#1760s ireland

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Beige Linen Hoop Skirt, 1760-1780, Irish.

Victoria and Albert Museum.

[chiropteracupola]

just a couple of creepy 18th-century innkeepers talking shop!

[featuring @borisyvain's lazarus mcclure and my own james webster]

[millingroundireland]

Beginning with a boom: The Irish origin of the Mills and Bibby families

This was originally the first chapter in my family history on the Mills family, but has been adapted and changed for this blog. All the sources are noted in a bibliographic essay at the end of this post, with maps and other photos throughout. Enjoy! I excerpted this from the original post on the WordPress version of this blog, and broke it up into smaller chunks to put on here, to make it more readable.

The year was 1796. Invasion rocked the isle of Ireland, or as the Irish call it, Éire. In the Expedition to Ireland, or Expédition d'Irlande, Napoleon’s imperial French army had tried to assist the Irish who were revolting because of taxation and religious laws, in hopes of creating a sister republic friendly to the British, but had failed. Again, in 1798, the French, one year after the Dutch had unsuccessfully invaded, were at it again (Figure 1.1). The imperial French army had come to the island for the last time in hopes of weakening the British empire and support the Irish revolt against the rule of the British which flared up again in May of that year. Again, they were unsuccessful as 150,000 British troops across all of Ireland, commanded by Lord Cornwallis, the same who had fought the Americans during the Revolutionary War and surrendered at Yorktown, was ultimately victorious with the Irish rebels on the run while the invading French were made prisoners.

Figure 1.1: Maps of the French invasion(s) of Ireland 1796-1798 courtesy of DK’s World History Atlas (left) & the Times Concise Atlas of World History (right).

The Mills family was about to begin anew. Seven years after the failed invasion by the French, in 1805, John Mills was born in Ballysheehan, County Tipperary, Ireland (as they call counties in Ireland), with his middle name was Rand as family stories say. While some sources say he was born in 1804 or even 1806, he attested, by his own recollection, that he was born that year. Three years later, in 1807, Thomas Mills was born in the same location as John. Neither Thomas nor John’s parents are currently known. However, it is likely that both Thomas and John were brothers. A Margaret or Jonathan Mills are listed in the 1766 religious census for Ireland, living in Mealiffe and Cashel, indicating deeper roots of the Mills family on the island. As for the surname of Mills, it also has a strong basis in England from a “John Mills” in 1541 to a “William Mills” in 1608. Furthermore, the surname of Bibby was derived from Norse movement and originates from Christian believers as well. As for the surname of Mills, it means either “living near a mill” and/or was a “genitive of an abbreviated form of Michael.”

As for County Tipperary, where the Mills family was living, it was a relatively well-populated area which was undoubtedly agricultural (it still is) as it was not near the textile industries clustered around Dublin or in the northern part of the island. Ballysheehan itself, called Baile Uí Shíocháin in Irish, is a town and civil parish in Middle Third barony, within Munster Province and the southern part of County Tipperary. This small area, which is a little more than 400 acres, has been historically Protestant, is only 3 miles north of Cashel (Figure 1.2), and had only, as Samuel Lewis wrote in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, about three thousand inhabitants by 1838.

Figure 1.2: Cashel in the middle of County Tipperary, with Ballysheehan nearby, courtesy of Carl Radefeld's 1844 map of Ireland within the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection on davidrumsey.com.

The Bibbys, which later marry into the Mills family, had long roots in County Tipperary. First of all, the surname of Bibby, which is more common in Great Britain than Ireland, is also spelled Bibbey, Bibey, Bybee, Biby, Bebby, and Beeby, was located in Ireland mainly from 1847 to 1864. Reportedly it is a relationship name “from the Middle English personal name Bibby” and occurs in places such as Manchester, England. Other connections to Ireland are not known.

In 1813, a man named Robert Bibby was born in Ireland. While his exact birth place is not known, it is likely that he was born in County Tipperary. Like Thomas and John, his parents are not known. In later years, Thomas Lyndop Bibby was born (in 1822) in Cashel, Ireland, County Tipperary. His parents were reportedly John Bibby and Mehitable Lyndop, who died in 1840. These could have been the same parents of Margaret Ann Bibby, born two years after Thomas, also in Cashel. It is possible that the Bibby family was large, as could have been the Mills family, and they may have crossed paths. After all, Bibbys were born as far back as 1765 (Thomas Bibby) in Ireland.

