Social Standing and the Right to Bear Arms

 
David Pope
 
Avatar
 
 
David Pope
Total Posts:  559
Joined  17-09-2010
 
 
 
20 December 2015 14:50
 

Here’s a link to an earlier thread on this phrase.  Disrespect to the Irish aside, Byrd seems to be one colonial American who did not think that free assumption of arms for all classes was a good idea, I guess.

http://www.americanheraldry.org/forums/showthread.php?t=6285&highlight=Courtesy+of+ireland

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
Avatar
 
 
Michael F. McCartney
Total Posts:  3535
Joined  24-05-2004
 
 
 
21 December 2015 01:28
 

I’ll leave it to Joe to address your question, as/if he deems appropriate.

Speaking personally, while historically interesting, it’s peripheral to what is, to me, the ultimate question - who can/should/shouldn’t bear arms nowadays.  But that’s a debate for a later day…

 
liongam
 
Avatar
 
 
liongam
Total Posts:  343
Joined  19-02-2006
 
 
 
21 December 2015 06:05
 

Dear David,

In your recent post (number 29 in this particular thread) you posit that ‘there is little practical need of heraldry in the modern world’.  For a republic such as the United States of America this is probably the case as many of the correspondents to this forum are well aware; owing to the fact that there has never been an official governmental agency to oversee the granting/confirmation of personal and corporate heraldry apart from the US Army’s Institute of Heraldry producing a form of heraldry that could be deemed decidedly American for units of the US armed forces as well as government departments.  It could well be perceived by an outsider that the American population as a whole has never taken on the the subject of heraldry seriously from either an academic view point or one that could pertain to themselves or their families.  At worst, heraldry in the USA as subject is often seen as working against the egalitarian tenets of the Founding Fathers (although as we know many of whom were armigerous or at least laid claim to the use of arms) and at the very least, heraldry is considered by many an inconsequential conceit in the 21st Century that had no place in modern American society and elsewhere.

 

Yes, of course, we know that there is a strong egalitarian strain in the USA that perhaps baulks against the use of personal heraldry the use of which may be thought to be sending out the wrong signals to the viewer of such arms - that the armiger is attempting by the use or display of his/her arms to state that they have a social superiority of some kind.  It should always be remembered that heraldry in its most simple manifestation - the use of devices on a shield during the late 12th Century is inherently a system of identification - it was thus in 1199 as it still today in 2015.  In the British Isles and on Continental Europe where monarchical systems do and have pertained in the past, personal arms have been added over the centuries with the incidents of rank such as coronets and supporters.  Again, this is a practical and wholly sensible system, especially in the British Isles where within the distinct Peerages of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom only the ‘reigning’ peer uses the coronet indicative to his/her rank as well as supporters.  There is no sense of superiority here in the use of such coronets or supporters.  In fact, I have never known a peer, baronet or knight to be condescending in any way whatsoever.  Generally, on meeting such you would never know that they were a peer, baronet or knight because in the main the majority are fairly self-effacing and wear their ‘rank’ lightly upon their shoulders.  They are often found to be much more egalitarian in their view on life than the so called new rich (not only now but also in the past) and today’s much vaunted celebrity.

 

Yes, as your rightly mention not all knights petition for a grants of arms to which should be added the Life Peers created since the Life Peerages Act of 1958 and the very few baronets who have never sought arms.  Sometimes, especially in the case of some life peers their political perspective would be against the notion of petitioning for arms and some genuinely have no interest in such things which is a shame but there it is.  So saying, Knights/Ladies of the Garter and Thistle, together with the Knights/Dames Grand Cross of certain orders such as the Bath, the St Michael and St George there is an expectation if they were not armigerous at the time of their appointment to their respective order to petition for arms in order for their banner to be hung above their stall in their order’s chapel along with their stall plate emblazoned with their arms in enamel, together with the year of their appointment.

 

In passing, amongst other Crown appointments such as High Sheriffs of the English and Welsh counties they are generally expected to be armigerous as there is a tradition of placing their arms in their county’s County or Shire Hall to act as a remembrance of their year of office.  And there is a whole plethora of other offices where traditionally holders were armigerous and could place their arms as an impalement with those of their office.  From an heraldic perspective this would include Garter Principal King of Arms and the two English provincial kings of arms, Clarenceux and Norroy & Ulster as well as the Lord Lyon King of Arms.  Further, chancellors and provosts of universities, archbishops and bishops of the Anglican Community, moderators of certain churches in Scotland and many other office holders could do likewise if they so desired.

 

Just think if the founding fathers of the USA were less ambivalent to the use of heraldry upon both the federal and state stage how colourful and acceptable the concept of heraldry would be in today’s USA?  There might even have developed a system of registration of arms from an official perspective whether federal or state driven?  Again, just imagine, the White House, the US Congress and its respective houses emblazoned with the arms of former presidents and speakers.  Not forgetting the state legislatures or the governor’s mansions arrayed with the bright tinctures and charges of heraldry.  The use of heraldry in such a way adds to the nation’s history and acts as a memorial to those men and women who have served your nation and their state well.  It acts as a focus of pride and as such acts as a spur to future generations.

 

With every good wish

 

John

 
David Pope
 
Avatar
 
 
David Pope
Total Posts:  559
Joined  17-09-2010
 
 
 
24 December 2015 00:21
 

John,

Thanks so much for your helpful post.

