The Declaration of Independence
John Trumbull (1819)
Portrait of Alexander Hamilton
John Trumbull (1806)
George Washington
Portraying Washington
John Trumbull (1806)
stands in front of a white horse, with Bowling Green and the Battery in the background, on Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783
John Trumbull (1787)
The Battle of Quebec (Death of Gen. Montgomery)
John Trumbull
The Battle of Bunker Hill
John Trumbull, 1786
Gen. George Washington Resigning His Commission, Dec. 23, 1783
Trumbull, John (1824)
Surrender of Lord Cornwallis,
Trumbull, John (1826)
Surrender of Gen. Burgoyne
Trumbull, John (1821)
Wikipedia and Wikicommons Art in the Public Domain
1. Cunne Shote, Cherokee Chief [Standing Turkey]
| Description | Depiction of the Cherokee attack on the retreating Fort Loudoun garrison in Monroe County, Tennessee, United States, in August 1760. |
| Date | 1913 (published) |
| Source | Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree), The Story of Old Fort Loudon (The Macmillan Company, 1913), p. 346. Downloaded from Google Books, Full View. |
| Author | Ernest Peixotto (illustrator) |
The Four Stages of Cruelty is a series of four printed engravings published by English artist William Hogarth in 1751. Each print depicts a different stage in the life of the fictional Tom Nero.
Beginning with the torture of a dog as a child in the First stage of cruelty, Nero progresses to beating his horse as a man in the Second stage of cruelty, and then to robbery, seduction, and murder in Cruelty in perfection. Finally, in The reward of cruelty, he receives what Hogarth warns is the inevitable fate of those who start down the path Nero has followed: his body is taken from the gallows after his execution as a murderer and is mutilated by surgeons in the anatomical theatre.
The prints were intended as a form of moral instruction; Hogarth was dismayed by the routine acts of cruelty he witnessed on the streets of London. Issued on cheap paper, the prints were destined for the lower classes. The series shows a roughness of execution and a brutality that is untempered by the funny touches common in Hogarth's other works, but which he felt was necessary to impress his message on the intended audience.
First Stage of Cruelty (Children Torturing Animals)
While various Scenes of sportive Woe, | Behold! a Youth of gentler Heart, | Learn from this fair Example—You |
The other boys carry out equally barbaric acts: the two boys at the top of the steps are burning the eyes out of a bird with a hot needle heated by the link-boy's torch; the boys in the foreground are throwing at a cock (perhaps an allusion to a nationalistic enmity towards the French, and a suggestion that the action takes place on Shrove Tuesday, the traditional day for cock-shying);[10] another boy ties a bone to a dog's tail—tempting, but out of reach; a pair of fighting cats are hung by their tails and taunted by a jeering group of boys; in the bottom left-hand corner a dog is set on a cat, with the latter's intestines spilling out onto the ground; and in the rear of the picture another cat tied to two bladders is thrown from a high window. In a foreshadowing of his ultimate fate, Tom Nero's name is written under the chalk drawing of a man hanging from the gallows; the meaning is made clear by the schoolboy artist pointing towards Tom. The absence of parish officers who should be controlling the boys is an intentional rebuke on Hogarth's part; he agreed with Henry Fielding that one of the causes for the rising crime rate was the lack of care from the overseers of the poor, who were too often interested in the posts only for the social status and monetary rewards they could bring.
