a portrait that isn't Mary Todd Lincoln

This seems more hoax than myth, but either way, it’s one that has been going on for almost a hundred years. The New York Times carried this story a few days ago.

The painting was purported to be one Mrs. Lincoln had made of herself as a surprise gift for the president, but before she could give it to him, he was assassinated. Turns out it’s another woman’s likeness, and the painting was retouched by a vaudeville actor, no less, in the 1920s and sold to Lincoln descendants along with the heart-wrenching story. The forger changed the hairdo to look more like Mrs. Lincoln’s and added a brooch that showed a picture of Abraham Lincoln. The scam earned him a couple hundred bucks. Art conservators who cleaned the painting discovered the over-painting and realized it wasn’t Mrs. Lincoln at all. For the whole story, see 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/arts/design/portrait-of-mary-todd-lincoln-is-deemed-a-hoax.html?nl=todaysheadlines 

Sara Rivers Cofield heard this recently during a historic house tour and wondered if it was a myth.

Not a myth–this one’s true. Wine was expensive, lots more expensive than beer or cider, because it was imported. Beer, “small beer” (with lower alcoholic content), and cider were everyday beverages for men, women, and children, drunk morning, noon, and night, and often made at home by the woman of the house. Small beer was served at every meal to boys at the College of William and Mary–in fact, the school had it’s own brewery. But wine had to be imported, usually from France, Portugal, the Canary Islands, or Spain.

The price differential shows up best in the colonial regulation of taverns and ordinaries. Many jurisdictions set “The Rates and Prices that every Ordinary keeper in this County may ask, demand, receive, or take for drink, Diet, Lodging, Fodder, Provender or Pasturage.” While these prices differ throughout time and place, there is a clear price gap between beer and cider and the more expensive wines.

For example, in 1743/1744, Lancaster County, Virginia, regulated beverages by the quart. Wines included Canary or French brandy at 5 shillings, Portugal or French wine at 4 shillings, Madeira wine at 2 shillings 3 pence, and Western Island wine (not sure which islands those were) at 2 shillings. Meanwhile, a quart of strong beer from Virginia or Pennsylvania cost 6 pence and cider was 3 and 3/4 pence. At 12 pence to a shilling, that made wine eight to ten times as costly as strong beer and twelve to fifteen times as much as cider. Wine was for the gentry; cider and beer for everyone. 

There are so many myths that involve taxes–can you stand one more?

Taxes are a complicated subject–what’s new there? In early America, most of the government’s money came from import/export duties on liquor and slaves and from port charges. Colonists paid several sorts of taxes but no income tax and only occasional taxes on real estate and personal property. The usual tax assessments due from individuals were the parish tax, which paid for churches, clergy salaries, and aid to the poor; county taxes, which paid for courthouses, bridges, and ferries; colony taxes, which paid for public officials and the Capitol Building; and in some colonies, the old feudal quitrent to the king, who legally owned all the land. (Property owners were technically only renting.) These taxes didn’t necessarily occur every year and they varied over time. Most taxes were based on the number of “tithables” in the household (white males over 16 and all slaves over 16), meaning those with the most slaves and the largest families paid the most tax.

I could find no mention of taxes on a second story in the colonies of  Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Georgia, after having searched online databases of those colonies’ laws. (If you are not aware of this resource, see http://libguides.bgsu.edu/content.php?pid=65781&sid=486039 to find links to the laws of the 13 colonies.) I plan to check the remaining colonies–a tedious task–as the week progresses, but I do not expect to find any mention of a tax on the second story.

A one-and-a-half story house is just a one-story house with a finished attic for extra living or storage space. As the director of research at Colonial Williamsburg wrote so succinctly when this myth surfaced back in 1968: “One-and-a-half stories are simply cheaper to build than two.” 

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2012/10-bestselling-books-that-were-later-debunked/

News flash:

DEATH BY PETTICOAT: AMERICAN HISTORY MYTHS DEBUNKED is now available for reviewers on www.netgalley.com. The book itself won’t be in bookstores until June 5. 

If anyone has a connection to a publication that might run a review of the book, I’d appreciate it if you’d consider writing one. The publisher has given permission for reviewers to excerpt up to 3 myths of their choice, if that makes it easier (I think it does!) Actual hard copies of the book will be available for reviewers in a couple months, and if you’d like to have one, send your name and address directly to my email at mmtheobald@comcast.net and tell me where your review would appear, and I’ll forward the information to the publisher.

This week we are fortunate to have a guest blogger, Katie Cannon, to debunk one of her pet-peeve myths. Katie has more than a dozen years of experience working in history museums, and has just completed a Master of Arts in Museum Studies through the University of Leicester. She is especially fond of living history, she says, having never quite grown out of playing dress-up.