 


liongam;105315 wrote:

It could well be perceived by an outsider that the American population as a whole has never taken on the the subject of heraldry seriously from either an academic view point or one that could pertain to themselves or their families.  At worst, heraldry in the USA as subject is often seen as working against the egalitarian tenets of the Founding Fathers (although as we know many of whom were armigerous or at least laid claim to the use of arms) and at the very least, heraldry is considered by many an inconsequential conceit in the 21st Century that had no place in modern American society and elsewhere.


I think you’re spot on about this.


Quote:

Just think if the founding fathers of the USA were less ambivalent to the use of heraldry upon both the federal and state stage how colourful and acceptable the concept of heraldry would be in today’s USA?  There might even have developed a system of registration of arms from an official perspective whether federal or state driven?  Again, just imagine, the White House, the US Congress and its respective houses emblazoned with the arms of former presidents and speakers.  Not forgetting the state legislatures or the governor’s mansions arrayed with the bright tinctures and charges of heraldry.  The use of heraldry in such a way adds to the nation’s history and acts as a memorial to those men and women who have served your nation and their state well.  It acts as a focus of pride and as such acts as a spur to future generations.


I’ve often thought about how nice it would be if this would have been the case.  Ireland shows that an official arms-granting body is not necessarily at odds with"small-r" republican values.  Instead, the Senates of Virginia and North Carolina have devisals from the COA.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
Avatar
 
 
Michael F. McCartney
Total Posts:  3535
Joined  24-05-2004
 
 
 
24 December 2015 01:18
 

Both of John’s paragraphs quoted by David, and his responses, merit discussion (I have some comments in mi d); but rather than disrupt the continuity of Joe’s presentation (which may or may not address these points) I’d rather wait till Joe has finished his commentary.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
24 December 2015 07:48
 

David Pope;105319 wrote:

Ireland shows that an official arms-granting body is not necessarily at odds with"small-r" republican values.


That’s true, and yet the CHI was for decades the subject of sneers from the gentlemen in Queen Victoria Street, and eventually found itself unable to resist the temptation to dabble in questions of noble rank and precedence, leading to a scandal (the MacCarthy Mor affair) from which only emerged badly bruised and might not have survived at all.


Quote:

Instead, the Senates of Virginia and North Carolina have devisals from the COA.


Undoubtedly under the misconception that arms assumed on one’s own authority are less than real.  For the legislature of a sovereign U.S. state to obtain a devisal from the College of Arms makes no more sense than for the Flemish Parliament in Belgium to obtain a certification of arms from a Spanish cronista.  Heraldry can exist quite happily without the involvement of official heralds.

 
David Pope
 
Avatar
 
 
David Pope
Total Posts:  559
Joined  17-09-2010
 
 
 
24 December 2015 08:45
 

Joseph McMillan;105321 wrote:

Undoubtedly under the misconception that arms assumed on one’s own authority are less than real.  For the legislature of a sovereign U.S. state to obtain a devisal from the College of Arms makes no more sense than for the Flemish Parliament in Belgium to obtain a certification of arms from a Spanish cronista.  Heraldry can exist quite happily without the involvement of official heralds.


I agree, and think that this is an example of how America has fundamentally misunderstood heraldry.  Had heraldry been embraced by the new republic early, this could have been prevented.  Instead, the Senators of NC and VA, the very men who would unquestionably meet Keen’s identikit requirements in an American context, neither have arms themselves, nor understand that a devisal from the COA is ill-fit.

 

I have to guard myself against pessimism, but I believe the boat has sailed and America (or heraldry, viewed from the other side) wasn’t on it.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
28 December 2015 12:19
 

After a break for Christmas, picking up where we left off:  did Americans in the English colonies see the use of heraldic arms as a sufficient (although not necessary) condition for being a gentleman?  Put another way, did they see the bearing of arms as a claim of gentility?

I think, based on four points, that they generally did:

 

(1) This was obviously the view held by most 18th century Englishmen and thus probably also that of most of their transatlantic cousins.

 

(2) I’ve yet to find anyone from the period directly repudiating this position.

 

(3) The very few instances I’ve found in which Americans expressed a view on the matter suggest that they saw arms in this light.

 

(4) Americans who “arrived” at positions of prominence seem to have taken up the use of arms—one way or another—coincident with that arrival.

 

Point one has already been covered in an earlier installment and point two requires no further comment (although if someone can find a case where a colonial American rejected this view, I’d be delighted to know about it).

 

As to point three, I know of only two cases, but there are probably others.  The first is the one cited by David Pope, dated to around 1730, in which William Byrd II expresses doubts about Richard Fitzwilliam’s right to his arms as well as to his name.  The other is from Byrd’s brother-in-law John Custis IV, in a 1739 letter, expressing doubts about his son-in-law William Winch’s possession of a coat of arms, unless it were the kind that “any scoundrell that has mony” could buy from the “heralds office.”  What’s particular interesting about both these cases, however, is that the mention of arms is largely peripheral to the central point being made by Byrd and Custis.  Both strongly disliked the person in question on other grounds and are using the reference to heraldry as a rhetorical device.  Winch apparently made no claim to arms at all, and Byrd surely had never consulted Ulster King of Arms about the validity of Fitzwilliam’s.

