The American Revolution --"WE should rule OURSELVES" and European thought.

Random thoughts from the last few days:

No one should be mocked for the color of their skin or their sex and that includes White males. Nuff said. Not sure why it has become fashionable in some circles to pretend this isn't racism, but it is. The goal, I thought, was to work towards an America that was a color-blind meritocracy where people of all classes and colors work in harmony and if you think this sort of divisive nonsense somehow helps, well, you are wrong and deserve to be called out on it. Nuff said.

If you think it is appropriate to mock White Males because they are White Males then your vision of America and its ideals does not match mine because my vision of America welcomes people of all races, and colors and I will resist you. Simple enough.

Second, three days after July 4th I find myself reading a classic historical work on the Hessians and other German Auxiliaries of the American revolution. (I finished the book on the French in that war.) For those who don't know their history, in 1775, the British government found itself faced with a large scale uprising in its North American colonies. They needed to send large amounts of troops to try to put down the armed uprising. There were not enough British troops to do this and meet the other obligations of the British army. So the British government looked to hire troops abroad to send to fight in America. Germany was not a unified nation and instead a collection of independent feudal states of various sizes. About half a dozen of the petty tyrants of the minor German states agreed to rent or sell their subjects and citizens to the British with the plan being to put them in military units and ship them to America to fight in a distant war all without their consent or agreement.

As Hesse-Hanau sent the most, such troops are often called Hessians, but this was not the only small German state that sent it's citizens to the USA.

Along the way, the German draftees at times tried to mutiny and riot or escape, but most got to America where they fought George Washington, the other patriot leaders, and their armies. (Please no airport jokes, please. They've worn thin.)  And they often fought surprisingly well once there, and despite not having chosen their lot, there seem to be few if any records that they considered their fate to be unjust, immoral, or a sign of an underlying social or political problem. After all these Germans considered such acts by petty tyrants to be a natural state of affairs for mankind. Instead they seemed to have just considered themselves rather unlucky to be the ones having gotten chosen to do this, but it was only natural to expect such things to happen and it wasn't something one could really do anything about.

Which sort of makes me think how amazing it was that the Americans of this time said "WE should rules OURSELVES." And that was a pretty radical idea for the time. A very radical idea.

And then they tried to make it happen.

And while half informed pseudo-intellectuals today are quite quick to say "What about the Indians? What about the Blacks? The women?" and then use this as a reason to dismiss the entire process and events of the American Revolution as somehow being unimportant and even immoral, they're missing the significance of the whole thing.

The idea was "WE should rules OURSELVES."

And this was in direct contrast to how the Germans of the  day lived.

The Germans sort of thought "WE are ruled by others, WE have no say in the process, and that is the way things always have been and always will be. It is natural.

And not only that, the bulk of the German citizenry had never considered that there might be a better different way to be governed.

The Americans of the time had begun to think outside the box, outside the traditional cultural framework of most Europeans of the time.

The idea that "WE should rule OURSELVES" was a radical one.

And what about the Indians, well. they were clearly not "WE" to the Americans of the time. The Indians were "THEM", the classic other, and, besides not only were the bulk of the Indians already ruling themselves, but they had no desire to become part of the American governmental system and its ethnocentric to think they would have. (Heck, there are still Iroquois today, Mohawks in particular, who are asserting their independence from the USA and its government. I'm not saying the Indians were treated fairly at this time, they weren't, but that does not mean they wished to become US citizens. The issue is, as they say, complicated.)

And the Black slaves, obviously a social and moral problem of the time that still has continuing repercussions today, cannot be ignored. The role of Blacks in the armies of the American Revolution (they fought in surprisingly large numbers on both sides) being a very complicated issue. It was essentially, a war for freedom being fought by a society that had legal slavery, an issue that was grappled with for years and finally only settled with a surprising amount of bloodshed.

But one that does not need distract us from the radical notion of the time that "WE should rules OURSELVES."

