Our October Meeting: David W. Young Speaks about Cliveden

Hello, Round Tablers.  Our fall season starts with an exciting meeting on Tuesday, October 7. 

Here are the details; click on the images to enlarge them.

From our October newsletter, Broadside

Please remember to make a reservation in advance of October 7.  For more about Cliveden, visit http://www.cliveden.org/  And join us on October 7th!

And while you're at it, you can easily renew your membership for 2014-2015 by mailing in the form or completing it and bringing it with you on October 7.  Here's the form, which is also available on our website at http://arrt-ny.org/ARRTDuesForm2014-2015.pdf  You can print the enlarged image or the image from the website by typing CTRL+P on your PC.  (Mac users -- you're on your own!)

We think this is the best deal around!

Membership has its advantages:  special rates for our great dinner events; a copy of the Broadside mailed to you five times a year, reminders of special events.  It's a great time to join the Round Table!

For more information, take a look at our membership flyer:

See you soon!

Mid-September Round-Up

Here are some tidbits from history and current news for Round Tablers and friends.

British Troops Landing at Kip's Bay
In the public domain; courtesy of www.wikipedia.com

Round Tabler Richard Melnick wrote yesterday, 9/15: "Kip's Bay Invasion Day
On September 15, 1776 British warships in the East River bombarded American positions around Kip's Bay, Manhattan (York Island), allowing British and Hessian troops, who boarded flatboats on Newtown Creek at Long Island, and invaded our fair city's shores ...".  Thanks, Richard.

Jack Kelly reports on his new book:  "Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence is now officially available in stores."  I hope it’s an enjoyable, exciting and informative narrative about the Revolutionary War and the “forgotten founders” who fought the war.

"The best source of information about the book is: http://bandofgiants.org/"
Thanks, Jack.  We hope Round Tablers (and friends) will enjoy the book!  Post comments here or on Facebook.  

U.S. 10-cent commemorative stamp
Issued 1975; image in the public domain

Lynne Saginaw reports on a timely item:  Unsung Hero, 5775 Edition:   Haym Salomon

Whether or not you’re celebrating the upcoming Jewish New Year, here’s the story of an American patriot we should all know.

Haym Salomon (or Solomon; April 7, 1740 – January 6, 1785) was a Jewish American broker who immigrated to New York from Poland. He helped convert French loans into ready cash by selling bills of exchange for Robert Morris, the colonies’ Superintendent of Finance. Salomon was the prime financier of the Revolution.

Haym Salomon was born in Leszno (Lissa) Poland in 1740 to a family, originally Spanish and Portuguese, who migrated to Poland and lived there for many generations. During his travels in Western Europe, he acquired knowledge of finance as well as fluency in several languages. He returned to Poland in 1770 but left for England two years later. In 1775, he came to New York, where he established himself as a financial broker for merchants engaged in overseas trade.

Sympathetic to the Patriot cause, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776 he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after holding him for 18 months on a British ship, to use him as an interpreter for their Hessian mercenaries. Salomon used his position to help prisoners escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death, but he managed to escape, and made his way with his family to Philadelphia.

Once resettled, Salomon resumed his activities as a broker. The Continental Congress was struggling to raise money. It had no powers of direct taxation and had to rely on requests for money to the states, which were mostly refused. The government had no choice but to borrow. ...

For more about Haym Salomon and his service to the Republic, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haym_Salomon and www.nps.gov/amrev.  If your taste runs to hard copy, you might want to read William Pencak's book, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800.

Unsung Hero: Dr. David Hosack and the Medicinal Garden

Where Rockefeller Center stands now in midtown Manhattan was once the location of one of the outstanding medical facilities of the immediate post-colonial era. Not a hospital, but a garden. Dr. David Hosack, who also designed the garden at Hamilton Grange, planted it, beginning in 1801. Here is his story, as contributed by the indefatigable Lynne Saginaw (Chair, ARRT-NY Book Review Committee).

Portrait of Dr. Hosack by Rembrandt Peale, 1835
In the public domain; courtesy of www.wikipedia.com

Born August 31, 1769, 245 years ago this week, David Hosack is perhaps best known as the doctor who tended Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr. Born in New York City, Hosack attended Columbia College, where he began as a student of art, but became fascinated by medicine. He apprenticed with Dr. Richard Bayley.

Hosack transferred to the College of New Jersey, today's Princeton. He graduated in 1789 and enrolled for further study under Dr. Nicholas Romayne. In the fall of 1790 Hosack transferred to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on cholera. He received his medical degree the following spring, and moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he opened his first practice.

He’d learned that the best practitioners received at least some of their schooling in Europe, so his father agreed to pay his way to Britain. Hosack attended the University of Edinburgh, where he spent much of his time in botanical gardens.

Shortly after his return to America, Hosack's son died. His wife soon followed, in childbirth. These tragedies, and the epidemics of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 and New York in 1795 and 1798, led Hosack to devote much of his life to the expansion of medical knowledge and education, and to the training of doctors in caring for women and children. He helped found Bellevue Hospital.