 

Point four reinforces this observation.  Far from delving into the validity of someone’s arms, colonial Americans seem to have taken unilateral assumption of arms in stride, and even fairly egregious cases of usurpation, when done by someone they were willing to accept as a gentleman on non-armorial grounds.  I recall one case (unfortunately I can’t remember the specifics) in which a governor of one of the Middle Atlantic colonies who needed a seal of arms for official business stated frankly that he’d told the engraver to just use whatever arms he thought appropriate.

 

If we want to consider the Founders specifically, however, there is no better example than Benjamin Franklin.  In 1739, Franklin’s father wrote that his own brother had “made inquiry of one skilled in heraldry, who told him that there is two coats of armour, one belonging to the Franklins of the north, and one to the Franklins of the west.  However our circumstances have been such that it hath hardly been worth while to concern ourselves much about these things, any farther than to tickle the fancy a little.”  But by 1751, having founded various civic institutions and attained public office in Philadelphia (member of the city council 1748, justice of the peace 1749, member of the provincial assembly 1751), Franklin adopted a coat of arms belonging to one of the “Franklins of the north,” which he used on his personal seal as well as his seal as co-Postmaster General a few years later.  His brother John put the same arms on a bookplate and engraved on a silver “cann” or cup.  It was not until years later, as the Penns’ agent in London, that he traced his genealogy to a family of blacksmiths from Northamptonshire with no known claim to arms or gentry.  Yet even after having done that, Dr. Franklin and his family (including his son Governor William Franklin) continued to use the arms he had previously “borrowed.”  No one in America ever seems to have questioned either Franklin’s use of the arms or his totally self-achieved gentility.

 

More tomorrow.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
28 December 2015 12:36
 

I meant to add, in addition to Franklin, the cases of his colleagues Adams and Jefferson, both addressed in the presidential arms articles on our site.  In 1771, Jefferson wrote to a friend who was traveling to London:  "I have what I have been told were the family arms, but on what authority I know not. It is possible there may be none. If so, I would with your assistance become a purchaser, having Sterne’s word for it that a coat of arms may be purchased as cheap as any other coat."  Jefferson’s biographers tie this request to a desire to impress a potential bride, but it seems equally plausible that he had a feeling of having "arrived" (he was approaching 30 years of age, had been appointed a JP and elected to the House of Burgesses, and had just started building his own house, Monticello).

For his part, Adams inherited his maternal grandfather Boylston’s signet ring and began using it as his own when he needed a seal-at-arms for diplomatic work during the Revolution.

 
David Pope
 
Avatar
 
 
David Pope
Total Posts:  559
Joined  17-09-2010
 
 
 
28 December 2015 15:57
 

Joe,

Based on your posts above it seems like the AHS may be missing the mark. Instead of being concerned about scrupulously avoiding duplication or usurpation, we might ought to have been more concerned with who is assuming arms. That is, if were trying to emulate the traditions of American heraldry.

 

Just kidding, well,...kinda…

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
28 December 2015 18:36
 

Joseph McMillan;105329 wrote:

More tomorrow.


Actually, tomorrow is looking pretty busy, so more now and then more again in a few days.

 

Charles Bolton observes, in the introduction to his American Armory, that “Before the days of stationers, arms were drawn by carriage painters and wandering ‘heraldic artists.’  At the very least, it may be said that the man who paid ten dollars or gave bed and breakfast for a painted coat of arms had some gentlemanly aspirations.”  This is exactly the same idea expressed by Keen in The Origins of the English Gentleman, that when an increasingly affluent and influential man in medieval England adopted an armorial seal of his own design, it made an implicit statement about how he saw his status in the community.  His self-perception may or may not have coincided with what the neighbors thought about his social position, but if the seal was used on legal documents and other papers, repeatedly and publicly, for several generations, and no one objected, that was prima facie evidence that the man was fit to bear such an armorial device, i.e., a “gentleman.”  As Sylvia Thrupp says, “A man was thus free to judge of his ripeness in gentility, subject only to the opinion of his neighbors.”

 

Thus the proud New England parents who hung in their front parlor the “hatchment” embroidered by their daughter for the needlework course at her New England finishing school —often to a pattern drawn by one of Bolton’s itinerant heraldic artists—could be seen as making an implicit statement about their standing in the community.  So might the man who had an armorial bookplate made for his library, or left a piece of silver with his arms engraved on for use with his church’s communion service.  Perhaps the same reasoning would apply to many of those Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in and around Charlotte, N.C., who paid to have armorial bearings cut into their departed kinsmen’s gravestones by the extended Bigham family of stone carvers.  In all these cases, if the point was to assert standing in society, the legitimacy of the arms themselves, an issue that so obsesses us heraldists, would have been secondary at best.  (Note to David Pope:  that doesn’t mean it should have been unimportant; as your namesake Davy Hume taught us, we can’t deduce "ought" from "is"... or "was.")

 

This gets directly to the core of Fred White’s question that prompted this very prolonged discourse:  If, as this evidence suggests, Americans of the revolutionary era viewed any use of heraldic arms as implicitly expressing social status, isn’t it inconsistent for us to say today that one may bear a device that says “I am a gentleman” but not one that says “I am a nobleman”?  Isn’t that just sophistry?

