OCTOBER SPEAKER: GEORGE WASHINGTON: LONG ISLAND COMMUTER?
Our own Dr. Joanne Grasso, Program Chairperson of the Round Table, was our October speaker. Dr. Grasso has just published her second book, George Washington’s 1790 Grand Tour of Long Island.
Aided by a slideshow, as all our speakers are, Dr. Grasso explained that His Excellency was on Long Island four times. He rode out to Greenport before the war, he commanded at the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, he visited a plant nursery in Flushing as President in October of 1789, and made his grand politicking tour the following summer. He employed advance men who arranged for his lodging at inns and private homes. He rode in a white coach pulled by white horses. He traveled as far out as Patchogue on the South Shore and Setauket (home of the wartime Culper spy ring) on the north.
Dr. Grasso’s main source was the General’s own diary. She gave us a research tip: People don’t read government documents enough, and they are very useful in tracing history.
The President could see for himself how the Redcoats had stripped Long Island of anything useful, and writes in his diary of Kings County: “Farmers had been pillaged and the property of exiled Whigs given over to Tory friends of the Governor.”
Here is what grabbed this reporter: Washington,
when stopping at an inn, would take an inferior room
over one that had been slept in by British officers.
There you see an insight into the hard feelings
entertained by the American Commander in Chief
toward the late military occupiers of this war-torn
part of the country.
Dr. Joanne Grasso (right) chats with Lynne Saginaw and
Dave Jacobs prior to the October meeting.
A few of Dr. Grasso’s additional notes: You can today follow the markers, along the roads, of the “Spy Trail” on Long Island. Students no longer know who Nathan Hale was. (True! Eight customers in their twenties on a walking tour just this October had never heard of America’s first spy or his famous last words.) Perhaps they know Hale’s story in Halesite, a hamlet in Suffolk County where it is believed Hale landed by boat from Connecticut on his fateful mission. There is a Hale monument there.
Finally, Dr. Grasso has been trying to get a plaque set up in Soho to mark the site of Richmond Hill, a country seat inhabited at one time or another by Aaron Burr, the Washingtons, the Adamses, and Washington Irving. The house stood at Varick Street and Charlton Street. No luck so far.
BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS
At the October meeting, Elizabeth Kahn Kaplan reviewed George Washington’s Surprise Attack: A New Look at the Battle that Decided the Fate of America, by Phillip Thomas Tucker, PhD. (Skyhorse Publishing, 2014).
Ms. Kaplan compared the Tucker book with David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing (2004), and David McCullough’s 1776 (2005). She had good news and bad in all three cases. Fischer she found too wordy. Tucker tells us more than Fischer or McCullough about some German-American soldiers who happened to come from the same villages in Hesse as some of the Hessians fighting with the British. Tucker also tells us about some Black and even Native American troops in Col. Glover’s Marblehead, Massachusetts regiment of fishermen. That’s the kind of fascinating touch that makes history books fun, especially for the non-specialist.
On the negative side, though, Ms. Kaplan found no index in Tucker’s book, and she found his writing repetitive, and he turns out to be the kind of writer who never uses one adjective where five will do.
Your editor gave a docent tour at the Morris-Jumel Mansion on October 10. The Mansion had just received a shipment from the publisher, Simon and Schuster, of a new book, not even in the stores yet, called Valley Forge, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. Copyright 2018. It looks good. It has plates, maps, a six-page, single-spaced bibliography, and lots of notes. Kirkus Reviews promises us some correcting of myths and a nuanced narrative. The opening line reads: “His troops had never seen George Washington so angry.” Looks like a lively book.
Our December speaker’s book, Fatal Sunday, was published in March, 2017 by the University of Oklahoma Press. It is Book Number 54 in a series called “Campaigns and Commanders.” This publishing company was the first university press to be founded in the Southwest, in 1929. It specializes in books on Native Americans and western history, and on tornadoes.
Book review czarina Lynne Saginaw offered three books for review in October. One was The Apostles of Revolution: Jefferson, Paine, Monroe and the Struggle against the Old Order in America and Europe, by John E. Ferling (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). Jonathan Piel will tell us all about it in December.
Lynne also auctioned four books, including The Campaign that Won America: The Story of Yorktown, by Burke Davis, Acorn Press, 1979, and Bruce Lancaster’s Guns of Burgoyne, Pinnacle Books, 1939. The Davis book fetched 63 dollars, while Burgoyne got no bids at all. Go figgur. Maybe it really does help sell a book to have those long subtitles. In 1939, Lancaster apparently got along without any subtitle at all, while today’s books have subtitles long enough to constitute a whole chapter.
A TASTE OF HISTORY
Channel 21 runs a cooking series called “A Taste of History.” The host is Chef Walter Steib, who was born in Pforzheim, Germany in 1946 and speaks with a thick accent that makes him just a bit hard to understand. He shows how to make dishes and at the same time shows how those dishes figured in American history. He presides over Philadelphia’s City Tavern. His show has run for eight seasons (so it’s well seasoned) and has won twelve Emmys. On his website, www.atasteofhistory.org, are offered Steib’s cookbooks and DVDs of the show.
The September 8 episode, “Rochambeau’s Revolutionary Road,” features Chef Steib making a duck breast and beans cassoulet that General Rochambeau enjoyed after landing in Newport, Rhode Island in 1780. The Chef mentioned that duck breast was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson’s. He also showed how to make braised pork belly and cabbage, and biscuits – all in an 18th Century fireplace. “To bake bread, you need a beehive,” Steib explains, “but for biscuits, you don’t.” You can bake biscuits right in the pan over the fire along with the main dish. By “beehive” he means a bake oven, such as you can see at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the Conference House in Tottenville, Staten Island, or the Old Merchant’s House museum on the Lower East Side. Adding to the background of the General’s dinner was Dr. Robert Selig, the show’s historian.