© 2018-2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[fatehbaz]

Travel back [...] a few hundred years to before the industrial revolution, and the wildlife of Britain and Ireland looks very different indeed. 

Take orcas: while there are now less than ten left in Britain’s only permanent (and non-breeding) resident population, around 250 years ago the English [...] naturalist John Wallis gave this extraordinary account of a mass stranding of orcas on the north Northumberland coast [...]. If this record is reliable, then more orcas were stranded on this beach south of the Farne Islands on one day in 1734 than are probably ever present in British and Irish waters today. [...]

Other careful naturalists from this period observed orcas around the coasts of Cornwall, Norfolk and Suffolk. I have spent the last five years tracking down more than 10,000 records of wildlife recorded between 1529 and 1772 by naturalists, travellers, historians and antiquarians throughout Britain and Ireland, in order to reevaluate the prevalence and habits of more than 150 species [...].

In the early modern period, wolves, beavers and probably some lynxes still survived in regions of Scotland and Ireland. By this point, wolves in particular seem to have become re-imagined as monsters [...].

Elsewhere in Scotland, the now globally extinct great auk could still be found on islands in the Outer Hebrides. Looking a bit like a penguin but most closely related to the razorbill, the great auk’s vulnerability is highlighted by writer Martin Martin while mapping St Kilda in 1697 [...].

[A]nd pine martens and “Scottish” wildcats were also found in England and Wales. Fishers caught burbot and sturgeon in both rivers and at sea, [...] as well as now-scarce fishes such as the angelshark, halibut and common skate. Threatened molluscs like the freshwater pearl mussel and oyster were also far more widespread. [...]

Predators such as wolves that interfered with human happiness were ruthlessly hunted. Authors such as Robert Sibbald, in his natural history of Scotland (1684), are aware and indeed pleased that several species of wolf have gone extinct:

There must be a divine kindness directed towards our homeland, because most of our animals have a use for human life. We also lack those wild and savage ones of other regions. Wolves were common once upon a time, and even bears are spoken of among the Scottish, but time extinguished the genera and they are extirpated from the island.

The wolf was of no use for food and medicine and did no service for humans, so its extinction could be celebrated as an achievement towards the creation of a more civilised world. Around 30 natural history sources written between the 16th and 18th centuries remark on the absence of the wolf from England, Wales and much of Scotland. [...]

In Pococke’s 1760 Tour of Scotland, he describes being told about a wild species of cat – which seems, incredibly, to be a lynx – still living in the old county of Kirkcudbrightshire in the south-west of Scotland. Much of Pococke’s description of this cat is tied up with its persecution, apparently including an extra cost that the fox-hunter charges for killing lynxes:

They have also a wild cat three times as big as the common cat. [...] It is said they will attack a man who would attempt to take their young one [...]. The country pays about £20 a year to a person who is obliged to come and destroy the foxes when they send to him. [...]

The capercaillie is another example of a species whose decline was correctly recognised by early modern writers. Today, this large turkey-like bird [...] is found only rarely in the north of Scotland, but 250–500 years ago it was recorded in the west of Ireland as well as a swathe of Scotland north of the central belt. [...] Charles Smith, the prolific Dublin-based author who had theorised about the decline of herring on the coast of County Down, also recorded the capercaillie in County Cork in the south of Ireland, but noted: This bird is not found in England and now rarely in Ireland, since our woods have been destroyed. [...] Despite being protected by law in Scotland from 1621 and in Ireland 90 years later, the capercaillie went extinct in both countries in the 18th century [...].

---

Images, captions, and text by: Lee Raye. “Wildlife wonders of Britain and Ireland before the industrial revolution – my research reveals all the biodiversity we’ve lost.” The Conversation. 17 July 2023. [Map by Lee Raye. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[principiumindividuationis777]

Patrick Cotter O'Brien (1760-1806), of County Cork, Ireland, holds the distinction of being the first person confirmed, in his own lifetime, to be at least eight feet tall, at 8 foot 1 inch (c. 2.46 meters).