Clearly America still had a need to work out for itself who it meant when it say "WE" but the notion was still important and revolutionary for its day.

Women, the same thing. "Are they WE, US, or THEM?" Another issue worth looking at. Despite the presence of religious groups like the Quakers who practiced equality for women and the nearby Iroquois who had developed a Democracy that pre-dated the contact with Whites but one where, interestingly enough, only women could vote, it would be astonishingly long before women got the right to vote in the USA. (Women only got the right to vote in the USA in 1920,believe it or not.)

But regardless, the notion that "WE should rule OURSELVES" was a surprisingly radical idea for the time and an idea that was completely alien to much of the European population of the time.



You can find a PDF of Lowell's book here: https://themarshallhouse.org/assets/pdf_files/Lowell%20-%20Hessians.pdf

If you prefer, you can buy a copy. As the work is out of copyright, it is available from multiple publishers. If you buy though these links you will support this blog.

Iroquois housing and architectural shift at the time of the American Revolution (plus some gaming stuff)

If you have looked at this blog much, you will know that I enjoy miniature wargaming, model building, and studying history, among other things. Currently I am looking into local history from the American Revolutionary War era and reading "The Iroquois in the American Revolution," a classic work by Barbara Graymont (1972, Syracuse University Press.) Please note the link to purchase this book and support the blog below.

Which got me to thinking, what sort of houses did the Iroquois live in at this time and what sort of fortifications did they have?

Traditionally, the Iroquois lived in multi-family longhouses in walled villages. Many illustrations of them exist.  I've included several below, but before you look at them, let's think a bit. Did the Iroquois live in the longhouses at the time of the American Revolution?

For the record, Iroquois still live today and today they do not live in longhouses. Even at the most traditional Mohawk and/ or Iroquois settlements today, you are not going to find people living in longhouses. (In fact, my father once helped with a construction project at Ganienkeh, a radical, Mohawk / Iroquois separatist community with both a Mohawk language school and a stubborn insistence that they are part of the sovereign Mohawk nation, not subject to US or Canadian law. He helped build some houses. They were, for the record, of modern design and not longhouses.)

So when did the architectural shift take place? Like so much in Iroquois history and society, the shift, it seems took place in the mid-eighteenth century.But first let's look a bit at the traditional housing and styles of community lay out.



According to Graymont, pages 9-10, while some of the longhouses were single family, most were multi-family, The number of longhouses in a community varied widely, depending, as one would expect on the size of the community. "Small hamlets" might have just four to five longhouses, while the largest Iroquois communities could have over one hundred longhouses, as well as walls and structures for smoking food and other necessities of community life. The smallest longhouses were  "20 feet long, 16 feet wide, and 15 feet high" (about 6m. by 5m. by 5m) according to Graymont, while the average was "60 feet long, 18 feet wide, and 18 feet high" (about 18m. by 5.5m by 5.5m) again according to Graymont. The largest on record, she says, was 334 feet long by 23 feet wide. (about 102m. long by 7m wide). She gives no height but as longhouses were curved in shape, I think it's safe to estimate it was between 18 and 23 feet high ( 5.5m to 7m. approximately).  She also gives detailed descriptions of the construction and other architectural details of these longhouses. As these are easily found through a websearch, I see no need to share them here. 

Again according to Graymont, these traditional settlements were often fortified. As this is a detail of much interest to wargamers, it seems worth quoting the entire paragraph from the book in full:

"The Iroquois lived in stockaded villages located usually in easily defensible high places near a supply of water. The log palisades were from fifteen to twenty feet in height, in single, double, triple, or quadruple lines, interlaced, and then reinforced with heavy bark. A deep ditch might surround the palisades with the dirt being thrown up to form an embankment next to the palisade. A bark battlement might also run along the top and, in time of war, be supplied with piles of stone to hurl down upon the enemy and jars of water to extinguish fires started by burning arrows. After 1600, when the power of the Iroquois Confederacy was at its height, and particularly after 1700, with the end of the Iroquois wars, fewer of the inner villages of the Five Nations were heavily palisaded. A more modest type enclosure was all that was needed to keep the forest animals from scavenging in the village," (Graymont, pp. 9-10)

However, we are talking about the time of the American Revolution (or as they say in the UK, "the American War of Independence" ), a period when Iroquois culture and politics was in great flux, a time when, as one science fiction series says in the prologue, "everything changed."