Below the text the authorship is established: Designed by W. Hogarth, Published according to Act of Parliament. 1 Feb.. 1751 The Act of Parliament referred to is the Engraving Copyright Act 1734. Many of Hogarth's earlier works had been reproduced in great numbers without his authority or any payment of royalties, and he was keen to protect his artistic property, so had encouraged his friends in Parliament to pass a law to protect the rights of engravers. Hogarth had been so instrumental in pushing the Bill through Parliament that on passing it became known as the "Hogarth Act"
Second Stage of Cruelty (Coachman Beating A Fallen Horse)
In the second plate, the scene is Thavies Inn Gate (sometimes ironically written as Thieves Inn Gate), one of the Inns of Chancery which housed associations of lawyers in London.[12] Tom Nero has grown up and become a hackney coachman, and the recreational cruelty of the schoolboy has turned into the professional cruelty of a man at work. Tom's horse, worn out from years of mistreatment and overloading, has collapsed, breaking its leg and upsetting the carriage. Disregarding the animal's pain, Tom has beaten it so furiously that he has put its eye out. In a satirical aside, Hogarth shows four corpulent barristers struggling to climb out of the carriage in a ludicrous state. They are probably caricatures of eminent jurists, but Hogarth did not reveal the subjects' names, and they have not been identified. Elsewhere in the scene, other acts of cruelty against animals take place: a drover beats a lamb to death, an ass is driven on by force despite being overloaded, and an enraged bull tosses one of its tormentors. Some of these acts are recounted in the moral accompanying the print:
The generous Steed in hoary Age, | The tender Lamb o'er drove and faint, | Inhuman Wretch! say whence proceeds |
The cruelty has also advanced to include abuse of people. A dray crushes a playing boy while the drayman sleeps, oblivious to the boy's injury and the beer spilling from his barrels. Posters in the background advertise a cockfight and a boxing match as further evidence of the brutal entertainments favoured by the subjects of the image. The boxing match is to take place at Broughton's Amphitheatre, a notoriously tough venue established by the "father of pugilism", Jack Broughton: a contemporary bill records that the contestants would fight with their left leg strapped to the floor, with the one with the fewest bleeding wounds being adjudged the victor.[13] One of the advertised participants in the boxing match is James Field, who was hanged two weeks before the prints were issued and features again in the final image of the series; the other participant is George "the Barber" Taylor, who had been champion of England but was defeated by Broughton and retired in 1750. On Taylor's death in 1757, Hogarth produced a number of sketches of him wrestling Death, probably for his tomb.[14][15][b]
According to Werner Busch, the composition alludes to Rembrandt's painting, Balaam's Ass (1626).[16]
In an echo of the first plate, there is but one person who shows concern for the welfare of the tormented horse. To the left of Nero, and almost unseen, a man notes down Nero's hackney coach number to report him
Third Stage of Cruelty (Cruelty in Perfection)
By the time of the third plate, Tom Nero has progressed from the mistreatment of animals to theft and murder. Having encouraged his pregnant lover, Ann Gill, to rob and leave her mistress, he murders the girl when she meets him. The murder is shown to be particularly brutal: her neck, wrist, and index finger are almost severed. Her trinket box[c] and the goods she had stolen lie on the ground beside her, and the index finger of her partially severed hand points to the words "God's Revenge against Murder" written on a book that, along with the Book of Common Prayer, has fallen from the box.[17] A woman searching Nero's pockets uncovers pistols, a number of pocket watches—evidence of his having turned to highway robbery (as Tom Idle did in Industry and Idleness),[18] and a letter from Ann Gill which reads:
The spelling is perfect and while this is perhaps unrealistic, Hogarth deliberately avoids any chance of the scene becoming comical.[10] A discarded envelope is addressed "To Thos Nero at Pinne...". Ronald Paulson sees a parallel between the lamb beaten to death in the Second Stage and the defenceless girl murdered here.[5] Below the print, the text claims that Nero, if not repentant, is at least stunned by his actions:
To lawless Love when once betray'd. | Yet learn, seducing Man! nor Night, | The gaping Wounds and bloodstain'd steel, |
Various features in the print are meant to intensify the feelings of dread: the murder takes place in a graveyard, said to be St Pancras but suggested by John Ireland to resemble Marylebone;[10] an owl and a bat fly around the scene; the moon shines down on the crime; the clock strikes one for the end of the witching hour. The composition of the image may allude to Anthony van Dyck's The Arrest of Christ.[19] A lone Good Samaritan appears again: among the snarling faces of Tom's accusers, a single face looks to the heavens in pity.