Depending on which source one reads, he may have been the first confirmed eight-foot tall person period, though I have read sources claiming that a skeleton was later found of another man, who supposedly lived earlier than O'Brien, and measured at eight feet in length.

Prior to him, there were the reports on Goliath's height, but the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrated that a simple typographical error had inflated Goliath's height from something around 6 foot 9 (c. 2.06 meters), which means that Goliath was actually about the size of a basketball power forward, up to a fantastical 9 foot 9 (c. 2.97 meters)

[victoriansecret]

Vails

I haven't actually talked about it here a lot, partly because I try not to do heavy history stuff here - this blog is meant to be a hobby, after all - and it's something I'm frankly too passionate (obsessed) about, but my main area of historic interest and focus, especially when it comes to my own personal research, is the history of domestic service. It is not an exaggeration to say it is my life's work. Another reason I don't write about it often is I don't really know where to start. My breadth of knowledge on the subject is quite broad, so there's a lot I could say, but I think I'll try to write some small things about specific aspects of it. Vails were, in the 18th (and I believe also 19th) century, basically what we could today call tips, often paid to servants. And when you read things written by the 'master class' of people being served, while they're obviously biased and exaggerating, it does become clear that servants rather enforced them. There wasn't a guild system for servants like there were for trades, but there were informal clubs and groups, and this is one of the ways they seem to have acted together, almost as a form of unionization. There's a letter to a British newspaper where the write says that he estimates many servants are doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling their annual salaries through vails. I could write more but I'll just transcribe some of my favourite passages on this subject from the book Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland by Patricia McCarthy: I will add too, while this is specifically talking about paid servants in Britain, you do see vails paid to enslaved people in America as well. Probably not as often, but Philip Vickers Fithian, who wrote a diary about his experiences in Virginia in the 1770s, writes about similar things of the enslaved people at the plantation he's staying at expecting their "Christmas boxes" of vails, although they weren't quite as beholden to the actual date of Boxing Day.

... The customary scene in the hall, as their guests waited for their carriages or horses to be brought to the door, embarrassed many. [Marshall, Domestic Servants] Hosts feigned ignorance of their guests' fumbling in their pockets to find shillings and half-crowns to distribute to the servants, who had lined themselves up expectantly. Whether the motive for allowing the practice was to salve the collective conscience of the employers at paying such low wages is not clear. [Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the 18thc.] It was not confined to great houses, but was also expected in more modest establishments, although the amounts given were less. It was also not only expected on departure from the house of a friend: vails were disbursed by 'house tourists' to whichever servant showed them around - in most cases an upper servant.

...

An army officer described how much his visit to the house of a friend would cost him: 'The moment your departure is known, all the domestics are on the qui vive; the house-maid hopes you have forgotten nothing in packing up, if so, she will take care of it till you come again; this piece of civility costs you three ten-pennies; the footman carries your portmanteau .. to the hall, three more; the butler wishes you a pleasant journey - his greate kindness in so doing of course extracts a crown-piece; the groom brings your horse, assuring you 'tis an ilegant baste, and has fed well' - three more ten-pennies go; the helper runs after you with the curb-chain, which he has 'till this moment carefull secreted - two more; making a total of seventeen, or, in English money, upwards of fourteen shillings. A heavy tax for visiting a friend!' [Benson Earle Hill, Recollections of an Artillery Officervol. 1]

...

Richard Griffith from Bennetsbridge, Co. Kilkenny, complained in c.1760 in a letter to hise wife that 'an heavy and unprofitable Tax still subsists upon the Hospitality of this Neighbourhood .. in short while this Perquisite continues, a Country Gentleman may be considered but as a generous Kind of Inn-holder, who keeps open House, at his own Expence, for the sole Emolument of his Servants .. this Extravagance is not confined, at present, solely to the Country .. ; for a Dinner in Dublin, and all the Towns in Ireland, is even in a Morning, with a Person who keeps his Port, you may levee him fifty Times, without being admitted by his Swiss Porter. So... I shall consider a great Man as a Monster, who may not be seen, 'till you have fee'd his Keppers.' [R. and E. Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances, vol. 4]

...