So did the Iroquois live in such houses at this time? It seems some did but an increasing numbers of others were adopting White housing styles.  Again, it seems worthwhile to include Graymont's entire paragraph on this:

"Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Iroquois began to build the same type of log houses used by the white frontier settlers. An occasional well-to-do Indian would even build a frame house in imitation of his more affluent white neighbors. Bark houses survived to some extent well into the middle of the nineteenth century but gradually gave way to the sturdier dwellings copied from the whites." (Graymont, p. 10)

This house is a modern reconstruction of a house on the Saratoga Battlefield, a National Historic Park. It is shared merely to show a typical house of the time and place discussed. You may see other photos at https://benedictarnold.smugmug.com/Battles-of-Saratoga/John-Neilson-House/ I did not wish to infringe upon the copyright of those photos but there is one there that includes people and clearly shows the small size of the house, not uncommon in those days.

===

Graymont also includes an interesting story about an Oneida church built in the 1770s. While the missionary who promoted the  church in the first place, Samuel Kirkland, followed a school of theology known as "the New Light Principle" which held that churches need not have steeples and Baptism with water was not essential for salvation (Note: I hope to research this more. It sounds like the teachings of the Religious Society of Friends / "Quakers" may have had an influence here.) his local parishners, Oneida felt otherwise and in 1774 when the church was two years old decided, over his objections that it was unnecessary, that their church should have a steeple insisting, in Graymont's words, that "if white people could have steeples over their churches, so could they. Indian religion was worth no less than the white man's religion." (Graymont, p. 46)

While it was not this church, you may see photos of another Iroquois built church (Mohawk-built) from this era here: https://indiancastle.church/

As for Iroquois fortifications of the era, they are mentioned in several places in this work and in the histories of that time. Lacking knowledge to the contrary (at least at this time of writing), I would assume they would have been a mix of the fortifications described above along with the White style of frontier fortifications of the time.

Stillwater, New York Blockhouse Museum ( https://www.albany.org/listing/stillwater-blockhouse-museum/1006/ )

The Old Stone Fort from Schoharie New York ( see https://theoldstonefort.org/our-museums/old-stone-fort/  )

WARGAMING 

I am painting a large quantity of northeastern woodland Indians from that era, a large bag of 25mm Old Glory French and Indian War figures that were donated to me by a friend who never got around to paint them. ( Product ID: FIW-01 Natives Advancing with muskets ) Although in my mind they are supposedly Iroquois, I do not guarantee the details are correct, some of the hairstyles in particular look quite "iffy" but they are good enough for wargaming particularly as I did get them for free.

They will supplement the old RAFM Flint and Feather figures that I bought and painted years, really decades, ago. ( RAFM Flint and Feather ) I'll try to post pictures later. I also hope to do some supplements with figures from other ranges as well. Perry Brothers and Warlord Games both have some nice looking figures for the period but I am sure they are not alone. Bob Murch and Crucible Crush have an exciting looking line called "Flint and Feather" of pre-European and time of European contact Iroquois and Algonquins that while not quite right for this period seems nevertheless definitely worth mentioning.