 

Before addressing that directly in the next installment, I do think it’s important to note the existence of evidence of an alternative, and perhaps minority, understanding of what arms meant to colonial Americans.  As I pointed out in post #23 above, the one colony in which I found no significant portion of early leaders without heraldic arms was Pennsylvania, where nine out the ten leading families* of the early 18th century Quaker oligarchy (in addition to the armigerous Penn proprietors themselves) can be proven to have used arms.  This is a far higher incidence of arms-bearing than can be found either among the Anglican gentry on the royally-appointed Virginia Council or the somewhat more democratically chosen leaders of Puritan New England.  Yet, of all these, it is the Quakers that we would most expect to eschew such outward signs of personal vanity—if that’s what coats of arms are.  Quakers were supposed to believe in simplicity and equality, as symbolized in their in clothing, language, and manners.  What are all these Friends doing using coats of arms?

 

This same question occurred to a Russian nobleman traveling in Pennsylvania in the United States shortly after independence.  He related to Hector St. John Crèvecoeur (author of Letters from an American Farmer, 1782) that during a visit to the eminent Quaker botanist John Bartram, he was surprised to see a painting of a coat of arms hanging on the wall.  The Russian visitor asked Bartram, “Does the Society of Friends take any pride in those armorial bearings, which sometimes serve as marks of distinction between families, and much oftener as food for pride and ostentation?”  Bartram replied that his father had brought the painting with him to America, and that he kept it “as a piece of family furniture, and as a memorial of his removal hither.”

 

This is a useful reminder that while many, and perhaps most, people in the 13 colonies perceived coats of arms as carrying status connotations, this was not necessarily a universal perception.  For some, a coat of arms may have been purely and simply a mark of family identification without any sense that having one made a particular family better than another family without one.  As we saw in looking at medieval and early modern Europe, heraldry can be and often has been vested with status significance, but such a meaning is not intrinsic to arms as such.  Clothing has also been used as an indicator of social status, not just de facto as it often is today but also de jure.  Yet we would not conclude from the existence of sumptuary laws in many medieval and early modern societies, including England and her colonies, that wearing a silk jacket in modern times is necessarily a statement about anything other than taste.

 

That’s more than enough for now.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
30 December 2015 17:08
 

So it appears that some colonial Americans saw coats of arms as an indicator of gentility.  Others, such as John Bartram saw his as purely a piece of family property, like an heirloom or a portrait, or perhaps as a marker of family identity, like a surname.  Either of these views raises some issues relating to the use of personal heraldry in republican America, but the one connecting arms to gentility would seem at first glance to be more problematic.

We must bear in mind, however, the ambiguity surrounding the term “gentleman.”  This is why I’ve focused so much in this thread on the meaning of the word.  As we saw from Maurice Keen’s “identi-kit” methodology, even in late medieval England the word “gentleman” could be a source of confusion.  One recognized a gentlemen based on his ancestry, his source of livelihood, his political role, who he associated with, and his level of education and manners, but there was no guarantee that two observers—not even two kings of arms—would evaluate a man’s gentility the same way or even according to the same standards.  And we saw that over the 250 years-plus between the landing at Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence, the term (whatever it meant) became applicable to an expanding share of the white male population of British North America as a result of the peculiar economic, political, and social circumstances of the colonies.

 

By the time of independence, the main criterion of gentility seems to have been personal conduct.  The Founders would have said “manners,” but by that they meant much more than the “what fork do I use” connotations that we tend to apply to “manners” today.  This comes through loud and clear in the correspondence of delegates to the Continental Congress.  “Gentleman” appears predominantly in these letters as a polite synonym for “male”—an amusing example being John Adams’s instruction to Abigail that if the child she was carrying should be “a young Gentleman call him William after your Father…”  We would say “boy.”  But more generally we find thousands of references to “we got word from a gentleman in Hartford” and the like, as well as the practice of delegates to refer to each other as “the gentleman from Delaware,” or wherever.

 

The tie to source of livelihood had apparently vanished; thus John Adams writing in 1777 about “Three Gentlemen, the first is a Gentleman of Letters, the second an able Merchant, the third an eminent shipwright.”  Some gentlemen are described as “of family” or “of fortune,” but this comes across more as a simple descriptor than a source of gentility.  Henry Laurens of South Carolina several times uses the expression “gentleman of family” but also describes one Robert Jackson in these terms:  “He possesses a large Estate in the Island of Jamaica, he is allied by Marriage to one of the best families in South Carolina, and his deportment in Philadelphia bespeaks the Man of Honor and the Gentleman.”  It is not the wealth or the family connection that makes Jackson the gentleman but how he conducts himself.

 

Whenever the word is given a substantive significance, it is almost always in exactly such terms.  Thus when Thomas Cushing wrote a letter in June 1775 introducing the newly appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army to the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, he described Washington as “a compleat gentleman.  He is sinsible, amiable, virtuous, modest, & brave.”  Similarly, Thomas McKean describing a French officer in October 1781:  “He has always bore [sic] the character of an industrious, sober and moral man, and that of a Gentleman.”