Hosack was appointed professor of natural history at Columbia College in 1795, and in 1797 succeeded to the chair of medicine. By 1801 he was a Professor of Botany at Columbia. In 1807 he was named professor of midwifery and surgery in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, later occupying the chairs of the “Theory and Practice of Medicine” and of “Obstetrics and the Diseases of Women and Children.”

Always an innovator, he was one of the first physicians to use a stethoscope, and a strong advocate of smallpox vaccination. Hosack made great progress towards combating yellow fever, and was the first to make an accurate description of its symptoms. He and Nicholas Romayne worked to found several new medical schools. One of his early accomplishments was the merger of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Columbia.

In 1801, Hosack purchased twenty acres of land in New York for $4,807.00. At the time, the land was in a rural area, three and a half miles from the city limits. Elgin, as it was called, was the first public botanical garden in the United States. At his own expense, Hosack landscaped the garden with a variety of indigenous and exotic plants. By 1804, the garden was home to 1,500 species of plants, the majority of American origin.

In addition to an enormous variety of plants, the garden contained an expansive greenhouse, two hothouses, and a pond for the propagation of aquatic species. It soon proved too expensive for even a man as prosperous at Dr. Hosack to run properly.

The New York Legislature passed an act in 1810 that allowed the State of New York to purchase the Elgin Botanical Garden. Care of the garden was placed in the hands of the State Regents, who did not share Hosack’s foresight. The garden was abandoned in 1812, fell into decay and was sold to raise funds for Columbia.

After his wife Catharine died, Hosack married Mary Eddy of Philadelphia, with whom he had nine children—seven of whom survived to adulthood.

Hosack was the founder and first president of the New York Horticultural Society, the first such organization in America. He was president of the Literary Society and the Philosophical Society, one of the founders of the New York Historical Society—and its fourth president (1820–1827).After Mary died in 1824, he married Magdalena Coster, widow of a friend and mother of seven. The families were combined with success, living on Chambers Street and at a country estate on Kip’s Bay—both part of the Coster inheritance. Every Saturday, the Hosacks hosted a salon for leading artists and intellectuals as well as medical men, and they became known as social leaders in the city. Hosack was a patron of American artists including Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and Thomas Cole.

In later life, with Coster family assets, Hosack was able to purchase the famous Hudson River estate of Hyde Park, former home of his teacher and partner in medical practice, Dr. Samuel Bard, and there he developed another fine botanical garden. The Hosacks’ opulent home became popular with visitors who enjoyed the beauty of the Hudson River valley, including not only painters and naturalists but the writer Washington Irving.

He died tragically, of a stroke, only days after a fire destroyed his New York property, on December 22, 1835.

Sources: 
Hosack, Alex Eddy, M.D.  Lives of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons of the Nineteenth Century.  Samuel Gross, ed. 1861.  Dr. Alex Hosack was the son of David Hosack.
Magnet, Myron. The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817.
www.wikipedia.org
Dictionary of American Biography
http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu (website of the Robert L. Brown History of Medicine Library at the University of Buffalo)

Objects of the Revolution: The Silver Oar

Sailing through Deep Waters

Images from Document 259, February 1941, "Gift of the Silver Oar to the United States District Cour
for the Southern District of New York.  Court en banc, Room 506, February 14, 1941, 10:30 a.m.

This object forms a bridge between pre-Revolutionary New York Province and post-Revolution New York City.  What is it, who made it, and where is it now?

What?

This is the Silver Oar, formerly the mace of the Vice-Admiralty Court of the Province of New York until the court was dissolved in 1775.  At that time, Thomas Ludlow, Jr., the Marshal of the Court, took the oar “into his own possession, doubtless for safekeeping.”  It remained in his family until around 1939.  It was put up as collateral for a loan and then sold in October 1940 to a silversmith (Robert Ensko), who sold it to a group of Columbia University men and friends.  (By the way, Columbia beat out Yale for the purchase of the oar. Roar, Lion, roar!)

Who made it?

Preeminent silversmith Charles LeRoux (1689-1745) served for many years as the official silversmith of New York City.  He made many gold and silver boxes to contain seals that granted the freedom of the City, and is noted for engraving the plates for bills of credit issues from 1715-1737.  The bills for 1737 show a version of the Seal of New York, still in use today.

Who led the effort to purchase it?

Charles Culp Burlingham (1858-1959) spearheaded the fund-raising effort.  He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1879 and a Bachelor of Laws degree from Columbia University in 1881.  (He received an honorary Juris Doctor degree from Columbia in 1933).

Where is it now?

On 14 February 1941, the silver oar was presented to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, document no. 259.  I don’t know where the Court keeps the oar, or even if the Court still owns it.  That is a subject for further research.  A copy was exhibited in New Hampshire in 2010.

Notes:  More details about LeRoux and the silver oar are available. The writer has done a great deal of research on colonial silversmiths, especially Charles LeRoux and his family.  Post a comment here if you would like more information about him or other silversmiths in New York City before the Revolution.

