GO DOWN MOSES | Rhodes Statues Removed... Next, Robert Moses?

A statue of Cecil Rhodes in Capetown being removed
to an undisclosed location. 

June 21, 2020—The shocking killing of George Floyd has had national and global implications. It reenergized the Black Lives Matter campaign and then the long-time "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign for the removal of statues to Cecil Rhodes.

The campaigns, which have recruited from a wide range of voters, are now coming after the statue to Robert Moses in front of the Village Hall in Babylon, New York. More about that after three paragraphs of background.

Rhodes, of course, was the Brit who had a dream of a "Capetown to Cairo" British Empire in Africa. He helped realize that dream and had two countries named after him for many decades—Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He created the famed Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford, won by such American political successes as Senators Richard Lugar (Univ College, Oxford) and William Fulbright (Pembroke College, Oxford), and President Bill Clinton (Univ College, Oxford).

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign was successful in Capetown, South Africa, where the statue of Rhodes was lifted from its pedestal. However, the campaign to remove a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford came to a screeching halt when several alumni threatened to end their giving to Oriel if it acceded to the demands of the campaigners. At the time, the Rhodes Must Fall banner was not one that the Oriel Provost wanted to fight under. The resolution seemed reasonable—balancing the importance of keeping historical valuable monuments while facing up to the moral or other shortcomings of people who were once lionized.

What a difference the video of Floyd's killing has made! On June 9, a thousand RMF protesters descended on Oriel College. On June 17, the governing body of Oriel College voted to remove the statue to its alumnus, Cecil Rhodes. The next day (the 78th birthday of Sir Paul McCartney), Husayn Kassai, founder of the verification company Onfido, revealed that he promised to replace any funding commitments withdrawn by "racist" alumni donors who object to the removal of the memorial to Rhodes.

So, now, what about Robert Moses? His biographer, Robert Caro, has famously documented the man's aggregation of power. Moses was a New York City Parks Commissioner for 26 years. He built parks and parkways all over New York City and Long Island. He used his power to promote the automobile and higher-income residents. For example, he built bridges on his parkway with low clearance, to prevent busloads of poor people coming to use his park. There is a Rhodes connection. After Yale, Moses went to Oxford (Wadham College), graduating with a degree in jurisprudence in 1911. He was not himself a Rhodes Scholar, but he had some strong opinions about those who were Rhodes Scholars. The new campaign to remove his statue in Babylon gives new meaning to Paul Robeson's singing of Go Down Moses.

Meanwhile, the Governor of Virginia is determined to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee on his horse in Richmond. Which raises the question: What happens to statues that are taken down?

BREXIT | Sir Ivor Crewe

Sir Ivor Crewe (L) with Univ Old Member
The Rt Hon Sir Alan Moses Law.

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 14, 2019–Last month, Sir Ivor Crewe visited Washington and spoke to the Oxford University Society branch about Brexit. 

He is the Master since 2008 of University College, Oxford – one of the three oldest colleges at Oxford. It was the residence of Bill Clinton when he was a Rhodes Scholar. 

Sir Ivor is also the President of the Academy of Social Sciences. 

He pioneered in polling in Britain since the 1970s and predicted that the Labour Party was losing its base. 

He was certainly proven right this week, as the (well-deserved) rejection of Jeremy Corbyn means a continuation of Brexit. This outcome is not favorable for academic institutions in Britain because it inhibits exchanges of students and faculty. Some worry that the Scots will in due course secede from the United Kingdom.

None of this is so surprising when one appreciates the depth of the historical divisions within the United Kingdom. Some of that is covered in my book, Oxford College Arms, because the history of Britain is intertwined with the history of the coats of arms of the Oxford colleges.

After Sir Ivor's talk, I gave him a copy of my book, which includes illustrations by an excellent heraldic artist, Lee Lumbley. Sir Ivor wrote back (I include his comment here by permission):

Thank you for your gift of Oxford College Arms, which I enjoyed reading on my return flight today from San Francisco. I can confirm that there isn’t even the tiniest of errors in your account of Univ, which gives me complete confidence that your entries for all the other colleges are reliably informative. I imagine it was a labour of love to produce this fine book.

Since I have been in Washington working for the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress in 2019, I haven't had much opportunity to travel to Oxford branches to talk about the book, but I did give one slide show presentation in 2019 to the Oxford University Society of Washington, D.C., following the talks I gave in London, Oxford and New York City the previous year.

 

How to Order the Book. I have recently been asked how to order a copy of the book. I just type "Oxford College Arms" in my browser and it takes me straight to the Amazon landing pages for my book. Or click on the short web site address here: https://amzn.to/34h6ksd.

If you want to keep bookstores thriving by giving them your business, they can order the book for you through Ingram. All you need is the ISBN Number, which is 978-0-9845232-3-8 (the ISBN number is also on the Amazon site). As of today, Amazon says they will deliver books by Christmas, but that window is closing.

More about the book here: https://boissevainbooksllc.blogspot.com/2018/11/boissevain-books-gift-ideas.html

BIRTH | 130 years ago, Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble

This day was born in 1889, 130 years ago, Edwin Powell Hubble, an American astronomer after whom was named the most powerful telescope hitherto sent into space, the Hubble Space Telescope. A model is displayed in his home town of Marshfield, Missouri.

Hubble received a scholarship to  the University of Chicago in 1906 and worked as a lab assistant under Robert Millikan, who won a Nobel Prize later for his work in physics. 

In his senior year at Chicago, Hubble was voted a Rhodes Scholarship, one of the first,  So after graduation in 1910, he enrolled at Queen's College, Oxford, where for three years he studied law and philosophy. He earned a bachelor's degree in jurisprudence. Sadly, about that time, his father, John Hubble, died.

Edwin Hubble helped establish the field of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology and is one of the most important astronomers ever. Hubble discovered that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies of their own, beyond the Milky Way of our galaxy. He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period, discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.