 

Being a gentleman seems to have been separable in the minds of the founders from being a nobleman.  “The Count [de la Luzerne] is a perfect Gentleman,” one delegate wrote to Washington about the newly arrived French minister to the United States in 1779.  Similarly, “Monsr. Cambray…has deported himself in all respects as a Gentleman,” “Monsr. Holker, or in English, John Holker Esquire, a Man of Sense, and in all his deportment a Gentleman,” and “Col. L’Aumery…bravery and skill as an officer, and his manners as a Gentleman.”  Finally, in reference to the enemy commander, “Lord Howe, who by all Accts is a Politician, a Soldier and a Gentleman…”

 

Misconduct could lead a person, no matter how eminent, to be judged not to be a gentleman.  Most obviously, giving offense without offering “the Satisfaction of a Gentleman,” clearly led to a loss of status, at least in the eyes of the injured party’s friends.  But other violations of the gentlemanly code were also taken into account.  Of another enemy commander, Gen Thomas Gage, Benjamin Harrison of Virginia wrote, “I knew him a Slave, lost to all Sense of Honour, but suppos’d he would endeavor to keep up the appearance of the Gentleman.”  Gage’s offense was not only intercepting and reading Harrison’s mail, but then proceeding to publish its contents.  Or John Adams describing RAdm Thomas Montagu (a descendant of the 1st Earl of Manchester) in 1772:  “An American Freeholder, living in a log House 20 feet Square, without a Chimney in it, is a well bred Man, a polite accomplished Person, a fine Gentleman, in Comparison of this Beast of Prey.”

 

This is not to say that the Founders considered all their compatriots gentlemen by default.  George Mason, later the father of the Bill of Rights, wrote in the Fairfax Resolves of January 1775 of the need for “a well-regulated Militia, composed of gentlemen freeholders and other freemen.”  There was, in his mind, then, at least one category of men entitled to bear [real] arms in defense of the colonists’ liberties, or perhaps two categories if we interpolate a comma between “gentlemen” and “freeholders,” as most editors do.  Mason’s class consciousness, as the Marxists would call it, shows up again in April, speaking of the newly formed Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers:  “gentlemen of the first fortune and character…have submitted to stand in the ranks as common soldiers,” once again suggesting that there was at least one category of freemen below that of gentlemen.

 

How could the same men who took for granted that some people were gentlemen (and ladies) while others were not also subscribe at the same time to the principle put forth by Pinckney and Madison just a decade later that all (white male) Americans were of the same “estate” of commons or freemen?  I think there are two factors at work.  One is that they conceived of gentility in behavioral rather than ascriptive terms. This meant that no one (provided he or she was white) was locked out of the gentry by birth; Benjamin Franklin, for one, served as a living, breathing example of the self-made gentleman, fully accepted by other gentlemen (the suspect nature of his arms notwithstanding).

 

The other is that they did a better job than most modern politicians of differentiating between the private and public spheres.  One of the things that struck me in the use of the term “gentleman” by delegates to the Continental Congress is this distinction between a man’s public and private capacity.  Thus James Duane of Pennsylvania, writing in early 1776, refers to “a debt of Justice, which I was bound to discharge both in my private Character as a Gentleman, and my publick one as a Delegate.”  Similarly, in 1778, John Jay writes to John Hancock describing “the Respect & Esteem I have long had for your private as well as public Character…every mark of Attention due to a Patriot, and a Gentleman.”  Again, Elias Boudinot in 1782 describing someone who “has supported a most unexceptionable Character both as a Gentleman, an officer and an undaunted Friend to his Country.”  And John Penn:  “General Lincoln…is greatly esteemed both as a Soldier and a Gentleman by all that know him.”

 

And what about heraldry and arms?  If gentility was understood as a social and private construct rather than one defined by law and officially recognized by the political system, and if access to the gentry was open to merit and not determined by birth, then there was nothing in gentility that was antithetical to the values of the Revolution.  And if the idea—gentility—was acceptable within the new dispensation, then so was the system of symbols representing that idea, namely the coat of arms.  And, it is important to note, because Washington declined to support the establishment of a U.S. heraldic authority, arms as well as gentility remained a private, not a public matter in the new United States.  (More on this subject later.)

 

The situation was entirely different with nobility.  Nobility, in the lexicon of the day, necessarily entailed state recognition.  In the British realms, the noble class coincided with the peerage.  Peerages owed their existence to action by the Crown, either by writ of summons to Parliament or, in the more recent centuries, by letters patent of the monarch.  Succession to a peerage title depended on the approval of official state institutions.  There was no such thing in Britain as nobility for life; every creation of a new peer created a potentially infinite succession of men accorded defined legal and political privileges (including a seat in the House of Lords, then still a significant element of the British constitution) simply because of whose son they were.  In other European countries the specifics were different (in France and Russia, there were such things as nobles for life) but the fundamentals were the same:  the nobility was an estate formally defined by law and existing only in relation to the political system of which it was a part.  This is what the American Founders considered objectionable:  the treatment of one privileged class within the society by a different set of legal rules than those that applied to everyone else.  Gentility didn’t do that; nobility did.

 

Of course we know that while the Founders did prohibit the creation of a nobility in the United States, and while Congress enacted a law in 1795 requiring any anyone applying for citizenship, who “shall have borne any hereditary title, or been of any of the orders of nobility, in the kingdom or state from which he came” to expressly renounce his title and/or noble status, the states did not ratify the amendment passed by Congress in 1810 that would have annulled the citizenship of any American who accepted a foreign title.  It is still possible to be a foreign noble and an American citizen at the same time.  What is not possible is to be an American noble.