Prepared by Maria A. Dering
Member, Board of Governors
American Revolution Round Table of New York

Vacation

Your e-newsletter blogger will be on vacation next week, but please check back after Labor Day for new posts on Objects of the Revolution (the silver oar, for sure) and exciting fall events.  See you soon!

The Battle of Brooklyn -- Part Two

The Battle of Brooklyn (Long Island):  August 27, 1776

British military map from 1776 showing the marching routes and battle sites
during the Battle of Long Island.  Public domain, courtesy of www.wikipedia.com.

Here is the conclusion to our summary of the Battle of Brooklyn (Long Island), thoughtfully prepared by our Book Review Chair and Board of Governors Member Lynne Saginaw. Thank you, Lynne!

When we left off, the sudden appearances of 10,000 British troops behind their lines had thrown the Continentals into a panic. Many ran for their lives. They and those who stood were shepherded into a defensive line on Brooklyn Heights. There they shivered in flooded emplacements as the British dug their way ever closer and Washington tried to figure out how to save what was left of the army.

Fortunately, one of the men Washington had at hand was a stocky, hard-bitten member of the “codfish aristocracy,” Colonel John Glover. A militia officer since 1759, Glover was colonel of the 14th Continental Regiment, the “Marbleheaders.” He had raised ten companies of some 500 fishermen and sailors; Spanish, Native American, Jewish, and African-American, as well as local Massachusetts men. Those men -- many of whom Glover knew personally – were to remain together throughout the year, an example of discipline and courage for the rest.

At 5 o’clock on the morning of August 28^th, the regiment crossed to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Glover directed the manning of the vessels and rafts that had been brought down through the Harlem River from the North River, as the Hudson was then known.

During the first part of the night, the men worked with great difficulty because of the ebb tide and a strong northeast wind. Later, when the wind changed and a heavy fog covered the Long Island side, Glover and his soldiers were able to complete the evacuation of the last 700 of Washington’s 9,000 men, plus field pieces, heavy ordinance, and all ammunition, as well as horses, cattle, and provisions. All this was accomplished in nine hours across the mile-wide East River, oars muffled against the splashing of the water. By the official record, only three men did not make it back, and they were stragglers who failed to board with their comrade.

By 7 a.m. it was done. Washington crossed in the last boat. While pleased with their success, the British were nevertheless nonplussed at the miraculous escape of their foe. This was not going to be as easy as they had assumed.

Postscript: Washington’s most iconic moment again found him on the water, crossing the Delaware on a brutal December night. And who was there, ten miles below Trenton, on the night of December 25^th?

Of course! Glover and his extraordinary “Marbleheaders” ferried 2,400 troops -- again with horses, artillery and wagons -- across the Delaware River under extreme weather conditions. After marching several miles, they fought in the Battle of Trenton, and then transported the army and about 1,000 Hessian prisoners back across the river, all on the same day.                                                  
                                           
Sources: 
www.nps.gov/sapa
Ellis, Joseph J.  Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence. Knopf, 2013
Kelly, Jack. Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers who won America’s Independence. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014.

EXTRA! The Boston Tea Party ... Opera ... 2014

Photo courtesy of www.bostonteapartyopera.com

Round Tabler Treasurer Jon Carriel submitted this review about an opera in New York City that might interest our readers.  But note:  The last performance is this Friday, August 22nd.  The Boston Tea Party Opera is presented as part of the New York Fringe Festival.  Details follow.

And now for something … completely different!  An opera about the Boston Tea Party composed (story, lyrics, and music) by ARRT-NY member Matthew Zachary (“Matt”) Johnson! 

Its time frame is not just the title December 1773 event, but includes many years leading up to it, including the Boston Massacre of March 1770. The story line involves a cross-section of Boston’s citizens in a series of sometimes-realistic, sometimes-fantastical vignettes, but is dominated by the dramatic conflict of Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson. 

How well the opera will play to those with only faint memories of American History 101 I don’t know, but most Round Tablers should have little problem following the progression of events, which also involved the audience in the real debate of the era regarding the dangers and opportunities of defiance of the British Empire for the men and women of the time.

Musically, it’s radical only in the sense of being contrary to one’s expectation of it being annoying. (I confess to approaching any “classical” effort created in my lifetime with huge trepidation.)  There’s much to enjoy in its rhythmic riffs, vocal pyrotechnics, and harmonic sonorities. And the music is extremely well served by a young, enthusiastic cast of a dozen or so prodigious vocal talents. 

In short, it was certainly worth my time and may well be worth yours. 

Unfortunately, what I saw this afternoon was the fourth of only five performances of the current production. The last is this Friday, August 22^nd, at 5:15 PM, at the very comfortable Sheen Center Loretto Theatre, which is a short walk from the Broadway-Lafayette subway station.

For more information, visit Matt Johnson's website: http://www.bostonteapartyopera.com/