Why did John Hancock sign his name so large?

July 4 approaches. And as we think about what happened on that day in 1776, when the U.S. Declaration of Independence was approved by our Continental Congress, chances are that some of our beliefs are based on popular myths.

In our mind’s eye, we see how it went down – a bunch of patriotic men in one large room, nobly arguing for and ultimately signing a document that is among the most revered in our history. We think, too, of John Hancock, president of that Continental Congress, signing his name largely and boldly at the center of the place in the document for signatures to demonstrate his defiance of the British Crown and to encourage others to sign the document as well. At least that’s how the story goes.

But much of it isn’t accurate. Take Hancock writing his name so large, for example. Analysis of his signature from other documents shows that he always signed his name in that kind of a super-sized style. So the size of it on the Declaration of Independence was typical for him. He wasn’t trying to send a personally defiant message to Britain’s King George, as legend has it. Quotes with that message attributed to him are simply myths.

What about Hancock placing his large signature so boldly at the top center of the space for the delegates to sign? Hancock, as president of the Continental Congress that approved the Declaration, signed it first. Most probably, as head of the body and without guidance from anyone or anything else, he simply put his name where he thought it most appropriate in that role. After all, there was only a huge blank space for signatures, not signature lines and other indicators so common in modern documents.

Also, it wasn’t until August 2, after the Declaration was made available in a final, clearly written version on parchment, that Hancock and other delegates signed it. Most other delegates then added their names, placing them on the document to match the general location of the geographic locations represented, beginning with Georgia on the upper left and ending with New Hampshire on the lower right. A few delegates signed the document after August 2, and a handful never signed it, although they had voted for approval.

Captain Bligh ... villain or hero?

William Bligh, captain of the British ship Bounty in the late 1700s, might be viewed too harshly by today’s popular culture. Although depicted in 20^th century movies and fictional narratives as a merciless tyrant, Bligh probably treated the Bounty’s crew no worse than any other 18th century British sea captain would have treated them, and there is some evidence that he treated them better than most. For example, in preparing for the ill-fated voyage of the Bounty to the Pacific island of Tahiti, where the crew mutinied, Bligh hired a fiddler for the trip – based on Bligh’s belief that regular dancing would help improve the health and well-being of the ship’s crew, wrote Caroline Alexander in her 2003 book The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. On the other hand, rather than merely providing the opportunity for dancing, Bligh required it, and punished a couple of men who did not participate in the three-hour nightly sessions. So there was a demanding, unforgiving side to Bligh as well, although that characteristic was probably needed to establish and keep control over the type of unruly men who served on British ships of the day.

The Bounty’s mission on this fateful trip was to collect breadfruit plants on Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, in hopes of establishing the plants there as an inexpensive supply of food. But the trip from England to Tahiti was especially difficult. For a month, the ship attempted to leave the Atlantic and enter the Pacific by sailing east around the southern tip of South America, but storms and rough seas prevented that approach.  So instead, Bligh took the ship on a longer route to the west, past the southern tip of Africa, then crossing the Indian Ocean and finally into the Pacific and Tahiti. After 10 months at sea, the Bounty reached the island, where it remained for five months, waiting for native breadfruit plants to grow enough to be removed successfully.

No one is certain today what led to the Bounty mutiny, in which a group of crewmen led by Fletcher Christian, reported to be Bligh’s friend and protégé, took control of the ship on April 28, 1789, several weeks after leaving Tahiti. Many on-the-scene accounts appear to be contradictory and self-serving, unfortunately. Today, some believe it was simply Bligh’s harsh demands on his crew. Others believe that the crew wished to return to the comparative comfort of their five-month stay at Tahiti, where many of them began to live among the natives and adopted a relaxed lifestyle.