 

And of course no one at the time specifically addressed the question of nobiliary additaments on the arms of former noblemen.  Still, neither the Founders nor our early legislators forbade the wearing of crimson velvet robes with ermine trim or the wearing of coronets with gilt strawberry leaves and silver bars, either.  I merely maintain that (1) it is logically impossible to be a nobleman in the framework of a country with no nobility, and (2) it is as absurd for someone who is not a nobleman to display a coat of arms with nobiliary additaments as it is for him to dress up in nobiliary costume.

 

So I promised to get to the question of gentry and arms in the American republic, and I have.  But we’re not out of the woods yet.  What about the alternative theory, that arms had nothing to do with social rank but were merely a family heirloom or “token of kinship”?

 

But that’s way more than enough to chew on for a while, so I’ll pick this up next year.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
02 January 2016 21:52
 

Now that the black-eyed peas are eaten, the eggnog drunk, the Michigan State Spartans beaten. and our AHS website recovered from its hangover, on with the unending essay.

I left things with the observation that the understanding of arms as primarily a marker of family identity, a “piece of furniture” brought over from the old country, as set forth by the botanist John Bartram, still raised issues that need to be considered in figuring out the place of heraldry in the American republic.

 

This interpretation of heraldry—arms as the equivalent of a surname—was the core of the case set forth by William Barton (Philadelphia lawyer and antiquarian and co-designer of the national arms of the U.S.) in his 1788 essay, “A Concise Account of the Origin and Use of Coat Armour,” the paper he enclosed with his letter soliciting George Washington’s support for the establishment of an official U.S. heraldic authority.

 

Although writers ever since the mid-19th century have overstated its impact, there was a significant element of American political thought in the wake of the Revolution that coats of arms should be consigned to the dustbin of history as relics of monarchism and aristocracy.*  This view never reached the intensity that it did in France a few years later, in 1790, when the Constituent Assembly (with Louis XVI’s acquiescence) decreed the abolition of coats of arms, along with nobility and orders of chivalry, and prohibited their display.  The ensuing years, especially after the rise of the Jacobins in 1792, saw wholesale destruction of heraldic heritage all across the country.

 

But if the American Revolutionaries did not indulge in the sort of thyreoclasm** committed by the Jacobins, several prominent men are nevertheless said to have publicly renounced the use of their ancestral arms, including a member of the Blount family of North Carolina who, according to Dom Wilfred Bayne, destroyed the armorial engraving brought from England by his ancestor, and the Revolutionary naval hero Commodore Jacob Jones, who supposedly had the family’s armorial silver melted down.  This feeling seems to have been sufficiently widespread that politicians had to take it into account, witness John Adams’s direction to Abigail to paint over the family arms on her carriage to avoid exciting “popular feelings and vulgar insolence.”

 

It was this view that Barton was principally concerned with rebutting in his 1788 “Concise Account.”  Sharing the view of his contemporaries that social rank existed even in a republic in which it had no legal (or, in principle, political) significance, Barton observed that “the Gentry of Republics value themselves as much on the reputation of their families, as the Nobility of Monarchies.”  There was therefore “no reason why they should not be equally carefull in preserving their family Coat-Armour.” He went on to contend that the “present representatives of original Colonists, presiding in each family of the United States, should now consider themselves as heads or chiefs of their respective families, in a genealogical sense," and that “such as have paternal arms belonging to them ought no more to abandon them, then to relinquish their family names; or, than we should disuse the English language, because we are not Englishmen.”

 

If he had stopped there, he would have been on fairly solid ground, but Barton clearly foresaw the objection that could be raised to that phrase, “such as have paternal arms belonging to them.”  His answer is initially a utilitarian one:  “Though the virtues of a father do not necessarily descend to his children; yet, mankind, by common consent, are disposed to transfer the respect they entertain for a virtuous character, to his posterity; provided they should not render themselves unworthy of it. This kind of prejudice, (for such, in strictness, it is) has a beneficial tendency: influenced by it, the reputation obtained by a man, for his public services, will operate on his descendants as a powerful restraint from the commission of any act, that might sully that reputation, which they are supposed in some sort to inherit.”

 

But the idea of blotting the family escutcheon seemed necessarily to derive from the idea that arms were intrinsically an honor in themselves.  Barton was so steeped in the English theory of arms that, even while insisting that arms were fundamentally no different than a surname, he also felt compelled to describe them as “marks of Honor, conferred on persons of distinguished Talents or Services, in the civil as well as the military departments of Government, by the command and direction of the Sovereign power,” as surnames most assuredly were not.  He was also under the mistaken impression that arms only became hereditary after they began to be granted by kings, and that from the time arms started to be granted as “insignia of honor…the assumption of Arms, without that Sanction was disused.  From this time, assumed Arms were deemed contemptible; the persons by whom such were taken having no right to them.”  Thus, for heraldry to keep performing the useful function of encouraging honorable behavior without either discriminating against “new” families or making heraldry “contemptible,” it was necessary to create an American analogue to the College of Arms.