Hubble provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from the Earth, a property called Hubble's Law, though it had been formulated and demonstrated two years earlier by a Jesuit priest, Georges Lemaître, at the University of Louvain. The Hubble–Lemaître law implies that the universe is expanding from a "Big Bang". A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities. Hubble died September 28, 1953.

CONNECTICUT | How Theocratic Brits Created Two Colonies and a State

Rev. John Davenport, First Minister
of New Haven, 1638-1668. Portrait by
Amos Doolittle, c. 1797, Connecticut
Historical Society.

John Winthrop and the story of the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is better known than the stories of Hartford and New Haven, and the State that grew out of these towns is less well understood.

Thomas Hooker was a great preacher, an erudite writer on Christian subjects, the first minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the founders of both the city of Hartford and the state of Connecticut. He is also the inspiration for the "Fundamental Orders" of Connecticut, the world's first written democratic constitution.

Most likely he was born in Leicestershire, the county east of Warwickshire. The Hooker branch in Devon produced the great theologian, Rev. Richard Hooker who, with Sir Walter Raleigh, was one of the two most influential people to come from Exeter, Devon's the county town.

As a speaker, Hooker attracted crowds as well as spies from the Church of England. The Puritans wanted to "purify" the church, but the Anglican Church was a step ahead, purifying itself of heretics including Puritans, to protect the unpopular Charles I.

Hooker was ordered to appear before the High Commission, the Star Chamber. It was originally established to ensure fair enforcement of laws, but  became a vehicle for political oppression through its arbitrary use of power. Hooker decided to flee to Holland. From there, he and some parishioners made their way to Gov. Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony.

They settled in Newtown, later called Cambridge. But they came to oppose the undemocratic ways of Winthrop’s theocracy and moved in May 1636, the year Harvard was founded, en masse to the Connecticut River Valley. Two years after they moved, Hooker delivered a sermon on how Hartford should govern itself. He said:

The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people. … [The] choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance. … [T]hey who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates [should] also … set the bounds and limitations of the power and the place unto which they call them. 

A historian (Ellsworth Grant) calls this statement “the first practical assertion ... of the right of the governed not only to choose their rulers but to limit their powers.” The Fundamental Orders of the colony of Connecticut, consisting of the towns of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor, were based on Hooker’s sermon. They are the world's first written constitution. It is why Connecticut is known as the Constitution State. (https://www.hartfordhistory.net/founding_of_hartford.html)

John Davenport also left Winthrop not long after Hooker did. He was from the north end of Warwickshire, east of Birmingham, in the city of Coventry. Davenport is remembered as the man after whom Davenport College at Yale is named. He was born to a wealthy family, son and grandson of two generations of civic leaders in Coventry. He was educated at Oxford, matriculating at Merton College in 1613, switching to Magdalen College in 1615 and leaving Oxford before completing his degree. (He returned in 1625 when Charles I came to the throne to earn his B.D. and M.A. degrees.) 

In 1624 he was made vicar of the parish of St Stephen’s Church in London. At St. Stephen’s, his boyhood friend from Coventry, Theophilus Eaton, became a member of his parish. Eaton was the son of a minister with a B.D. degree from Oxford (Lincoln College). Davenport’s efforts to support rural clergy and relieve reformed clergy displaced by war were frustrated by Bishop William Laud, an alumnus of St John’s College, Oxford and a junkyard dog of a heretic-hunter. When Charles I appointed Laud to be Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Davenport resigned in disgust from the Church of England and moved to Holland. 

Davenport and Eaton left England on a ship to join the Massachusetts Bay Colony and fellow Puritans in Boston. Davenport brought with him much of the St Stephen’s parish on the Hector in 1637. William Woodin, ancestor of the first Treasury Secretary under FDR, might well have been on this ship even though he was only 12, since the Puritans tended to bring their families. There is no record of an older Woodin having come on the Boston voyage or on the later trip to New Haven, but young Woodin might have been put in the care of a friendly family. 

When they reached Boston, Davenport and Eaton were disappointed. Winthrop demanded his own version of Puritan orthodoxy. The last straw was the church trial in 1638  in the midst of the Antinomian disputes, i.e., the debate over whether people were saved by good works or by grace. Davenport was ordinarily on the side of battling heresy, but when he attended the trial of a fellow dissenter, he did not like conduct of the trial.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591-1643) argued for a Covenant of Grace. The trial ended with her excommunication from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and she fled to Providence, where Roger Williams (1603-1683) had created the first Baptist Church and preached the ideas that Anne Hutchinson promoted. Williams was the first to argue for separation of church and state. Hutchinson moved to Portsmouth, R.I. and years later she and her children were killed by Indians.

Davenport and Eaton decided to leave Boston but not to join Hooker. Eaton, who had become a wealthy merchant in London, became New Haven’s first governor.

Davenport sought a "new haven", since he wanted a more orthodox theocracy than Hooker was offering. Eaton and his fellow merchants had a practical interest in being in a harbor like Boston. Men who returned from hunting the Pequots told them of a spot at Quinnipiack on the Long Island Sound shoreline. That was perfect. Here they chose to put into practice a theocracy even more rigid than in Massachusetts. They arranged their civil and church affairs in accordance with details in the Bible. 

In the spring of 1638, the town of New Haven was founded. More people came in subsequent years and some groups fanned out to form Milford, Guilford and Stamford towns. These four towns were united into the republic of New Haven and they added Southold, on Long Island, and Branford. As a confederation of six independent towns, New Haven resembled Connecticut. 

From their origins during the colonial era, a sense of rivalry existed between the settlement at Hartford, formed in 1636 by followers of the Rev. Thomas Hooker and the settlement of New Haven, formed in 1638 by the followers of Puritan minister, Rev. John Davenport and his merchant-organizer friend, Theophilus Eaton.

So William Woodin put his head down and settled into being a New Haven resident. He would have felt the rivalry strongly. His name appears in the New Haven Congregational Church records in 1642. He married Sarah Clark in 1650 when he was 25 and she was 21. The church records show that he lived a quiet life with just a few embarrassing incidents caused by excessive alcohol consumption. 