DR. PHIL ON GW
In February, Dr. Phillip Schoenberg, of Ghosts of New York Walking Tours, spoke to the Queens Libertarian Club on Washington and his role in the American Revolution. Among Phil’s interesting points were these: GW “preferred a bad peace to a good war.” When he was elected President, GW was “bigger than the nation, but when he left, the nation was bigger than he was.” Also, the USS Constitution and her sister ships were the best in the world at that time.
UNGER ON LEE
February also saw a talk at Fraunces Tavern Museum by Harlow Giles Unger, who has spoken at the Round Table. This time his topic was Richard Henry Lee, who was made into a laughable yahoo in the musical 1776. Unger finds Lee to be a neglected Founder of great importance. Lee was the first national figure to advocate independence, and union, and a Bill of Rights, and abolition. He called for independence ten years before Patrick Henry’s famous speech. Unger goes so far as to call Lee the First Founding Father. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence expanded on the resolution that Lee got through the Virginia House of Burgesses. When General Howe took Philadelphia, Lee led 20 members of Congress to York, Pennsylvania. Lee bankrolled the army for a year – the Lees were the richest family in America. Lee was General Washington’s man in Congress during the war. After Lee’s death, his widow abandoned the house, and the British ships in the Potomac shelled and destroyed it in the War of 1812.
Every revolutionary is bound to remember some event that radicalized him. In Lee’s case it was his discovery of embezzlement on the part of John Robinson, a Burgess.
IN OTHER NEWS
On October 5, the AP reported that Goodwill workers in southern New Jersey found a copy of the Pennsylvania Journal & Weekly Advertiser of December 28, 1774. It had three items written by John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress. An auction house estimates that the paper might sell for six to sixteen thousand dollars. Goodwill Industries plans to sell the paper to benefit its educational and job training services. The item was dropped at a Woodbury, New Jersey Goodwill facility.
On October 19, it was reported that the New York State Archives had received a grant from the National Parks Service and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (that ought to be a subtitle!) for $125,000 to "conserve, digitize, and post on the Archives website hundreds of pages of documents back to 1775, the first year of the American Revolution."
(Like everyone else, these big history muckamucks confuse the Revolution with the Revolutionary War.)
These documents include fire-damaged papers of the Royal Governor, and military enlistment papers held by the New York State Library.
SITE CITES SIGHTS
No room for a travel destination this month, but by the February deadline perhaps some peripatetic Round Tabler might send in a report on a place somewhere somehow connected with our Revolution. So far we have seen the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Boxwood Hall, Liberty Hall, and Fort Greene Park.
DECEMBER SPEAKER
Mark Edward Lender will speak to the Round Table on December 4th on his book Fatal Sunday: George Washington, the Monmouth Campaign, and the Politics of Battle. Unfortunately, his co-author, Garry Wheeler Stone, cannot attend.
Lender is Professor Emeritus of American History at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, and coauthor of A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, and Citizen Soldier: The Revolutionary War Journal of Joseph Bloomfield. Lender is 71. He is a former Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kean University. (See the June 2018 Broadside for a profile of Liberty Hall, on the Kean campus, the former home of many Livingstons and Keans.) His Doctorate in American History is from Rutgers. He is the author or co-author of ten books. He has won the Cincinnati History Prize, the Richard P. McCormick Prize, and the Richard J. Hughes Award, the New Jersey Historical Commission’s highest award for service to New Jersey history.
Last November Lender and Stone spoke at Mt. Vernon on their book. Mr. Stone is a retired archeologist-historian. One of those people whose name sounds like what he does. Get it? Stone… archeologist. Like Olympic swimmer Diana Nyad, and White House Spokesman Larry Speakes.
Our co-authors argue that without the Battle of Monmouth and the subsequent court martial of General Charles Lee, General Washington’s critics in Congress might have succeeded in replacing him… with Charles Lee. Choke.
And best of all, Messrs. Lender and Stone will be presented with the prestigious American Revolution Round Table Annual Book Award for 2017. Other historical associations have been asking us lately about this award, so the word has gotten around that this award comes from some very well-read Revwar aficionados. It carries some weight now in the historical community.
ANNUAL BOOK AWARD
Nominations are open and encouraged for this year’s ARRT Annual Book Award for the best book on the American Revolution published in 2018. You may email your nomination to Chairman Dr. David Jacobs at djacobs01@snet.net, or you may just hand it to Dave at the December meeting.
The Round Table has given out this award for at least twenty years now, and the best-known recipients have been David McCullough and of course Thomas Fleming.
DEADLINE
The deadline for submissions to the February Broadside is Tuesday, January 15, and the following Tuesday, January 22 should see the February Broadside appearing in your email inbox. Lynne "Lois Lane" Saginaw has sent in items, so let’s see some "Clark Kent" and "Jimmy Olsen" by-lines too! Great Caesar's Ghost!
DINNER PLAN
The Coffee House is now publishing the menu for our meetings in advance. The December entree will be a hearty veal stew. Vegetarians and others with special dietary requirements are welcome to contact our chef, Irene Semerjak, at 646-427-6121, well before the preferred general reservation deadline. Everyone please inform our treasurer, Jon Carriel, by Monday noon, December 3rd, if planning to attend.
Dinner menu displayed on the hors d'oeuvres table during the October social hour. [Photos by Jon Carriel]
AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM OUR CHAIRMAN
The December Round Table will convene on Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at the Coffee House Club, General Society Library Building, 20 West 44th Street, 6th Floor, at 6:00 pm. The annual meeting of the Board of Governors will be held at 5:00 (not 5:30), prior to the general meeting.
Your most obdt svt,
David W. Jacobs