Swift gives similar suggestions in Directions to Servants: 'By these, and like Expedients, you may probably be a better Man by Half a Crown before he leaves the House.' He further urges those servants who expect vails 'always to stand Rank and File when a Stranger is taking his Leave; so that he must of Necessity pass between you; and he must have more Confidence or less Money than usual, if any of you let him escape, and according as he behaves himself, remember to treat him the next Time he comes.'

...

Card money was particularly lucrative for butlers and footmen - so much so that, in London at least, such menservants refused service in houses where gaming parties were not held. [Marshall, Domestic Servants - Two footmen at the court of Queen Anne, Fortnum and Mason, used this perquisite as capital to begin their grocery business in London. Country House Lighting 1660-1890, Temple Newsam Country House Series No. 4] But it was vails that finally undermined the authority of the employers, who virtually allowed servants to dictate whom should be received, and then pretended not to notice when the servants extracted money from the departing guests.

...

In the London Chronicle a correspondent wrote in 1762 that 'Masters in England seldom pay their servants but in lieu of wages suffer them prey upon their guests'. George Mathew of Thomastown, Co. Tipperary, a man famous for his hospitality, was one of the first employers to ban the 'inhospitable custom' of giving vails to servants, and to compensate them by increasing their wages. This was apparently as early as the 1730s. His servants were warned that, if they disobeyed, they would be discharged. He also informed his guests that he would 'consider it as the highest affront if any offer of that sort were made'. [Anthologia Hibernica, I - No date given for this account, by 'Grand George' Mathew, who died in 1737, was the man described, who was host to Jonathan Swift at Thomastown in the 1720s, a visit described by Thomas Sheridan in A Life of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift] A crusade against the giving of vails began in 1760 in Scotland, where seventeen counties issued appeals to abolish them. Four years later the movement had spread to London, resulting in riots there by footmen, the servants who stood to lose the most. [Marshall, Domestic Servants] It was probably at about the same time that employers from a number of counties in Ireland agreed among themselves to abolish vails. [Griffith, Series of Letters..., IV, 'An Agreement entered into among the Gentlemen of several Counties in Ireland, not to give Vails to Servants'] Like George Mathew before them, they decided to increase staff wages in an effort to compensate them for loss of earnings. One of them was Lord Kildare: in March 1765 he issued a directive from Carton to members of his household, stating that 'In Consideration of Vails &c, which I will not permit for the future to be received in any of my Houses upon any Account whatsoever from Company lying there or otherwise I shall give in lieu thereof... five pounds per annum each to the housekeeper, Maitre D'Hotel, cook and confectioner; three pounds per annum each to the steward at Carton, the butler, valet de chambre and groom of the chambers, and two pounds to the Gentleman of Horse. ...

And I will conclude with this funny account, about the penalty for being known amongst the staff to be a spendthrift, from the same book: ...

An unfortunate guest in England in 1754 found his punishment [for not giving vails] truly humiliating. 'I am a marked man,' he wrote, 'if I ask for beer I am presented with a piece of bread. If I am bold enough to call for wine, after a delay which would take its relish away were it good, I receive a mixture of the whole sideboard in a greasy glass. If I hold up my plate nobody sees me; so that I am forced to eat mutton with fish sauce, and pickles with my apple pie.' [Quoted in Marshall, Domestic Servants]

feel free to tip here (and yes the irony of this is not lost on me, although it did not occur to me until about halfway through writing this)

[werewolfetone]

Biographies of important figures in late eighteenth century Belfast are like 'james was was born in 1760 to a reverend whose father had been a reverend whose father had been a reverend whose father had been a reverend whose father was directly related to william of orange and had been kicked out of Scotland for being a "professional anglican-killer" in a house with no other structures within 200 leagues of it. at the age of three he moved to the city where he opened a fork making factory, a shoelace making factory, and a successful theatre company. he also preached frequently at multiple churches, edited a newspaper, built frigates with his bare hands, painted murals, and played the piano better than beethoven. when he was twelve he invented the concept of standing armies and thereafter captained his own Volunteer regiment. with the money from his fork and shoelace factories he bought seven hundred thousand acres of land and then created a paramilitary called "the landlord dismemberment association," until he realised that he was also a landlord and had to disband it. he also is suspected of killing several hundred informers for the united irishmen -- though he consistently denied this. regardless of the truth, in 1798 he didn't see any action during the rebellion due to the fact that he had stubbed his toe the day before the battle. after the act of union he opened a chain of successful restaurants, created the field of dentistry, and introduced communism to Ireland, though his later life was plagued by scandals such as the fact that we're still not 100% sure that he didn't write that one pamphlet calling for catholics to be thrown into a meat mincer. he died at the age of 135 in 1895 of tripping over his own feet. five seconds after his death, his wife and brother, lord edward carson, turned his house into an orange hall and destroyed his grave with a giant hammer. the location of his body is still unknown, though 1927 someone did uncover bones that could either have been his or those of his pet hamster'

