With Trump filling Twitter with his stupid appropriation of a quote from John Paul Jones, here's some better JPJ content. 10 years ago I wrote about a 1790s radical named Robert Coram who served under JPJ in the Revolution. He's someone worth remembering. https://books.google.com/books?id=QEzaLJ4u_MEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA347

Coram lived is short adult life (he died at 35) in Joe Biden's Delaware. He was a newspaper editor and teacher whose formal education ended at age 14. Despite being fairly poor, he was probably one of the more widely read people of his era. This is the list of books he owned.

He filled the columns of his Wilmington newspaper with excerpts from the works of several leading British radicals of his day like William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft. Those two are probably most well known today for being the parents of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Coram grew up in the slave society of Charleston, South Carolina, the son of a fairly unsuccessful merchant. When he returned to North America after serving aboard JPJ's ship he joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Coram's 1791 pamphlet on education reform is available here and is very worth reading. It offers a compelling argument for why a rough degree of economic equality is essential in a polity that aspires to be democratic. https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/lutz-american-political-writing-during-the-founding-era-1760-1805-vol-2#lfHyneman-02_label_082

Here's a thread where I discuss that 18th century conversation about democracy and economic justice. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1092799967914328072?s=20

An interesting piece of this story is that I was only able to reconstruct Coram's life (to the extent that I did) because the New Deal happened. Without the Delaware Writers Project of the 1930s, Coram's story would have likely been lost to history. Let me explain.

If you want to do research on Robert Coram, you'll have to go to the Wilmington Historical Society and look in the Jeannette Eckman papers. She was the head of the New Deal funded Delaware Writers Project. WTF, you're probably thinking. Why there?

Well, in the 1930s Virginia Shaw, a young woman who lived in the progressive, intentional community of Arden, De and worked for the Federal Writers Project, re-discovered Coram’s pamphlet and devoted several years of her life to reconstructing and writing up his life story.

Shaw contacted every rare book library in America to see if they owned copies of Coram’s pamphlet and if they had any marginalia in them or other information about the text’s readers. She scoured the nation’s newspapers to find pieces by and about Coram.

She spent months pouring through military records to trace Coram’s career serving under John Paul Jones during the revolution, and tracked Coram assiduously through the local tax and court records. It's an astonishing body of research.

She drew maps tracing Coram's travels throughout the Atlantic world. She found every extant scrap of documentary evidence about his life. She created detailed timelines of his life, and genealogies of his family. She contacted his descendants.

All of this work has been preserved in a couple boxes at the Delaware Historical Society. Also preserved in those boxes is the sad story of why all of this work never saw the light of day. And it was all the fault of....drum roll...the Republicans.

Shaw’s passionate interest in Coram grew out of her own progressive political commitments. As an ardent New Dealer, she saw in Coram a precursor to the sort of progressive economic vision she saw in politicians of her day like FDR's VP, Henry Wallace.

When WWII began and funding for New Deal programs dried up, Shaw tried to get the state of Delaware to fund her project on Coram, but support from a Republican-dominated state legislature was not forthcoming without major revisions to the political thrust of her analysis.

In those Jeannette Eckman papers are multiple drafts of Shaw's biography of Coram with 90% of the text crossed out by Eckman, a longtime Delaware Republican. Eckman seemed to appreciate Shaw's work ethic, but she could not stomach her historical and political analysis.

Also in those papers are plaintive letters from Shaw to Eckman in which she begs leave to keep her government issued typewriter for just a few more weeks so she can finish her work on Coram. Her request was denied.

When I did this research in 1996, the memory of Virginia Shaw lived on in Wilmington. She had passed only a few years earlier and had worked for the state doing historical/archival work her entire life.

Perhaps as a punishment for her progressivism, she was assigned to work on the papers of the Bayard family, the richest and most reactionary family in Delaware history (before the DuPonts). She spent her life transcribing and cataloguing the letters of people Coram hated.

One historian I spoke with who knew Shaw well told me this story. Whenever Shaw didn't feel like retrieving an item someone wanted from the archive, she would say "oh, we don't have that, it was burned by the Hessians."

A small gesture of resistance, perhaps. Or maybe she was just tired that day. Or maybe she was sick of doing the bidding of rude historians who knew less about their subjects than she did, but still felt authorized to treat her like "the help." We'll never know.

I got so interested in Virginia Shaw that one weekend I took a trip to Arden, Delaware and had lunch with a woman who'd been Virginia's neighbor for years. Arden was founded in 1900 by some Henry George, single-tax acolytes.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-11-03-1997307012-story.html

Virginia had no descendants, and from what her neighbor told me, she seemed to be a very private person, not given to spinning tales of her life and her work. The neighbor had no idea about Virginia's Robert Coram project.

Like most efforts to reconstruct the life of non-wealthy and non-famous people in the past, this one ends with far more unanswered questions and archival dead ends than rousing epiphanies. And such is the nature of much historical research.

And what we get, instead, are decontextualized (probably apocryphal) quotes from famous dead white men who people like Trump don't know the first thing about (other than they are famous, for some reason). Because patriotism, and America First.