George Robert Twelves Hewes
Washington Irving’s likable character Rip Van Winkle represents a resilient rogue indifferent to the passage of time. In 1835, the emerging conservative Whig mechanic party patronized a similar “hero.” The once obscure George Robert Twelves Hewes, a shoemaker during the American Revolution and survivor of its main events, was brought back to Boston to be recognized. Hewes had the same effect as Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. His age linked him to survival and indifference to the passage of time. Eager to control national memory of the Revolution, Hewes was ideal for being presented to the American public in 1835, yet not without the tempering of his character. Hewes was used by conservative patriots, primarily the Whig mechanic master class, in the mid-nineteenth century for the embellishment of the history of the American Revolution, when contention between radical journeymen and conservative Whigs emerged in a fight for public memory of the Revolution.
History, Forgetting, and Remembering
Alfred F. Young, author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, states that nineteenth century Americans approached memory of the American revolution with a process of “willful forgetting and purposeful remembering of American history”. Patriots of a conservative nature, such as Benjamin Bussey Thatcher and Nathaniel Hawthorne, were very willing, and intent, on forgetting the mobbish nature of the events surrounding the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre or the tarring and feathering of Tories, and to replace it, or ‘purposely remember it”, as a cleansed story of morality and virtue, non-inclusive of unbecoming citizen mob behavior. This conservative agenda is evident in historian Benjamin Bussey Thatcher’s biography of George Hewes written in 1835. As Young suggests, Thatcher, though anti-slavery was not an abolitionist, he was a reformer but did not advocate mobs, and was connected to the “genteel literary circle connected with the Federalist/Whig North American Review”. In his youth, he was influenced by his father’s actions to subjugate “the rebellions of angry settlers against the great land proprietor”. Thatcher was a Whig.
Distorting History
Young has suggested that Thatcher’s biography of Hewes is flawed In 1835, Thatcher gave Hewes a tour of Boston fifty two years after Hewes had left the city at the end of his participation in the Revolutionary War. So as to jog his memory and to embellish his return to Boston as “triumphal” in nature, as Young suggests, Thatcher “primed” the old patriot’s memory. It is evident that the historian had a strategy in mind: invoke Hewes with images of himself as a triumphant hero and place the old patriot in physical relation to the very places he formed those memories. By influencing Hewes’s memory Thatcher could add to the story of Hewes’s memory of the Revolution. Not stopping there, Thatcher embellished Hewes’s story by adding “a good many new anecdotes, especially about Hewes’s youth, and expanded others about the Revolution”. Furthermore, Young suggests that because of Thatcher’s own interests in schools and slavery in Revolutionary Boston, Thatcher indirectly “disassociated Hewes from the “mob” probably with some distortion”. By doing this Thatcher unhinged mobs or un-virtuous behavior from the historical memory of the shoemaker, serving the greater political purposes of the Whig party to embellish national memory. By applying his own conservative and intrusive biases to a biography of a man who had participated in the important and mobbish nature of the American Revolution, Thatcher deposited into American historical memory a distorted image of Hewes and the Revolution.
Josheph Cole's Painting: The Centenarian
A painting by Joseph Cole done in July eighteen thirty five of Hewes, entitled The Centenarian, is another method in which Hewes was used for the embellishment of American Revolutionary memory. Cole, an emerging painter, commissioned a portrait of Hewes that was to hang in the Boston Athenaeum; a place that Young suggests was “a place of fashionable resort” and furthermore, ‘not exactly a site journeymen mechanics were likely to visit”. The painting portrayed Hewes as a humble churchgoer, his features un-weathered by time, an alert sense of his surroundings, and filled with citizen pride. Furthermore, in his narrative, Young points out a significant feature about the painting. Hewes is not shown with any of his mechanic tools, in fact there is no signifier of his connection with the mechanic class of the Revolution, and it is completely obsolete of proof that Hewes was of a despairing lower class. The portrait in turn discredits Hewes’s actual character. Instead of a faithful likeness of the man of George Hewes, an inviting but distorted image of him was portrayed. This is not to say that Cole’s portrayal was entirely inaccurate but Hewes’s true character was construed in the process. It is true that Hewes was a churchgoer later in his life but he was also a shoemaker of the mechanic class, a fact not displayed in the portrait. Instead, Cole produced a painting of Hewes that Young suggests, “was reassuring to the viewer”. It “conveyed Hewes’s triumph in his survival, it comforted the viewer to see that he looked so hale and that his cloths were not threadbare”. Furthermore, Young asserts, “The painting congratulated the viewer: America took care of its veterans” .
