
Those hair triggers have been the source of quite a fuss recently. Last spring Virginius Dabney, the former editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, who is now chairman of the United States Bicentennial Society (a commercial organization), published an article in New York magazine with the dramatic title “The Mystery of the Hamilton-Burr Duel.” His story was related in the tone that one might adopt for an article raising doubts about the guilt of John Wilkes Booth in the Lincoln assassination. Dabney spoke portentously of “questions” that “should be answered” lest “uncertainty … surround America’s most historic confrontation on ‘the field of honor.’”
It seems that in the summer of 1974 Dabney’s society borrowed the pistols from the bank to serve as models for a limited edition of expensive reproductions. When the pistols were disassembled, they were found to contain hidden hair triggers. With these triggers set, the pistols fire very quickly and with only the slightest pressure, as opposed to the ten or twelve pounds of pressure normally necessary to discharge the pieces. Dabney felt that the discovery of the hair triggers raised a number of vital questions: “What part did they play in the tragic denouement? Did Burr know of their existence?” and so forth.
In fact there has been no real discovery at all; the hair triggers have been known about since a week after the duel, when Nathaniel Pendleton, Hamilton’s second, published an account of the meeting in the New York Evening Post. In it he said of Hamilton: “When he received his pistol, after having taken his position, he was asked if he would have the hair spring set.” Hamilton replied: “Not this time.” We mentioned this comment in our article on the duel, and, curiously, so did Dabney in his, though the article went blithely on just as if that revelation made no difference.
As for the rest of it, it is patently absurd to suggest that Hamilton, a man of rigid honor, would knowingly enter a duel concealing an advantage from his opponent. It is unlikely that the hair triggers played any role at all, and if they did, it makes little enough difference. What we know, and what is important, is that the tragic meeting ended with Hamilton dead and Burr’s career in ruins.
DEAR COLONEL
On August 7, 1865, George Anderson, a recently freed slave, wrote from Dayton, Ohio, to his sometime master, Colonel P. H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee. The mordant, fascinating letter was apparently dictated to the V. Winters mentioned therein, who sent a copy to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. It was published in the society’s Anti-Slavery Reporter on November 1, 1865. As the editor commented, “It is certainly a curiosity in its way, and presents a kaleidoscopic internal view of slavery.” We thank Nan Gillespie of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, for calling Anderson’s ironic exercise to our attention:
SIR—I got your letter, and was glad to find that … you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harbouring rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. …
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here: I get 25 dols. a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson,) and the children, Milly, Jane, and Grundy, go to school and are learning well: the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday-school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them coloured people were slaves down in Tennessee.” The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old sores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At 25 dols. a month for me, and 2 dols. a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to 11,680 dols. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will shew what we are injustice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’ Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labours in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. …
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here, and starve and die, if it come to that, than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the coloured children in your neighbourhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
From your old servant, GEORGE ANDERSON.
P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
A WORD OF WARNING
Those of our readers who happen to be passing through Indiana and decide to stop at a historical society to take a look at some local artifacts should be on the alert against a possible surprise. Due to a loophole in state laws, shops selling pornographic magazines and films are currently avoiding prosecution by calling themselves museums.
BUY-CENTENNIAL AWARDS
There has been much comment about the crass and exploitative marketing ideas that have been spewing out upon us since the beginning of our bicentennial celebrations, but credit for the most vigorous and unusual protest must go to Luckenbach, Texas.
Luckenbach is a very small town sixty miles northwest of San Antonio. It was founded in 1850 as an Indian trading post and today consists of a saloon, a dance hall, and a general store. Some revenue is generated by a single parking meter. Three people live there. Nevertheless, last February 29 a crowd of five to six thousand converged on Luckenbach to take part in the Non Buy-Centennial Awards Day, when handsomely engraved certificates were distributed “for singular achievement in bad taste by abusing the spirit of the U.S. Bicentennial.”
There were, of course, a great many contenders for this honor. Among those selected by contest judge Jack Harmon were a red, white, and blue prophylactic and a product that seemed somehow to hark back to the spirit of the 1876 Centennial—a red, white, and blue manure spreader manufactured by the New Idea Farm Equipment Company of Coldwater, Ohio.
The N.F.L. was cited for its $25,000 bicentennial essay contest, which called for expositions on “The National Football League’s Role in American History.” (Henry Steele Commager has made a laconic evaluation: “It has no importance whatsoever.”)
The Non Buy-Centennial City was Omaha, where a budget car-rental agency was opened amid bicentennial ceremonies and a bicentennial buyer’s guide to the Omaha home market has been published.
Two products tied for second place: the Falstaff Brewing Company’s bicentennial beer cans and the Jackson Casket Company’s red, white, and blue coffin. (At least two other concerns are manufacturing the latter item, and one of them, the Jacwill Casket Company of Nightstown, Indiana, is receiving three hundred orders a day.)
But first prize was easily taken by the Midwest Breeder’s Cooperative of Shawano, Wisconsin, for its Bicentennial Semen Sale. An advertisement for its product featured a portrait of George Washington and offered seven quarts of bull semen for the price of six.