You hear this one all over the place: “Everyone died young back in the old days,” or “You were lucky if you lived to age 40,” and so forth.

You can crunch some numbers and certainly come to this conclusion, but the big problem with this is infant mortality.  If you include the (generally high) infant mortality rate of early America, life expectancy plummets. However, if you calculate life expectancy past infancy and childhood, people in historic periods could expect to live to ages not that different from today.

In Massachusetts in 1850, an infant at birth could expect to live 38-40 years. Pretty bleak, right? But, if that same infant survived to age 20, he could expect to live another 40 years, to age 60. Quite an improvement! Compare that to the Center for Disease Control statistics for 1998, in which a person’s life expectancy at birth was 76, and at age 20 was 77, hardly any difference because we’ve managed to sharply decrease mortality in infants and children.  And remember, “life expectancy” does not mean everyone suddenly drops dead at that age. There are plenty of people today who live past 77, just as there were plenty in 1850 who lived past 60.

Here, for example, are the ages at death of the first 10 presidents of the United States, from oldest to youngest: 90, 85, 83, 80, 79, 78, 73, 71, 68, 67.  Most of them were older than the life expectancy in 1998!  And, since those are all men, here are the ages of their wives at death (John Tyler married twice, so there are 11 women accounted for): 89, 81, 77, 74, 71, 69, 62, 61, 52, 36, 34.  Almost half made it into their seventies at least; of those under 70, five died from disease (including 2 strokes) and one from the complications of childbirth.  True, in general they were not as long-lived as their husbands, but it’s still a far cry from the bleak “dead-at-forty” report you may have heard.  

The big killer, as you may have noticed, was disease. The age of antibiotics changed many things, and today far more infants are expected to reach adulthood, so the average life expectancy has indeed gone up. But, old folks were not an endangered species in early America! 

Sources:
U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/statab/lt98internet.PDF

Bruton Parish Church tower built 1769 with glazed headers

Examine the bricks and learn the date–or so says this myth. If you see glazed headers, you know the buildings is older than 1750, because a law was passed in 1750 against burning hardwood. Hardwood is necessary to make fire hot enough to glaze bricks in a kiln. (A header, by the way, is a brick turned so the short end faces out instead of the long side.) 

It is not possible to date a building this way. “I have seen plenty of buildings built after 1750 with glazed bricks,” says Matthew Webster, Colonial Williamsburg’s Director of Historic Architectural Resources. It is true that hardwoods burn hotter. “Softwoods burn fast,” he says. “Hardwoods create a better and sustainable high heat.” But it is the potassium contained in hardwoods that helps the sand in the brick vitrify into glass.

“It’s not the heat necessarily that is required for glazed bricks,” explains Jason Whitehead, supervisor of Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Masonry Trades and Brickyard. “It’s the potash that is released from hardwoods such as oak and hickory that then builds up on the bricks and reacts with the clay. This combo creates the glazing seen on the bricks that are making up the fire tunnels in the bottom of the kiln.”

Besides, there was no colonial law against burning hardwoods. “I have never heard of or seen evidence of any law forbidding the burning of hardwoods in brickmaking,” says Whitehead. Hardwoods gradually became scarce in colonial America because of their desirability in both England and the colonies. From the earliest years, English colonists burned hardwood to produce potash, used in making glass, for export to England where few hardwood trees remained.  

Yawn . . . another bogus tax. Let’s all say it together: There were no taxes on — uh, hang on a minute . . . 

There actually was a tax on windows! Toward the end of the Revolutionary War, Virginia passed an emergency tax on homeowners based on the number of windows in their houses. (Hening’s Statutes, vol. 10, p. 280.) It was to last three years and it only counted windows with glass, which eliminated the lowest economic cohort that would likely have had only shutters because they couldn’t afford glass. However, this was a war measure, not a regular tax, so most historians discount it, insisting that there were no taxes on windows. I was unable to discover whether this war-time tax was ever collected, since the war ended shortly thereafter and it was, presumably, no longer needed. Also, this law pertained only to Virginia. Here’s the law:

“A tax or rate of one shilling for every glass window shall be paid by the proprietor of each inhabited house within the commonwealth in the month of September 1781, and so on in each of the three next succeeding years.” The law goes on to list other taxes, calling them “urgent necessities of this commonwealth” due to the war. 

This could be the basis for the persistent window tax myth. An online search of other colonies’ compiled statutes through google books yielded no other examples. Not all records of colonial laws are available online, but the ones I could access–Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina–did not mention windows. I think it’s pretty safe to say there were no taxes on windows, except for that one little, temporary, exception in Virginia.  