But what happened next might one of the most fascinating parts of the Bounty story. Bligh and 18 men loyal to him (a few others wouldn’t fit in the boat and remained on the Bounty) were set adrift – in the middle of the South Pacific – in a small open boat that measured about 23 feet long and a bit less than seven feet wide. Fortunately, the mutineers gave them some food and water, as well as some navigational equipment. And with that alone, Bligh took that small boat and its crew some 3,600 nautical miles across the Pacific in 47 days to a Dutch settlement on the island of Timor. The only casualty of the journey was a man killed by natives of an island at which the boat visited to add to its food and water supplies, although several of the British sailors died soon after arriving on Timor.

Bligh made it back to England, where he was court-martialed for losing the Bounty but acquitted. After several more ship commands (including a second – and successful – trip to Tahiti for breadfruit plants), he was appointed Governor of New South Wales in Australia. He later returned to England, where he died at 64 in 1817.

And what happened to the Bounty mutineers?  That's another fascinating story, for another time. 

Note:  In late October 2012, a replica of the Bounty sunk off the Eastern United States. The ship was a victim of Hurricane Sandy.

 

The bureaucrat who put his own face on our money

As the Civil War continued into the early 1860s, U.S. money in the form of coins was in short supply. People tended to hold on the coins as more intrinsically valuable than paper money in such troubled times. And there’re some reports that the war effort’s demand for metals crimped the supply of coins too, even driving up the cost of metal so high that at least some coins became worth more than their face value.

In response, the U.S. government issued fractional notes – paper money in denominations of less than a dollar – beginning in 1862. At one point or another during the war and in the years that followed, paper bills were issued for 3 cents, 5 cents, 10 cents, 15 cents, 25 cents, and 50 cents.

During the first several issues of these fractional notes, portraits of either George Washington or Thomas Jefferson were on the bills for every denomination. But that changed with a new issue of notes in late 1864, when the 5 cent note carried the portrait of Spencer M.Clark, the first superintendent of the National Currency Bureau (now the Bureau of Engraving and Printing). The Bureau was the agency responsible for the design of the notes.

Members of Congress were outraged when they saw the bureaucrat's likeness on the new notes, and soon passed legislation prohibiting U.S. bills from carrying the portraits of anyone still living.

Clark reportedly kept his job at the time only through the intervention of U.S. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Clark resigned in 1868, however, as a result of a congressional investigation into alleged improprieties at the Bureau.

Clark is generally credited for organizing and developing the Bureau, creating the basic design for one of the seals appearing on U.S. bills today, and for implementing security measures such as a standard reproduction of federal officials’ signatures on the bills rather than having those officials’ signatures penned by Bureau workers. Little definitive information about his life and contributions seems easily or widely accessible, however.

General Washington's wayward stepson ...

As American patriots rejoiced following the British defeat at Yorktown in fall 1781, General George Washington found himself dealing with a family tragedy involving his stepson.

When Washington married Martha Custis 22 years before the Yorktown battle, she brought her two children to the union – Patsy, 2, who later died as the result of an epileptic seizure when she was a teenager, and John, 4, nicknamed “Jack.”

Jack, who enjoyed partying and other frivolities much more than tending to his responsibilities even after he married and became a father, exasperated Washington. In school, he lived on the edge of being expelled, and he dropped out of college years later. As a husband and father, he became so angered when his wife delivered a daughter instead of a son that his mother sought to adopt the baby. In his business dealings, he cheated Washington in a cattle purchase – calculating the price based on only the least-desirable animals and applying that value to the entire herd that he was buying from his stepfather, who was away leading troops.

But despite his notable shortcomings, “Jack remained Martha’s darling. She would not tolerate any criticism of him from anyone, even George,” wrote Thomas Fleming in his 2009 book The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers.

Martha would not consider allowing Jack to become a soldier for the American cause. But as the British army under Lord Cornwallis became trapped at Yorktown in fall 1781, Jack pleaded with Washington to join his staff as an aide. Because the battle was shaping up as only a siege of the British garrison, and that Jack would face even less danger if he remained with Washington’s staff, he was allowed to join the general at Yorktown.