But the Mother Country’s long arm was felt in New Haven. When Cromwell died, the opposition easily defeated his government. The monarchists swooped in and restored Charles II. Leaders in Boston and Hartford quickly recognized the new regime, but New Haven acted more slowly and in fact harbored two judges who had signed the death warrant for Charles I. While Charles II extended a general pardon to Cromwell’s leaders, he excepted the regicides.

Charles II punished New Haven for giving two of his father's killers, the regicides, a home. He granted a new charter to the Colony of Connecticut in 1662, ending the independence of New Haven and joining it to  Connecticut as of 1665. He was correct that the New Haven colony was more willing to oppose him, but was wrong about which of the two governing philosophies would be more dangerous for continued rule by the Mother Country. 

Hooker's colony was more radically democratic than Winthrop, while Davenport was more conservative about holding the power in the hands of fewer people. In the New Haven colony only church-members could vote, disfranchising half the settlers in New Haven town and Guilford, and one-fifth in Milford. Each of the six New Haven towns was also governed by seven church officers known as "11 pillars of the church" who served as judges. They ended the English system of trial by jury, because there was no authority for it in the laws of Moses. (Based on John Fisk, 1896 http://colonialwarsct.org/1638_eaton_davenport.htm.) 

Davenport was still venerated by his congregation in New Haven. Near the end of his life he was offered a position at the First Church in Boston, the most prestigious Puritan church in the colonies. Davenport accepted it, and thereby agitated his own New Haven parish. In the brouhaha that followed, Davenport died in 1670. He is remembered as a visionary who developed a plan for new college, 30 years before it was established and was given the name Yale. The University has recognized Davenport's role by naming a college after him.

In 1701 the Connecticut legislature made New Haven and Hartford co-capitals, with meetings every May in Hartford, and every October in New Haven. But maintaining capitol buildings in both places was expensive. Officials proposed eliminating one of the capitols and put it to a referendum. New Haven was larger, but Hartford was more central and offered land and $500,000 toward construction. In the fall of 1873, Hartford won the referendum, becoming Connecticut’s sole capital city, effective 1875. (Source: Patrick J. Mahoney, "A Tale of Two Capitals", https://connecticuthistory.org/a-tale-of-two-capitals/)

WOODIN | Will Woodin's Oxford, Conn. Ancestors

William H[artman] ("Will") Woodin, FDR's first Treasury Secretary, was born in Berwick, Pa., but before his family settled in Pennsylvania they lived in Oxford, Conn.

His ancestor David Woodin left England because he did not conform to the Church of England. Being a dissenter was, for a time, a treasonous way of life.

The English dissenters with which the first Woodins identified appear to have been Congregationalists. Having first  tried settling in the Netherlands, the dissenters migrated in large numbers to New Haven.

Why New Haven Was a Magnet for Puritans

New Haven was founded in 1638 by John Davenport and some 500 other Puritans who left Boston to create a theocratic colony. Unfortunately there were lapses of discipline in Boston and immigrants to New England chose to go to a new colony that permitted only fellow dissenters. Called the New Haven Colony, it was originally independent of the Connecticut colony to the south.

The Congregational churches or meetinghouses in the United States broke more definitively with the Church of England than the Presbyterians, who were at times allied with the Anglicans. The distinctive feature of the Congregational Church is that each church runs its own affairs; there is no hierarchy. The Presbyterians, however, elect not only their elders but higher regional levels of church leaders—the American Constitution is modeled on the Presbyterian church organization, using some of the language of Free Masonry.

The Congregational churches led the migration to America and later the revolt by Oliver Cromwell and others against Charles I. In 1630, Puritans founded the first American Congregational Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Sir Richard Saltonstall. They chose Rev. George Phillips from Norfolk County, England, as their first pastor.

Because of their emphasis on thinking for themselves, the Congregational churches put great emphasis on learning and founded some of the first colleges and universities in America, starting with Harvard in 1636 and then (as with Cambridge leaving Oxford) through dissent with Harvard thinking, Yale. Then they started Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst—and later, Beloit, Carleton, Grinnell, Oberlin, and Pomona. 

As Harvard was forming, in 1635, seven of the Watertown Puritans who came in 1630 left the Boston area and settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut, becoming the second church organized and located in Connecticut (the first being in Windsor, earlier in the same year). In 1641, the New Haven Colony, at Rev. John Davenport's suggestion, offered land to 28 Wethersfield families within New Haven and they became the First Congregational Church of Stamford, six years before Stamford itself formally existed. Rev. John Sherman served as first pastor in Wethersfield (1635-1641) and Rev. Richard Denton, originally from Halifax, England, served as first pastor of the church in Stamford (1641-1644). Out of the migration to New Haven would come the momentum to found Yale.

William Woodin Migrates from England before 1642

Records of the First Congregational Church in New Haven indicate that three Woodin generations lived in New Haven at least part of their lives. The first William Woodin arrived three years after New Haven was founded, in 1842. He married Sarah Clark, who may have been the reason he chose New Haven, because she seems to have had family in the Colony. She died in 1691, seven years after her husband. Almost surely he or she had family or business connections in New Haven. They were members of the growing Congregational church, which would found Yale University in 1701, ten years after Sarah died. 

The first two American generations of Woodins appear to have sought security and lived long lives. The two Woodins born in New Haven to William and Sarah Woodin lived to an average age of 70. Will Woodin's g4[gggg] grandfather, Benjamin Woodin (1670-1738), was born when his father was 29. Benjamin married Mary Wilmot and he lived to be 67. His wife was five years younger and lived four years longer.

Benjamin and Mary Woodin had a son William in 1718. He married Katherine Harrington and moved to Oxford, Conn., He lived to 73 and his wife to 80.

