St. Nicholas Hails from Tug Hill

Clement Clark Moore (From: Wikipedia)

Clement Clarke Moore wrote "Twas the Night Before Christmas" in 1822. This was the first popular culture item to conceive of St. Nicholas in the contemporary manner of a big man in a red suit with a sleigh pulled by a reindeer and gifts for all the good little boys and girls. The cartoonist Thomas Nast was inspired by Moore's poem to draw St. Nicholas. His were the first pictures of the new Santa Claus. These are all well-known facts of 19th century Christmas history. What is not precisely known is where Moore was when he wrote the poem. This is of crucial significance because proponents of one or the other location adduce a number of inspirations for the poem based on where they believe Moore wrote it. There are two possible locations: 1) Constableville, New York, or 2) Greenwich Village, New York City.

"Involved in the debate is Constable Hall, a stately limestone mansion in the rugged Tug Hill Country of northern New York state, far from Moore's New York City home. One 'Historic Museum Guide' for New York states with full conviction: 'It was at Constable Hall in 1822 that Clement Clark Moore, a first cousin of William Constable, Jr.'s widow, wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which is popularly known today as "Twas the Night Before Christmas.' 

Constable Hall, Constableville, New York
(From: Constable Hall Museum)

"A second opinion relating to the Constables has subsisted through the years. Some believe that although Moore was not present in the Hall at the time of its writing, the poem was intended as a gift for the Constable children whose father had earlier died to an accident during the building of the elegant home...

"And from where did Clement Moore draw inspiration for the poem? Again, opinions seem to vary with the source.

"Constable Hall was built in Lewis County by William Constable Jr. on a vast expanse of land inherited from his father. Constable's wife, Mary Eliza McVicker Constable, was a first cousin of Clement Moore and his visits there are documented. 

"A 1998 Palm Beach Post newspaper story contends that on one such visit Moore encountered a Dutch gardener named Pieter, 'plump and jolly' and perhaps the inspiration for Santa Claus according to one of the last generation of Constables to live in the Hall. The account implies that physical features of the Hall, such as a large chimney and interior shutters in each room, are suggested in the poem." (338-339) --James Hughes, "Those Who Passed Through: Unlikely Visits to Unlikely Places," New York History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Fall 2010)

Thomas Nast's 1881 Drawing of St. Nicholas
(From: St. Nicholas Center)

Wait a second... the Palm Beach Post?? Hughes rests content with the Palm Beach Post as a source?! I found Hughes' article fascinating because (sad to say) I have never heard of this story of Moore and Tug Hill before. I was glad to read the article. But I am disappointed to see a writer published in New York History citing a contemporary newspaper as his final source of information on a historical matter. I think we could all agree that a published article in a history journal should dig deeper than a current newspaper source.

Nevertheless, what a great story! I cannot wait to visit Constable Hall the next time I go back to northern New York!  

(By the way, Hughes goes into equal depth in the article on the possibility of Greenwich Village as the location for Moore's creativity. But, despite my love for New York City, I'm giving the limelight to Tug Hill because limelight does not shine on Tug Hill very often.)

The Real Meaning of "Manhattan"

Oak-Hickory Forest (From: Wikipedia)

"The Moravian missionary John Heckewelder reported an Indian tradition that when the Dutch first landed on Manhattan Island they gave liquor to the local inhabitants, as a consequence of which 'the Delawares call this place (New-York Island) Mannahattanink or Mannahachtanink to this day,... the same as to say, the island or place of general intoxication.' Another version, published earlier but evidently somewhat revised, has this as a tradition among the Delawares and the Mahicans that they named the island 'Manahachtanienk' meaning 'the island where all became intoxicated.' The story does not agree with known facts, notably the existence of the name already at the time of Hudson's voyage [long before the Dutch arrived], if not before, and the translation is nothing more than a folk etymology... (283)

The Mannahatta Project, which reconstructs the natural history of Manhattan as of 1609, has spread the claim that the name used by the local Lenape Indians was Mannahatta and meant 'island of many hills.' In fact, the spelling 'Mannahatta' is taken from a poem by Walt Whitman and does not mean in any spelling 'island of hills' let alone 'island of many hills'..." (287) --Ives Goddard, "The Origin and Meaning of the Name 'Manhattan,'" New York History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Fall 2010)

Goddard bolsters his argument as to the incorrectness of both of the above proposed meanings (and others) with extended historical and linguistic arguments. So, what does "Manhattan" mean, according to Goddard? The original Native American inhabitants of Manhattan were Munsees. Their language was Munsee, part of the major linguistic group of Algonquins. Goddard locates the meaning of "Manhattan" as they themselves used it by focusing on the report of Albert Anthony, a 19th century Munsee Indian living on a reservation in Ontario. Anthony provided the Munsees' traditional explanation of "Manhattan" (the following is a quote of Anthony):

"Our traditions affirm that at the period of the discovery of America, our Nation resided on the Island of New York. We call that island Man-a-ha-tonh, The place where timber is procured for bows and arrows. The word is compounded of N'man-hum-in, I gather, and tan-ning, at the place. At the lower end of the island was a grove of hickory trees of peculiar strength and toughness. Our fathers held this timber in high esteem as material for constructing bows, war-clubs, etc." (289)

I am always fascinated to read about the natural history of Manhattan before the European exploration. The contrast between the current and pre-European landscapes could not be greater. The natural order here is almost completely obliterated. Think of it: a grove of hickory trees in lower Manhattan. Amazing!