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in Irish History | 27 February:

1495 – Garret Mór Fitzgerald, Eighth Earl of Kildare, is arrested in Dublin by Sir Edward Poynings, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. 1760 – François Thurot holds the castle and the town of Carrickfergus until this date. 1792 – The Irish House of Commons is partly destroyed by fire. 1841 – William Bruce, Sr., the last surviving member of the Ulster Volunteer convention of 1783, a group that fostered…

[thepastisalreadywritten]

BORN ON THIS DAY:

George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738 – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 25 October 1760 until his death in 1820.

The two kingdoms were in a personal union under him until the Acts of Union 1800 merged them on 1 January 1801.

He then became King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

[oceancentury]

Castletown House, Kildare, Ireland.

Building began in 1722 for William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. Designed by Italian architect Alessandro Galilei with the wings additions later added by Irish architect; Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. Under the instructions of Lady Louisa Conolly (granddaughter to Charles II) the interiors were finished in the 1760s and 1770s from designs of Scottish-Swedish architect; Sir William Chambers. It was the first Palladian designed house in Ireland, with all materials source within Ireland.

[ifreakingloveroyals]

6 May 2023 | King Charles III and Queen Camilla travelling in the Gold State Coach built in 1760 and used at every Coronation since that of William IV in 1831sets off from Westminster Abbey on route to Buckingham Palace during the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla in London, England. The Coronation of Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as King and Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the other Commonwealth realms takes place at Westminster Abbey today. Charles acceded to the throne on 8 September 2022, upon the death of his mother, Elizabeth II. (c) Rob Pinney/Getty Images

[borisyvain]

Jory; he/him; horror + historical fiction writer

Stories:

Untitled Steampunk Project, a project concerning a war in an evil steampunk mirror world

Mister Kates, a haunted house story set in the 1760s

Red and Riotous Light, a story about... the leadup to the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. sort of.

EDIT 30/12/23: Eight Grams of Gold, a sequel story to RRL about a lawsuit. And the leadup to the 1798 rebellion in Ireland.

The Well, a "lighthearted" romance about a woman and her friend finding love in 1810s England

[the-paintrist]

Thomas Hudson - Portrait of king George II of UK - 1744

oil on canvas, height: 218.8 cm (86.1 in) Edit this at Wikidata; width: 146.7 cm (57.7 in)

National Portrait Gallery, London, UK

George II (George Augustus; German: Georg August; 30 October / 9 November 1683[a] – 25 October 1760) was King of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover) and a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire from 11 June 1727 (O.S.) until his death in 1760.

Born and brought up in northern Germany, George is the most recent British monarch born outside Great Britain. The Act of Settlement 1701 and the Acts of Union 1707 positioned his grandmother Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant descendants to inherit the British throne. In 1705, George married Caroline of Ansbach, with whom he had eight children. After the deaths of George's grandmother and Anne, Queen of Great Britain, in 1714, George's father, the Elector of Hanover, ascended the British throne as George I. In the first years of his father's reign as king, Prince George was associated with opposition politicians until they rejoined the governing party in 1720.

As king from 1727, George exercised little control over British domestic policy, which was largely controlled by the Parliament of Great Britain. As elector he spent twelve summers in Hanover, where he had more direct control over government policy. He had a difficult relationship with his eldest son, Frederick, who supported the parliamentary opposition. During the War of the Austrian Succession, George participated at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, and thus became the most recent British monarch to lead an army in battle. In 1745 supporters of the Catholic claimant to the British throne, James Francis Edward Stuart ("The Old Pretender"), led by James's son Charles Edward Stuart ("The Young Pretender" or "Bonnie Prince Charlie"), attempted and failed to depose George in the last of the Jacobite rebellions. Frederick died suddenly in 1751, nine years before his father; George was succeeded by Frederick's eldest son, George III.