The Oxford Woodins

Oxford, Conn. is located midway between Waterbury and Bridgeport, nestled between the Naugatuck River to the east and the Housatonic River to the west. The two rivers create an opportunity for good farmland and woodlands. Oxford, Conn. has a sawmill that would have been an Oxford export and generated the raw materials for builders of homes and boats in the region. Today there are many Woodins living in Oxford, with first names Alvin (connected with the Trowbridge family), Donald, Heidi, Lisa, and Pin Dylan.

The two Oxford-born Woodin ancestors were adventurous. Both had shockingly short lives. One Woodin died at sea as a young man and his son died of an illness in the same year his wife died.

Milo Woodin was born in 1774 in Oxford but decided to make his career on the open seas as a whaler — a dangerous but exciting profession. He was successful, rising to become captain of his own whaling ship, an Ahab (but presumably nicer) of his day. He married someone named Lucy (her last name is not recorded anywhere). Sadly, he was lost at sea as a young man of 28, in 1803.

Five years before he died, in 1798, Milo had a son, Will Woodin's great-grandfather, David Charles Woodin. David was an architect, and the last of the Woodins born in 1798 in Connecticut.

Pennsylvania, Ho!

David Woodin most likely left Oxford, Conn. in search of work. Pennsylvania was well-suited for the industrial revolution that was under way in the early 19th century, with ample coal and iron and rivers to carry them on. He was married in 1819 to Sarah Hartman (1792-1825), who was born in Catawissa, Columbia County, Pa., six years before her husband. David died, like his father, a very young man, on October 21, 1825, just 27, a month after his wife. Sarah’s brother Casper Hartman and his son and daughter-in-law were felled by an illness called the “flux”. The same illness seems to have killed David Woodin and his wife. It is considered today to have been a form of dysentery caused by bacteria or a parasite.

David and Sarah's children were William Hartman Woodin — Will Woodin's grandfather and co-founder of the Jackson & Woodin foundry — and two younger siblings, Joseph B. Woodin, and a daughter whose name is lost. All three of them were orphaned in 1825, the eldest being just five years old and the daughter aged two. These toddlers appear to have been brought up by Sarah’s brother Casper Hartman, and his wife Deborah Carr. Casper was born in Catawissa in 1777, the son of a pioneer German immigrant, Johann Wilhelm Hartman (1748-1831) from Baden Baden, Germany and a Quaker, Frances Reemy, so that there may have been some Quaker influences in the home of David Woodin.

LIBRARIES | May 23–NY Public Library Opens

The Main Reading Room of the NYPL, the world's most
accessible research library.

This day in 1911, presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library was dedicated.

It was the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States, extending from 40th Street to 42nd Street.

It took 14 years to complete at a cost of $9 million, with two lions (Patience and Fortitude) posted out front on Fifth Avenue to protect the books and collect late fees. The library then had a tad more than one million books.

New York City in the late 1890s passed Paris in population and was gaining on London, which was then then largest city in the world by population. Its library lagged behind the other cities. This was rectified by a merger among three library initiatives:

• The Astor family library.
• The Lenox family library.
• The Tilden family, after the death in 1886 of N.Y. Governor Samuel J. Tilden. He left New York City $2.4 million to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York.” 

Out of these three legacies the New York Public Library was born. Its branch libraries were strengthened by a $5.2 million gift from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

Today, the New York Public Library is visited and used annually by well over 10 million people (one estimate is as high as 18 million), and there are currently more than two million cardholders, more than for any other U.S. library system. (I am proud to have a card for the NYPL and for Friends of the NYPL.)

Comment

For ease of use, the NYPL must rank near the top of all the research libraries in the world. Of the five greatest libraries, two are in the United States (NYPL and Library of Congress), and two are in Britain (the British Library and Oxford's Bodleian). The fifth, the Bibliothèque Nationale, lags far behind the other four in accessibility. (I have library cards for all five of these libraries.)

After NYPL's annual visitors of 10-18 million (depending on how you count) there is a free fall to the 1.7 million-per-year figure at the second-placed British Library and Library of Congress.

I question Wikipedia's conclusion that the NYPL's 53 million books ranks it the third largest cataloged collection in the world after the Library of Congress (more than 160 million items) and the British Library (more than 150 million items). If Archives Canada in Ottawa has 54 million volumes or items, then Ottawa ranks third and NYPL only fourth in the world in collection size–still not shabby.  Russia (Moscow Library) is at 44 million items and France (Bibliothèque National) has 40 million items.

A spokesperson at the Library of Congress told me that there is some disagreement about how to count items. The British Library allegedly counts some individual stamps as items equivalent to a book, whereas the Library of Congress combined stamps into albums.

FOOD BIZ | Randolph Hotel, Oxford

L to R: John Tepper Marlin and Brigid Marlin.

It was a nice idea, going back to the MacDonald Randolph Hotel with my sister Brigid for lunch. 

The Randolph is right across from the Ashmolean Museum, which has been renovated and is a popular destination–except on Mondays, when it is closed.

Martyrs' Memorial from the Dining Room,

The Randolph dining room has a terrific view of the Martyrs' Memorial in St. Giles.

I was surprised to find the restaurant empty at noon and even at 12:30. We left at 1:30 pm and still there were few people at lunch.

My sister Brigid bearing up.

The service was attentive at all times, so the problem is not that the hotel does not want to please its customers.

My sister and I think that the reason there are few diners is that the food doesn't keep pace with the location.

I had a disappointing minestrone soup and an avocado salad with too much inferior salad dressing. Diners expect more than that nowadays.

However, an Oxford friend says I should consider this a lapse of the Randolph most likely caused by the lingering aftermath of a fire at the Randolph on April 20, 2015 caused by too much cognac in the flambéed beef stroganoff. 

So we won't go on about the poor quality of the meal.

  

U.S. FLAG | Why Its Origins Are Masked (Updated 2019)

George Washington's inkwell in 
Gilbert Stuart's "Lansdowne" 
portrait. Note GW arms topped by 
griffin crest on sauce-type boat.

June 2, 2013 (Updated Nov. 2019) – As flags for Memorial Day unfurl across the United States every year, I think back to the origin of the flag.