 

So here Barton was urging Washington to make room in the new American polity for what amounted to an official hereditary honor, the personal coat of arms.  He tried to draw an analogy with various titles of honor that were in fact used in the United States without any objection:  esquire as “an appendage of Office… His Excellency, The Honorable, the Reverend…the terms used to denote the different grades of Military rank … Academic Honors, and those conferred by societies instituted for the advancement of Science & Learning.”  “None of all these constitute any Order of Nobility,” Barton argued, and they are therefore “by no means incompatible with the spirit of a Commonwealth.”

 

But neither were these titles hereditary, nor (Barton’s contention to the contrary notwithstanding) were such things as diplomas, medals, and swords of honor voted by Congress or other authorities for specific services.  A medal or sword or gold box conveying the freedom of a city would be inherited as a physical object by the recipient’s heirs, but it was not inherited in the same sense as a coat of arms.  For a son or grandson to wear a war hero’s medal or sword would hardly be construed as doing himself or the family any honor.  I don’t suppose that John Quincy Adams ever read Barton’s 1788 essay, but he nevertheless expressed the obvious objection to Barton’s theory in 1819.  If we accept that “arms are emblematical hereditary titles of honor, conferred by monarchs as badges of nobility or of gentility” (which is what Barton had argued) then they are indeed “incompatible with that equality which is the fundamental principle of our Government.”

 

Washington clearly understood the implications of Barton’s proposal.  Coming on the heels of the incredibly virulent controversy over hereditary membership in the Society of the Cincinnati—a purely private organization, but one whose adoption of regalia mimicking those of a monarchical order of knighthood had raised popular suspicions about its ultimate agenda—there was no way Washington was going to sign up to establishing an official public body that would confer hereditary “honors” of the that also looked remarkably like those conferred by monarchs.  Washington was quite right when he agreed with Barton that heraldic arms were not inherently “unfriendly to the purest spirit of republicanism,” and indeed that they might even “be rendered conducive to public and private uses with us.”  But he was also absolutely right to decline the battle of establishing a public office to regulate and confer them.

 

This would not be the end of the various conundrums raised by the “arms as family identifier” argument.  There were still many dead ends of this labyrinth for American heraldists to explore.  Barton would eventually figure out the answer, although his second essay setting it forth would remain unpublished for nearly 200 years.  We’ll get into some of that next time.

 

_________

 

* The apparent decline in public use of heraldry in late 18th century America has to be seen in the context of fashion trends in Europe during the same period, not in isolation purely as a function of the Revolution.  Post-Enlightenment tastes ran to classical rather than medieval symbolism in architecture, art, etc.  For example, where seals of public bodies would previously have been heraldic in design, in the 18th century they tended to favor mythological motifs.  The German Handbuch der Heraldik refers to a period of heraldic “decay” in the 18th-19th centuries when the urban patriciate turned away from armorial styles.  Stephen Friar’s Heraldry for the Local Historian and Genealogist notes a comparative eclipse of heraldry in England itself over the course of the 1700s (e.g., the disappearance of the heraldic funeral, the decline in the use of hatchments, the disappearance of arms from the background of formal portraits, etc).  According to a private conversation I had not long ago with an English officer of arms, this trend was only reversed in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the use of heraldry was consciously revived as an expression of loyalty to the monarchical order—not a use of arms that would recommend itself to the promotion of heraldry in the USA.

 

** “Thyreoclasm”—literally “shield breaking”—a term I invented with the help of Kimon Andreou and his colleagues in the Heraldry Society of Greece especially for this essay, to describe the ideologically driven destruction of heraldic artifacts. The only thing I’ve found in the U.S. to which this term could be applied was the wholesale destruction of paintings and carvings of the royal arms in the months following the Declaration of Independence.  But this never carried over to attacks on other arms—it was directed against the British crown, not heraldry as such.

 
JJB1
 
Avatar
 
 
JJB1
Total Posts:  83
Joined  31-10-2014
 
 
 
03 January 2016 11:32
 

Thanks for taking the time for this essay. It’s formed a great comprehensive resource on the subject. I’ve found myself taking short notes of names, dates and respective quotes/stances to help wrap my head around it all.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
Avatar
 
 
Joseph McMillan
Total Posts:  7658
Joined  08-06-2004
 
 
 
05 January 2016 14:06
 

As I mentioned before, there was a strong current of political thought in the early United States that found heraldry at least laughable, at worst offensive to American values.  To some degree, this was a partisan matter, with the Democratic-Republicans/Democrats generally viewing arms as part and parcel of a hidden Federalist agenda of re-creating monarchy.  Philip Freneau’s rabidly D-R National Gazette was typical in this regard, writing during the first Washington administration: “It appears from some late publications, that a new order of citizens has been created in the United States, consisting only of the officers of the federal government.—The privileges of this order, it is said, consist in sharing, exclusively, in the profits of the 25000 dollars a year allowd for the President’s table, and in the honor of gazing upon him once a week at his levees—It remains only to give this new order a name, and assign it a proper coat of arms and insignia.”  The substance was not only absurd but inaccurate, but for our purposes it suffices to note the emotive association of heraldry with incipient neo-monarchism.  (Members who have been around a while may recall the Whig President John Tyler’s later having ridiculed a former Democratic cabinet officer’s use of a supposed coat of arms in a tone equally dismissive of heraldry itself; see http://www.americanheraldry.org/forums/showthread.php?p=92107#post3.)