In the alternative image for this stage, produced as a woodcut by Bell, Tom is shown with his hands free. There are also differences in the wording of the letter[1] and some items, like the lantern and books, are larger and simpler while others, such as the man to the left of Tom and the topiary bush, have been removed.[20] The owl has become a winged hourglass on the clock tower.
Fourth Stage of Cruelty (The Reward of Cruelty)
Having been tried and found guilty of murder, Nero has now been hanged and his body taken for the ignominious process of public dissection. The year after the prints were issued, the Murder Act 1752 would ensure that the bodies of murderers could be delivered to the surgeons so they could be "dissected and anatomised". It was hoped this further punishment on the body and denial of burial would act as a deterrent.[21] At the time Hogarth made the engravings, this right was not enshrined in law, but the surgeons still removed bodies when they could.[5]
A tattoo on his arm identifies Tom Nero, and the rope still around his neck shows his method of execution. The dissectors, their hearts hardened after years of working with cadavers, are shown to have as much feeling for the body as Nero had for his victims; his eye is put out just as his horse's was, and a dog feeds on his heart, taking a poetic revenge for the torture inflicted on one of its kind in the first plate.[5] Nero's face appears contorted in agony and although this depiction is not realistic, Hogarth meant it to heighten the fear for the audience. Just as his murdered mistress's finger pointed to Nero's destiny in Cruelty in Perfection, in this print Nero's finger points to the boiled bones being prepared for display, indicating his ultimate fate.
While the surgeons working on the body are observed by the mortar-boarded academics in the front row, the physicians, who can be identified by their wigs and canes, largely ignore the dissection and consult among themselves.[22] The president has been identified as John Freke, president of the Royal College of Surgeons at the time.[10][d] Freke had been involved in the high-profile attempt to secure the body of condemned rioter Bosavern Penlez for dissection in 1749.[5] Aside from the over-enthusiastic dissection of the body and the boiling of the bones in situ, the image portrays the procedure as it would have been carried out.[23]
Two skeletons to the rear left and right of the print are labelled as James Field, a well-known boxer who also featured on a poster in the second plate, and Macleane, an infamous highwayman. Both men were hanged shortly before the print was published (Macleane in 1750 and Field in 1751). The skeletons seemingly point to one another. Field's name above the skeleton on the left may have been a last minute substitution for "GENTL HARRY" referring to Henry Simms, also known as Young Gentleman Harry. Simms was a robber who was executed in 1747.[14] The motif of the lone "good man" is carried through to this final plate, where one of the academics points at the skeleton of James Field, indicating the inevitable outcome for those who start down the path of cruelty.
The composition of the scene is a pastiche of the frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica, and it possibly also borrows from Quack Physicians' Hall (c. 1730) by the Dutch artist Egbert van Heemskerck, who had lived in England and whose work Hogarth admired.[22] An earlier source of inspiration may have been a woodcut in the 1495 Fasciculo di medicina by Johannes de Ketham which, although simpler, has many of the same elements, including the seated president flanked by two windows.[19]
Below the print are these final words:
Behold the Villain's dire disgrace! | Torn from the Root, that wicked Tongue, | His Heart expos'd to prying Eyes, |
From Wikipedia
Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth in support of what would become the Gin Act. Designed to be viewed alongside each other, they depict the evils of the consumption of gin as a contrast to the merits of drinking beer. At almost the same time and on the same subject, Hogarth's friend Henry Fielding published An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers. Issued together with The Four Stages of Cruelty, . . .