For two centuries after George II's death, history tended to view him with disdain, concentrating on his mistresses, short temper, and boorishness. Since then, reassessment of his legacy has led scholars to conclude that he exercised more influence in foreign policy and military appointments than previously thought.

Thomas Hudson (1701 – 1779) was an English painter, almost exclusively of portraits.

[nordleuchten]

24 Days of La Fayette: December 8th - William Constable

William Constable is one of the reasons why I liked this research so much. When I first sat down to write this post, the name sounded rather generic to me, I had never heard it before. Not in connection with La Fayette or anyone else. I expected a few bites in letters, maybe a grave marker and a few listings in genealogy books – as it turns out, Donald G. Tailby (later associated Professor at the University of Georgia) wrote his PhD about the early career of William Constable (the dissertation can be partly read here) and the papers of the Constable family are for the most part held by New York Public Library.

William Kerin Constable was born on January 1, 1752, in Dublin, Ireland. The family originally hailed from France, but they moved to England for unknown reasons. William’s paternal grandfather, also named William Constable, moved from England to Ireland “in the King’s service”. In Ireland he met and married Elizabeth Owen (probably of Welsh descent). Together they had three surviving daughters and one son. The son’s name was John Constable, and he was born in Dublin in 1728. He married Jane Kerin, born 1731, daughter of William Kerin and Jane Ewer on February 6, 1749 in Dublin. Their son William (our William) was born on January 1, 1752 in Dublin, their daughter Eweretta was born in 1754. Two other children, Elizabeth and George, died young. A fifth child, Henriette, was born in Montreal in 1761. The couples last child, John, was born in North America in 1764.

There is considerable uncertainty when and how the family left Dublin. Before they came to North America, they settled for some time in Montreal. Family records imply that they moved there around the year 1754, shortly after Eweretta’s birth. John Constable was a regimental surgeon in the British Army and the city of Montreal was under French control until 1760 when the French surrendered the city to the British during the French and Indian War. It is highly unlikely for a British, non-Catholic family with a husband and father that works for the army to move into a French city during a war between France and Britain. Far more likely is the scenario that either the whole family moved to Montreal in 1760/1761 or that in 1754 John Constable was in Montreal with the army and his family joined him there in 1760/1761.

Anyway, by 1762 the family had moved to Schenectady in New York. John Constable was still employed as a military surgeon but earned his money mainly as a private physician. It appears as if William Constable was send back to Dublin to receive a formal education before returning to Schenectady. His younger sister Eweretta had married James Phyn in 1768. Phyn was one of the partners of the fur-trading firm Phyn & Ellice. James Phyn offered his brother-in-law an apprenticeship in his firm in 1769 and William started working there as a clerk despite his fathers wishes for him to study law. William met many of his lifelong friends and business partners during his time by Phyn & Ellice. Between 1773/1774 and 1777 he was sent by the firm to England. Little is known about his time in England, but soon after his return to North America, he joined the Continental Army and took his Oath of Alliance in Philadelphia.

It appears that during the Revolutionary War, Constable was not only La Fayette’s aide-de-camp but prior to that also an aide-de-camp to General John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg. Founders Online currently has two letters written by Constable during this time and in both cases, the editors of Founders Online describe him as Muhlenberg’s aide-de-camp. The last of these letters was written on April 7, 1781 and the first connection that appears between Constable and La Fayette is a letter from April 28, 1781.

While with La Fayette, Constable appears to have been often tasked with coping letters or taking dictations. Between April 28, 1781 and July 25, 1781 there are fifteen letters in Constable’s hand that survived. But Constable was doing more than simply copying letters. La Fayette wrote to the Baron von Steuben on May 31, 1781:

I am to beg your pardon for opening your letter, but I was gone from the place when they arrived and Mr. Constable who had remained behind hearing that Tarletons Horse were on his route to join me unsealed every letter on public Service that in Case he should destroy them he might know their Contents.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 4, April 1, 1781–December 23, 1781, Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 150-151.