At the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, the connection between the Stars and Stripes and George Washington's arms was widely accepted and celebrated.

Some skeptics rained on this parade in the early 1900s. One in particular visited England and reported that he couldn't find the connection, so he announced that therefore it didn't exist. 

A century later, on the website platform of the authoritative American Heraldry Society, Joseph McMillan, Director of Research for the Society, also dismisses what was once conventional wisdom:

[T]here is not a shred of evidence that the one [Washington's coat of arms] had anything to do with the other [U.S. flag].

This ex cathedra judgment continues to mystify me. What was Mr. McMillan's motivation in placing himself on such a frail limb? 

The fact is, many shreds of evidence are in plain sight. They just don't fit with some people's idea of who George Washington was or who they would have liked him to be. The dominant prejudice seems to be our wish to remember George Washington as a man of the people, not an aristocrat:

• George Washington's love of his family arms would surely have had to be disguised from the rebels of New England. They were opposed to aristocrats, whether in the Mother Country or the colonies. 
• Any influence his family arms had on the design of the flag might not therefore have been seen as helpful to Washington's overall reputation. See #7 below for my take on the Betsy Ross story as misdirection.
• Washington clearly did not want to become a U.S. monarch, when the British monarch George III in England was the arch-enemy. (Postscript 2017: We may look at the British monarchy differently these days as we see the placid Queen of England's providing impressive continuity and dignity to her country and how the British Commonwealth looks up to her.)

Washington was deeply loyal to his family, who were indeed from aristocratic origins, first in the northeast of England and later at the Sulgrave Manor near Oxford. From today's vantage point, Washington's interest in the coat of arms of his forefathers would be viewed as an obsession. His arms and badge were on the family silver, stationery and bookplates. McMillan doesn't dispute this. Many items from Washington's home are in museums on display. These are not shreds of evidence; they represent high-quality exhibits.

Does it matter whether Washington's arms contributed to the creation of the Stars and Stripes? Yes, it does. When the full story is told, it helps us appreciate Washington's greatness, why he was first among the Founding Fathers. It gives us some strong insights into his political perspicacity and how he wanted to be perceived. He was both a man of his times and a man for all times.

Seven Shreds of Evidence 

Below I serve up for Mr. McMillan and the educated reader Seven Shreds of Evidence beyond my 2012 Huffington Post article.

1. GW's Arms Are Widely Tied to the U.S. Flag. The connection between the GW arms and the U.S. flag was and is widely believed. Four examples:

Sulgrave Manor pairing, GW and
U.S. shields. Photos by JT Marlin.

• GW's estate custodians believe it. At Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire not far from Oxford, the Washington arms are paired with a shield showing the stars and stripes. The museum staff told me that the connection between the two is taken there as a given.

• In New York City's high-real-estate-value Penn Station, there is a large tableau representing it.  A revolving mechanical tableau was created by George Mossman Greenamyer in 2002 showing George Washington crossing the Delaware with an eagle on a staff bearing the Washington arms, with three five-pointed stars (mullets in English heraldry). The stars on the flag in Penn Station are idiosyncratically blue rather than the red (gules) of GW's arms. This makes a direct connection to the U.S. flag's canton with its white stars on a blue background. It shows that GW's coat of arms is linked in the artist's imagination with the stars and stripes. (It is worth noting here that there are several takeoffs from the painting that is the inspiration of the tableau. Warning: You may not like all of the alternative portrayals of the event when seen through the eyes of artists who are leaning against what they see as a white supremacist view of U.S. history. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-contemporary-artists-washington-crossing-delaware-challenge-history. Many are the most educational moments in my life that I didn't like at the time.)

The circling tableau, erected in 2002, shows
 The Crossing of the Delaware.
Detail below. Photos by JT Marlin.

• The red-and-white flag of the nation's capital is undeniably derived from the Washington family coat of arms. 

• In other places such as Washington County, Va., the Washington shield shows blue stars. Again, this creates a missing link between the Washington arms and the Stars and Stripes.

Detail of Washington's Arms in an artist's
version of The Crossing of the Delaware.

2. GW Was Properly Proud of His Ancient Arms. The Washington arms date back probably to 1183 (see below) with the acquisition of the Wessyngton-Wassington (spellings vary) property from the Prince Bishop of Durham.

The colors and symbols of the Washington arms and U.S. flag include colors and symbols that some have assigned meanings (and which I hasten to say others dismiss as invented). White (argent for the arms) is said to signify peace and sincerity, red (gules for the arms) stripes a warrior or martyr, military strength and magnanimity, and blue (azure for the arms) is for truth and loyalty.

Stars in vexillography imply a divine quality from above.

(Postscript, 2016: This meaning of the stars was provided by George Washington himself in the story in the next paragraph told by J. R. Manship in the comment below this post, for which I thank Mr. Manship. When a devout Christian complained to GW that dropping the Union Jack from the canton of the United States flag would mean the loss of the crosses of two saints – Sts George of England and Andrew of Scotland – GW replied: "But we are adding the stars of heaven, a new constellation.")

When Washington's first ancestor adopted a coat of arms it did not imply that a family was a nobleman. That did not come until English heraldry started being supervised by the Crown with the creation of the College of Arms. This negates the argument that GW could not have promoted his coat of arms because he was a modest man who disdained the trappings of office.

In fact, he did promote his arms, in bookplates, silver, letterheads and other artifacts, certainly more than any later president. He even changed his arms, substituting a griffin for the traditional raven. The artist who worked on the Crossing of the Delaware shows the coat of arms on an eagle, another version of the crest. Titles, yes, are forbidden in the Constitution (Article 1, Sections 9-10):

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state. No state shall...grant any title of nobility.

Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of GW. The
 inkwell below his right hand is enlarged in
the detail at top of this post.

However, coats of arms were never forbidden. Evidence of the attachment of Washington to his coat of arms is in the "Lansdowne" painting of him by Gilbert Stuart, so called because it was given by Senator Bingham to the Marquess of Lansdowne for his support of the colonies. The inkwell features the Washington coat of arms (see detail, showing a griffin above the shield).