On the simplest level, Hogarth portrays the inhabitants of Beer Street as happy and healthy, nourished by the native English ale, and those who live in Gin Lane as destroyed by their addiction to the foreign spirit of gin; but, as with so many of Hogarth's works, closer inspection uncovers other targets of his satire, and reveals that the poverty of Gin Lane and the prosperity of Beer Street are more intimately connected than they at first appear. Gin Lane shows shocking scenes of infanticide, starvation, madness, decay, and suicide, while Beer Street depicts industry, health, bonhomie, and thriving commerce; but there are contrasts and subtle details that some critics[citation needed] believe allude to the prosperity of Beer Street as the cause of the misery found in Gin Lane. [The last part of this sentence is pure bullshit that relieves the individual of any agency]
Beer St. from Wiki listed as Public Domain
Urban Planning of Chas. – Streets, sidewalks, drains and treei
i Urban Planning of Chas. – Streets, sidewalks, drains and tree
Routes from Fort 96 to Charlestoni
Express Riders, the fastest travelers, “routinely made the 300-mile journey between Charleston and Fort Prince George in six or seven days, and the additional 150 miles over the mountains to Fort Loudoun in a further five to seven days, depending on the weather.” So, 50 miles per day on flat terrain, 25 miles per day through the mountains.
i Route – 96 to Charleston
1706 – 1793: Parishes and political subdivisions in SCi
i 1706 – 1793: Parishes and political subdivisions in SC
1754 – 1792: Postal ops in SCi
i 1754 – 1792: Postal ops in SC
In seventeenth century America, before the creation of a postal system, if you wanted to send a letter to a nearby friend or to a distant relative across the ocean, you had a choice of two different types of services. The first choice I’ll call a “closed network” (for lack of a better term—I haven’t found any historical literature that examines this topic). A “closed network” is a series of contacts that are known and familiar to both the sender and the recipient. If you wanted to send a letter to your mother who lived several miles down the road, for example, you might entrust the letter to a sibling, a spouse, a friend, a servant, or (in early South Carolina) a slave. If your correspondent lived some greater distance away, say, in New York or London, you might ask a friend or relative, who happened to be going in that direction, to personally deliver your letter. In such cases, your letter traveled free of charge and stayed within a series of familiar hands. Alternatively, if you needed to send a letter, but didn’t have a friend heading in the right direction, you would use what we might call an “open network,” which involved your letter passing through a series of hands who were unknown to you before it reached its destination. Someone had to pay for this service, of course, either at the front end of the transaction, or at the end of the network, where your letter was received, or both. This informal network of people carrying letters for strangers in return for a small fee, eventually coalesced into what we now call the postal system.
The Public House and Post Office:
In the earliest days of American colonies, “public houses” such as taverns or coffee houses were the information hubs of every community. In a port town like Charleston, information about the outside world arrived by way of ships from distant lands. While on shore, ship captains would frequently use local taverns as their business offices. By bringing stories, gossip, and, later, newspapers to their favorite watering hole, ship captains helped taverns attract customers who wanted to hear the latest information from abroad and to discuss business and politics with their peers. More importantly, ship captains would also place mail bags in taverns and offer to carry letters to their next ports-of-call. If a ship captain happened to be carrying a letter for you, sent by distant correspondent, it was your responsibility to pay the captain for his trouble. This was the scene at hundreds of taverns across the Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the bigger cities, the tavern scene was even more specialized. On Birchin Lane, in the heart of London, for example, there was a business called the Carolina Coffee House. From the earliest days of Carolina in the 1670s into the early 1800s, the Carolina Coffee House was the place to meet ship captains headed to or just arrived from Charleston. If you wanted the hear the latest news about Carolina or had letters to send to family or friends there, you went to the Carolina Coffee House.
By 1754, Post office being run out of Peter Timothy's print shop.
In 1763, immediately after the conclusion of our latest war with France and Spain, the British postal service began planning another expansion of its colonial packet boat service. The northern branch, sailing between Falmouth and New York, remained unchanged, but in 1764 the route of the southern branch was altered to include Charleston and Britain’s new possessions in Florida. This new service involved three 140-ton packet boats, each manned with eighteen hands (London Gazette, 28 January 1764). Two years later, in the spring of 1766, the British government added two 170-ton packet boats to this route to ensure that his majesty’s colonies overseas would enjoy a monthly mail service (see the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 3 June 1766).