Football and Bull Fights

"It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture." (160) --Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994 Dover edition)

Veblen was not much of a football fan, was he? He wrote this in 1899. If you haven't read any Victorian texts recently, "physical culture" was the term then used for exercise and maintaining good physical fitness. Veblen's larger point is that football accentuates archaic human traits of predation and barbarism that are little economic use to a society. His ideas were part of the popular late 19th century ideology of social evolution. (You are probably more familiar with Herbert Spencer as social evolution's main advocate.) Veblen thought the evolution of the human species is driven by the natural selection of traits that enable humanity to progressively produce more wealth. For Veblen, it all comes down to whether certain human traits are useful in an economic sense. Apparently, football does not make the cut!

The Theory of the Leisure Class is a classic of economics and sociology. I would recommend it for its unique descriptions and explanations of Victorian upper class society--which, by the way, can be largely adapted to Americans of all classes today. His observations of the upper class's "conspicuous consumption" help one to understand why contemporary Americans (and probably all of Western society) are obsessed with consuming goods--cars, clothing, houses, etc--in order to remain "respectable" to their neighbors. However, Veblen's book is awfully convoluted. The organization of his arguments within chapters is sometimes hard to distinguish. I think he could have written this book using half the number of pages--and been better off for it.    

Drinking Health to King Jesus

George Whitefield, whose preaching in 1740
began theGreat Awakening.
(From www.nndb.com)

The Great Awakening was "the boisterous and often fractious religious revivals that gripped New England following George Whitefield's celebrated preaching tour of 1740. Partisans of the Whitefieldian awakenings frequently referred to local events in places such as Newbury [Mass.] as a 'surprising,' 'extraordinary,' 'Glorious,' 'Marvelous,' and 'wonderfull' outpouring of God's Holy Spirit. More often, they simply called it 'the Work'...

"[In 1744], a Rowley [Mass.] layman named Richard Woodbury descended on Newbury, accompanied by Daniel Rogers and Nicholas Gilman. Together, they spent more than a month laboring to stir up fervent revival advocates in the town's two largest parishes. Woodbury claimed to possess the 'Power to bless and curse eternally whom he pleased.' He dared to drink 'healths to King Jesus' and vehemently condemned to hell anyone who questioned his charismatic authority. Exhibiting what one report called a 'strange Emotion,' Woodbury frequently fell into trances during which he would roll on the floor and rail against revival opposers, crying out that they had crucified Christ. Other reports suggested that he and his disciples bent to the ground and made crosses in the dust, before kissing and licking the earthen symbols." (65)  --Douglas L. Winiarski, "The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion and Deception in New England's Era of Great Awakenings," Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 14 (2012)

I should hasten to add in fairness that George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, all closely associated with the First Great Awakening, would all have strongly disapproved of the sort of madness described above. There were both respectable and disreputable aspects of the First Great Awakening. Needless to say, Woodbury, Rogers, and Gilman represented the wilder side.

Smallpox Under a Walnut Shell

"In 1716, while searching the [Royal Society's] Philosophical Transactions... [Cotton] Mather came across a report from Turkey describing a medical procedure that produced a mild case of smallpox and left the patient immune to the disease. The process involved removing infected tissue from one person and transferring it to a healthy individual. According to the report, a medical practitioner used a sharp needle to puncture a few pocks on a young person with a mild case of smallpox and extracted a small sample of the pus, which was pressed into a clean glass vessel that was covered and kept warm until it reached the home of the inoculee. There, the practitioner made one or two small wounds in the patient's arm with a needle or lancet, inserted a drop of the pus, and gently mixed it with the oozing blood. A walnut shell provided temporary protection for the wound. In due time, pocks appeared, but fewer than in natural smallpox, and the patient seldom suffered a high fever or other serious discomforts." (10) --Amalie M. Kass, "Boston's Historic Smallpox Epidemic," Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 14 (2012)

Dr. Zabdiel Boylston was one of the first physicians in Boston
to use smallpox inoculation. (From: Mass Moments)

I wonder how it was first discovered that the inoculation procedure described above protected people against a more severe case of smallpox. Who was the very first physician to conduct it--and what were they thinking?! Just as important, who was the first volunteer for the experiment?

Kass describes what 17th century Bostonians believed the causes of smallpox to be. First of all, it was a punishment from God for the sins of an individual or community. Second, it was thought to result from an imbalance in bodily fluids--a conclusion based on ancient Greeks' humoral theory. Kass explains, "According to humoral theory, good health required a balance of the four elements--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile--that constituted the bodily fluids. Disease indicated that one or more of the humors was either deficient or excessive due to internal or external factors." (4)

Bostonians were in some degree aware of smallpox's contagiousness. Kass describes how quarantine measures were taken and efforts made to clean up the city's streets at the first sign of smallpox. But does it not seem to be the height of insanity to transfer the bodily fluids from a person with a deadly disease to a healthy person! What was the reasoning here for the first physician to try this out?

The reasoning seemed to have been based on the observation that once a person had had smallpox, he/she was in most cases immune from it during subsequent epidemics. The idea must have been that if the pus could be taken from the sores of a person with a mild case of it and transferred to a healthy person, then the latter would hopefully be infected with only a mild case and later become immune. Seems reasonable in a way... but, with smallpox's contagiousness being common knowledge, I sure wouldn't want to be the first guinea pig for this experiment!