Let’s start the New Year with a correction and a revision. Thanks to Beth Chamberlain, who pointed me toward an 1835 household management book that mentions dying fabric with blue wrapping paper, I have revised Myth #49 about using (or not using) the paper to dye fabric.

While there is no evidence of this practice in early America (the 17th & 18th centuries), Beth noted that Lydia Maria Child’s American Frugal Housewife of 1835 mentions using “the purple paper which comes on loaf sugar, boiled in cider or vinegar with a small bit of alum, makes a fine purple slate color.”  http://books.google.com/books?id=Fq_uAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA39 

I immediately went to other mid-19th-century household management books and found another reference, Eliza Leslie’s Lady’s House-Book; a Manual of Domestic Economy (1850) that contained a chapter on domestic dyes and told how to make “a slate color” with “the thick purple paper that comes round sugar-loaves.” No doubt there are other mid-19th-century references. 

The question that immediately comes to mind: Why then and not earlier? What had changed? Research revealed a steep drop in the cost of sugar from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth due to the expansion of Caribbean sugar plantations. The market was flooded with sugar. Prices plunged, bringing sugarloaves, wrapped in their traditional purplish-blue paper, within reach of most housewives for the first time. Domestic economy books aimed at the middle class homemaker often pointed out economical ways to do things, and making homemade dyes would have been a useful skill, especially on the expanding frontier where access to stores was limited. 

So this myth turns out to be false when heard at early American sites and true for later, nineteenth-century sites. I’ve modified Myth #49 accordingly. Another detail: those websites and museums that mention this myth usually say that the blue paper was used to dye fabric blue, when in actual references, the blue (or purplish-blue) paper resulted in a slate color. And many say that the blue paper was dyed with indigo, but Colonial Williamsburg’s expert on dyes, Max Hamrick, says it was most likely logwood.

As good luck would have it, Beth Chamberlain’s note arrived in the nick of time. A few more days and it would have been too late for me to modify this myth for Death by Petticoat, which has now gone to the printers. Readers like Beth are the strength of this blog–it’s given me the chance to preview things and make changes before going into the unforgiving medium of a printed book. I am grateful to all have chimed in with corrections and comments on various myths.

Wishing everyone a year full of good health and happiness! 

Well, yes and no. Ironically, the German Christmas tree came to America from England, courtesy of an English queen.

The Christmas tree is a German tradition that can be traced back to the 1500s to Strasbourg, which is now part of France. (See Myth #73)  But it was a minor tradition confined to the Alsace region that did not spread to the rest of Germany until after 1750. German-speaking immigrants had been coming to America in significant numbers since the late 17th century. Many came from parts of Germany where the decorated tree custom was unknown. Many did not celebrate Christmas at all, for religious reasons (like the Puritans in New England). So, not all German immigrants were aware of the Christmas tree custom, and some of those who were aware of it opposed all celebration of Christmas. 

But some German immigrants did celebrate the holiday with a decorated tree. There are numerous references to Christmas trees in America, each competing to be first in its state or region, and a few lay claim to the 1700s. Whenever the name of the family setting up one of these early trees is known, it is a German-sounding name. But this quaint German custom might well have died out as immigrants assimilated had it not been for the influence of an English queen.

When Queen Victoria’s German-born husband and first cousin, Prince Albert, arranged for a fir tree to be brought from his homeland and decorated in 1841, it created a minor sensation throughout the English-speaking world, thanks to the newly important media: the magazine. Everyone knew about Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree. A print of the royal family gathered about the Christmas tree at Windsor Castle appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1848, then in Godey’s Lady’s Bookin 1850, and was reprinted again ten years later. The six-foot fir sits on a table, each tier laden with a dozen or more lighted wax tapers. An angel with outstretched arms poses at the top. Gilt gingerbread ornaments and tiny baskets filled with sweets hang by ribbons from the branches. Clustered around the base of the tree are dolls and soldiers and toys.

The queen’s Christmas tree certainly caught the public’s imagination. It was not, however, the first German tree in England, as is commonly thought. Queen Victoria had seen one as a girl in 1832. The little princess wrote excitedly in her diary that her Aunt Sophia had set up two “trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments. All the presents being placed around the tree.” And long before that, in 1789, Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, the last king of America, sent to her native Meckelberg-Strelitz in northern Germany for a Christmas tree. The queen’s physician, Dr. John Watkins, described it as “a charming imported German custom, [with] bunches of sweetmeats, almonds, and raisins in papers, fruits, and toys most tastefully arranged” on its branches. Charming it may have been, but it didn’t stick. More than three generations would pass before the custom took root in England and in America. 