As South Carolina’s economy and population boomed in the 1760s, so too did our volume of mail, and so we began to garner even more attention from crown officials back in England. In late 1768, the king’s Postmaster General initiated a new, monthly packet service that sailed directly between Falmouth and Charleston, carrying mail for the provinces of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida. Four vessels were assigned to this route, which commenced in early 1769: Swallow, Eagle, Earl of Sandwich, and Le DeSpencer (the last two ships named for John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, and Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le DeSpencer, who jointly held the office of His Majesty’s Postmaster General).
The passage from Falmouth to Charleston took anywhere from six to nine weeks, but by dispatching one packet boat on a fixed date each month, the goal was to ensure that Charleston would receive the latest news from England at least once a month. Once the packet mail bags arrived in Charleston, the local postmaster would carefully inventory their contents, separate the mail destined for our neighboring colonies, and hand the appropriate sub-packets to post riders who then galloped to the north and to the south along the King’s Highway.
Postal ops generallyi
iPostal Operations of the British Government
The English government dabbled with establishing a national postal system in the early 1600s, but it wasn’t until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 that the concept of “Royal Mail” began to take root in a legal sense. Their early system encompassed only the country of England, but here in North America, our various provincial governments began imitating the English model. By the end of the seventeenth century, each of the American colonies had an officially-designated letter depot, or post office, but there was no official inter-colony service until a bit later.
The earliest English settlements in New England commenced in the 1620s, and within a few decades there was a system of rudimentary roads, or at least riding paths, connecting the various northern colonies. In 1673, the governors of both New York and Pennsylvania created post offices to facilitate a monthly mail service along a road stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Annapolis, Maryland. Because this road, really more of a horse path, was maintained with government funds, it became known as “the King’s highway.” Along this public highway, men riding on horseback carried mail bags from one end of the road to the other, stopping at towns along the way to pick up and deposit mail. It wasn’t until more than a century later, years after the American Revolution, that the volume of mail increased to the point that it needed to be carried by wagons or coaches.
Following the creation of the North American post office in New York, in conformity to the postal law of 1710, the big challenge for the North American postmaster was to improve the existing New England post road and connect it to Virginia. The southern colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas had smaller populations than those up north, however, and our people were scattered among rural plantations instead of clustered in towns like in New England. The idea of connecting the King’s Highway to Charleston was part of the government’s plan, but it remained a low priority for many years. From the perspective of government officials back in London and merchants in Charleston, South Carolina was more closely aligned with the Caribbean sphere of communication and trade.
In 1753 after the death of Elliot Benger, the Postmaster General, Franklin was appointed Postmaster General of America, a post he shared with William Hunter. During his employment he toured all the northern colonies to survey post roads and post offices establishing more efficient routes. He traveled a total of 1,600 miles. In order to improve delivery time he had riders carry mail during night and day.
Although Franklin did not invent it, he designed an odometer and attached it to the front wheel of the letter carriage, the odometer measured the number of revolutions of the wheel. Each revolution was counted by dials and by the end of the trip the mailman would know the distance traveled by multiplying the number of revolutions by the circumference of the wheel. That way Franklin determined which routes were the quickest. He determined postal rates based on distance and weight and were standardized for all colonies. He also mandated the delivery of newspapers for a small fee. His improvements turned the American Post Offices profitable for the first time.
Franklin remained Postmaster General until 1774. After the Hutchinson Affair Franklin was judged too sympathetic to the colonies and was dismissed from his post.