3. A Story of the Two Red Washington Stripes (Bars) is Stirring.  A Washington, D.C. source dates the origin of the two red stripes on the Washington shield back to a battle between the Danes and the English in 979 during which the Danish king was killed. The English king allegedly honored the soldier who slew the Danish king by dipping two fingers into a wound on the Dane, and drawing two lines across the shield of the soldier. That became the soldier's coat of arms. (The stars came later.) The source of this fine theory is Rick Snider in his blog "Monumental Thoughts", October 2012

My Comment: Robert Crichton was reported by Jules Feiffer at Crichton's memorial service as having said: "Never investigate an interesting fact." However, I investigated Rick Snider's theory, and it needs to be reexamined. I found no corroboration anywhere of a battle in 979 or a Danish king dying in battle. So the legend as told is questionable. But this does not necessarily disprove the story, only Snider's date and battlefield. 

Quick Summary of the Period of Snider's Theory: During the 900s, the rule of England emerged from individual kingdoms aligned in two groups:

• Wessex consolidated control of England's west and southern regions into the Kingdom of England. 
• The Viking Danelaw ruled the north and eastern kingdoms established from the century before.

The year 979 was the second year of a long reign of England from 978 to 1016, 38 years, of Ethelred II ("the Unready"). Ethelred was defeated by invading Danish King Sweyn in 1013, but Sweyn died the following year and Ethelred II–far from having died in battle–was restored to the throne for two more years. In 1015, Sweyn's son King Canute invaded again and agreed with Ethelred's successor, Edmund Ironside, to divide England between them. However, Edmund died in November 1016, so England was reunited under Danish rule for the next 26 years. In 1042 Harthacanute– son of Canute and Emma of Normandy, widow of Ethelred the Unready–died and left no heirs. He was succeeded by his half-brother, Ethelred's son, Edward the Confessor. Under Edward the Kingdom of England was independent of foreign domination for 24 years, till Edward died without an heir and the Normans invaded and took over in 1066.

4. Two Oxford Connections with the Washington Family.  The Washington Family is connected both with Trinity College and Brasenose College, Oxford.

Trinity College. The Washington coat of arms appears in the Trinity College old library. It is believed by the Trinity College library staff to have been moved to the Old Library from the chapel after the previous Durham College was disestablished  by Henry VIII and a new college was established under Mary Tudor by Sir Thomas Pope.

One of Pope's jobs (despite the fact that he was a devout Catholic) was to value the various monastic properties that Henry VIII took over and then to sell them. One technique by which Sir Thomas Pope became rich was that he reportedly would require a prospective tenant to pay a substantial entry fee, enough for Sir Thomas to utilize to buy the property for himself.

The Shelby Abbey, Yorkshire, version has the same design as the one in the Trinity College Old Library with the stars (mullets) and stripes (bars) clearly colored red (gules) on a white (argent) background.

A document headed in Latin as being for “Lawrence Washington” is a sketch of the Washington arms. (See photo at left.)

Details on Washington ancestor's coat of arms, with

griffin crest, likely sent to a Washington in Virginia 

from the UK.

The Washington arms are quartered with another that is described as “St. Mervery or Ivather” which is either another family or a patron saint.

The supremacy of the Washington arms in the first and fourth quarters means that the coat of arms was in the male line, and the raven above further indicated the standing of the Washington family.

The lower coat is that of the Washingtons. Though undated, the document is written on paper whose watermark dates from the middle of the 17th century, being a shield and fleur de lis–the mark of the English papermaker Thomas Gunther.

The instructions were “gallicé, latiné & anglicé,” i.e., in French, Latin, and English, and show the positions, colors and arrangements of the various elements of the quartered coat of arms. It also gives a “Carmine Heroico,” or heroic verse, below the third illustration.

One possible source of these  instructions is that they were sent by Reverend Lawrence Washington in Oxford to those who emigrated to the United States. George Washington was proud of his family’s heraldry and used his coat of arms on his bookplates, seals, china and silver. Someone along the line changed the older raven to a griffin. The original raven could have come from the legend that a raven snatched a poisoned piece of bread from St Benedict and thereby saved the saint's life; Durham Abbey was a Benedictine establishment.

Where did George Washington and other later members of the family get the griffin?

Three griffins appear on the coat of arms adopted by Thomas Pope when he was knighted in 1535 and were then passed on to Trinity College for its use along with properties that he donated such as Wroxton Abbey. Why would the Washingtons have used the griffin in the United States and how would they have known, if there is any connection, of the connection between the Washington family and Trinity College? Could both Pope and Washington have picked up the griffin from a common source?

They both might have used it after 1555 to recognize the successor institution to Durham Cathedral's institution at Oxford, Durham College, and the re-establishment of the college as Trinity College in 1555. Sir Thomas, in his Grant of Arms, was allowed to use three "griffons" [sic] in his coat of arms (see Number II, http://ota.ox.ac.uk/text/5313.html). The Washington family may have felt the griffin was a more appropriate (and meaningful) bird for them than the raven, establishing a connection between them and a living college at Oxford instead of a dead one.

Brasenose College. How would the Washington family have known anything about the establishment of Trinity College? It could have come from an important second Oxford connection, Rev. Lawrence Washington, son of Lawrence Washington (1568-1616) and the father of the two Washington boys who emigrated to the Virginia Colony at the urging of Amphilla, Washington's wife.

Rev. Washington (1602-1653), was a Fellow of Brasenose College (BNC), Oxford. He was also Rector of the above-mentioned large parish, Purleigh. This Rev. Washington is the common ancestor of all the American-based Washingtons. In the early days when Rev. Washington's sons wrote back asking about their family coat of arms, they would be writing to him.

Rev. Washington would be well acquainted with the Trinity College griffin, as Trinity was in the mid-17th century producing future leaders of the country. Three Trinity alumni became prime ministers in the 18th century – Lord Wilmington (1673-1743), Pitt the Elder/Lord Chatham, (1708-1888), and Lord North (1732-1792).