A Portrait of Hewes
Thus the painting was done not to adhere to the reality of Hewes’s person but rather to appeal to the onlooker. Not to tell a whole truth about a patriot man who had given his all when he had barely anything but rather to serve the political purpose of showing good morals, virtuous behavior: humble and calm characteristics; It could further be argued that the painting served as an antithesis to mob outbreak, associated with shoemaker mechanics like Hewes and the American Revolution, by covering up Hewes real ties and thus appealing specifically to the “the sensibilities of the ladies and gentlemen” who visited the “fashionable” Athenaeum.
By “sugar coating” Hewes’s image, Joseph Cole, contributed to the appropriation of Hewes. The painting would have resonated with conservative Whigs because it exuded the moral lessons of humbleness, warmth, survival, and citizenship; all virtues needed to support their agenda of embellishing history for the control of American public memory of the Revolution. Hewes fell victim to this agenda for as Young relates, the Thatcher biography of Hewes, the portrait by Cole, all were appropriations of the man of George Hewes that “came at a price”. They erased Hewes’s membership in a class [and] minimized his agency in making history”.
Hewes’s appropriation also served to comfort eager conservatives who feared the mob rule representative in the radical journeymen mechanic class that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century while also appeasing those who wished to see a return to the moral community emphasized during the American Revolution. As Dr. Andrew Burstein states, “late colonial Americans regularly-almost obsessively-voiced their concern with moral character, and this naturally translated after independence into a concern with the national character”.
Preserving the American National Character
In fact this concern can be found reflected in Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence when Jefferson made liable the King of England for “bribing America’s slaves with freedom, if they took up arms against their rebellious masters”. As is suggested in Burstein's Sentimental Democracy, Congress edited out the phrase entirely because it “placed the ruling race of Americans on grounds that were morally suspect”. The key here is morally suspect. Congress was concerned with making America appear morally upright to the rest of the world, thus there was no room for the discussion of Americans owning slaves. This concern with moral upstanding dates back to early English explorers and Puritan ancestors who, as Burstein states, “equated the idea of America with the promise of universal good”. For nineteenth century conservatives this promise still rang true and could only exist if the two principles of morality and liberty shared a symbiotic relationship; in other words for liberty to remain intact the preservation of moral behavior, such as selflessness and tempered desires, had to be a priority.
Upholding the Moral Community
Given what is summarized about nineteenth century conservative fixation on holding up the moral community, let us return to Joseph Cole’s 1835 portrait of Hewes, the Centenarian; When Cole painted Hewes, he left out yet another important detail. A scar on Hewes’s forehead which remained visible for sixty years.The scar was left in 1774 by John Malcolm, staunch loyalist and disliked in Boston. Hewes had questioned Malcolm about hitting a little boy on a sled who was seemingly doing nothing to disturb Malcolm. Malcolm subsequently insulted Hewes in a condescending manner. Hewes continued with modest yet stern replies, taking no violent action, before Malcolm slashed Hewes across the forehead with his cane, nearly “penetrating to the skull”. Patriots, hearing of the event, tarred and feathered the haughty Malcolm while the injured Hewes felt nothing but guilt and empathy at seeing his adversary harmed in public.
This story fits the mold of the moral American story praised by Whigs. It demonstrates courage and compassion on the part of Hewes. It is an anecdote nineteenth century conservatives, concerned with fashioning an American history of superior moral community, should have desired to accentuate about Hewes. But then why is it, that the scar that represented Hewes’s moral courage, was omitted from the portrait? It is because the culture of sensibility, or the tender “sensibilities of men and women”, had to be appealed to and protected. Furthermore, Hewes’s scar was a sort of “window” to the exchange between him and Malcolm, which led to Malcolm’s tarring and feathering; an example of mobbish behavior that conservatives were eager to conceal”. Had the scar been shown, then the unhinging of Hewes from mobs of the eighteenth century would likely be unsuccessful and the appropriation of George Robert Twelves Hewes would no longer feed the mission of embellishing history for conservative patriotic purposes.
Bibliography
Burstein, Andrew. Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image. Hill and Wang Publishers, 2000.
Young, Alfred F. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Rachel Lombardo - I am a recent graduate of Louisiana State University with two B.A. degrees in History and International Studies. I enjoy reading, writing, ...
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