Mail Packet Boats from 1710 – One of the most important features of the British postal law of 1710, and its subsequent revisions, was the appropriation of money to fund a small fleet of packet boats. More than just a simple sail boat, the packet was a medium-sized, ocean-going vessel designed for speed and efficiency rather than for cargo. A packet boat might carry a few passengers and a bit of cargo, but its main purpose was to transport mail and other small “packets” or packages on a regular timetable. While a cargo ship might linger at port until her hull was full, however long that might take, a packet boat was expected to depart and arrive on a set schedule. In accordance with the 1710 postal law, the first government-sponsored packet boats provided a weekly service between the regional post offices in Dublin and Edinburgh with the central post office in London.
What about connecting the central post office in London with the regional postal headquarters in New York and the West Indies? In the first half of the eighteenth century, it appears that there wasn’t a sufficient volume of mail to induce the British postal system to appropriate money for a fleet of trans-Atlantic and inter-colony packet boats. Instead, the government relied on the customary practice of using private ship captains to carry mail bags from port to port. To encourage ship captains to participate in the system created by the 1710 postal act, the British government authorized colonial postmasters to pay ship captains one penny for every letter delivered to the official post office in the colony where they arrived. To ensure accountability, the law required ship captains to make a list of the letters they carried and to deliver said list to the local postmaster, who was also required to make a list of all incoming letters and the names of the persons to whom the letters were delivered. Eventually this duty would be executed by packet boat captains in coordination with colonial postmasters, but in the meantime, this public-private partnership endured for many decades.
In the autumn of 1755, the British government announced the beginning of an expanded trans-Atlantic packet boat service (see the London Gazette, 25 October 1755). Commencing in 1756, there were two fleets and two branches, one servicing the northern colonies in America, and another connecting Britain’s southernmost colonies. Each month, a northern packet boat departed Falmouth, England, and sailed directly to New York, carrying mail for all of his majesty’s colonies in North America. From the main post office in New York, mail was distributed to the post office in each colony by way of the post road, or King’s Highway. Because that highway didn’t yet extend to Charleston, however, this new and improved postal service had no impact on South Carolina. Meanwhile, the southern branch of the new packet service departed Falmouth monthly and delivered mail to Barbados, Antigua, Monserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Jamaica, before returning to Falmouth. In the mid-1750s, the two Carolinas and Georgia were simply too thinly populated to merit inclusion in the British government’s expanded packet boat service. While other colonies benefitted from improved mail transport, we continued to rely on the old practice of private ship captains carrying mail bags from port to port.
In 1763, immediately after the conclusion of our latest war with France and Spain, the British postal service began planning another expansion of its colonial packet boat service. The northern branch, sailing between Falmouth and New York, remained unchanged, but in 1764 the route of the southern branch was altered to include Charleston and Britain’s new possessions in Florida. This new service involved three 140-ton packet boats, each manned with eighteen hands (London Gazette, 28 January 1764). Two years later, in the spring of 1766, the British government added two 170-ton packet boats to this route to ensure that his majesty’s colonies overseas would enjoy a monthly mail service (see the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 3 June 1766).
King controls Fort Johnsoni
Fort Johnson was a frontier military outpost, separate and independent of any town, the King reserved the right to appoint a governor or commander to superintend the fort. The King’s first appointee, Capt. James Sutherland, died in early 1741, and Lt. Governor William Bull appointed John Pennefather as the fort’s interim commandant. In his four-and-a-half year tenure in that position, Capt. Pennefather was a steadfast, diligent, and honest guardian of the entranceway to Charleston harbor, and handled many delicate negotiations with Spanish ships that came here to exchange prisoners during the conflict known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. When the king’s next appointee for the post, Mr. John Lloyd, arrived at Fort Johnson in the summer of 1745, John Pennefather dutifully resigned his position, received the thanks of our governor and all his troops, and disappeared into obscurity.
![Cunne Shote, Cherokee Chief [Standing Turkey]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conocotocko_II#/media/File:Francis_Parsons_-_Cunne_Shote.jpg){kind=link}
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