Washington family silver cup – similar to,
could have been from, Trinity College,
Oxford.

When Rev. Washington lost his plush parish at Purleigh, his wife Amphilla went to live with her uncle and despaired of ever regaining a good home, because Lawrence had been routing out dissidents so well as an Oxford proctor.

He was on a list of about 100 marked clerics who were considered deserving of punishment by the religious leaders who supported the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell after the beheading of Charles I.

At the urging of Amphilla and probably her uncle, John (1633-1677) and Lawrence (1635-1677), both went off to seek new opportunities  in the Virginia Colony. They founded the Washington family of Virginia. (The sons of the first Lord Baltimore who took over the proprietary colony of Maryland, by contrast split their allegiance between Britain and the colonies. The one who stayed in Britain became the second Lord Baltimore. The one who emigrated became the first governor of Maryland.)

John Washington, son of Rev. Lawrence Washington, was GW's great-grandfather.  John had a son Lawrence Washington who was born in 1659 and died in 1698. He was the grandfather of George. And George’s brother, from whom he inherited Mount Vernon, was also named Lawrence.

So the bird that serves as the Washington family crest, traditionally a raven, was changed by the Washington family in the colonies, into a griffin. Later, the bird morphed into the American eagle – see next section.

Thomson's design of the 
Great Seal

5. The Great Seal and the Eagle.  On June 13, 1782, Congress asked 53-year-old Charles Thomson to design America’s Great Seal based on reports and drawings of the three committees that had looked into it.  Thomson had served the previous eight years as Secretary of the Continental Congress. He had previously been a Latin master at an academy in Philadelphia. His sketch of a design is at left. (See his description, which seeks to show the 13 original colonies as leaning into one another to make the Chevron where the bars were on the Washington shield.)

For our purposes, that Great Seal looks a lot like the Great Seal the White House uses today, minus the innovation of the chevron. It also has the major elements of the Washington coat of arms – a bird, stars, and stripes. The bird has become an American bald eagle and two main additions have been made:

• The eagle is carrying the olive branch in one talon and a "bundle of arrows" in the other. Note that in this sketch Thomson has the eagle's head looking left (dexter), which is the correct way from a heraldic perspective. It is also the direction of the olive branch, peace. This was reversed in the final version, which was not the best message. This was reversed again more than a century and a half later, when President Truman decided that the United States should show itself intent on peace, not war. 
• In the eagle’s beak, Thomson placed a scroll with the first committee’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One).

6. The Washington Shield. George Washington (1732-99), first U.S. President (1789-1797), was born at Bridges Creek, Va. His great-grandfather John Washington settled there in 1658 from Dillicar in Westmorland. The coat of arms of County Westmorland in northern England is the familiar red-and-white stripes of the Washington family, with a tree superimposed. Westmorland is just west of Yorkshire (where Shelby Abbey church has a window with the Washington stars-and-stripes coat of arms) and is also just west of Durham county to the north.

The college at Oxford preceding Trinity College, and on the same location, was a foundation of Durham Abbey for its students, which is why a Durham family's coat of arms is still on display at Trinity College. The Durham archdiocese was led (I was first told by a monk from Ampleforth) a Prince Bishop, the only such bishop with secular authority in England. The foundation of Balliol College, Oxford by John de Balliol, brother of King James II of Scotland, was guided by the Prince Bishop of Durham, which suggests the importance of this bishop to people on both sides of the border. A stained glass version of the Washington coat of arms from 1588 is in the Corning, NY, Museum of Glass.

The ancestry of George Washington shows how the honors to the family accumulated. The names in bold face have already been mentioned. Here is a genealogy. (In the comments I provide a source that takes the ancestry back further, with some authority.)

1 g17grandfather of George Washington - Patric FitzDolfin de Offerton, c. 1145-1182. His son
2 g16grandfather William FitzPatric de Hertburn, c. 1165-1194. In 1183, William de Hertburn procured the village of Wessyngton, not far from the border between England and Scotland. He changed his surname to his new land, i.e., William de Wessyngton. The "Wessyngton" evolved to "Washington" and “Washington.” Their status as a knightly family allowed the family to adopt a coat of arms, i.e., two silver/white (argent) bars and three five-pointed mullets of red (gules). At the crest, the raven rested in the crown (corona) of gold (or). William served the bishop of Durham, and in 1185 was granted the manor of Washington in return for the service of attending the episcopal hunt with four greyhounds. The family lived on the estate for 400 years, but in 1613 the estate was returned to the church with (a source says) compensation for the improvements.
3 g15grandfather William de Washington, c. 1180-1239
4 g14grandfather Walter de Washington, c. 1212-1264Here
5 g13grandfather William de Washington, c. 1240-1288
6 g12grandfather Robert de Washington, 1265-1324
7 g11grandfather Robert de Washington, c. 1296-1348
8 g10grandfather John de Washington, c. 1346-1408
9 g9grandfather John de Washington, c. 1380-1423
10 g8grandfather Robert Washington, 1404-1483
11 g7grandfather Robert Washington, 1455-1528
12 g6grandfather John Washington, 1478-1528
13 g5grandfather Lawrence Washington, 1500-1583
14 g4grandfather Robert Washington, c. 1544-1623
15 g3grandfather Lawrence Washington, c. 1567-1616 - Sulgrave Manor
16 g2grandfather (Rev.) Lawrence Washington, Fellow of Brasenose and Proctor, 1602-1653
17 greatgrandfather (Col.) John Washington, c. 1631-1677
18 grandfather Lawrence Washington, 1659-1698
19 father Augustine Washington, 1694-1743
20 #(President) George Washington, 1732-1799.

George Washington knew that the family coat of arms (as he confirmed in a response to Mr. Heard) had been brought to Virginia about 135 years before by John and Lawrence Washington. These two sons of Rev. Lawrence Washington of Brasenose, Oxford and grandsons of Lawrence of Sulgrave had their arms granted by the Clarenceux King of Arms. The Sulgrave family arms sometimes show the mullets and bars in blue (azure) instead of red (gules), as is done for the mullets in chief in the Penn Station arms.