It appears as if William Constable never held a specific rank in the army because he always referred to as “Mr. Constable” and I could not find anything about potential commissions or further promotions.

After the war, Constable returned to his business endeavours. He was a merchant and a fur dealer, as well as land and debt speculator – he and his partner owned a tenth of the state of New York during their business’ peak years. Constable’s business endeavours were numerous and too complex to unfurl here in total, so a short summary has to suffice.

He was involved with such illustrious names like Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, William Duer and James Seagrove. He was a partner to Porteous & Company of New York, later Constable, Porteous & Company of Philadelphia. He had early business connections to Benedict Arnold during his time as military governor of Philadelphia and engaged together with James Seagrove in trade in France and Havana. He also entered a contract about the trading of tobacco with France. He is probably best known for his connections with the Morris’ and their combined endeavour to establish trade between America and China. During the early years of trade relations, few men were so actively engaged in the venture as Constable. He also had contracts with the government, especially as a partner at Constable, Rucker and Co. Beside Tailby’s PhD dissertation I also recommend his paper titled Foreign Interest Remittances by the United States, 1785-1787: A Story of Malfeasance.

Constable settled in Philadelphia and married Anna White. Together they had at least one surviving son, William Kerin Constable jr., who later settled in Constableville. The village was settled in 1796 and the older Constable was the sole proprietor after his partners pulled out. He sold parcels of land to people in France, England, and the Netherlands.

He died on May 22, 1803 in Greenwich near New York City.

Constable also had business and personal relations with Alexander Hamilton, especially in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Founders Online currently has twelve letters between the two of them. The Library of Congress has five letters written in William Constables handwriting, mostly parts of his correspondence with Tobias Lear.

George Washington Papers, Series 4, General Correspondence: William Constable to Tobias Lear, November 16, 1790, Manuscript/Mixed Material, Retrieved from the Library of Congress. (09/09/2022)

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day. Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday!

Red placebo pills work better than blue ones.

Eyebrows evolved to make humans look friendlier to each other.

It takes four seconds for a silence to become awkward.

You retain information better if it is accompanied by a pun.

The Chupa Chups logo was designed by Salvador Dalí.

All ten species of the most venomous snakes in the world live in Australia.

In the 1760s, 33 Cock Lane in London was believed to be haunted by a ghost called Scratching Fanny.

It requires seven to eight trees to provide enough oxygen for just one person per year.

Two-thirds of all the people in the world who have ever lived to be 65 are still alive today.

Psychology says no matter how angry you get, you always end up forgiving the people you love.

Within 200 yards of the flat in Islington where George Orwell had the idea for 1984, there are now 32 CCTV cameras.

The 'coffee break' was invented in 1952 by the American Coffee bureau.

The palm trees in Los Angeles, are the result of a job-creation scheme in the 1930s.

There are more phone calls placed on Mother's Day than any other day of the year.

India used to be the richest country in the world until the British invasion in the early 17th Century.

Human saliva contains a painkiller called opiorphin that is six times more powerful than morphine.

Climate change is making it harder to sleep. On average, you are losing 44 hours of sleep a year due to higher temperatures.

All polar bears are Irish: they’re descended from brown bears that lived in Ireland over 10,000 years ago.

On the set of ‘Jaws’, the shark was named Bruce after Steven Spielberg's lawyer.

Cacozelia is the use of foreign words to make one appear un peu plus cultivé.

In 2002, a NASA intern stole a safe full of moon rocks, sprinkled them on a hotel bed, and had sex with his girlfriend on top of them.

Football World Cup referees have to learn swear words in other languages.

The sign-language equivalent of a tongue-twister is a ‘finger fumbler’.

Inserting a swear-word in the middle of another word, such as ‘abso-fucking-lutely’, is called an Expletive Infixation.

The thermostat knobs in many hotel rooms don't work; they're rigged to save electricity.

Disneyland shut down its gondola rides because too many people were having sex on them.

According to new research from Dartmouth College, people are at their most miserable when they are 47.2 years old.

About a third of the UK population has discussed the weather within the last hour.

Dancing Queen gets 16 times as many Spotify streams as the average ABBA song.

Breakups are hard to deal with because the body and mind goes through withdrawal, like drug addiction, we become addicted to love.