Once the royal seal of approval had been stamped solidly on the Christmas tree, the practice spread throughout England and America and, to a lesser extent, to other parts of the world, through magazine pictures and articles. Upper-class Victorian Englishmen loved to imitate the royal family, and Americans followed suit. Late in the century, larger floor-to-ceiling trees replaced the tabletop size. 

The Christmas trees that existed in America before the Queen Victoria media blitz seemed to have involved Moravians (now the Czech Republic), Alsatians (now France), or other German-Americans, and the custom had shown no sign of spreading beyond those narrow ethnic groups. The writer of an 1825 article in The Saturday Evening Post mentions seeing trees in the windows of many houses in Philadelphia, a city with a large German population. He wrote, Their “green boughs [were] laden with fruit, richer than the golden apples of the Hesperides, or the sparkling diamonds that clustered on the branches in the wonderful cave of Aladdin.” Gilded apples and nuts hung from the branches as did marzipan ornaments, sugar cakes, miniature mince pies, spicy cookies cut from molds in the shape of stars, birds, fish, butterflies, and flowers. A woman visiting German friends in Boston in 1832 wrote about their unusual tree hung with gilded eggshell cups filled with candies. 

Not until the mid-nineteenth century did Christmas trees start spreading to homes with no known German connection. In Virginia, Judge Nathaniel Beverley Tucker adopted the custom after a German friend introduced him to the Christmas tree in 1842. Robert E. Lee’s children enjoyed a tabletop tree at their quarters at West Point, NY, in 1853 when their father was Superintendent of the Military Academy. President Franklin Pierce set up a “German tree” in the White House in 1856. Newspapers and women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Godey’s Lady’s Book spread the Christmas tree custom to all ethnic groups and economic classes.

Merry Christmas to all! 

Strasbourg, from a 1492 text

This time of year, most museums and historic sites put up a Christmas tree which they endeavor to make relevant by decorating it to a certain date–a Victorian tree, a Civil War tree, or a 1940s tree, for example. Usually a docent or placard will say something like, “The Christmas tree was an old German tradition with roots in the Middle Ages,” or, “. . . with roots in the pagan festivals that dated back to the time of ancient Rome.” There is no evidence for either statement. No records from the Middle Ages or earlier mention or portray a Christmas tree.

Some cite the old tradition of a paradise tree as a plausible ancestor to the Christmas tree, but the link sounds weak to me. Judge for yourself: The paradise tree was a standard stage prop in one of the popular religious plays (called mystery plays), the one about Adam and Eve. It was hung, appropriately enough, with what passed for red apples. Although it would seem an oxymoron, December 24 was, in those years, commonly celebrated as Adam and Eve’s birthday—thus their association with Christmas. Those who see the paradise tree as the precursor to our Christmas tree claim, with some logic if no proof, that the apples evolved into our round ornaments. 

The earliest hint of the Christmas tree custom can be found in 1561 in a sternly worded Alsatian (German) prohibition that forbade anyone to “have for Christmas more than one bush of more than eight shoes’ length.” Whether this was a fire precaution, a conservation measure, a religious prohibition, or something entirely different, we will probably never know, but authorities wouldn’t have passed a law against excessive Christmas trees if people hadn’t been putting them in their homes. A few decades later in 1605, one year before the Jamestown adventurers sailed to Virginia, the first description of a decorated Christmas tree shows up–also in Alsace. “At Christmas they set up fir-trees in the parlors at Strasbourg and hang roses cut out of many-colored paper, apples, wafers, gold-foil, sweets, &c.”

The custom spread slowly among wealthy, upperclass Germans—it was certainly not common in average homes. Nor was it popular with everyone. One German minister in Strasbourg deplored the frivolous practice: “Among other trifles with which the people often occupy the Christmas time more than with God’s word, is also the Christmas or fir tree, which they erect in the house, and hang with dolls and sugar and thereupon shake and cause to lose its bloom. Where the habit comes from, I know not. It is a bit of child’s play . . . Far better were it for the children to be dedicated to the spiritual cedar tree, Jesus Christ.” 

The Christmas tree custom originated in the German Rhineland (although Strasbourg is now on the France side of the border), probably in the 1500s. It may be older than that, but the proof is lacking. (Claims about Latvia or Estonia having the first documented Christmas tree in 1510 or thereabouts are hard to verify; even if they prove solid, the premise remains the same, as these were Germanic people too, especially in the Baltic port cities.) 

medieval Strasbourg

historic houses in Strasbourg