7. The Washington Headquarters (Personal Position) Flag. (Added May 7, 2016 and updated Aug. 11, 2017). The Washington Headquarters Flag was a blue field with six thin-pointed asterisk-like (i.e., "*") white stars, as noted in the excellent comment below by J. R. Manship. The site that it is associated with has been moved as of 2017, so I will reproduce the comment:

Very interesting blog article. What role do you see in the Sons of Liberty flag from the Massachusetts colony, that was the flag with only red and white stripes? Then what of the Washington Headquarters flag, that was a blue field with six, thin pointed stars, 13 in number? The Grand Union flag was the "union" of the Sons of Liberty red and white stripes flag with a canton added of the British Union Jack. The "Stars and Stripes" flag is the Sons of Liberty flag with the Washington Headquarters flag added as its canton. The story goes that Betsy Ross showed how she could cut 5 pointed stars more quickly, so it was agreed to use 5 pointed stars. It is said there was concern about removing the two Christian crosses of the British flag from our American flag, and according to the story, Washington said, "But we are adding the stars of Heaven..."

The Hopkinson Flag, with Stars of Six Points.
Washington's ancestral arms had five. So does
the U.S. flag. Was Betsy Ross a beard for taking
off one of the points on the Hopkinson stars? 

The mutation of the proposed six-pointed Hopkinson flag to the five-pointed Stars and Stripes offers an explanation of the Betsy Ross story.

The Betsy Ross story is puzzling if you think about it. The fact that one cut creates a star is not persuasive when one thinks of all the steps that are needed to fold the cloth!

The Betsy Ross story makes sense only as misdirection, a "beard," to cover the mutation of the six-pointed stars in the Hopkinson flag and the general's personal position flag to the five-pointed stars that correspond to the general's ancient arms.

Note: This post has been read 3,000 times as of November 2019. Thank you, readers. See also:  More Shreds of Evidence. Even More Shreds. Hey, Still More Shreds.

FRENCH & INDIAN WAR | A Great Read

Borneman's "The French and Indian
War" places it in the context of the
struggles for power in Europe.

January 4, 2013–The past two weeks I have been enjoying the Florida sun and found a book to read when the sun went down that I recommend highly to anyone interested in the origins of the British Empire and the United States of America.

Walter Borneman's 2006 book, published by HarperCollins, shows above all how the British managed to drive the French out of North America – and along with them, eventually, the Spanish and the Native Americans whom they called Indians.

So long as the French were a threat, the American colonies were dependent on the British military to defend them. Ironically, by driving out the French, the British Government under the prime ministership of Pitt the Elder was making possible the independence of their colonies.

Pitt himself would not have minded this outcome of his efforts. He was a fierce devotee of the colonies and vigorously opposed the Stamp Act in 1766 ("The Americans are the sons, not the bastards of England.), argued for removing British troops from Boston and deplored the attitude toward the colonies of Lord North. (Both Pitt and North attended Trinity College, Oxford but they are judged very differently by history.) Although Pitt never set foot in America, he wished not long before his death that he were ten years younger so that he could

spend the remainder of my days in America, which has already given the most brilliant proofs of its independent spirit. (Borneman, p. 305, citing J. C. Long's 1940 book on Pitt.)

Borneman, who lives in Colorado, has previously written about the War of 1812. He shows that George II was wrapped up in keeping his "prized possession," Hanover. The king sent his "most treasured son", the duke of Cumberland, to defend Hanover, but the duke was surrounded by the French at Hastenbeck in Germany, and was forced to surrender Hanover to the French. Cumberland escaped with the help of Colonel Jeffrey Amherst, and on his return to Britain "resigned his military offices in disgrace".

Borneman provides highly readable summaries of the different battles in North American, showing how the outcome of battles hinged on the strategic sense of commanders, and the importance of small numbers of savvy soldiers. He portrays Pontiac as an able military commander but questions how important he was as a leader of the Iroquois or other tribes. At numerous points he suggests that the early allegiance of different tribes to the British was based on lavish gifts, and to the French was based on the comfortable laissez-faire relationship that the French had with their Indian allies.

What the British had going for them is that they brought their women with them and built families. They increased and multiplied. The French came as traders and went home. The imbalance of population meant that the British were favored in the contest between British and French.

In the end, the French and Indian wars - what the Europeans called the Seven Years War - left Europe pretty much the way it started. But it made Britain lord of North America, and along the way established the British Navy as preeminent, and created bases for the British - for example, in India - that became the cornerstones of the British Empire. Pitt, and not George II, understood what was going to be important in the decades ahead.

The problem for the British after the dust settled is that the wars were costly and had to paid for and, many thought, why not make the colonies pay for their own defense?  The Stamp Act imposed duties on imported goods. To which Benjamin Franklin suggested that the new fashion would be "to wear their old clothes over again." Pitt in 1766 succeeded in having it repealed. The Quartering Act billeted British soldiers on the homes of American colonists and the New York legislature voted to nullify it. The British were "aghast".

George III was "contemptuous" of the colonials. Pitt's chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townsend, seeing Pitt ailing, moved ahead to do the king's bidding and imposed new taxes on imports into the colonies of glass, lead, paints, paper and... tea.

The last straw were the "Intolerable Acts", of which the Quebec Act of 1774 appears to Borneman as the most significant. It granted territory north of the Ohio river to the British colony at Quebec. George Washington had claimed these lands for Virginia in 1753 and in 1763 they were nominally marked as an Indian reserve, while several states had their eye on them for purposes of westward expansion.  The Acts also enacted reprisals for the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor.

All this came to a head on April 18, in 1775, when two lanterns were hung in the steeple of Boston's old North Church and their beams sent messengers riding toward Lexington and Concord.

This is a fascinating book and its 400 pages read like a thriller.