‘Billie Jean’ was about a girl who climbed over Michael Jackson's wall one morning and accused him of being the father of one of her twins.

King George VI's wedding was not broadcast on the radio in case people listened without removing their hats.

Not realising his microphone was switched on, Ronald Reagan once joked that the US was about to bomb Russia.

The harder you work for something, the greater you'll feel when you finally achieve it.

The first iPhone virus was the Ikee worm which infected thousands of Australian iPhones. Its only function was to change the phone’s wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley.

In 2019, a Danish politician paid for ads on Pornhub. When questioned, he said, "Half the internet is porn and you need to be where the voters are."

In 1923, an American man was killed trying to open a coconut with the butt of his (loaded) revolver and died from a bullet wound to the abdomen.

In 2019, a 31-year-old North Carolina man named Aaron Smith created and launched a new dating app, but there was a catch. He was the only guy on it. He banned all other men from joining.

In 2003, six monkeys were funded by the Arts Council of England to see how long it would take them to type the works of Shakespeare. After six months, they had failed to produce a single word of English, broken the computer and used the keyboard as a lavatory.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.

[aryo-bagus]

small note:maryland

Maryland (US: /ˈmɛrɪlənd/ (listen) MERR-il-ənd)[b] is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.[10][11] It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. Baltimore[12] is the largest city in the state, and the capital is Annapolis. Among its occasional nicknames are Old Line State, the Free State, and the Chesapeake Bay State. It is named after Henrietta Maria, the French-born queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, who was known then in England as Mary.[13][14]

Before its coastline was explored by Europeans in the 16th century, Maryland was inhabited by several groups of Native Americans – mostly by Algonquian peoples and, to a lesser degree, Iroquoian and Siouan.[15] As one of the original Thirteen Colonies of England, Maryland was founded by George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, a Catholic convert[16][17] who sought to provide a religious haven for Catholics persecuted in England.[18] In 1632, Charles I of England granted Lord Baltimore a colonial charter, naming the colony after his wife, Henrietta Maria.[19] Unlike the Pilgrims and Puritans, who rejected Catholicism in their settlements, Lord Baltimore envisioned a colony where people of different religious sects would coexist under the principle of toleration.[18] Accordingly, in 1649 the Maryland General Assembly passed an Act Concerning Religion, which enshrined this principle by penalizing anyone who "reproached" a fellow Marylander based on religious affiliation.[20] Nevertheless, religious strife was common in the early years, and Catholics remained a minority, albeit in greater numbers than in any other English colony.

Maryland's early settlements and population centers clustered around rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Its economy was heavily plantation-based and centered mostly on the cultivation of tobacco. Demand for cheap labor from Maryland colonists led to the importation of numerous indentured servants and enslaved Africans. In 1760, Maryland's current boundaries took form following the settlement of a long-running border dispute with Pennsylvania. Maryland was an active participant in the events leading up to the American Revolution, and by 1776, its delegates signed the Declaration of Independence. Many of its citizens subsequently played key political and military roles in the war. In 1790, the state ceded land for the establishment of the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C.

Although then a slave state, Maryland remained in the Union during the American Civil War, its strategic location giving it a significant role in the conflict. After the Civil War, Maryland took part in the Industrial Revolution, driven by its seaports, railroad networks, and mass immigration from Europe. Since the 1940s, the state's population has grown rapidly, to approximately six million residents, and it is among the most densely populated U.S. states. As of 2015, Maryland had the highest median household income of any state, owing in large part to its proximity to Washington, D.C., and a highly diversified economy spanning manufacturing, retail services, public administration, real estate, higher education, information technology, defense contracting, health care, and biotechnology.[21] The state's central role in U.S. history is reflected by its hosting of some of the highest numbers of historic landmarks per capita.

Sixteen of Maryland's twenty-three counties, as well as the city of Baltimore, border the tidal waters of the Chesapeake Bay estuary and its many tributaries,[22][12] which combined total more than 4,000 miles of shoreline. Although one of the smallest states in the U.S., it features a variety of climates and topographical features that have earned it the moniker of America in Miniature.[23] In a similar vein, Maryland's geography, culture, and history combine elements of the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Southern regions of the country.