As the American siege of British forces came to a head in October, Jack became ill with “camp fever,” which was probably typhus. After the British surrender, Washington sent Jack to the home of Jack’s maternal uncle, about 30 miles away, for better care and recovery. Washington’s wartime duties fell to a level that allowed him to visit Jack and check on his status a week or two later.

Upon arriving at the uncle’s home, Washington was surprised to find Martha, Jack’s wife Nelly, and Jack and Nelly’s eldest daughter there, all deeply upset. Jack was near death. Only 27, he soon succumbed, and Martha in particular was overwhelmed with grief.

“Washington spent the next five days there, overseeing the funeral and trying to console his wife ... while everyone else in Virginia and the rest of America was celebrating the Yorktown victory over the British,” wrote Fleming. Depite that victory, the war was not over, and Washington had to return to his troops, for whom war raged for another two years. Martha's brother reportedly agreed to oversee Jack's estate, but refused an offer to take responsibility for Jack's wife and children. So George and Martha ultimately took on much of that role.

 

Abe Lincoln ... on the wrong side in the "mileage" scandal

As a first-term congressman from Illinois in 1848, Abraham Lincoln found himself on the wrong side of a scandal regarding reimbursement for travel expenses to and from Washington and his home state. To be fair, he broke no laws and wasn’t alone, but the episode reinforced the view of many, even a century and a half ago, that Congress is wasteful and possibly corrupt.

Another new member of Congress at the time was Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who was elected to serve only four months at the end of an unexpired term. Greeley soon discovered that in the previous session (during which he was not yet a member himself), almost all members of Congress based their travel expenses on the “usually traveled route,” which was usually much longer than the most-direct mail route – the route between post offices. So for each member of the U.S. House of Representatives and each member of the U.S. Senate, Greeley published in the Tribune the amount of travel funds each received, how much each would have received based on the shortest postal route, and the difference between these two figures.

For his travel expenses to and from his home state and Washington, Lincoln was reportedly reimbursed $1,300.08 for 1,626 miles, or $676.80 more than he would have received for the most-direct route of 780 miles. For the Senate and House together in that session, the total overage came to $62,105.20 for 77,632 miles, the Tribune story concluded. (Curiously, six Congressmen were reimbursed for less than the most-direct postal route for their travels.)

Background information that accompanied the published list in the Tribune was written personally by Greeley and noted that the reimbursements were not illegal, but suggested that the system was highly susceptible to abuse. The “law expressly says that each shall receive eight dollars for every 20 miles traveled in coming to and returning from Congress ‘by the usually traveled’ route, and of course if the route usually traveled from California to Washington is around the Cape Horn – or the members of that Embryo state choose to think that it is – they will each be entitled to charge some $12,000 mileage per session accordingly.”

“We assume that each man has charged precisely what the law allows him … but we insist that the law not continue to allow such charges as these. Is not the distinction a clear one?” Greeley’s article asked.

Many members of Congress were outraged by the publication of the list, and the mileage issue was the talk of Washington – not to mention the chambers of the House and Senate, where discussions became heated – for many days. Greeley biographer Lurton Dunham Ingersoll wrote in his 1873 book The Life of Horace Greeley that the “reform of the law which he had in view was defeated, but ‘the usual routes of travel’ were henceforth very much less ‘circuitous’ than they had been, and some years afterward the rate of mileage was reduced by 50 percent, and constructive mileage utterly prohibited.”

Charles Dickens on America's “most disgusting” habit

English author Charles Dickens first visited the United States in 1842, and his letters back to friends in Britain offer a fascinating glimpse of American life at that time. Slavery and the pirating of his books among the American population disturbed him greatly, but it was another American practice – tobacco chewing – that drew the greatest amount of his disgust.