ADDITIONAL LINKS

A New York State Museum exhibit and presentation on Iroquois longhouses. 
http://exhibitions.nysm.nysed.gov/iroquoisvillage/

Another website with lovely pictures of longhouses and Iroquois architecture.
https://www.hhhistory.com/2016/04/the-iroquois-longhouse.html


Should you wish to purchase one, this company makes resin models of Iroquois longhouses for wargaming. Although I've linked to a particularly nice looking one, there are others on their site, as well as a blockhouse and stockade walls, under the "American Frontier" section. Please note I have not done business with this company or seen their products in person.
https://achesoncreations.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=82&virtuemart_category_id=16

A fun website that gives instructions on how to build your own model longhouses for wargaming if you do not wish or are not able to spend money on resin cast models.
https://onelover-ray.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-to-build-no1-fiw-indian-longhouses.html


I stumbled across this while researching this blog, a biography of Samuel Kirkland, the missionary to the Iroquois mentioned above. I have not read it yet but it seemed worth noting and sharing. 
https://archive.org/details/samuelkirklandsm00lenn 


   

Mary Dyer, Quaker Martyr and Troublemaker Supreme

On the front lawn of the capital building of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts near the famed Boston Commons sits a statue of a woman. Who was this woman and why did the Massachusetts government choose to honor her in this way? Why, because an earlier version of the Massachusets government had hung her for being a dangerous and disruptive person. And when you hang someone, and feel bad, the only way to make it up is to create a statue of them a couple centuries later.This woman's name was Mary Dyer and she lived and was hung in the 17th Century.

Mary Dyer is widely credited as the only woman hung for heresy in Massachusetts. She is also, so they say, an ancestor of mine. (see https://history-for-fun-profit-and-insight.blogspot.com/2018/06/genetics-race-geneology-famous.html for some of my thoughts on these things please.)

And personally, despite a lot of self-righteous posturing and simplistic explanations of what occured, there actually were some complex issues involved. (Honestly, I lived in the Boston area for three years. I found it a rather smug and self righteous place and the fact that they responded to hanging a woman, essentially because the government considered itself the one true way and she disruptively insisted they weren't, by building a statue to her 150 years or so later, acting as if they were above all things and had now found the one true way again by saying they were above such things, just strikes me as an equally smug and dangerously self-righteous thing to.  My opinion is if the government and ruling class of Boston hung someone once, sooner or later they will be tempted to do it again, and for the same reason --that person is very, very bad because he criticized the moral authority of the ruling class of Massachusetts.)

So who was Mary Dyer and what did she do that was so awful and disruptive anyway? What motivated people to consider her to be someone best killed? There's a lot of writing on it

Well, was it because she was a Quaker? And if so, what was it about Quakers that excited the government of Massachusetts so much.

First, the government of Massachusetts at the time was controlled by Puritans. Although both the Puritans and the Quakers were Christian sects that had originated in England, they were very different in their approaches to society, authority, and approach to God. 

The Puritans were a rigid sect, with a hierarchical structure, in which the authorities, by virtue of their position and education in such matters, interpreted the Bible and the will of God and set these teachings out for their members, expecting them to be obeyed and followed.  

The Quakers, by contrast, were (and still often are) an anarchistic group that believed that each of their members could sense the will of God guiding them from within. Thus a Quaker (or more properly, as they later became known, a member of the Religious Society of Friends) not only had no need of an authority figure when they wished religious guidance, and felt quite comfortable ignoring the authorities in even the most important of things, with their belief that God could guide them from within, they were prone to completely disregard and even contradict the Puritan authorities. They would even go so far as to criticize them publicly. And they would encourage others to do so as well. 

And many people of the time considered Quakers to be a dangerous, insane, fringe element, of absolutely no use to the good people of mainstream society. During this time, Quakers were known to do such things as take off all their clothes, enter a Puritan church in mid-service while still completely undressed, and then, without missing a beat, having become the focus of attention instead of the designated preacher, lecture all present, including the preacher, on the errors of their ways and the problems with Puritan theology in general. This was called "going naked for a sign." 

(Citations: 1, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41946859?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents 2. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3810400551/naked-quakers-who-were-not-so-naked-seventeenth-century  and elsewhere) 

In fact, the very term "Quaker" was a slur used because these religious fanatics would tend to became excited and "quake" when they preached or did things like this. And if the act of entering someone else's church, naked, and telling them they were not only praying wrong but their entire society was based on a misinterpretation of the Bible, sounds self destructive, it is important to understand that at this time the "Quakers" (members of what was later named the Religious Society of Friends) believed that the second coming was imminent, Jesus was going to return shortly, and we would all be judged and it was a good idea to get your own house and theological affairs in order shortly as the end was nigh. 