At about the same time that the Tyler anecdote was first reported, the “arms as family marker” started being brought to the fore again.  In a review of an English book on heraldry, the American Whig Review opined in December 1845, “For a century and-a-half [i.e., since the 1690s, long before the American Revolution], the things pertaining to antiquity have been gradually falling into disuse, until at length this contempt has reached its ebb, and the tide sets the other way…. One of the most beautiful effects of this innovation upon the utilitarian spirit of the age, is to be found in the increased attention which is now paid to the study of HERALDRY.  As a leisure amusement, we can imagine none more befitting or interesting to an American gentleman, who dates his origin from an European stock.  Surely there can be nothing offensive to the purest Democracy, in a man’s being proud that his ancestors were honest men; that all the sons were brave, and all the daughters virtuous, provided that he does not force the feelings of others to keep pace with his own, and that he bears in mind the apothegm of Pope—‘What can ennoble sots, or fools, or cowards?  Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.’  Why should we pay more regard to the pedigree of Durham heifers and Godolphin nags than to our own?”

 

Americans who were interested in heraldry—notably those who founded the NEHGS Committee on Heraldry in 1864, seized on this idea that arms were nothing more than a mark of family identity.  But, like Barton in his 1788 essay, they were trapped by the linkage between arms and gentility—all the more so the more deeply they studied English source material—and tended to overlook the cautionary language in the 1845 review.  As a matter of fact, the establishment of the committee in the midst of the Civil War was motivated in large measure to refute, by means of heraldic evidence, “the claim of the Virginia and South Carolina ‘chivalry,’ that they represented the gentlemen of England, while the Yankees were no better than base-born churls, [a claim] as amusing as it was false….  Heraldry may be used as an assistance in genealogical and historical studies; and we propose to inquire by whom, and by what right, and to what extent, coats of arms have been used in New England.” (“Heraldry in New England,” The North American Review, Jan. 1865).

 

Thus, while the leading member of the committee, William Whitmore, would write that “the sole value or interest of our American coats-of-arms consists in the remembrance of an honorable ancestry” (The Elements of Heraldry, 1866), the entire agenda of the enterprise depended on coats of arms having been more than mere graphic equivalents of the surname.  His emphasis was on “honorable” more than on “ancestry.”  After all, if just any old family could have a coat of arms, how could the heraldic evidence prove the point the COH had set out to prove?  Although they dismissed “as entirely worthless to the genealogist, all recent assumptions of coats-of-arms,” a category within which they included many borne during the 18th century, the committee took for granted that the use of arms before roughly 1730-35 was prima facie evidence of the bearer’s right to the arms and therefore that he was a certified gentleman.  Absolute proof, they conceded, could be found only by reference to records of grants or confirmations by the College of Arms, but surely their pious forefathers would not lie about such things:  “Our ancestors were accustomed to give a certain respect to social position, and would have detected and punished any attempt at fraud. Their religious principles were also diametrically opposed to any desire to assume false honors.”

 

(The Committee was in for a rude awakening when manuscripts of the English heraldic visitations began to be published by the Harleian Society four years later, and it gradually came to light that many if not most of the arms the New England founders had borne did not appear in the official records, but that’s another story.)

 

The core problem, however, was the same one faced by Barton in 1788.  How could rising families acquire new arms?  Barton had proposed a U.S. heraldic authority.  At this point, the Boston gentlemen couldn’t see past their antiquarian blinders.  “We are glad to take this occasion,” the committee wrote, “to represent the folly of unwarranted assumptions of arms at the present day. No act of silly pride or vanity can be more absurd in a republic like ours. The only value of these emblems is their historic value. And he is not merely foolish, but dishonest, who pretends to the right to bear arms, and thus falsifies one of the sources of history. Let the use of new-invented arms on seal rings and coach-panels be left to our new-invented aristocracy, the shoddy millionnaires of our great cities.”  The committee’s approach thus effectively attempted to set in stone, as a de facto hereditary aristocracy, the families who had borne arms in the early colonial period, no one else having access to personal heraldry.  (William Whitmore would recognize the problem a couple of years later; I’ll address his solution in the next installment.)

 

The aftermath of the Civil War, of all times, when millions of men on both sides had just endured four years of sacrifice and suffering, in which the slogan “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight" had gained considerable resonance, was probably the worst moment to suggest that male line descendants of the English gentry could have family emblems, but no one else.  The absurdity can be illustrated by my own family.  My maternal grandfather’s maternal grandfather was a fellow named Nathaniel Barham, who served as a private in Co K, 5th Mississippi Infantry.  He went home and farmed about 250 acres, where there is absolutely nothing that would objectively distinguish him from his neighbors in Beat 4 of Neshoba County.  Except that (utterly unbeknownst to him), he was the 5 x great-grandson of Robert Barham of East Hall, Boughton-Monchelsea, Kent, to whom the arms Argent on a fess Gules between three bears passant Sable muzzled Or a fleur-de-lis between two martlets Or had been confirmed at the visitation of 1619.  Can we imagine anything more likely to provoke the quintessentially American reflex—“I’m just as good as you are”—than for the men standing to the right and left of Nathaniel Barham in the lines at Chickamauga and Franklin to be told that old Nat could have a coat of arms because of who his 5th great grandfather was, but they couldn’t?

 

How could American heraldry get out of the box its enthusiasts had constructed?