In a March letter to Albany Fonblanque, a friend and highly regarded newspaper editor in England, Dickens painted a vivid image about the “prevalence of spit-boxes” and related unsavory issues: 

“They are everywhere. In hospitals, prisons, watch-houses, and courts of law – on the bench, in the witness box, in the jury box, and in the galley; in the stage coach, the steam boat, the rail road car, the hotel, the hall of a private gentleman, and the chamber of Congress; where every two men have one of these conveniences between them – and very unnecessarily, for they flood the carpet, while they talk to you. Of all things in this country, this practice is to me the most insufferable. I can bear anything but filth. I would be content even to live in an atmosphere of spit, if they would but spit clean; but when every man ejects from his mouth that odious, most disgusting, compound of saliva and tobacco, I vow that my stomach revolts, and I cannot endure it. The marble stairs and passages of every handsome public building are polluted with these abominable stains; they are squirted about the base of every column that supports the roof; and they make the floors brown, despite the printed entreaty that visitors will not disfigure them with ‘tobacco spittle.’ It is the most sickening, beastly, and abominable custom that civilization ever saw.”

This letter and others containing Dickens' impressions of American life in that period are published in The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3, 1836-1870. He also wrote about his American visit in a book titled American Notes for General Circulation (Cambridge Library Collection - North American History). Both of these sources provide first-person insight, based on an outsider's view of everyday life, that you don't often find recorded.

President Cleveland's big secret ...

As a severe economic crisis challenged the U.S. in 1893, President Grover Cleveland faced an additional, personal crisis. A sore spot on the roof of his mouth had become more and more painful. His doctor took samples of tissue from the inflamed area he found and sent them – without identifying the source – to two labs for analysis. Both reported the tissue to be cancerous.

“Keeping secrets in the 1890s was easier than it would be a century later, but Cleveland didn’t want to take any chances,” wrote historian H.W. Brands in his 1995 book The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s. News of the president’s serious health problem could push the nation’s already-teetering economy over the edge, it was feared.

An elaborate plan to hide the president’s surgery was devised. Cleveland quietly left Washington on a train, supposedly to visit his pregnant wife at their summer home in Massachusetts. But instead, he was taken to a yacht on the Hudson River. On that boat, as it sailed in the waters surrounding New York on July 1, a team of surgeons and a dentist began to operate on the president.

The first step was to remove several of the president’s teeth to allow surgeons access to the tumor. Nitrous oxide – “laughing gas” – was used as an anesthetic at first. But when the medical team became concerned that it might be wearing off as the surgery continued longer than expected, ether was administered, putting Cleveland into a much deeper anesthetic sleep. After the tumor was extracted, the golf-ball sized hole was packed with gauze and the president was sent to private room to recover on the yacht.

One day later, Cleveland was able to walk in his room, but remained below deck to avoid being seen. Security became an increasing concern, however, when the medical team’s dentist – Dr. Ferdinand Hasbrouck – left the yacht to perform a previously scheduled surgery on another patient. Rumors about the president’s health had already arisen, and he was brought ashore to his Massachusetts summer home on July 5. There, a presidential aide responded newsmen’s inquiries, saying only that Cleveland had an infected tooth that had been removed.

The president spent four weeks recuperating at his residence. During this period, a special rubber plug was inserted into the hole on the roof of his mouth. It prevented food particles from entering the incision and helped restore the fullness of Cleveland’s face, Brands wrote in his book.

Rumors about the president’s health gathered strength. Speaking to a colleague, Dr. Hasbrouck casually mentioned his service to the president, and the colleague mentioned the story to a friend who was a reporter for the Philadelphia newspaper. The reporter then went to Hasbrouck, telling him that he had the story but just needed a few more details, thereby duping the dentist into telling all that he knew.  But when the reporter then sought insights from the other members of the medical team, they would confirm none of Hasbrouck’s story. Instead, they said that Hasbrouck had screwed up on pulling the president’s bad teeth and had been dismissed. Hasbrouck made up his fantastic story in retaliation, they suggested.