Now, for the record, to the best of my knowledge, Mary Dyer never did this (although it's safe to say I had other ancestors who surely must have done so) but this is how members of her sect were viewed by the people who hung her. 

So to some extent, the Quaker-Puritan rift grew out of a difference between authoritarian "top-down" Christian teachings and "bottom-up" each man or woman can find guide through their own efforts sort of Christianity as well as just a general fear of disruptive, anarchistic elements that would spread chaos and disorder. (all of which sound like things that, to me at least, the authorities in Boston sill oppose.) 

In 1661, Edward Burroughs wrote a book on the subject called "A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New-England, for the Worshipping of God." It contains a detailed description of the hanging of Mary Dyer as well as the persecution of other Quakers in this place. The book begins by stating that it is "A DECLARATION Of some part of the S U F F E R I NG S of the People of God (in scorn called QUAKERS) from the Professors in NEW-ENGLAND, Only for the Exercise of their Consciences to the Lord, and Obeying and Confessing to the T RUTH , as in his Light he had discovered it to them." Note the use of the term "Professors" to describe the people who persecuted them, another sign of the "authoritarian-anti-authoritarian" aspect of the disagreements between the two groups. In this context, it's worth pointing out that Harvard, the oldest university in the USA, began as a theological institute to train Preachers in Puritan Massachusetts.  

Which brings us to poor Mary Dyer. Yes, she was hung, but not only had she been told by the authorities in Massachusetts to get out and stay out (Rhode Island being the normal destination for these sorts of troublemakers and intellectual non-conformists of all types and stripes of the time), but she had defied this order and returned, repeatedly. 

In their opinion, she, and people like her, had to be exiled as they did things like encourage people to have small, private Bible study groups where they read and discussed the Bible among each other instead of waiting for an educated, authority figure to explain it to them as was intended. Now, for the record, this was in 1637, a few years before Mary Dyer converted to Quakerism, but it was nevertheless a dangerous act to study the Bible on one's own and could easily lead to such problems as egalitarianism and anarchy. 

Not only did the authorities tell her to stop, but to show the other residents of Massachusetts how wrong and evil her actions were, 1n 1638, they dug up her still born infant (born and died on October 17, 1637) and told people what they had found. Governor Winthrop himself declared the baby to be: "it was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp; two of them were above one inch long, the other two shorter; the eyes standing out, and the mouth also; the nose hooked upward; all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales, like a thornback [i.e., a skate or ray], the navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be, and the back and hips before, where the belly should have been; behind, between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.”

You think she'd get the message that she just wasn't wanted in Massachusetts. On the other hand, apparently, even though it was the governor who did it, taking a woman and telling people that her still-born child had been a demonic creature, no doubt do to his mother's heretical views, as demonstrated by trying to encourage independent Bible study groups, somehow failed to convince Mary Dyer that the authorities were terribly Christian and following the path of Christ. 

From this time onward, Mary Dyer sought religious truth and soon converted to being a Quaker. She then spent the next 23 years traveling New England, with a side trip to the old country of (old) England, meeting with Quakers, defying bans on the presence of Quakers, preaching publicly, even where it was forbidden, and was often arrested along the way. On June 1, 1660, the authorities in Boston became sick of her antics and hung her because she just wouldn't stop (which sounds like the way a lot of my Quaker relatives act when they think they are right, me too actually. Go ahead, hang us, we don't care. We're on a mission from God. No, really, we are. I felt it one day. Honest.)

But it's okay because they built a statue to her later.

For a good biography of Mary Dyer see:
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/15/Mary-Dyer

Edward Burrough in A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New-England, for the Worshipping of God (1661)

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1023&context=etas